Richard Lamm Quotes
It was almost a desecration to put a building on the Boulder Turnpike, which is now U.S.-36 and is almost backyards and even junkyards all the way up. We didn't have to put development just cheek to jowl all the way up to Boulder. There's enough room in Colorado! But we did.
Lamm, Richard D. Interview, The Denver Post, 1998.
Moses became the greatest “builder” the world had ever known. The Bridges and tunnels into New York, the highways in the city and Long Island, the development of Fire Island and the World Trade Center were all his work. Babbitt was a very large building and construction contractor. The Cold War was ongoing and his reference to civilian defense was an absurd notion of the 1950s that building bomb shelters in cities and homes could protect the civilian population in the event of nuclear attack. This was actually an official government position and program.
In most of the world there has been a continual migration into cities.
The emergency was what was called the “Dust Bow” which was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands in the 1930s. Over 350,000 people left the Great Plains. The phenomenon was caused by severe drought combined with a failure to apply dry land farming methods to prevent wind erosion. What makes this quotation important is that it illustrates a remarkable practice of Mrs. Roosevelt that no other first lady as every done. Here the First Lady of a sitting President was overtly whipping up public opinion to complain that the government, led by her husband, was doing nothing to cope with a national emergency. This was very common and Mrs. Roosevelt was way out ahead of the President and his administration on most issues of the day. The President seemed to like the idea and it may have been one of the great public strategies of a Presidency. The First Lady would publicly advocate major reforms. The President could then observe the public reaction, judge the newspaper and pundit pronouncements, see how different special interests reacted. Then he could decide to embrace the reform or ignore it saying that it was just the opinion of his very independent wife. FDR had a very strong ego and had no problem with his wife publicly criticizing him.
Richard Douglas Lamm is an American politician, writer, and attorney. He served three terms as 38th Governor of Colorado as a Democrat (1975–1987) and ran for the Reform Party's nomination for President of the United States in 1996. Lamm is a Certified Public Accountant and currently the Co-Director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies at the University of Denver.
