Twentieth Century Journey Quotes

“The gaudy, goofy 1920s, the dazzling “Coolidge-Hoover Prosperity,” the wild chasing of the dollar, the mania to get rich quick on the stock market, all the frenzy for the tinsel of life, all the swollen confidence of Americans that the immediate future was bright and paved with gold, had come to a precipitate end a few days before my boat docked in New York. The mighty stock market had crashed, wiping out the savings of millions and the fortunes of many. The Depression, which would become the worst in our history, had begun.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“What Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau wanted in Russia was the destruction of Communism and the revival of the capitalist state. They could not face being told by a confident young junior American diplomat that the Lenin regime, despite its difficulties, had too strong a hold on Russia to be replaced and ought to be dealt with while its weaknesses could still be exploited for concessions.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“Baroque was a call to the pleasures, fantasies and dreams of life, a reaction against the pure spiritualness of the Gothic and the severity of Protestant architecture in the north. It was warm, sensuous and full of movement.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“Watching the idle rich convinced you that there was something wrong with the distribution of wealth in this world, and that maybe the socialists, who wanted to redistribute it and give a little more to those who toiled, were right.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“Gradually we saw that the stupid human race was not yet ready for Wilson’s idea and ideal and might never be, as long as nations insisted on following, exclusively, their selfish interests and believed there was something to be gained by war, or the threat of war.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“From then on the League was condemned to death. Its main pillars, France and Britain, fell over themselves to regain the good graces of the sawdust Italian Caesar. In Berlin I noted that Hitler had taken due notice of the impotence of the League and the spinelessness of the two Western democracies. It was a good augury for the plans he was hatching.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“When finally after the second war he achieved his goal of becoming Prime Minister, he threw it away by joining France in sending troops to take over the Suez Canal. It was a foolish enterprise, inexplicable that it should be backed by such an experienced and intelligent man, and it finished his political career suddenly, and forever.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“It was not the last time the Vatican would do a favor for a Fascist dictator. Shortly after Adolf Hitler established his dictatorship in Germany, at a time when Nazi excesses, particularly the persecution of the Jews, the harsh measures against both Protestants and Catholics, the crushing of the democratic parties, had caused world-wide revulsion, the Vatican signed a concordat with Nazi Germany. Coming when it did, the concordat gave the Hitler government much badly needed prestige, both among its own people and in the outside world.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“The Church welcomed the advent of Fascism because it believed it might save Italy from anarchy and from being taken over by Socialists or Communists.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“My own guess was that Mussolini, like all dictators, would eventually overreach himself. Power would corrupt and corrode him, as it did all tyrants. I would feel the same about Adolf Hitler in the early years of his dizzy successes. But for many years, in both cases, it looked as if I couldn’t have been more wrong.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“even Winston Churchill, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was taken in. Meeting Mussolini in Rome shortly before my arrival he hailed him as a great European leader and especially for his “struggle against the bestial appetites of Leninism.” At home the banker Otto Kahn said of Mussolini: “The world owes him a debt of gratitude.” And Thomas Edison thought him “the greatest genius of the modern age.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“This was my first experience with Fascism. One could see at once the awful cost to a civilized people of having their freedoms trampled upon. But how, I wondered, had these roughneck black-shirted Fascists, with their castor-oil squads and their bullyboys, of whom Mussolini was the foremost, got away with it? And in one of Europe’s oldest and most sophisticated societies.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“No columnist, no “political correspondent”—the man who reported on or interpreted the top political developments—was independent. There were no Walter Lippmanns or Scotty Restons in Fleet Street, and this was a pity. The lack left a tawdry color to British journalism.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“The very thought horrified him. He solemnly warned that a political combination of the lower classes… is an evil of the first magnitude…; that their supremacy in the state means the supremacy of ignorance over instruction and of numbers over knowledge. So long as they are not taught to act together, there is a chance of this being averted, and it can only be averted by the greater wisdom and foresight in the higher classes.