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Quote by Richard Hofstadter

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The Age of Reform (Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History, 1956): From Bryan to F.D.R.

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Author

Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter, an American historian, was born on August 6, 1916, and passed away on October 24, 1970. Known for his profound insights into American history and society, Hofstadter is particularly recognized for his work on the history of American politics and intellectual life. His contributions have had a significant impact on historians that followed. more

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“MENS REA”: On January 16, 1944, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and one of his deputies, Randolph Paul, personally visited the President Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to coerce him to finally act and do something to help refugees escaping The Holocaust. More diplomatic efforts had failed, so Morgenthau's approach strengthened. The report brought to the President reveals a desperate and necessary act to coerce a response from an administration that was systematically and overtly preventing both private and official help for the victims escaping Hitler. The report documents a pattern of attempts by the State Department to obstruct rescue opportunities and block the flow of Holocaust information to the United States. Morgenthau warned that the refugee issue had become “a boiling pot on [Capitol] Hill,” and Congress was likely to pass the rescue resolution if faced with a White House unwilling to act. Roosevelt understood the deep implications and pre-empted Congress by establishing the War Refugee Board. The result was “Executive Order 9417” creating the War Refugee Board, issued on January 22, 1944.”

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“In the immigration studies, we find that anxiety-driven trust has a partisan dimension. Democrats and Republicans are both more likely to trust fellow partisans to handle immigration. However, anxiety causes both Democrats and Republicans to become more trusting of the Republican Party.”

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“Democratic Party not only elected virtually all public officials in the region and therefore commanded the admiration and participation of high-status people, it symbolized the abiding principle of right-thinking citizens—white supremacy. Even after Truman's integrationist policies drove Dixiecrats into revolt in 1948 Southern Democrats still saw their party in the 1950s as arguably committed to segregation by virtue of the power that the Southern delegation wielded within it. Goldwater's candidacy, the enfranchisement of black Democrats, Wallace's Independent candidacy in 1968, and the endorsement of Nixon by many Southern Democratic leaders in 1972 gradually chipped away at the middle-class respectability of the Democratic Party. When conservative Christian leaders became outspoken Republicans in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Democratic Party was routinely castigated as the party of secular humanists. The allure of respectability eventually redounded to the benefit of Republicans, as their ranks were augmented by evangelical and fundamentalist Christians.”

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“By the century's end, the balance of white Republicans and Democrats in the South mirrored the long-standing pattern in the non-South. In the past, each region perceived the parties in different terms. Southerners associated the Republican Party with the forces of Reconstruction, and non-Southerners associated it with business, farmers, and Protestantism. In the South, the Democratic Party was the party of states' rights and segregation, and in the non-South ii was the party of cities, labor and immigrants. For a variety of reasons—economic integration, migration, mass communication, the extension of federal power—the non-South's conception of the parties gradually spread southward.”

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“Today's Republican Party...is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.”

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