A biography for Heather Cox Richardsonhasn’t been written yet.
“By 1929, 5 percent of the population received one-third of the nation's income. The structural weaknesses of this economy plunged the nation into the Great Depression.”
“Mt. Rushmore was conceived in 1923 in a desperate attempt to draw tourist dollars to a state that had been rushed into the Union to protect Republican political dominance and could not manage to achieve economic stability.”
“The number of states in the union has been fixed at 50 for so long, few Americans realize that throughout most of our history, the addition of new states from time to time was a normal part of political life.”
“In the 1820s, westerners and political outsiders worried that rich men in the east had commandeered the government for their own ends.”
“Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, Movement Conservatives have tapped into the idea that an activist government redistributed wealth to lazy minorities. But they have also pushed hard on the idea that true Americans are Western individualists.”
“Elites want to cut taxes and stop government regulation of business. Evangelicals want to make America a Christian nation. And alt-right voters want to purge the rights of minorities and women.”
“Since 2012, the USPS has not been able to meet its prefunding requirement, but without it, the agency would have made a modest operating profit every year since 2013.”
“During the Civil War, the United States government had organized new territories in the West at a cracking pace, both to keep the Confederacy at bay and to bring the region's mines and farmland under government control.”
“I have always been a letter writer, and I found when my numbers got over half a million, I couldn't think about how many people there were out there. I had to think as if I were writing a letter to my brothers and sisters, to my good friends with whom I have had a correspondence since I could hold a pen.”
“Trump's alliance with Russia's Vladimir Putin, in defiance of America's own intelligence community, the Department of Justice, and the bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, forces us to face that the fundamental principles of our nation are under attack.”
“The question of impeaching Donald Trump is about replacing the toxic partisanship of today's Republican party with America's traditional rule of law. It has become a constitutional imperative.”
“By 2015, the top 1 percent of families took home more than 20 percent of income. Wealth distribution was 10 times worse than that: the families in the top 1 percent owned as much as the families in the bottom 90 percent.”
“In fact, there is no law that says election results must come the same day as the election. Historically, they used to take days.”
“Today, the District of Columbia has more residents than at least two other states; Puerto Rico has more than 20. With numbers like that, admitting either or both to the union is less a political power play on the Democrats' part than the late-19th-century partisan move that still warps American politics.”
“In the mid 19th century, it had taken a generation of political rhetoric to induce southern soldiers to fight for the interests of a small ruling class in the name of democracy.”
“For a generation, Republicans have tried to unravel the activist government under which Americans have lived since the 1930s, when Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and invested in infrastructure.”
“The Republican approach to handling the coronavirus and the economy is apparently not to turn to our government, but to put our heads down, go on as usual, and hope for a vaccine.”
“Undermining the rule of law is an assault on the government of the United States.”
“Since the 1950s, Movement Conservatives have fought the fair examination of their ideas. They embrace a worldview in which a few wealthy men control the economy and dominate society. This idea repels most Americans.”
“By the 1870s, ex-Confederates had taken their support for Western individualism a step further. They insisted the federal government was actively persecuting Western individuals.”