Henry Clay Quotes

Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.

The time will come when Winter will ask you what you were doing all Summer.

Cease, stranger, cease those witching notes, The art of syren choirs; Hush the seductive voice that floats Across the trembling wires. Music's ethereal power was given Not to dissolve our clay, But draw Promethean beams from heaven To purge the dross away.

Statistics are no substitute for judgment.

Despite a legacy consisting of enough violence and death for twenty men, Jackson admitted to having two regrets on his deathbed: “I didn’t shoot Henry Clay and I didn’t murder John C. Calhoun.” In a life rich with murdering people for little-to-no reason, Jackson’s only regret was that he didn’t kill quite enough people. People like Calhoun, who, it should be noted, was Jackson’s vice president. No one is safe from Jackson’s wrath.

Statistics are no substitue for judgement.

The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.

One doesn't defend one's god; one's god is in himself a defense.

Maybe I only thought I was in love. Maybe I was simply hungry, lonely, a clay pigeon any one could put away with a toy pistol.

The floods washed away home and mill, all the poor man had in the world. But as he stood on the scene of his loss, after the water had subsided, brokenhearted and discouraged, he saw something shining in the bank which the waters had washed bare. “It looks like gold,” he said. It was gold. The flood which had beggared him made him rich.3 HENRY CLAY TRUMBULL

Recognize at all times the paramount right of your Country to your most devoted services, whether she treat you ill or well, and never let selfish views or interests predominate over the duties of patriotism.

Sir, I would rather be right than to be President.

Of all the properties which belong to honorable men, not one is so highly prized as that of character.

An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.

I hope that it will yet be said, America is America's best customer.

Like his idol Henry Clay, Lincoln saw government as an active force promoting opportunity and advancement. Its “legitimate object,” he wrote in an undated memorandum, “is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do…for themselves.” He offered as examples building roads and public schools and providing relief to the poor. To Lincoln, Whig policies offered the surest means of creating economic opportunities for upwardly striving men like himself.13

When it was over, they lay on their backs; there was a window on this, the top floor of the stairwell, and grubby light, and rising-falling chests. The air was heavy. Tons of it, heaping from their lungs. Henry gulped it good and hard, but his mouth showed true heart.

Of all human powers operating on the affairs of mankind, none is greater than that of competition.

What is man but a mass of thawing clay?

largesse,

Their disappearance from the human family would be no great loss to the world.

NO POLITICIAN COULD devote as many evenings to poker and whiskey as had Henry Clay and expect a decorous presidential campaign.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.

Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the gratefully and appreciating heart.

I'd rather be right than be President

I heard Mr. Ingersoll many years ago in Chicago. The hall seated 5,000 people; every inch of standing-room was also occupied; aisles and platform crowded to overflowing. He held that vast audience for three hours so completely entranced that when he left the platform no one moved, until suddenly, with loud cheers and applause, they recalled him. He returned smiling and said: 'I'm glad you called me back, as I have something more to say. Can you stand another half-hour?' 'Yes: an hour, two hours, all night,' was shouted from various parts of the house; and he talked on until midnight, with unabated vigor, to the delight of his audience. This was the greatest triumph of oratory I had ever witnessed. It was the first time he delivered his matchless speech, 'The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child'. I have heard the greatest orators of this century in England and America; O'Connell in his palmiest days, on the Home Rule question; Gladstone and John Bright in the House of Commons; Spurgeon, James and Stopford Brooke, in their respective pulpits; our own Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, and Webster and Clay, on great occasions; the stirring eloquence of our anti-slavery orators, both in Congress and on the platform, but none of them ever equalled Robert Ingersoll in his highest flights. {Stanton's comments at the great Robert Ingersoll's funeral}

So I can only conclude that American democracy inherently does not want good leadership. We always passed over the very great men we had like Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, Henry Clay, John Fremont, and the people after the Civil War like Carl Shurz. We pass them up because we don’t want first-class men in that position, we want somebody who is a stupid bum like us. We’re afraid of good leadership until a time of crisis,

When the U.S. Senate was first conceived by the Founders, it was meant to be a forum for civilized debate. And for a long time it was, with scholars like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan among its ranks. These were people of ideas who relished a good give-and-take, the clash of intellects, and the possibility of finding common ground. This is not the modern U.S. Senate, where debate is often confused with authoritative Ted Kennedy–style yelling.

Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.

What does Africa — what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park,the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher,of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes — with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition,with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

In passing, I continually marvel at how different today’s lawyers and politicians are from us of the first generation. We did not possess a single orator to compare with the present crop. Jefferson and Madison were inaudible. Monroe was dull. Hamilton rambled and I was far too dry (and brief) for the popular taste. Fisher Ames was the nearest thing we had to an orator (I never heard Patrick Henry). Today, however, practically every public man is now a marvellous orator—no, actor! capable of shouting down a tempest, causing tears to flow, laughter to rise. I cannot fathom the reason for this change unless it be the influence of a generation of evangelical ministers (Clay always makes me think of a preacher a-wash in the Blood of the Lamb who, even as he calls his flock to repent, is planning to seduce the lady in the back pew); and of course today’s politician must deal with a much larger electorate than ours. We had only to enchant a caucus in a conversational tone while they must thrill the multitude with brass and cymbal.

the value of a personal fortune is better understood in relation to the total gross national product of an individual’s era. By that measure, Carnegie was worth $112 billion in his day, far ahead of Bill Gates ($85 billion), Sam Walton ($42 billion), or Warren Buffett ($31 billion).

Asking a question whose echo has been heard each time America went to war since, Goldman said, “How else is the world to take America seriously when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, and peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform?

Go on and finish your studies,” Gore said. “You are poor enough, but there are greater evils than poverty. Live on no man’s favor. What bread you do eat, let it be the bread of independence. Pursue your profession. Make yourself useful to your friends and a little formidable to your enemies, and you have nothing to fear.

Let us consider some of the most important Anarchist acts within the last two decades. Strange as it may seem, one of the most significant deeds of political violence occurred here in America, in connection with the Homestead strike of 1892. During that memorable time the Carnegie Steel Company organized a conspiracy to crush the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Henry Clay Frick, then Chairman of the Company, was intrusted with that democratic task. He lost no time in carrying out the policy of breaking the Union, the policy which he had so successfully practiced during his reign of terror in the coke regions. Secretly, and while peace negotiations were being purposely prolonged, Frick supervised the military preparations, the fortification of the Homestead Steel Works, the erection of a high board fence, capped with barbed wire and provided with loopholes for sharpshooters. And then, in the dead of night, he attempted to smuggle his army of hired Pinkerton thugs into Homestead, which act precipitated the terrible carnage of the steel workers. Not content with the death of eleven victims, killed in the Pinkerton skirmish, Henry Clay Frick, good Christian and free American, straightway began the hounding down of the helpless wives and orphans, by ordering them out of the wretched Company houses.

How is it with the President? Is he powerless? He is felt from one extremity to the other of this vast Republic. By means of principles which he has introduced, and innovations which he has made in our institutions, alas! but too much countenanced by Congress and a confiding people, he exercises, uncontrolled, the power of the State. In

What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, Umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip--labium, from labor (?)--laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther.

for one measure of economic power was the ownership of sports teams—the Tigers had been owned by the Briggses, an old manufacturing family for whom the baseball park had been named, and the football team by William Clay Ford, Henry’s brother—and in the early eighties the two newest owners, of the Tigers and the hockey Redwings, were pizza franchisers.

