Gilded Age Politics – Primary source quotes
1. “[political parties]may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to
become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the
power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very
engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
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2.
“Neither party has… anything definite to say on these issues; neither party has any clean-cut principles,
and distinctive tenets. Both have traditions. Both claim to have tendencies. Both have certain war cries,
organizations, and interests listed in their support, But those interests are int eh main interest of getting or
keeping the patronage of the government.”
- James Bryce, English observer of American Politics
3. “If you have to pay money to have the right thing done, it is only just and fair to do it. If a man has the
power to do great evil and won’t do right unless he is bribed to do it…it is a man’s duty to go up and bribe
the judge.”
- Collis P. Huntington, Southern Pacific Railroad Agent
4. “I believe that [the Republican Party] is today the most corrupt and debauched political party that ever
existed.”
-Senator James W. Grimes (1870), Republican from Iowa
5. “It really seems hard when we look back upon what we have done…that we should feel compelled to fight
for our lives against political adventurers who have never done anything but pose and draw a salary.”
-Joseph Wharton, Industrialist (nickel & steel)
6. “We have made the country rich. We have developed the country.”
-Jay Gould, Banking & Railroad tycoon.
7. “Who are these men…playing schoolmaster to the Republican Party and its conscience and convictions?
Some of them are man-milliners, the carpet Knights of politics. They forget that parties are not built by
deportment , or by ladies’ magazine, or by gush.”
-Roscoe Conkling, New York Republican Party boss
8. “The [Interstate Commerce] Commission… can be made of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the
popular clamor for government supervision of the railroads at the same time that that supervision is
nominal. Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the
business and railroad view of things.”
-Richard Olney, Attorney General under Grover Cleveland
9. “The conduct of the Senate [in passing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act] has not been in the line of the honest
preparation of a bill to prohibit and punish the trusts. It has been in the line of getting some bill with that
title that we may go to the country with. The questions of whether the bill would be operative … has been
idle talk.”
-Senator Orville Platt, Republican from Connecticut
10. “Fellow workers. ... This is the Continental Congress of the working-class. We are here to confederate the
workers of this country into a working-class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of
the working-class from the slave bondage of capitalism. ... The aims and objects of this organization shall be
to put the working-class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery
of production and distribution, without regard to the capitalist masters.”
-“Big” Bill Haywood, IWW organizer (1905)
11. “ANARCHISM:--The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the
theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as
pointless.
If not for the spirit of rebellion, of the defiance on the part of the American revolutionary fathers, their
posterity would still wear the King's coat. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades,
America would still trade in the flesh of the black man. True, the trade in white flesh is still going on; but
that, too, will have to be abolished by direct action. Trade-unionism, the economic arena of the modern
gladiator, owes its existence to direct action.
Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come about without a
revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is
but thought carried into action.”
-Emma Goldman (1910)