Progressive Era Quotes

[Theodore] Roosevelt is the most perfectly equipped and the most effective politician thus far seen in the Presidency.

FDR's New Deal and, after it, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower's similar Middle Way, used the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure, like roads and bridges.

Roosevelt or Ruin

[Franklin Delano] Roosevelt started more creations than were ever finished since Genesis—and finished none.

I'm hardly the first person to say that you've [Jeffrey Rosen] written a book about a person who has more to say about the current state of being than almost anyone, Louis Brandeis, and yet nobody is talking about Louis Brandeis.

Gradually, between his 15th and 25th years, during the ascendancy of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin began to persuade himself that he would become God’s chosen, and the American people’s constitutionally elected, instrument for the stewardship of the country.

Americans are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal.

But at the same time, in reality, what a difference there is between the world today, and what it used to be! And with the passage of more time, some two or three hundred years, say, people will look back at our own times with horror, or with sneering laughter, because all of our present day life will appear so clumsy, and burdensome, extraordinarily inept and strange. Yes, certainly, what a life it will be then, what a life!

Louis Brandeis really inspired me to write this book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet]. It was a crazy deadline. The editor said I'd miss the hundredth anniversary unless I pumped the thing out in six months, because I'd been delaying and dilly dallying for so long. So he both inspired me to get up early and write.

[Louis] Brandeis is often painted as an acolyte of judicial restraint, or the view that judges should uphold laws whether or not they like them.

Back a hundred years ago, especially around Woodrow Wilson, what happened in this country is we took freedom and we chopped it into pieces.

New York makes me swoony and in love. The New York of the 1880s was a place where black eye fixers did a brisk business and people were routinely killed for their shoes. But, the constant aspiration of the city never changes.

But no one can praise Roosevelt for doing this and then insist that he restored our traditional political and economic systems to their former vitality.

For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But the end will come.

Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.

'Colonel Roosevelt' is compelling reading, and Morris a brilliant biographer who practices his art at the highest level.

[Louis] Brandeis improves the prose. He simplifies it and perfects the balance of the sentence so it becomes even more memorable and aphoristic.

Reading Edmund Morris's 'Colonel Roosevelt' is a rewarding journey, as it must also have been for its author, who concludes his three-volume saga begun in 1980 with publication of 'The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.'

The Seventeenth Amendment serves not the public's interest but the interests of the governing masterminds and their disciples. Its early proponents advanced it not because they championed 'democracy' or the individual, but because they knew it would be one of several important mechanisms for empowering the federal government and unraveling constitutional republicanism.

[Louis] Brandeis is writing directly to us. His clear voice comes through a century and he's speaking to us and he's galvanizing us and he's persuading us. And that's why I love to read the prose.

In the time of the robber barons, my great grandfather insisted on reinvesting and sharing profits with workers... He was told he was a socialist, that he was not welcome on Wall Street.

History looks very different from a black point of view. The heroes are different, and the eras get different names. The Progressive Era is no longer the Progressive Era, because it's the era in which more black people are lynched than in any other period in American history.

American history is … best understood as a millenarian movement.

I love Teddy Roosevelt... As a country, we need to think big again.

There have been two periods in my lifetime when the excitement of government and of public issues drew to Washington many of the bright young people graduating from colleges and law schools. These were essentially the Roosevelt and the Kennedy years.