1. Ralph Waldo Emerson
( )
Background:
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
Born in Boston, son of a minister
Studied at Harvard
Crisis of faith - Proclaimed that while Jesus was a great man, he was not God – denounced as an atheist
Prominent Transcendentalist
Considered one of the great orators of the time
Poet
Emerson emphasized individualism and rejected traditional authority.

2. Quotes from Emerson’s Self-Reliance:
…To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private hears, is true for all men,--that is genius.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thought: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.

3. Do your thing, and I shall know you
Do your thing, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind-man-bluff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.  
For non-conformity the world whips you with its displeasure.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks…. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God spaketh, he should communicate not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole.

4.  …in the universal miracle petty and particular miracles disappear.
Man is timid and apologetic. He is no longer upright. He dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage.
…man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time….
Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state….
He who has more soul than I, masters me, though he should not raise his finger.
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
…you isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.

5. It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.
Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end, is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness.
The soul is no traveler: the wise man stays at home….
Insist on yourself; never imitate.
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Young American (1844)
The Young American was a lecture that Emerson read before the Mercantile Library Association, Boston, February 7, 1844.
Main Points:
1. Americans are split: they want everything that is British, yet want to live in America.
“It is remarkable that our people have their intellectual culture from one country and their duties from another…”
2. The railroad will alleviate this split by making natural resources readily known and available. The railroad will also hasten the settlement and development of the rest of the country.
“An unlooked consequence of the railroad is the increased acquaintance it has given the American people with the boundless resources of their own soil.”
“…It (the railroad) has given a new celerity to time, or anticipated by fifty years the planting of tracts of land, the choice of water privileges, the working of mines, and other natural advantages.”
“Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of the land and water.”
3. The most important consideration at this time is commerce because it will bring about means to build up America.
“…commerce is the political fact of most significance to the American at this hour.”
“Trade is an instrument in the hands of that friendly Power which works for us in our own despite. We design it thus and thus; it turns out otherwise and far better”
4. The young American is building a foundation for generations to come in order to enable their descendants to do far better.
“We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for remote generations. We should be mortified to learn that the little benefit we chanced in out own persons to receive was the utmost they would yield.”
5. Trade is the key to America’s success.
“Trade goes to make the governments insignificant and to bring every kind of faculty of every individual that can in any manner serve any person, on sale…”
Gentlemen, the development of our American internal resources, the extension to the utmost of the commercial system, and the appearance of new moral causes which are to modify the state, are hiving an aspect of greatness to the Future, which the imagination fears to open.”

7. Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)

8. Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
IT IS MAN’S DUTY TO WASH HIS HAND OF WRONG. It is not man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any…wrong; he may still properly have other concern to engage him; but it is his duty at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him fist, that he may pursue his contemplations too.
DEMOCRACY SOMETIMES PREVENTS PEOPLE FROM DOING THE RIGHT THING. In a democracy, there are unjust laws, but people “think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them.”

9. Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
ANY MAN MORE RIGHT THAN HIS NEIGHBORS CONSTITUTES A MAJORITY BECAUSE HE HAS GOD ON HIS SIDE, AND HE SHOULD ACT IMMEDIATELY TO WASH HIS HAND OF WRONG. If a government is maintaining unjust laws, people should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government. They should “not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”
ONE HONEST MAN CAN CHANGE THE STATE. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever. But we love better to talk about it: that we say is our mission.
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison…. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”

10. Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
“A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.”
IT IS GOOD TO BE A MARTYR RATHER THAN A SINNER. Suppose blood should flow when standing up to the government or the majority in refusal to consent to unjust laws. “Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death.”
THE STATE SHOULD HAVE TRUE RESPECT FOR THE INDIVIDUAL. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual…. There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imaging a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men.”

11. The Mexican View of the War (1850) Ramon Alvarez Et Al.
Main Points
Mexican political disarray allowed US to take its territory.
“Emancipated from the parent country, the country offered an easy conquest to any who might desire to employ against her a respectable force.”
“…it is sufficient to say that the insatiable ambition of the US, favored by our weakness, caused it.”
“…political inexperience of our national governors converted into a fountain of evil a benevolent and purely Christian principle.”

