“I could show you this country’s gone a long ways in the last fifty sixty years. I don’t mean machinery and education and that. I mean folks’ rights. They’ve clamped down on fellows like me who damn near ruined this country….
“Another quarter century of grabbers like us and there wouldn’t have been a decent stretch of forest or soil or waterway that hadn’t been divided among us. Museums and paintings and libraries—that’s was our way of trying to make peace with our conscience. I’m the last of the crowd that had all four feet in the trough and nothing to stop ’em. We’re getting along toward a real democracy now and don’t let anybody tell you different. These will be known as the good new days and those were the bad old days. The time’s coming when there’ll be no such thing as a multi-millionaire in America, and no such thing as a pauper. You’ll live to see it but I won’t. That’ll be a real democracy.”
—Edna Ferber, Saratoga Trunk (1941) (pp. 350-351)
Skip to content
theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks