Roger Morris Quotes
Growing up in the Midwest, I was very close to my maternal grandmother, who, as a young widow running a small business in 1920s Kansas City, had known firsthand the old Pendergast regime and its classic combine of politics and organized crime.
Morris, Roger. "A Conversation with Roger Morris." Random House, 2001.
In early 1933 President Hoover was a lame duck, but the country was in the midst of a banking panic in the Great Depression. Hoover tried to get President-elect Roosevelt to join him in some joint action, but Roosevelt didn't want to commit to anything in advance and preferred not to associate his administration with the banking debacle of the Hoover administration. He felt that the public was so soured on Hoover’s incompetence and lack of apparent empathy, that anything he did with Hoover would be perceived fas bad and doomed to failure. What Roosevelt wanted to do is diminish fear and despair and have new hope. However, Hoover was erroneously told by aids that Tugwell, a Roosevelt assistant, had suggested that Roosevelt should let the situation deteriorate, and then there would be more to blame on the Republicans when Roosevelt took office. Tugwell was as far from being a partisan politician as one could get. He was an academic with a PhD in agricultural economics. He had never been involved in politics before. Surprisingly, Hoover believed the story about Tugwell, but by then, the was a very frustrated man who felt that he had almost no good options.
The Senator had been criticized for taking campaign contributions from gamblers who were part of organized crime. Although his defense was the legality of gambling in Nevada, despite various efforts to reduce the influence of organized crime in the gambling industry, there is still some involvement and influence.
It took until the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt until monopolies were regulated. Like many of the rapacious businessmen of his era, bribery of public officials was so common that he had no problem admitting this to a reporter who was interviewing him. His father Cornelius, one of the great, creative industrialists of America, was not at all of the same mindset or the same corrupt character and saw corporations and the Railroads as having an important role in America with substantial obligations to the society which enabled the economic development and supported the railroads. He described his son as a “blockhead”. William goes down in American history as the arrogant industrialist and capitalist whose wealth was produced by his talent of being born to the right father who built the great empire. At that time the bribery of members of Congress was direct with cash going directly into their pockets, unlike modern times where it is indirect in the form of Campaign contributions.
Roger Morris, born 1937, is an American historian, foreign policy analyst, and journalist. He served on the staff of the National Security Council under the presidencies of both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. As an author he has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Society of American Historians and the National Endowment for the Humanities. On two occasions he has won the Investigative Reporters and Editors’ National Award for Distinguished Investigative Journalism.
