David L. Wolper Quotes

I've commissioned an adaptation of 'The Jungle', by Upton Sinclair, a story of a young immigrant from Lithuania to the meat-packing industry of Chicago in 1904, and the rise of the unions in America.

When the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brought a rapid increase in wealth, the demand of workers for a fair share of the wealth they were creating was conceded only after riots and strikes.

The industrial age was not about craftspeople trading peer to peer. It was about stopping that. You weren't supposed to be a craftsperson, you were supposed to be an employee.

Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.

Journalists were at the forefront. From the Civil War until the early 1900s, nothing was being done to solve the problems of the Industrial Age.

The real conflict, if any exists, is between two industrial systems.

We live in this era that has benefited from the Industrial Revolution, and we live with a kind of luxury and plenty that even all but the poorest of Americans live with a kind of sensuousness that was unimagined by medieval kings. But in order to get to this point, a lot of people had to suffer in really terrible ways.

I wonder how many people would have thought at the end of World War II that the capitalist system would be one that was meeting the challenges and making things better for people as we approach the 21st century.

It has often been said, that there is but one rank of men in America… we have no artificial distinctions of men into noblemen and commoners among us, but it ought to be remarked, that superior degrees of industry and capacity, and above all, commerce, have introduced inequality of property among us, and these have introduced natural distinctions of rank in Pennsylvania, as certain and general as the artificial distinctions of men in Europe. This will ever be the case while commerce exists in this country.

[The congressman visited Boston.] We often wonder how things are made so cheap among the Yankees. Come here and you will see women doing men's work, and happy and cheerful as the day is long, and why not?

I’m not going to go down in coal mines like Mrs. Roosevelt.

The industrial revolution turned time into a commodity.

When huge factories were established there could no longer be a close tie between the master and his men; the workman hated his employer, and the employer looked on his workmen simply as hands.

We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. There's something terribly brittle about it.

The Industrial Revolution has two phases: one material, the other social; one concerning the making of things, the other concerning the making of men.

It's important to remember that Britain was the first country to industrialize, so I think there's a strong argument to say this is where my profession was founded.

Late 19th-century America was basically a plutocratic enterprise while people toiled in mines and died of coal dust poisoning.

There's such a wealth of literature from the 18th century and 19th century, George Eliot... Jane Austen... that's all about a genteel high society, relationships, all of that stuff. There wasn't ever really, apart from Dickens, a literary evocation of working class life.

It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.

Every socialist recognizes the dependence of the workingman on the capitalist.

The labor movement was a reaction to capitalism.

The manufacturing population still lived to a very great extent in the country. The artisan often had his small piece of land, which supplied him with wholesome food and healthy recreation. His wages and employment too were more regular. He was not subject to the uncertainties and knew nothing of the fearful sufferings which his descendants were to endure from commercial fluctuations

One of the basic tenets of the working class is you want to get out of the working class.

Because of poverty, we must adopt the capitalist means of production to develop our resources to get rich. However, if we ignore the issue of social justice at the beginning of China's industrialization, we will sow the seeds of class warfare in the future.

In no country are all the people factory owners. The majority are workers.