Greg Grandin QUOTES

21 " It might seem an abstraction to say that the Age of Liberty was also the Age of Slavery. But consider these figures: of the known 10,148,288 Africans put on slave ships bound for the Americas between 1514 and 1866 (of a total historians estimate to be at least 12,500,000), more than half, 5,131,385, were embarked after July 4, 1776. "

― Greg Grandin , The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World

22 " Here on a frontier back road more than half a century before the Civil War, two different, racialized definitions of sovereign liberty faced off against each other. The first, represented by Jackson, imagined "free born" to mean white born and "liberty" to mean the ability to do whatever they wanted, including to buy and sell humans and move them, unrestrained by interior frontiers, across a road that by treaty belonged to an indigenous nation. "

― Greg Grandin

23 " In other words, the United States won independence from Great Britain in a revolutionary war that was, among other reasons, fought to deny Great Britain the right to establish a western border; then, once independence was recognized by the Treaty of Paris establishing a western border, the United States cited earlier grants issued by Great Britain to hop-skip over that border. "

― Greg Grandin , The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

24 " The prevailing note in the Amazon is one of monotony,” thought Kenneth Grubb, “the same green lines the river-bank, the same gloom fills the forest. . . . Each successive bend in the river is rounded in expectancy, only to reveal another identical stretch ahead. "

― Greg Grandin , Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

25 " They were “galvanized iron bake ovens,” said Carl LaRue, commenting on Fordlandia’s foibles years later. “It is incredible that anyone should build a house like that in the tropics.” Another visitor described them as “midget hells, where one lies awake and sweats the first half of the night, and frequently between midnight and dawn undergoes a fierce siege of heat-provoking nightmares.” They seemed to be “designed by Detroit architects who probably couldn’t envision a land without snow.”19 Ford managers, said the priest, “never really "

― Greg Grandin , Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

26 " And profit was generated by what was essentially an elaborate pyramid scheme: at the apex were foreign commercial and financial houses; in the middle stood Brazilian merchants, traders, and a few exporters; and the whole thing rested on the backs of indebted tappers, who, as one critic put it, received goods on credit charged at fifty but in reality worth ten, in exchange for latex that the local merchant assessed at ten but that was actually worth fifty. "

― Greg Grandin , Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

27 " preserving the essence, in fact the breath—when it opened, his museum displayed Thomas Edison’s last exhalation, captured by his son in a test tube at Ford’s request—of a more durable American experience. "

― Greg Grandin , Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

28 " Never before in history could so many white men consider themselves so free. Jacksonian settlers moved across the frontier, continuing to win a greater liberty by putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their liberty in opposition to the people of color they put down. "

― Greg Grandin , The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

29 " after centuries of observation scientists are still not exactly sure why the Amazon—unlike other forests, where leaves turn brown during the dry season—grows green and lush when the rain stops or how this reversed pattern of photosynthesis contributes to the broader seasonal distribution of water throughout the region. "

― Greg Grandin , Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

30 " If Washington was unable to bring prosperity, stability, and meaningful democracy to Latin America, a region that falls squarely within its own sphere of influence and whose population shares many of its values, then what are the chances that it will do so for the world? "

― Greg Grandin , Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

31 " most discussions of George W. Bush’s foreign policy focus on the supposed innovation of a small group of neoconservative intellectuals in asserting the right to unilateral preemptive military action both to defend national security and to advance American ideals. But neither the neocons’ dire view of a crisis-ridden world that justifies the use of unilateral and brutal American military power nor their utopian vision of the same world made whole and happy by that power is new. Both have been fully in operation in Washington’s approach to Latin America for over a century. The history of the United States in Latin America is cluttered with “preemptive” interventions that even the most stalwart champions of U.S. hegemony have trouble defending. "

― Greg Grandin , Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

32 " Clinton was Reagan's greatest achievement. He carried forward the Republican agenda by combining a postindustrial fatalism—regulation wasn't possible, austerity was unavoidable, budgets had to be balanced, crime was a condition of culture, not economic policy—with a folksy postmodern optimism. "

― Greg Grandin , The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

33 " Manaus is famous for its hulking Amazonas Theater, an opera house built of Italian marble and surrounded by roads made of rubber so the carriage clatter of late arrivals wouldn’t interrupt the voices of Europe’s best tenors and sopranos. "

― Greg Grandin , Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

34 " Another visitor described them as “midget hells, where one lies awake and sweats the first half of the night, and frequently between midnight and dawn undergoes a fierce siege of heat-provoking nightmares.” They seemed to be “designed by Detroit architects who probably couldn’t envision a land without snow.”19 Ford managers, said the priest, “never really figured out what country they were in. "

― Greg Grandin , Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

35 " was a "

― Greg Grandin , The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

36 " Anglo society moved forward not as a uniform front against Native Americans but more fluidly, as if it were poured into the interstices separating Indian nations and communities. "

― Greg Grandin , The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

37 " give today’s imperialism its moral force: punitive idealism, free-market absolutism, and right-wing Christian mobilization. The first justified a belligerent diplomacy not just for the sake of national security but to advance “freedom.” The second sanctified property rights and the unencumbered free market as the moral core of the freedom it was America’s duty to export. The third backed up these ideals with social power, as the Republican Party learned how to channel the passions of its evangelical base into the international arena. "

― Greg Grandin , Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

38 " it crystallizes a number of uniquely American ideals about the relationship between the economy, rights, and sovereignty: Labor mixed with nature creates property. Property creates virtue. Private property-based virtue exists prior to the state. And the state's only legitimate function is to protect virtue, not create virtue. It's a sleight of hand, this sequence, for, as Turner wrote in his notes, "government came before." But it was, and remains, a powerful move, one that premises the virtue of freedom as existing independently of the state and restricts the role of the state to only guarding virtue. That premise makes possible the ongoing refusal of the United States to accept the legitimacy of social or economic rights. "

― Greg Grandin , The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

39 " Having lost the national debate when it came to restricting Mexicans, and fearing they were losing the larger struggle in defense of Anglo-Saxonism, white supremacists took control of the newly established U.S. Border Patrol and turned it into a vanguard of race vigilantism. . . The Juárez-El Paso bridge became something like a stage, or a gauntlet; as Mexicans crossed, they were showered with spit and racial epithets by federal employees of the U.S. government. Border patrol agents beat, shot, and hung migrants with regularity. . . Migrants had no rights, which gave the patrol absolute impunity. "

― Greg Grandin , The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

40 " Most every other industrial nation in the world has pursued "free trade" policies similar to those enacted by the United States since its farm crisis, some combination of outsourcing, privatization, and financial liberalization. But no other wealthy nation has experienced the kind of alienation, inequality, public health crises, and violence that have become routine in the United States. That's because, as part of the post-Vietnam restoration, the United States didn't just restructure but also launched an assault on the social institutions—especially public services and unions—that might have moderated the effects of the restructuring. "

― Greg Grandin , The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

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