This nation was founded on the principle of wealth creation. As a young Henry Clay said in the House of Representatives in 1812, “It [wealth creation] is a passion as unconquerable as any with which nature has endowed us. You may attempt to regulate—you cannot destroy it.” That is supposed to be the federal government’s primary objective. It is supposed to promote the creation of an environment conducive to the creation of wealth—not job creation, not bailouts, not subsidies, not expansion of the federal bureaucracy, and not providing lifetime support to those who choose not to take advantage of the innumerable opportunities that exist in this nation for them to create a better, more productive life for themselves.

Now, years later and with Carnegie’s blessing, Frick had launched his plan to further consolidate his rule over their industrial kingdom by destroying the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. The labor union, formed in 1876, was one of many that emerged in the industrial age to combat the cruel and oppressive treatment of workers. In the steel mills, workers typically put in 12-hour days, six days a week, for less than a dime an hour. There were no government agencies to inspect the work sites, no forms of compensation in case of injury, and more than 35,000 workers died each year in industrial accidents. Only the unions offered some hope by fighting for higher wages, eight-hour workdays, and improved working conditions.

Goldman laid low until the 1927 executions of anarchists and convicted bank robbers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti stirred her back into action. With the support of admirers such as novelist Theodore Dreiser and philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim, Goldman began to write her memoirs as a way to reach the public in America. If she could not reach its shores, at least her words could.

In the weeks leading up to his arrival by train in Pittsburgh, Alexander Berkman had been obsessed with the escalating drama at Homestead. He was living with his partner and lover, the anarchist Emma Goldman, in the New England factory town of Worcester, Massachusetts. By day the couple earned a living serving sandwiches and scooping ice cream in a small diner. By night, they made love and dreamed of revolution.

That night Berkman fell asleep in the bosom of the industrial leviathan. “Its torch of liberty is a furnace fire,” he said, “consuming, destroying, devastating: a countrywide furnace, in which the bones and marrow of the producers, their limbs and bodies, their health and blood, are cast into Bessemer steel, rolled into armor place, and converted into engines of murder to be consecrated to Mammon his high priests, the Carnegies, the Fricks.

The rights of nullification and secession, Lincoln believed, had been thus settled. Henry Clay had helped resolve the crisis of 1832–33, and the Union had endured. The same had happened in 1820 and in 1850. History therefore suggested that a resolution short of war was within the realm of possibility. “My own impression is at present (leaving myself room to modify the opinion if upon a further investigation I should see fit to do so) that this government possesses both the authority and the power to maintain its own integrity,” the president-elect observed. Lincoln hoped for the best. “I am told that Mr. Lincoln considers the feeling at the South to be limited to a very small number, though very intense,” the New York Tribune wrote. White Southerners “won’t give up the offices,” Lincoln remarked in November. “Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.” The

War unhinges society, disturbs its peaceful and regular industry, and scatters poisonous seeds of disease and immorality, which continue to germinate and diffuse their baneful influence long after it has ceased. Dazzling by its glitter, pomp and pageantry, it begets a spirit of wild adventure and romantic enterprise, and often disqualifies those who embark in it, after their return from the bloody fields of battle, from engaging in the industrious and peaceful vocations of life.

In his years in prison, Berkman had come to believe that bullets directed at their oppressors were insufficient because eliminating what he viewed as the representatives of modern slavery didn’t resolve the problem. “The real despotism of republican institutions,” he wrote Goldman, “is far deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independent. That is the subtle source of democratic tyranny and, as such, it cannot be reached with a bullet.

Conversation between the two came easy, and within days they were sharing a bed and a cause. For both Berkman and Goldman, the dazzling utopian call of anarchism and its promise of a world without government and oppression was an elixir of hope, as it must have been for thousands of others who found themselves crushed by low-paying, tedious, and dangerous work in factories and sweatshops. The government, despite its rhetoric of freedom and democracy, seemed to be too-willing a partner in the enslavement of its people.

