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21 " But since Clark's triumphs were those of a war leader, that is, the products of fear, pain, and opportunity, they were not stable. Clark's mistake was to think them the larger triumphs of alliance. "
― Richard White , The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 - 1815
22 " Corporations could raise funds through the sale of stock and bonds, and many states offered charters that gave stockholders limited liability: they would not be held responsible for the corporation’s debts beyond their own investment. In exchange for all this, Americans believed that corporations had a greater obligation than other enterprises to serve a public good. "
― Richard White , The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896
23 " When industrial work crippled and epidemic diseases killed, and where chance—freaks of fortune—produced what John Maynard Keynes, the economist, would later call “the radical uncertainties of capitalism,” luck as much as effort seemed to dictate outcomes. "
24 " As the mayor of Chicago told a labor rally on May Day in 1867, eight hours of work had become more exhausting than ten or twelve hours had been earlier. "
25 " ...It was no accident that some of the first bureaucracies took shape in the West: the National Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which gradually took modern form as the older Indian Service sank beneath its long heritage of fraud and corruption), and the U.S. Geological Service. Mythologized as the heatland of individualism, the West became the kindergarten of the modern American state. "
26 " In 1870 in response to the Fifteenth Amendment, the citizens of Michigan made a simple but far-reaching alteration to their 1850 constitution. They struck out the word “white. "
27 " Republicans had reintroduced a bill that he had originally sponsored that moved beyond political equality toward a fuller social equality by prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations. "
28 " The absolute number of workers in agriculture continued to rise until the twentieth century, but agriculture’s share of the national workforce fell. By 1900 it had declined to 40 percent, from a majority in 1860. Those workers, however, still produced more than the country could consume.11 "
29 " At least on paper, Congress had dramatically enlarged federal power and black rights. In December 1866 only about 0.5 percent of black adult males could vote. In December 1867 the figure rose to 80.5 percent, with the entire increase coming in the old Confederacy. "
30 " In the Northeast there was $77 in circulation per inhabitant. As late as 1880, the South had a quarter of the country’s population but only 10 percent of its currency. "
31 " Congress also refused to give the South subsidies proportional to those that went to the West and Northeast. "
32 " Southern rivers, ports, and harbors received a fraction of the funds devoted to the Eastern and Pacific states, and even the critical levees along the Mississippi River languished. For the rest of the century Southerners contended that the banking system, the tariff, and federal subsidies for internal improvements discriminated against the South, and they clearly did. "
33 " What was developing in the South was a coercive labor system, which although not slavery, was not free labor either. It depended on extralegal violence, coercive laws, burdensome debt relations, and the use of convict labor to limit alternatives. The South was demonstrating that there were routes to capitalist development—both agricultural and industrial—that did not rely on free labor. "
34 " In one sense, massive land redistribution was the basis of the American republic. The U.S. government took Indian lands, peaceably through treaties if it could and forcibly or through fraud and war when it thought necessary. The government then redistributed these ceded or conquered lands to white citizens. Southern redistribution, in essence, was about whether Southern whites could be treated as Indians and Southern blacks could be treated like white men. "
35 " I have known tolerably well, a good many “successful” men—“ big” financially—men famous during the last half-century, and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A set of mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially unattractive and uninteresting. "
36 " In 1800 the United States had a birth rate higher than any ever recorded for a European country, but it fell steeply and consistently throughout the century. The total fertility rate, which is the average number of children borne by a woman before she reaches menopause, had fallen 50 percent by 1900. "
37 " American exports reduced the cost of food in Europe faster than at any time since the Neolithic era. European peasants could not compete with cheap American grain and meat. Forced off the land, many of them immigrated to the United States. Some became American farmers; more became American workers.16 "
38 " Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living "
― Richard White
39 " Sumner asserted that without equality of citizens before the law and full consent of the governed, a government could not be considered republican. It defined a standard that the North no more met than the South.3 "
40 " With settlers starting farms in the West, the South rebuilding, and northern industry expanding, the economy would soon need all the available money supply. "