12. The Mexican View of the War (1850) Ramon Alvarez Et Al.
Main Points
American Expansionism was dangerous and at fault for the war.
“From the days of their independence they adopted a project of extending their dominions, and since then, that line of policy has not been deviated in the slightest degree…”
“The [US] has already absorbed territories pertaining to Great Britain, France, Spain and Mexico.”
“While the US [acted in a peaceful way], their acts of hostility manifested very evidently what were their true intentions.”
“…it was the spirit of aggrandizement of the United States of the North.”

13. The Mexican View of the War (1850) Ramon Alvarez Et Al.
Main Points
US added insult to injury by blaming Mexico for the war.
“Thus, violence and insult were united: thus at the very time they usurped part of our territory, they offered to us the hand of treachery, to have soon the audacity to say that our obstinacy and arrogance were the real causes of the war…”

14. The Progress of Mankind (1854)
George Bancroft
The Progress of Mankind (1854)
Main Points:
 Americans and their political system have discovered how to bring to bear the Divine mind, and thus we are destined for greatness:
“…the condition of our race is one of growth or of decay. It is the glory of man that he is conscious of this law of his existence. (We great Americans choose growth.)
“The progress of man consists in this, that he himself arrives at the perception of truth. The Divine mind, which is its source, left it to be discovered, appropriated and developed by finite creatures.”
 All men should be able to participate in government:
“Every man is in substance equal to his fellowman.”

15. The Progress of Mankind (1854)
George Bancroft
The Progress of Mankind (1854)
Main Points (continued):
 In order to progress, each individual must contribute to the whole, and the whole of society is more intelligent than the wisest individual:
“COMMEN SENSE implies by its very name, that each individual is to contribute some share toward the general intelligence. The many are wiser than the few; the multitude than the philosopher; the race than the individual; and each successive generation than its predecessor.”
 Women can influence politics, not in public, but by talking to their men in their own home:
“Yet the progress of liberty, while it has made her less conspicuous, has redeemed her into the possession of the full dignity of her nature, has made her not man’s slave, but his companion, his counselor, and fellow-martyr; and, for an occasional ascendancy in political affairs, has substituted the uniform enjoyment of domestic equality.”
 Democracy is marching forward and the frontier is an opportunity; a symbol of freedom:
“Our Land extends far into the wilderness, and beyond the wilderness; and while on this side of the great mountains it gives the Western nations of Europe a theatre for the renewal of their youth, on the transmontane side, the hoary civilization of the farthest antiquity leans forward from Asia to receive the glad tidings of the messenger of freedom. The islands of the Pacific entreat our protection, and at our suit the Empire of Japan breaks down its wall of exclusion…”

16. Frederick Douglass, What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July? (1852)
Main Points
The Fourth of July is important to the white American people, but a mockery to the black people.
You high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance, between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not me. The sunlight that brought sunlight and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me.
A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, and unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless: you denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy

17. Frederick Douglass, What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July? (1852)
Main Points
It is obvious that slaves are human, and not just property.
On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government.

18. Frederick Douglass, What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July? (1852)
Main Points.
There is not a nation on earth more barbarous or hypocritical than America is at this very moment.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South American, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay the facts side by side, and you will say with me, that, for barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America Reigns with out a rival.

19. My Bondage and My Freedom Fredrick Douglass (1855) Main Points
Slaves do not have family because they are considered chattel
“A person of some consequence here in the north, sometimes designated father, is literally abolished in slave law and slave practice.”
“They keep no family records with marriages, births, and deaths.”
“It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as an institution.”
Fathers are nonexistent in slavery
“Its laws do not recognize their existence in the social arrangements of the plantation.”
“He may be a freeman; and yet his child may be a chattel.”
“Indeed, he may be, and often is, master and father to the same child.”
“by the laws of slavery, children, in all cases, are reduced to the condition of their mothers.”
“Men do not love those who remind them of their sins unless thy have a mind re repent – and the mulatto child’s face is a standing accusation against him who is master and father to the child.”