Lying alone in bed in New York City, an anxious Goldman decided she could get the money Berkman needed to buy a weapon and clothing suitable to get him close to Frick by taking a page from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. When she had read the novel, Goldman had been especially moved by the story of Sonia, the woman driven by economic desperation into prostitution who hears Raskolnikov’s confession and accompanies him to Siberia, where he is sent to prison. “If sensitive Sonya could sell her body,” Goldman said, “why not I?

But except for committed anarchists, the assassination attempt was widely condemned. In fact, it turned the tide of public opinion that, up until this moment, had been sympathetic to the strikers. Americans feared anarchists more than robber barons. Labor leaders, sensing the mood, went on the attack. “This man Berkman is an anarchist and, of course, is not identified with us,” said Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor. “I cannot use language strong enough to express my condemnation of such an act as Berkman’s.

In New York, Goldman continued her defense of Berkman. As his lover and co-conspirator she had become an overnight sensation, packing in as many as 1,000 anarchists in a Bowery hall. “The report of Berkman’s shot will be heard all over the world and echo down the ages,” she told them. “Other deeds like this will follow until capital is dead,” she continued, speaking in German. “His bullets did not kill, but others are being molded, and they will fly with surer aim.” Newspapers across the country carried reports of her speech, calling her the “anarchist Cleopatra.

Rainy took a sage bundle from the store in one of Henry's cupboards, dropped it into a shallow clay bowl, lit it with a match, and waved the cleansing smoke over Cork, Henry, herself and around the cabin saying, "Migwech, Nimishoomis. Thank you, Grandfather. Migwech, Nokomis. Thank you, Grandmother, for the beauty of this day, for the life you have given us, and for the wisdom that comes when we listen to your voices on the wind and in the water and singing among the trees. We pray for guidance from the Creator and the spirits. Let our hearts be open to all you offer us.

Upset over having deceived her sister, her failure as a prostitute, and the tension in waiting for Berkman to make his move, Goldman walked aimless about New York in the July heat and whiled away her evenings at Zum Groben Michel. The bar, a few blocks from her room, had become the hangout of one of the sects of anarchists. Its odd name was the result of a window sign painter’s mistake. Instead of garden, a word used by many German beer halls, the painter wrote groben, meaning coarse, rough, or tough — which suited the owner, who was known as Tough Mike. All Goldman could do now was wait.

The country, it seemed, was on the verge of a second civil war, this one over industrial slavery. But Frick was a gambler who cared little what the world thought of him. He was already a villain in the public’s eye, thanks to a disaster of epic proportions three years earlier. Frick and a band of wealthy friends had established the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club on land near an unused reservoir high in the hills above the small Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, 70 miles east of Pittsburgh. The club beautified the grounds around the dam but paid little attention to the dam itself, which held back the Conemaugh River and was in poor condition from years of neglect. On May 31, 1889, after heavy rainfall, the dam gave way, releasing nearly 5 billion gallons of water from Lake Conemaugh into Johnstown and killing 2,209 people. What became known as the Johnstown Flood caused $17 million in damages. Frick’s carefully crafted corporate structure for the club made it impossible for victims to pursue the financial assets of its members. Although he personally donated several thousands of dollars to relief efforts, Frick remained to many a scoundrel, the prototype of the uncaring robber baron of the Gilded Age.

In the weeks leading up to his arrival by train in Pittsburgh, Alexander Berkman had been obsessed with the escalating drama at Homestead. He was living with his partner and lover, the anarchist Emma Goldman, in the New England factory town of Worcester, Massachusetts. By day the couple earned a living serving sandwiches and scooping ice cream in a small diner. By night, they made love and dreamed of revolution. By late spring, Homestead was looking like the harbinger they’d been waiting for. “To us,” Goldman said, “it sounded the awakening of the American worker, the long-awaited day of his resurrection.

