William Graham Sumner Quotes
In England pensions used to be given to aristocrats, because aristocrats had political influence, in order to corrupt them. Here pensions are given to the great democratic mass, because they have political power, to corrupt them.
Sumner, William Graham. "The Conquest of the United States by Spain." War and Other Essays, edited by Albert Galloway Keller, Yale University Press, 1911, p. 320.
While we think of the Founding Fathers as great and noble men, it is interesting to consider a contemporary view of the American leadership from another leading American who chose the British side in the conflict. The British and the Loyalists suspected most of the revolutionary leaders as men who were very ambitious for personal gain and economically unsuccessful compared to many others of the then American “establishment.”
Illinois Democrats had made a few visible appointments of Blacks to patronage positions during the campaign, but who were generally opposed to Civil Rights Legislation or any economic reforms that would help the majority of Blacks—some would argue that this was the obverse of the party situation entering the third millennium.
In the English political system the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch are the same. In the House of Commons, the Front Benches are reserved for the Cabinet Ministers. The argument here is that when politicians become ministers, their career and party success often become more important than the welfare of the country.
In 2013 Immigration Reform was being debated in the Senate. To get a substantial majority to support the bill, an amendment was added to add many billions of dollars for the creation of 20,000 additional Federal Border Patrol Agents, buying drones and other technology. Ironically, the Senators who supported the bill because of this amendment were all conservatives who generally opposed all government spending, but many of these funds would go to Defense Contractors, one of their constituency groups, and most of the money would be a stimulus for job creation in the borders states.
William Graham Sumner was a classical liberal American social scientist. He taught social sciences at Yale, where he held the nation's first professorship in sociology. He was one of the most influential teachers at Yale or any other major school. Sumner wrote widely within the social sciences, with numerous books and essays on American history, economic history, political theory, sociology, and anthropology. He supported laissez-faire economics, free markets, and the gold standard. He adopted the term "ethnocentrism" to identify the roots of imperialism, which he strongly opposed, and as a spokesman against it he was in favor of the "forgotten man" of the middle class, a term he coined. He had a long-term influence on conservatism in the United States.