20. My Bondage and My Freedom Fredrick Douglass (1855) Main Points
Ignorance is a high virtue in the slave system
“Ignorance is a high virtue in a human chattel; and as the master studies to keep the slave ignorant, the slave is cunning enough to make the master think he succeeds…”
Necessary rules of slavery, thought by masters, to manage their human chattel
Teaching slaves to read “was unlawful, that it was also unsafe, and could only lead to mischief.”
“he should know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it.” “If you teach that nigger how to read the bible, there will be no keeping him,” “it would forever unfit him for the duties of a slave…. If you learn him now to read, he’ll want to know how to write; and this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.”

21. Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Main Points
Slavery was harmful to the stability and structure of many Southern families, and therefore destabilized the Southern society and culture as a whole.
Slaves were thought to be property disregarded as a person with no emotions or thought, even the life of a child could escape the oppression of slavery.
“He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things. My soul revolted against the mean tyranny.”
Slavery damaged family values.
The white children were brought up to think slavery was right but saw the tensions that it caused within their family.
The white women took their frustration out on the slave girl because they were more vulnerable to attack than their husbands were.
“The mistress, who ought to protect the helpless victim, has no other feelings toward her but those of jealousy and rage.”

22. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Harriet Jacobs ( ),
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
The master would go to the slave girl for his guilty pleasure because she would be at his disposal.
“My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belong to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him.”
Southern women knew that their men had fathered slave children and saw them as property.
“…Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation…”

23. Slavery and the Confederacy (1861)
Alexander Stephens
Slavery and the Confederacy (1861)
With the Independence of the Confederate States of America, the South will no longer suffer from the oppressive tariffs of the United States’ federal government.
The foundations of the Confederacy rest “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition.”
“The negro by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system [(i.e. slavery)].”
The truth of the Negro’s inferiority “has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.”
Whites teach Blacks how to work, as well as how to feed and clothe themselves.
“Our object is Peace, not only with the North, but with the world… The ideal of coercing us, or subjugating us, is utterly preposterous.”

24. Reverend Benjamin Morgan Palmer
Slavery a Divine Trust: Duty of the South to Preserve and Perpetuate it
The South’s providential trust “is to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of slavery as now existing….”
The South needs slavery to support its material interests.
White slave owners act as guardians of their black slaves. Blacks are like helpless children who the slave owner protects.
“Freedom would be their doom.”
Slaves “form parts of our households, even as our children….”
The world should FEAR abolition. The world is more dependent on slavery for its wealth than ever, and if slavery ends, the world economy will totter.
The South defends the cause of God and religion, since the “Abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic….”

25. Rabbi Morris J. Raphall POINT 1:
The Bible does not condemn slavery. However, it does condemn coveting another’s property, including another’s slaves.
POINT 2:
Abolitionists, such as Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, are inventing new sins when they claim that slavery is evil. By doing this they are insulting and exasperating “thousands of God-fearing, law-abiding citizens” and have pushed the country toward civil war.

26. Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
POINT 1: “…The whole nation is guilty [regarding slavery]….”
POINT 2: “Our civilization has not begotten humanity and respect for others’ rights, nor a spirit of protection to the weak….”

27. Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address (1863) Main Points
It is time we talk about the promise of equality.
“…a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”
We honor the soldiers sacrifice.
“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us”
The Union is worth fighting for. It is not a confederation but a federal government.
“—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not parish from the earth.”

28. Gettysburg Address
About a 2 minute speech given by President Lincoln at the dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery.
Given 4 months after the costliest battle of the Civil War.
Total casualties of the War to this time 472,154
This battle alone had 54,707 casualties

29. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893)
Main Points:
● Until now, American history has been the history of the colonization of the Great West
▪ “The wilderness masters the colonist.”
▪ “Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American.”
● Expansion = Independence
▪ “…the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the
influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.”
● To be an American is to tame the wild and gain both strength and individuality from it as well as unification
▪ “…to study this advance … is to study the really American part of our history…”
▪ “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people.”
● The spirit and success of the United States is directly tied to it’s westward expansion
▪ “The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its
activity, was conditioned on the frontier.”
▪ “The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of
the frontier…”
● The frontier creates individualism which encourages democracy
▪ “…the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe.”
▪ “… the frontier is productive of individualism.”
▪ “The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy.”
● Americans will never stop their expansion or development
▪ “From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance…”
▪ “Since the days…of Columbus…America has been another name for opportunity…”
▪ “Movement has been its dominant fact, and…the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its
exercise.”

30. Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life  
POINT 1: DO NOT LIVE A LIFE OF IDELNESS; A STRENUOUS LIFE IS MUCH MORE REWARDING AND NOBLE.
I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.
We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.
A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.
The man must be glad to do a man's work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and those dependent on him. The woman must be the housewife, the helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children.

31. POINT 2: ONLY THROUGH STRIFE AND STRENUOUS AND DARING EFFORT WILL WE ACHIEVE NATIONAL GREATNESS.
…it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.

32. Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life
POINT 3: WEAKNESS IS THE GREATEST OF CRIMES. OUR NATION HAS A RESPONSIBILTY TO BRING THE HALF-CAST NATIONS OF THE WORLD GOOD GOVERNMENT. IF WE DO THIS WE WILL BE GREAT, AND IF WE DO NOT WE WILL CEDE THE OPPORTUNITY TO “BOLDER AND STRONGER PEOPLES.”
We cannot, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in scrambling commercialism; heedless of higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for the day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow of question, what China has already found, that in this world the nation that has trained itself into a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities. If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world.
The guns that thundered off Manila and Santiago left us echoes of glory, but they also left us a legacy of duty. If we drove out a mediaeval tyranny only to make room for savage anarchy, we had better not begun the task at all. It is worse than idle to say that we have no duty to perform, and can leave to their fates the islands we have conquered. Such a course would be a course of infamy. It would be followed at once by utter chaos in the wretched islands themselves. Some stronger, manlier power would have to step in and do the work, and we would have shown ourselves weaklings, unable to carry to successful completion the labors that great and high-spirited nations are eager to undertake.

33. Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life
POINT 3 (CONTINUED): WEAKNESS IS THE GREATEST OF CRIMES. OUR NATION HAS A RESPONSIBILTY TO BRING THE HALF-CAST NATIONS OF THE WORLD GOOD GOVERNMENT. IF WE DO THIS WE WILL BE GREAT, AND IF WE DO NOT WE WILL CEDE THE OPPORTUNITY TO “BOLDER AND STRONGER PEOPLES.”
The Philippines offer a yet graver problem. Their population includes half-caste and native Christians, warlike Moslems, and wild pagans. Many of their people are utterly unfit for self-government and show no signs of becoming fit.
Resistance [in the Philippines] must be stamped out. The first and all-important work to be done is to establish the supremacy of our flag. We must put down armed resistance before we can accomplish anything else, and there should be no parleying, no faltering, in dealing with our foe. As for those in our own country who encourage the foe, we can afford contemptuously to disregard them; but it must be remembered that their utterances are not saved from being treasonable merely by the fact that they are despicable.
[We must send out there only good and able men.... [They] must show the utmost tact and firmness, remembering that, we such people as those with whom we are to deal, weakness is the greatest of crimes, and that next to weakness comes lace of consideration for their principles and prejudices.

34. What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883)
William Graham Sumner,
What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883)
Main Points
Only the select few can solve society’s problems and create problems.
“Those who are bound to solve problems are the rich, comfortable, prosperous, virtuous, respectable, educated and healthy; those whose right it is to set the problems are those who have been less fortunate or less successful in the struggle for existence.”
It is not your fault in society that you are better than me, and it is not your responsibility to help me become like you and be your burden.
“A man who is present as a consumer, yet who does not contribute either by land, labor, or capital to the work of society, is a burden. On no sound political theory ought such a person to share in the political power of the state.”
The crumbling of a society by a social class.
“Those whom humanitarians and philanthropists call weak are the ones through whom the productive and conservative forces of society are wasted. They constantly neutralize and destroy the finest efforts of the wise and industrious, and are a dead-weight on the society in all its struggles to realize better things.”

