The Crisis of the Old Order 1919-33 Quotes

“Liberals would like to rebuild the station while the trains are running; radicals prefer to blow up the station and forego service until the new structure is built.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 1919–1933: The Age of Roosevelt, 1919–1933

“Politics under democracy,” said Mencken, “consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting ‘Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum.’” Democracy’s dominating motive was envy, given the force and dignity of law; the technique was government by orgy, almost by orgasm; in essence, democracy was a combat between jackals and jackasses. “It has become a psychic impossibility for a gentleman to hold office under the Federal Union, save by a combination of miracles that must tax the resourcefulness even of God.” Urging more gentlemen to enter politics made no more sense, said Mencken, than to argue that the remedy for prostitution was to fill the bawdyhouses with virgins.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 1919–1933: The Age of Roosevelt, 1919–1933

“These were “times of stress and change,” and Roosevelt had thought much of the responsibilities of the Presidency in 1932. “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office,” he told Anne O’Hare McCormick during the campaign. “That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is preeminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” So Washington had personified the idea of federal union, Jefferson and Jackson the idea of democracy, Lincoln union and freedom, Cleveland rugged honesty. “Isn’t that what the office is—” he suggested, “a superb opportunity for reapplying, applying in new conditions, the simple rules of human conduct we always go back to? I stress the modern application, because we are always moving on; the technical and economic environment changes, and never so quickly as now. Without leadership alert and sensitive to change, we are bogged up or lose our way, as we have lost it in the past decade.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 1919–1933: The Age of Roosevelt, 1919–1933