Character gains through its expression, and loses through its repression. Love grows through its expression. Sympathy grows through its expression. Knowledge grows through its expression. The artistic sense grows through its expression. The religious sentiment grows through its expression. The capacity for instruction, for administration, for command, grows through its expression. The more a man does in any line of wise endeavor, the more he can do in that line, and the more of a man he is in that line. And the refraining from the free expression of love, or of sympathy, or of knowledge, or of the artistic sense, or of the religious sentiment, or of the power of instruction, of administration, or of command, both limits and lessens that which is thus repressed. To possess and to exhibit an admirable personal character is a duty incumbent on every one. In order to possess such a character, its exhibit by its expression is a necessity. He who does not endeavor to express those traits and qualities which are the exhibit of an admirable personal character, cannot hope to retain such a character, even if it were his by nature; and he who does endeavor to express them, can hope to gain the character which they represent, even though he lacked it before.

Berkman called no witnesses of his own. Instead, with the aid of an ill-trained interpreter, he began to read his long speech. “Some may wonder why I have declined a legal defense,” Berkman said. “My reasons are twofold. In the first place, I am an anarchist: I do not believe in man-made laws, designed to enslave and oppress humanity. Secondly, an extraordinary phenomenon like an attentat cannot be measured by the narrow standards of legality.” In short, Berkman said, he would explain the deed, and by doing so, society itself would be put on trial. An hour into his presentation, much of which was heard only in mangled English, Judge McClung’s patience came to an end. He ordered Berkman to finish by the rapidly approaching hour of one o’clock. “I can have all the time I want for my defense and will take all the time I need,” Berkman replied. “No, you haven’t,” said the judge. “We’ll teach you different if you think you can dictate to us.” Berkman and his interpreter sputtered on. At 1:10 the judge stopped Berkman and gave the prosecutor the floor. Holding the dagger in his hands, he urged the jury to convict Berkman. The jury didn’t even stir from the box. It immediately pronounced Berkman guilty on all counts. McClung sentenced him to 22 years of confinement.

In preparation for battle, Frick had requested 300 Pinkerton guards be held in readiness. Established in 1850, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was a private security company rumored to have as many agents as the U.S. Army had soldiers. It made good money putting itself at the service of industrialists in their battles against unions. Now Frick sent word to the company to load their guards onto train coaches with darkened windows and position the men five miles downriver from Homestead. By nightfall the following day, the men, along with 250 Winchester rifles and a greater number of pistols, as well as a storehouse of ammunition, were in place awaiting orders.

Unlike religions that offered a better life after death, the idealist callings of anarchism espoused making heaven on earth by ridding humankind of the shackles of oppressive governments and capitalism. Labor unions, like those at Homestead, were grenadiers on the front lines of the struggle. By challenging the rule of the robber barons they deserved the support of revolutionaries. But now several years later, Goldman and Berkman (or Sasha, as she called him) still remained only bystanders to any potential revolution. “We continued our daily work, waiting on customers, frying pancakes, serving tea and ice cream,” said Goldman. “But our thoughts were in Homestead with those brave steelworkers.

However marred, the world vessel of clay is not without some of the influence of the Master Molder. God has not left Himself entirely without witness in the global calamity; He discloses Himself in the tragedies as well as the triumphs of history. He works in history as well as above history. There is a universal confrontation of men and women by the divine Spirit, invading all cultures and all individual lives. There is a constructive work of God in history, even where the redemptive Gospel does not do a recreating work. The evangelical missionary message cannot be measured for success by the number of converts only. The Christian message has a salting effect upon the earth. It aims at a re-created society; where it is resisted, it often encourages the displacement of a low ideology by one relatively higher.

Woody Allen made a PBS television special called Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story in 1971, a half-hour satire of Henry Kissinger. The mockumentary was a natural follow-up to Allen’s directorial debut, Take the Money and Run. It opened with a Kissinger-esque character played by Allen, complaining on the phone: “I want you to get an injunction against The Times. Yes, it’s a New York, Jewish, Communist, left-wing, homosexual newspaper. And that’s just the sports section.” President Nixon already believed PBS was against him and had sent word through Clay Whitehead of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy that criticism of the administration would result in funding cuts. PBS screened the Woody Allen special for its legal department, which found nothing objectionable. Still, station president Ethan Hitchcock wrote a memo: “Under no account must it be shown.