35. What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883)
William Graham Sumner,
What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883)
Take care of your own business and not everyone else’s.
“Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is, to take care of his or her own self. This is a social duty.”
“the legislation are kept constantly busy, by the people who have made up their minds that it is wise and conducive to happiness to live in a certain way, and who want to compel everybody else to live in their way.”
The government gets its money from you to help reform society. It gives it to me to help make me like you.
“the right to claim and the duty to give one man’s efforts for another man’s satisfaction. We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.”
“prejudice that a man who gives a dollar to a beggar is generous and kind-hearted, but that a man who refuses the beggar and puts the dollar in a savings-bank is stingy and mean. The former is putting the capital where it is very sure to be wasted, and where it will be a kind of seed for a long succession of future dollars, which must be wasted to ward off a greater strain of the sympathies than would have been occasioned by a refusal in the first place. Inasmuch as the dollar might have been turned into capital and given to a laborer who, while earning it, would have reproduced it, it must be regarded as taken from the latter.”
I have as much right as you to have as much success as you do, but I expect to have it handed to me without the sacrifices that you have made.
“We each owe it to the other to guarantee rights. Rights do not pertain to results, but only to chances. They pertain to the conditions of the struggle for existence, not to any of the results of it; to the pursuit of happiness, not to the possession of happiness.”
“The men who have not done their duty in this world never can be equal to those who have done their duty more or less well.”

36. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
Veblen was the son of Norwegian immigrants, and he grew up in rural Minnesota.
He did not learn to speak English until he was a teenager.
He received a B.A. from Carleton College in 1880 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale in At Yale, he developed a friendship with his sociology professor, William Graham Sumner, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Immanuel Kant in the area of Moral Philosophy.
In 1882, he started to teach political economy at the University of Chicago. He became known as a brilliant and eccentric thinker and an unconventional teacher. At the University of Chicago he gained a reputation as an insightful social critic, and it was during his years in Chicago that he wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class.
He taught political economy and later became editor of the Journal of Political Thought.
He taught at Stanford from and at the University of Missouri from
In 1919 he became a founding member of the New School for Social Research in New York.
He died in 1929 of heart disease.

37. Main Point 1: The leisure class is conservative, finding no reason to support changes, because they enjoy the status quo and are little affected by economic pressures.
The exigencies of the struggle for means of life are less exacting for [the leisure] class than for any other; and as a consequence of this privilege position we should expect to find it one of the least responsive of the classes of society to the demands which the situation makes for a further growth of institutions and a readjustment to an altered industrial situation. The leisure class is the conservative class.
…exigencies do not readily produce in the members of this class, that degree of uneasiness with the existing order which alone can lead any body of men to give up views and methods of life that have become habitual to them. The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent….

38. Main Point 2: Conservatism is decorous and respectable
Main Point 2: Conservatism is decorous and respectable. Innovation is vulgar.
This conservatism of the wealthy class is so obvious a feature that it has even come to be recognized as a mark of respectability. Since conservatism is a characteristic of the wealthier and therefore more reputable portion of the community, it has acquired a certain honorific or decorative value. It has become prescriptive to such an extent that an adherence to conservative views is comprised as a matter of course in our notions of respectability; and it is imperatively incumbent on all who would lead a blameless life in point of social repute. Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar.
…progress is hindered by underfeeding and excessive physical hardship, no less effectually than by such a luxurious life as will shut out discontent by cutting off the occasion for it. The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.
From this proposition it follows that the institution of a leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of sustenance, and so reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought.

39. Main Points 3: The example of the leisure class fosters conspicuous consumption, which diverts resources away from sustenance of the lower classes.
The prevalence of conspicuous consumption as one of the main elements in the standard of decency among all classes is of course not traceable wholly to the example of the wealthy leisure class, but the practice and the insistence on it are no doubt strengthened by the example of the leisure class. The requirements of decency in this matter are very considerable and very imperative; so that even among classes whose pecuniary position is sufficiently strong to admit a consumption of goods considerably in excess of the subsistence minimum, the disposable surplus left over after the more imperative physical needs are satisfied is not infrequently diverted to the purpose of a conspicuous decency, rather than to added physical comfort and fullness of life. Moreover, such surplus energy as is available is also likely to be expended in the acquisition of goods for conspicuous consumption or conspicuous boarding. The result is that the requirements of pecuniary reputability tend (1) to leave but a scanty subsistence minimum available for other than conspicuous consumption, and (2) to absorb any surplus energy which may be available after the bare physical necessities of life have been provided for.