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“Nearly all of the gainfully employed—eighteen million of them—earned on an average only a little more than a thousand dollars a year. They were lucky if they could pay the rent. Yet the majority of them, even the majority of the manual workers, never voted for the Labor Party, which promised them a bigger slice of the pie. They seemed content with the crumbs left them by the Tories. Their loyalty to the ruling classes, their great respect and love for the monarchy, seemed touching but very puzzling to this youthful Yankee observer.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“Sudden fame threw him into the company of the rich and the powerful, whose conservative and sometimes reactionary and even antidemocratic view of the world appeared to gradually rub off on him. Worse, the fantastic adulation of his fellow-countrymen seems to have eventually tempted him to use this immense following for political ends, both foreign and domestic, a course that once embarked upon finally, after thirteen years of being worshiped as a nonpartisan hero, would prove disastrous.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“the depressing blight of unemployment and poverty and slums, the sight of the conspicuous luxury of the rich in their great town houses and country estates, and the arrogance of the upper classes, who ran the place and indeed, as they still believed, most of the world.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“The tax system was shocking, soaking the poor and sparing the rich. Yet all attempts to reform it, to make it somewhat equitable, were defeated in a Parliament that had been elected in 1924 on a radical wave.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“Grant, I gathered, was highly pleased. He called the three grotesque ladies in his painting “those Tory gals” and added to a reporter: “I don’t like Toryism. I don’t like people who are trying to set up an aristocracy of birth in a Republic.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“There was nothing very Christian, or even democratic, about our profit-greedy, money-dominated, elite-ruled democracy.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“who fell victim to the fatal flaws of so many men who rise from humble origins to prominence. He went with the upper crust, with the moneybags. Born of Dutch parents on an Iowa farm, penniless at first and later poorly paid on Iowa newspapers, despite his brilliance, he rejected the Populism and the radicalism of the Midwest, which were protests of our hard-working common people against the domination of the country by the wealthy of the East, and became a standpat Republican and an ultraconservative. (Herbert Hoover, born in West Branch, twenty miles from Cedar Rapids, and early orphaned, would follow the same path.)”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“Wicks had given me a further piece of advice, which was more important. “Acquire a background,” he admonished. “Read Plato, Socrates, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Anatole France and a lot more like them. It takes longer than learning the mere trade of journalism. But without it, you won’t be very good.” On this piece of advice, I have worked all my life.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“Iowa had backed him three to one. Harding had promised a period of “normalcy.” Now our good people had their wish: to be left alone by their government, and by history, free to make money and whoopee, freed from concerns about the wicked, war-torn world beyond the seas.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“What brought chautauqua to a sudden end were the automobile, the movies and above all the advent of radio. By the mid-twenties almost every rural American family had a car and could drive to the larger towns and cities to see a good movie or take in a concert or a play. But it was radio that dealt the death blow.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“One was faced, then, in America from an early age with the intolerance and violence of our people, with the frenzy with which they could be whipped up by an irresponsible press, shoddy political leaders, hypocritical captains of industry and bigots in the pulpit.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“The murder of innocent men by order of a court of justice after the Haymarket riot, and the obscene rejoicing it brought in the press and even in the Protestant pulpit, seemed inexplicable in a civilized society even to a small boy, and still does to that former child, now nearing the end of a long life that has witnessed at first hand so much injustice and killing all over the world.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“The fanatics would eventually succeed at the end of the Great War (1919) in clamping Prohibition on the nation. But the “noble experiment,” as President Herbert Hoover would call it, was a dismal failure. It made lawbreakers out of millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens until finally the country, under the prodding of President Franklin Roosevelt, came to its senses in 1933 and repealed the Eighteenth Amendment.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“No matter how raw a deal they were getting, they shrank back from voting for drastic change, except for the desperate Depression years of the early 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“Actually some of the principal demands of the Populists, which both Republicans and Democrats had branded as “socialistic,” were later adopted by the country as it grew to maturity: the graduated income tax, direct election of U.S. senators and the eight-hour day.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988

“There is nothing like the return of a bit of prosperity to make most of our citizens forget the basic inequalities in their society.”
― William L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, 1904–1930; The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940; A Native's Return, 1945–1988