Herbert Croly Quotes
So far I, at least, have no fault to find with implications of Hamilton's Federalism, but unfortunately his policy was in certain other respects tainted with a more doubtful tendency.
Croly, Herbert. The Promise of American Life. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1909, p. 40.
The first Georgia legislature had been corrupt and had been bribed to sell huge tracts of land at cheap prices to four large speculators who in turn sold smaller parcels of land to thousands at huge profits. Over a decade later a new state legislature realizing the mistake that had been made, voted to invalidate all the sales and treat the land as public land. This solution had great popular support. However, the Supreme Court in upholding private rights ruled that the State legislature could not invalidate a legal private contract. More important, it established the precedent, still argued to this day.
Herbert David Croly was an intellectual leader of the progressive movement as an editor, political philosopher and a co-founder of the magazine The New Republic in early twentieth-century America. His political philosophy influenced many leading progressives including Theodore Roosevelt, Adolph Berle, as well as his close friends Judge Learned Hand and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.
