45 Quotes by Nancy Isenberg

It was an article of faith in eighteenth-century British thought that civilized societies usually formed out of the fundamental human need for security to ensure survival, but the same societies were gradually corrupted by a preoccupation with luxuries, which resulted in decadence.

Today as well we have a large unbalanced electorate that is regularly convinced to vote against its collective self-interest. These people are told that East Coast college professors brainwash the young and that Hollywood liberals make fun of them and have nothing in common with them and hate America and wish to impose an abhorrent, godless lifestyle.

If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders’ ingenious plan, or that Jacksonian democracy was liberating, or that the Confederacy was about states’ rights rather than preserving class and racial distinctions.

We need to stop thinking that some Americans are the real Americans, the deserving, the talented, the most patriotic and hardworking, while others can be dismissed as less deserving of the American dream.

In this sense, what Hakluyt foresaw in a colonized America was one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough. As the “waste firm of America” was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets.

The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves.

Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America’s colonial period and British notions of poverty.

Many people – -women especially – -remain trapped in the poverty into which they were born. The successful person from this background is the exception. The American dream is a double-edged sword in that those who are able to carve out their own destiny are also hard-pressed not to condemn those who get struck between the cracks.

Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded rational to those who wished to reduce the burden of “loser” people on the larger economy.