In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the futu...re which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future--with a shopping center for twice the population, with a school building already built, with churches constructed, with parks and playgrounds and swimming pools. These were as essential to building a suburb as the prematurely grand hotel had been to building a city in the wilderness. In large developments where the developer had a plan, and even in the smaller developments, there was a new kind of paternalism: not the quasi-feudal paternalism of the company town, nor the paternalism of the utopian ideologue. This new kind of paternalism was fostered by the American talent for organization, by the rising twentieth century American standard of living, and by the American genius for mass production. It was the paternalism of the market place. The suburban developer, unlike the small-town booster, seldom intended to live in the community he was building. For him community was a commodity, a product to be sold at a profit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have feudal governments in a commercial age. It would be but an easy extension of our commercial system, to pay a private emper...or a fee for services, as we pay an architect, an engineer, or a lawyer. If any man has talent for righting wrong, for administering difficult affairs, for counselling poor farmers how to turn their estates to good husbandry, for combining a hundred private enterprises to a general benefit, let him in the county- town, or in Court-street, put up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, Governor, Mr. Johnson, Working king.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What happens in a strike happens not to one person alone.... It is a crisis with meaning and potency for all and prophetic of a fu...ture. The elements in crisis are the same, there is a fermentation that is identical. The elements are these: a body of men, women and children, hungry; an organization of feudal employers out to break the back of unionization; and the government Labor Board sent to "negotiate" between this hunger and this greed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in ...Canada as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad citizen, probably a rebel, there,--certainly if he were already a rebel at home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of He...nry V for the first time in a log cabin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, f...or the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »