Rebirth of a Nation Quotes

“Ultimately Rockefeller's confidence games proved wildly successful. At its height, his fortune outstripped those of all the other robber barons-even Carnegie's, by a hair. By 1913, Rockefeller's net worth totaled nearly a billion dollars, or 2 percent of the U.S. gross national product; a comparable share today would give Rockefeller a net worth of $190 billion, or more than triple that of the richest man in the contemporary world, Bill Gates.”
― Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920

“Henry Flagler: “Do unto others as they would do unto you—and do it first.”
― Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920

“The desire for unmediated grace put mystics like Anne Hutchinson in direct conflict with Puritan authorities in Massachusetts Bay, who sought to contain her challenge to ministerial authority. The molten core of conversion needed to be encased in a solid sheath of prohibitions, rules, agendas for self-control—the precisionist morality that we know as the Protestant ethic. An ethos of disciplined achievement counterbalanced what the sociologist Colin Campbell calls an other Protestant ethic, one that sought ecstasy and celebrated free-flowing sentiment, sending frequent revivals across the early American religious landscape. The two ethics converged in a cultural program that was nothing if not capacious: it encompassed spontaneity and discipline, release and control. Indeed, the rigorous practice of piety was supposed to reveal the indwelling of the spirit, the actuality of true conversion. Yet the balance remained unstable, posing challenges to established authority in Virginia as well as Massachusetts. The tension between core and sheath, between grace abounding and moral bookkeeping, arose from the Protestant conviction that true religion was not merely a matter of adherence to outward forms, but was rooted in spontaneous inner feeling.”
― Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920

“All history is the history of longing. The details of policy; the migration of peoples; the abstractions that nations kill and die for, including the abstraction of “the nation” itself—all can be ultimately traced to the viscera of human desire. Human beings have wanted innumerable, often contradictory things—security and dignity, power and domination, sheer excitement and mere survival, unconditional love and eternal salvation—and those desires have animated public life. The political has always been personal.”
― Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920

“Douglass went on forcefully for an hour. “We Negroes love our country. We fought for it. We ask only that we be treated as well as those who fought against it.” The crowd roared its approval.”
― Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920