40. Main Point 4: Since the leisure class discourages change, it hinders evolutionary progress.
…the leisure class, in the nature of things, consistently acts to retard that adjustment to the environment which is called social advance or development. The characteristic attitude of the class may be summed up in the maxim: "Whatever is, is right" whereas the law of natural selection, as applied to human institutions, gives the axiom: "Whatever is, is wrong." Not that the institutions of today are wholly wrong for the purposes of the life of today, but they are, always and in the nature of things, wrong to some extent. They are the result of a more or less inadequate adjustment of the methods of living to a situation which prevailed at some point in the past development
The institution of a leisure class, by force or class interest and instinct, and by precept and prescriptive example, makes for the perpetuation of the existing maladjustment of institutions, and even favors a reversion to a somewhat more archaic scheme of life; a scheme which would be still farther out of adjustment with the exigencies of life under the existing situation even than the accredited, obsolescent scheme that has come down from the immediate past.

41. Seneca Falls Convention, Declaration of Sentiments (1848)
Main Points
Women declared their independence and inalienable Rights: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
“We insist that [women] have immediate admission to the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.”
“…Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.”

42. Seneca Falls Convention, Declaration of Sentiments (1848)
Main Points
Men have created a social and political tyranny over women by not recognizing their civil liberties.
“He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.”
“He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.”
“He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.”
“He has withheld from her rights which are given the most ignorant and degraded men- both natives and foreigners.”
“He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.”
“He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.”
“In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master.”
…if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.” 1

43. The Origins of Insanity in Women, Horatio Storer (1865)
Main Points
1. His propositions:
Mental disease (insanity) in women is due to their reproductive systems.
Mental disease is made worse by menstruation
To treat mental disease (insanity) in women, you must believe the above theories.
2. Storer wanted to cure insane women.
“The necessity of removing a cause to prevent or to cure its effect is as decided in mental pathology as in physical. We recognize it everywhere else; we must recognize it in the treatment of insane women…”
3. Storer’s view of women was preconceived and warped.
“…they have become habitually thievish, profane, or obscene, despondent
or self-indulgent, shrewish or fatuous…”
Storer felt like women needed to be sheltered and protected. For them to have their own views and feelings was wrong. Being passionate or sexually aggressive was something that needed to be taken care of. Nymphomania was a term used only to describe obsessive sexual desires in women.
4. As the weaker sex, women are more vulnerable to their passions.
“The attacks of this (sexual desire) were clearly coincident with the menstrual period, and so extreme that the patient could with difficulty restrain herself from soliciting the approach of the other sex.”
Upon treatment (removal of the ovaries, menstrual pain, potassium monoxide), the “morbid desires” stopped.
The sexual desires for men were normal, sexual desires in women had to be treated. Why?

44. Bradwell v. The State of Illinois (1873), U.S. Supreme Court  
Main Point #1:
Citizenship does not give one the right, under the fourteenth amendment, to practice law in the courts of a state.
“We agree with [counsel] that there are privileges and immunities belonging to citizens of the United States, in that relation and character, and that it is these and these alone which a State is forbidden to abridge. But the right to admission to practice in the courts of a State is not one of them. This right in no sense depends on citizenship of the United States.” pp
Justice Bradley
Myra Bradwell

45. Main Point #2: Men and women are very different
Main Point #2: Men and women are very different. Women are naturally timid and delicate and there are many occupations for which they are unfit. Man is woman’s protector and defender.
 …The civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman's protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. p. 69.   
Main Point #3: Women belong to the domestic sphere, and should not adopt a career distinct and independent from that of her husband.
The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband. p. 69.
Main Point #4: God has given women the role of wives and mothers. This is a natural law to which we must adapt, and not be persuaded by exception cases.
The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things, and cannot be based upon exceptional cases. p. 69.

46. Historical Significance
About a hundred years later, the Court began employing the Fourteenth Amendment as a way of overturning gender-discriminatory state laws. In doing so, however, it would typically use the "equal protection" clause, rather than the clause cited in Bradwell, "privileges and immunities."
In 1882, however, the Illinois legislature passed a law guaranteeing all persons, regardless of sex, the right to select a profession as they wished. Although Bradwell never reapplied for admission to the bar, the Illinois Supreme Court informed her that her original application had been accepted. As a result, she became the first woman member of the Illinois State Bar Association; she was also the first woman member of the Illinois Press Association. On March 28, 1892, she was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In addition to her efforts to win admission to the bar, Bradwell played a role in the broader women's rights movement. She was active in the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association and helped form the American Woman Suffrage Association. She was also influential in the passage of laws by the Illinois legislature that gave married women the right to keep wages they earned and protected the rights of widows.
Bradwell died February 14, 1894, in Chicago, Illinois.

47. Margaret Sanger, Women and the New Race (1920)
Main Point 1: Much of humankind’s misery can be attributed to women’s ignorance about reproductivity, women’s acceptance of inferior status, and women’s willingness to unthinkingly submit to the will of their men and have numerous children. The result has been the cheapening of life through over-population.
Whether it was the tyranny of monarchy, an oligarchy or a republic, the one indispensable factor of its existence was, as it is now, hordes of human beings—human beings so plentiful as to be cheap, and so cheap that ignorance was their natural lot. Upon the rock of an unenlightened, submissive maternity have these been founded; upon the product of such a maternity have they flourished.
No period of low wages or of idleness with their want among the workers, no peonage or sweatshop, no child-labor factory, ever came into being, save from the same source. Nor have famine and plague been as much “acts of God” as acts of too prolific mothers.
Unknowingly, women replenish the
poor
insane
criminal
hungry
ranks of prostitutes
legions of soldiers to die in foreign conquests (due to pressures of overpopulation)
[In the mass, women] went on breeding with staggering rapidity those numberless, undesired children who become the clogs and the destroyers of civilizations.
In her submission lies her error and her guilt. By her failure to withhold the multitudes of children who have made inevitable the most flagrant of our social evils, she incurred a debt to society.
War, famine, poverty, and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.
Margaret Sanger, Women and the New Race (1920)

48. …she must emerge from her ignorance and assume her responsibility.
Main Point 2. Through sex education and birth control, women will gain free motherhood and become liberated. They will also be remaking the world into a more humane and less miserable place.
The most important force in the remaking of the world is a free motherhood.
...she may, by controlling birth, lift motherhood to the plane of a voluntary, intelligent function, and remake the world.
Millions of women are asserting their right to voluntary motherhood. They are determined to decide for themselves whether they shall become mothers, under what conditions and when. This is the fundamental revolt referred to. It is for women the key to the temple of liberty.
Even as birth control is the means by which woman attains basic freedom, so it is the means by which she must and will uproot the evil she has wrought through her submission.
…she must emerge from her ignorance and assume her responsibility.
She can do this only when she has awakened to a knowledge of herself and of the consequences of her ignorance. The first step is birth control. Through birth control she will attain to voluntary motherhood. Having attained this, the basic freedom of her sex, she will cease to enslave herself and the mass of humanity
Birth control is woman’s problem. The quicker she accepts it as hers and hers alone, the quicker will society respect motherhood. The quicker, too, will the world be made a fit place for her children to live.

49. Main Point 3: Women need to value themselves for who they are
Main Point 3: Women need to value themselves for who they are. They also need to educate themselves (know thyself).
The problem of birth control has arisen directly from the effort of the feminine spirit to free itself from bondage. Woman herself has wrought that bondage through her reproductive powers and while enslaving herself she enslaved the world.
Her mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its activities.
She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. That right to decide imposes upon her the duty of clearing the way to knowledge by which she may make and carry out the decision.

50. IDA B. Wells, A Red Record (1895) Main Points
Ida Wells documented extralegal lynchings to expose their illegality and barbarity.
The real condition of the child was not as brutal as claimed
“the father and his friends, at once shamefully exaggerated the facts and declared that the babe had been ruthlessly assaulted and then killed.
“the white people of the community made it a point to exaggerate every detail of the awful affair, and to inflame the public mind so that nothing less than immediate and violent death would satisfy the populace.”
“Person’s who saw the after its death, have stated, under the most solemn pledge to truth, that there was no evidence of such an assault as was published at the time, only a slight abrasion and discoloration was noticeable and that mostly about the neck.

51. IDA B. Wells, A Red Record (1895) Main Points
The authorities made an example out of Smith.
“They determined to make an example of him and proceeded to carry out their purpose with unspeakably greater ferocity than that which characterized the half crazy object of their revenge…”
People from various parts of Texas and Arkansas came to see the lynching.

