Edward Levi Quotes
The one thing we ought to worry about is the propensity of this country to overreact, and to engage in cycles of bitterness.
Edward Levi, 1911-2000, U. S. Attorney General, President, University of Chicago, Bicentennial Essay, Newsweek
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At the time very few national leaders and still fewer politicians were willing to even criticize McCarthy or his methods. Flanders, in a great example of political courage, did so.
Howe was specifically referring to the Gastonia strike of 1929. The Communists, never known for their skill at organizing labor action, sold out the workers in order to have a political issue to campaign on throughout the world. Meanwhile, the Southern establishment saw the strike as an Armageddon where Communism and racial integration had to be stopped cold and therefore not only refused even reasonable demands, but used the National Guard {592420} and law enforcement authorities to murder and jail innocent people. Both sides got what they wanted unfortunately, with the communists cleverly exposing to the rest of the world, the worst of Southern racism. All civil rights protests thereafter in America were claimed by the Southern segregationists to be communist organized, and even affirmative action efforts are still often so labeled.
After Roosevelt, most eras of American politics more or less followed the pattern Roosevelt described herein as a “calamity”, with the anger becoming more or less intense. Jefferson thought that these were natural divisions of politics in all societies--{604810}. The thing that masked this for years was race and slavery. In Lincoln’s time there were liberals and conservatives in both parties if race were ignored. In Theodore Roosevelt’s era, he, Taft and others were generally liberal reformers, while a large number of Republicans were conservative supporters of the status quo. Some democrats were radical reformers like William Jennings Bryan while others were arch conservatives. Until 1964 and the Civil Rights Act there were many conservatives in the Democratic Party, but almost all switched to the Republican Party in anger. The Republican conservatives tended to drive the Republican liberals out of the party and for the last part of the 20th century Roosevelt’s “calamity” well described the American political scene, and the anger increased carrying partisan bitterness into the 21st century.
Edward Hirsch Levi was an American law professor, academic leader, scholar, and statesman. He served as dean of the University of Chicago Law School from 1950 to 1962, president of the University of Chicago from 1968 to 1975, and then as United States Attorney General in the Ford Administration. Levi is regularly cited as the "model of a modern attorney general", the "greatest lawyer of his time", and is credited with restoring order after Watergate. He is considered, along with Yale's Whitney Griswold, the greatest of postwar American university presidents.
