Class president

“ The President had been already severely criticised for giving important places to comparatively young and untried men—men of the silk-stocking class—and the President had but a doubtful hold upon the people. ”

“ I ran for President to keep the American dream alive for the forgotten middle class and for all of those struggling to make it in our country, to make sure all Americans have the chance to live up to their God-given potential. Today in Washington, there's a great debate about how best to do that, and the choices we make will say a lot about who we are as a nation as we enter the new century. ”

“ President, you said it best in your inaugural address, in my view. You said -- and I quote -- "A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous." Quite simply, a strong middle class, in our view, equals a strong America. ”

“ I rejoice to hear you went through your examination with propriety, and have no doubt but that the president has placed you in the class which he conceived best adapted to the present state of your improvement. The more there are above you, the greater your exertions should be to ascend; but let your promotion result from your own application, and from intrinsic merit, not from the labors of others. ”

“ Necessarily the quality of work was low, though many institutions struggled for the maintenance of respectable standards. One college president frankly said: "We are liberal about letting young men into the Freshman class, but particular about letting them out." ”

“ Boys, each one of you has an opportunity of becoming President of the United States or filling any office from that of President down to the lowest. Dear boys and girls, work hard for the attainment of the highest character, as millions of such are wanted and needed, and they will always be in great demand to fill good positions. Millions are also needed as good citizens of the United States. If all our citizens were of the first class our country would be a very pleasant place in which to live. ”

“ I could not but reflect that the triumph of reason over partisanship and demagoguery had at last been reached, and that the American people had resolved no longer to temporize with measures 104 or men, but were determined to have the government run according to the original design of its founders, upon the principle of the greatest good to the greatest number.
No President since Grant was ever more abused by a certain class of newspapers and politicians than President Roosevelt, who adopted the policy of appointing worthy men to office, regardless of color. ”

“ The Americans are in the habit of speaking very disparagingly of their official class. I never heard one speak in any other tone on this subject. If the canon, that whatever all men, at all times, and in all places, affirm must be true, is to be accepted, then this class in the United States occupies a position of very bad pre-eminence. No one is spared. ‘The President is a Judas Iscariot who has sold his country. Senators, and representatives, are a set of log-rollers and wire-pullers, who make, on an average of the whole body, £6,000 a year out of their votes in Congress. ”

“ In his annual message in 1870 the president took strong ground in favor of civil service reform, saying: “I would have it govern, not the tenure, but the manner of making all appointments,” and “The present system does not secure the best men, and not even fit men, for public place.” This subject gave rise to a spirited controversy in congress, many declaring the principle to be wholly un-American, and calculated to build up a favored class, who would be in great measure independent of their executive chiefs, etc. ”

“ First of all, Theodore Roosevelt and Charles W. Fairbanks, candidates for President and Vice-President, respectively, deny the class struggle and this almost infallibly fixes their status as friends of capital and enemies of labor. They insist that they can serve both; but the fact is obvious that only one can be served and that one at the expense of the other. Mr. Roosevelt’s whole political career proves it. ”

“ It selects the most prominent and popular men of the Senior Class as President, and arrangements are so made that a Freshman no sooner enters town than he finds himself unexpectedly surrounded by hosts of friends, willing to do anything for him, and especially instruct him in his duty with reference to the selection of societies. For the benefit of those who do not yield to this private electioneering, this Statement of Facts is made. It amounts, however, to little more than a 'good time,' as there are very few who wait to be influenced by 'facts' they know will be so distorted. ”

“ The college president has acquired enormous prestige in American capitalist society; he is a priest of the new god of science, and newspapers and purveyors of “public opinion” unite in exalting him. He receives the salary of a plutocrat, and arrogates to himself the prestige and precedence that go with it. He lives on terms of equality with business emperors and financial dukes, and conveys their will to mankind, and perpetuates their ideals and prejudices in the coming generation. ”

“ Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honours of a single state. But it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit to establish him in the esteem, and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it, as will be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of president of the United States. ”

“ The failure in public and in private life thus to treat each man on his own merits, the recognition of this government as being either for the poor as such or for the rich as such, would prove fatal to our Republic, as such failure and such recognition have always proved fatal in the past to other republics. A healthy republican government must rest upon individuals, not upon classes or sections. As soon as it becomes government by a class or by a section it departs from the old American ideal. ”

“ Any mistakes in the execution of this fine conception must be set down to the fact that the President’s great powers were rather the happy gift of nature than the result of culture. To this truth he was himself in no way blind, and he was accustomed to attribute his want of a liberal education to the social ruin brought upon his family by the American Civil War, and to the dislocation thereby produced in his studies. ”

“ Some of these Republicans see education as just another place to cut and gut. I want to cut Government. I have cut Government. There are already more than 100,000 fewer people working here than there were the day I became President. ”