52. Thousands gathered in Paris, Texas, for the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.

53. Spectacle lynching. The Burning and Lynching of Jesse Washington, Waco Texas 1916. 
Although accurate figures on the lynching of blacks are lacking, one study estimates that in Texas between 1870 and 1900, extralegal justice was responsible for the murder of about 500 blacks—only Georgia and Mississippi exceeded Texas’s numbers in this grisly record. Between 1900 and 1910, Texas mobs murdered more than 100 black people. In 1916 at Waco, approximately 10,000 whites turned out in holiday-like atmosphere to watch a mob mutilate and burn a black man named Jesse Washington. (Source: Calvert, De Leon and Cantrell, The History of Texas, pp. 189, )

54. Main Point: We should concentrate on work and progress
Main Point: We should concentrate on work and progress. Blacks and whites need stop fighting, agitating and relocating. The South will progress if we work together. We only hurt ourselves by fighting.
Brooker T. Washington, Atlantic Exposition Address (1895)

55. THE MESSAGE FOR BLACKS: Work hard, and do not agitate for equality
THE MESSAGE FOR BLACKS: Work hard, and do not agitate for equality. Start at the bottom and work your way up.
Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. …when it comes to business…, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world…. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life…. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.
The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.
However, working together does not necessary include socializing together.

56. THE MESSAGE FOR WHITES: We are a loyal and humble people who serve you well if you treat us well. It is in your interest to encourage and help black people.
Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested….. Cast down your bucket among these people who have without strikes and labor wars tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, just to make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sickbed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives,….
[We will interlace ] our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one.

57. THE MESSAGE FOR WHITES: If white people insist on keeping the Negro down, they will only be hurting themselves.
Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body, of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.
Stamp commemorating Booker T. Washington Issue Date: April 7, 1940

58. SIGNIFICANT FINE POINT FOR BOTH RACES: We do not have to socialize together, but we should work together for the common cause of development.
In all things that are purely social we call be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

59. W.E.B. Du Bois, Strivings of the Negro People (1897)
Main Points:
1. Being a problem [i.e. being an black person in 19th c. America] is a strange experience.
[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,--a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. (p. 88)

60. 2. The African American feels his duality of being both African and American.
One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes — foolishly, perhaps, but fervently — that Negro blood has yet a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development. (p. 88)

61. 3. Prejudice and discrimination keep the freedman oppressed.
The freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of lesser good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people…. (p. 88)
4. Americans, including white Americans, should appreciate the Negro race.
Work, culture, and liberty,--all these we need, not singly, but together; for to-day these ideals among the Negro people are gradually coalescing, and finding a higher meaning in the unifying ideal of race,--the ideal of fostering the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to, but in conformity with, the greater ideals of the American republic, in order that some day, on American soil, two world races may give each to each those characteristics which both so sadly lack. (p. 88)

62. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Niagara Movement, (1905)
1. We should meet, despite the existence of other organizations for Negroes.
2. We must complain about common wrongs toward blacks.
We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong—this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty, and we must follow it. (p. 100)
3. In not a single instance has the justice of our demands been denied, but then come the excuses.

63. Joseph Lochner
U.S. Supreme Court,
Lochner v. New York (1905)

64. Mr. Justice Peckham delivers the Court Opinion:
The New York statute limiting the number of hours a baker can work in a week interferes with the right of contract between the employer and the employees.
No State can deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. The right to purchase or to sell labor is part of the liberty protected by this amendment.
There is a limit to the valid exercise of the police power of the state.
There is no reasonable ground for interfering with the liberty of person or the right of free contract, by determining the hours of labor, in the occupation of a baker.
There must be more than the mere fact of the possible existence of some small amount of unhealthiness to warrant legislative interference with liberty.

65. Mr. Justice Harlan…dissenting.
The decision violates states rights.
“Let the State alone I the management of its purely domestic affairs, so long as it does not appear beyond all question that it has violated the Federal Constitution. This view necessarily results from the principle that the health and safety of the people of a State are primarily for the State to guard and protect.”

66. Mr. Justice Holmes dissenting
The majority has a right to embody their opinions in law.
“The constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, wither of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire. The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statistics.”
Mr. Justice Holmes dissenting