Janet Fitch Quotes
Wasn't that the way it always was? You didn't know, you couldn't tell, you just let it happen... Perhaps they didn't know themselves. Sometimes the line was very fine.
Fitch, Janet. Paint It Black. Little, Brown and Company, 2006.
The question produced this silly answer from a brilliant man and public critic of the ultra conservatives’ racism within his own party. He didn’t dare say “Yes” for if he did, the opponents of the Republcian party would quote his answer to great advantage. However most of the racists in America identify with the Republican party. Although this was the party of Lincoln and the major force against slavery and segregation in America, in 1964 the racists of America were furious at Lyndon Johnson and the liberal Democrats for passing the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 over their opposition and filibusters. The Republicans then adopted their “Southern Strategy” and welcomed the racists into the Republican Party. In a few short years, the highly racist“Solid South” had changed from solid Democratic to solid Republican. Politically the Southern Strategy was very successful in the 20th Century, but started to hurt Republicans in National Elections by the end of that century.
This quotation may be apocryphal and not real. We have not been able to find an eyewitness or even a quotation the citation of which gave a date or suggested how the quote was ever made public given that it passed between these two men. However it is so frequently quoted that we have decided to include it. A further argument in its favor is that it fits the circumstances of the time. FDR had given Hopkins a huge budget and told Hopkins to get the American people working again. Hopkins did not believe in payments to the able bodied unless worked and his programs created an astounding array of jobs for the unemployed to do ranging from fixing benches in parks to writing poetry about poverty. He spend more money than any human being in history and started and implemented a nationwide program at a pace that has never been matched, Incredibly, no one was ever able to find any dishonesty in the administration, but it took years for the information of exactly what had going on at the local level to filter back to Washington. So the quote is plausible factually. Style-wise Hopkins was brutally honest with Roosevelt and others so well might have admitted that he did not know all that was going on in his programs. See {642829}.
Janet Fitch is most famously known as the author of the Oprah's Book Club novel White Oleander, which became a film in 2002. She is a graduate of Reed College.
