Homes Quotes



Even though the research was done by the U. S. CDC (Communicable Disease Center), the finest public health research center in the world, it was still attacked by the National Rifle Association and many of their supporters in Congress. The response was so intense that in the appropriations for the CDC there was an amendment that required that Federal Money not be spent for “Gun Safety Research”. So Federal Health Agencies were actually barred by Congress from doing any research as to how guns can be used, stored and manufactured more safely.


The Great Depression was afflicting the nation. Farmers and homeowners who lost jobs (over 35%) or could not sell produce at a decent price could not pay their mortgage debts and homes and farms were being foreclosed in record numbers. Veterans who had saved the nation in WWI and farmers who had fed the population were impoverished and homeless. Rankin appealed to President Herbert Hoover to place a moratorium in bank foreclosures, which not only ruined the individuals but drove down the value of real estate by throwing so much on the market at a time when few had money to buy. Hoover, an otherwise decent man and an excellent administrator, had a blind spot and would not consider having the government solve or alleviate any of these problems as he felt that this would be bad for the national character. By 1932, the voters threw Hoover out and elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt who used the power of government in new and imaginative ways, improved the economy. Profided relief, and prevented a popular revolution and many believed saved capitalism from its own excesses.


RSD Party platform. The Russian Social Democratic Party was in 1887 a very modern democratic party inside the feudalism of Tsarist Russia. The Tsar and the nobility thought them wild radicals and yet their party platform was not only reasonable, but in large part influenced by the American Constitution, Bill of Rights, and then current practices in America. It is hard to believe but at the time a Russian could not work at an occupation he chose but could only do the work that was permitted by the aristocrat who owned the land he lived on. The Tsar, Alexander III, was a terrible autocrat, unlike his father who had desired some reform and abolished serfdom. All efforts at any kind of Democratic reform were put down, and Russian reformers in this party tended to split between those who still hoped for reform and those who saw violent revolution as the only hope. By 1906 the party which had no success at any of their planks of reform had split into two main subgroups—the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks—both active revolutionary groups, but the Mensheviks tended to be more democratic and moderate and wanted to include the workers and the middle class whereas the Bolsheviks saw the middle class as part of the problem and argued for a more radical political structure. The real split occurred after the 1917 revolution when the Mensheviks lost popularity among the Russian revolutionists as not being radical or realistic enough in what it would take to transform Russia. The Bolsheviks gained control and by 1921, they had outlawed and purged the Menshevik party. That was the last hope of democracy in Russia, as the Bolsheviks model was that which guided the country until the fall of the Soviet Union.


While hard to believe today, in that era, Presidential candidates often did not travel to campaign. They had surrogates campaigning for them, and the candidate gave interviews and wrote material for their partisan press outlets. But they basically stayed at home.