“ Separate interests only, and not national opinion, can furnish a government with opposite and contending impulses. If the states are not aristocratical beings, how can they produce an aristocratical being?
It is as foreign to the intention of our policy, to create a monarel as an aristocracy. The president is the compound creature of the equality of states and the equality of man, both of which are infused into the mode of his election, for the purpose of preserving both; and in his legislative capacity, he is equally exposed to the control of the popular and state representatives. ”

“ In the past the most direful among the influences which have brought about the downfall of republics has ever been the growth of the class spirit, the growth of the spirit which tends to make a man subordinate the welfare of the public as a whole to the welfare of the particular class to which he belongs, the substitution of loyalty to a class for loyalty to the Nation. This inevitably brings about a tendency to treat each man not on his merits as an individual, but on his position as belonging to a certain class in the community. ”

“ The shade of the veranda where we sat was deliciously somnolent, and I was beginning to regret my question when the president relented for a moment.
“You know I have always advocated an earnest, intelligent [175] study of political subjects by young men. Our American politics offer a clean, wholesome field, after all is said and done, for the young man of character and ability; but never should one enter politics for a living.”
“Now, we know that you approve of college education for boys, but want your own words about it.” ”

“ To do something but not too much, to meet the popular demands without destroying the economic well-being which the Republican ascendency had undoubtedly promoted, to insure a better distribution of wealth without crippling the production of wealth—this was the problem of a President who had had only two years in public life, and most of whose assistants would have to be chosen from men almost without executive experience. ”

“ In conclusion I again urge upon Congress the danger of class legislation, so well calculated to keep the public mind in a state of uncertain expectation, disquiet, and restlessness and to encourage interested hopes and fears that the National Government will continue to furnish to classes of citizens in the several States means for support and maintenance regardless of whether they pursue a life of indolence or of labor, and regardless also of the constitutional limitations of the national authority in times of peace and tranquillity. ”

“ While we do not make office the one thing important, nor the one condition of our alliance with any party, and hold that the welfare, prosperity and happiness of our whole country is the true criterion of political action for ourselves and for all men, we can not disguise from ourselves the fact that our persistent exclusion from office as a class is a great wrong, fraught with injury, and ought to be resented and opposed by all reasonable and effective means in our power. ”

“ How could intelligent men delude themselves with the notion that the most portentous and revolutionary idea of all time had exhausted its influence and fulfilled its mission in changing the title of the executive of a nation from king to President, and the name of the national Legislature from Parliament to Congress? If your pedagogues, college professors and presidents, and others who were responsible for your education, had been worth their salt, you would have found nothing in the present order of economic equality that would in the least have surprised you. ”

“ No doubt there are many poor boys among my readers, but I do not believe that any of you are as poor as was little Abe Lincoln, or have had as hard a life. So you see that while a king must have a king or great noble for father, a President may be the son of the poorest laborer. Any one of my young readers, if he can bring himself strongly to the notice of the people, may become President, and I should not wonder at all if some one among you should do so in future times. ”

“ An American President is selected by the newspapers, which know little about him, by the politicians, who do not want a master but a slave, by the delegates to a national convention, tired, with hotel bills mounting, ready to name anybody in order to go home. The presidency, the one great prize in American public life, is attained by no known rules and under conditions which have nothing in them to make a man work hard or think hard, especially one endowed with a handsome face and figure, an ingratiating personality, and a literary style. ”

“ Over a century later, America needs this kind of leadership more than ever. We need a President who sees government not as a tool to enrich well-connected friends and high-priced lobbyists, but as the defender of fairness and opportunity for every American. ”

“ It is evident, then, that in the work of inaugurating a genuine reform of the civil service the President is the natural leader, and that much of it he can accomplish, for the time being at least, without the aid, and even against the opposition, of Congress. ”

“ In our democracy, where everything else is so shifting, we alumni and alumnae of the colleges are the only permanent presence that corresponds to the aristocracy in older countries. We have continuous traditions, as they have; our motto, too, is noblesse oblige; and, unlike them, we stand for ideal interests solely, for we have no corporate selfishness and wield no powers of corruption. We ought to have our own class-consciousness. ”

“ If I were writing a book to be used during a Presidential campaign, used as a handbook of the beliefs of the people—a book in the next few weeks for a nation to say yes or no to, for a great people to go before their conventions with, the first belief I would put down for the new President to run on would be the belief that every man in this country is a bigger, better and truer man than the present arrangements of our industrial and social life seem willing to let him express. ”

“ And such a condition is fully in accord with the popular notion respecting the president's duties; the position needs a man of great executive capacity, great energy, magnetic personality, capable of keeping himself in public view, so as to advertise the university, to attract students and to increase the resources. Recently a new president was chosen for a promising young college. ”

“ It is impossible for a democracy to endure if the political lines are drawn to coincide with class lines. The resulting government, whether of the upper or the lower class, is not a government of the whole people, but a government of part of the people at the expense of the rest. Where the lines of political division are vertical, the men of each occupation and of every social standing separating according to their vocations and principles, the result is healthy and normal. ”