A few weeks later, in the middle of a cold December night, the pair, along with 247 other radicals, were herded onto a freighter and shipped off to Soviet Russia, a government the United States didn’t even recognize. Greeted as heroes upon their arrival, Goldman and Berkman believed they had landed in a country where their politics would find a home. But once again, a promised land disappointed. Instead, they found workers in conditions of servitude, corruption among their managers, and no tolerance of free speech. In a remarkable moment, Goldman and Berkman complained to the leader of the revolution himself, Vladimir Lenin. Unlike muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens and other American fellow travelers, Berkman and Goldman courageously criticized the Russian Revolution. Lenin dismissed the complaints and said that there was no room for free speech in the revolutionary period.

the headline death and disaster atop the latest dispatch from Homestead. “Capital and labor have met once more on a bloody field,” the article stated. “Never in the history of strikes and riots, since the railroad riots of 1877, have there been so many lives sacrificed, and such fighting between the representatives of the two great social divisions.” Members of the Pennsylvania National Guard were on their way to restore order, the dispatch reported. He and Goldman had been right. It was clear that Frick would soon vanquish the strikers. Exiting the station, Berkman looked to the east. Above him, perched on what locals still called Jenkins Hill, the Capitol dome was bathed in a flood of golden light from the deep red sun rising behind it. “Like a living thing the light palpitates,” Berkman recalled, “trembling with passion to kiss the uppermost peak, striking it with blinding brilliancy, and then spreading in a broadening embrace down the shoulders of the towering giant.

Berkman and Goldman had met three years earlier, in the dim, smoke-filled dining room of Sachs’ Café on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Sachs’ was the regular hangout of Yiddish-speaking radicals, poets, and free spirits. Goldman had found her way there after escaping a loveless marriage and oppressive relatives. She had felt that no one in her family understood her, and she couldn’t fathom why they weren’t as angry as she was about the injustices of American society. She seethed with anger over the highly publicized hanging of four anarchists. They had been wrongly convicted of conspiracy following the detonation of a bomb thrown by an unseen assailant at an 1886 labor rally for the eight-hour day on Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The executed men had been made into scapegoats. They were rounded up because of their views and given a sham trial to placate a disquieted public agitated by a yellow press who saw bearded, fiery-eyed foreign revolutionaries behind every strike and workers rally. The Goldmans had fled oppression in their native Russia only to find that capitalists were no better than czars.

Like ending the life of a czar in their native Russia, Goldman and Berkman were convinced that Frick’s death would be a mortal blow to the ruling class. To them, it was not murder. “A revolutionist would rather perish a thousand times than be guilty of what is ordinarily called murder,” Berkman said. But this was different. “To remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people.” “Could anything be nobler than to die for a sublime cause?” Berkman asked. He located his copy of The Science of Revolutionary Warfare by Johann Most. The author, who had been one of Goldman’s bedmates, was the best-known anarchist in New York. He was notorious for promoting the “propaganda of the deed,” the idea of conducting violent political acts to inspire others. The book convinced Berkman that the best course of action would be to construct a bomb with a fuse. This way, he could survive the attack and use his trial to justify his actions. “Of course,” he told Goldman, “I will be condemned to death. I will die proudly in the assurance that I gave my life for the people.

Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty. “[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small,” he observed. “ . . . I could wish their Numbers were increased.” James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public lands in order to raise the money to buy the entire slave population and transport it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After two terms in office, Madison served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy. At the inaugural meeting of the society in 1816, Henry Clay described its purpose: to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of the population.” The following prominent Americans were not merely members but served as officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. All opposed the presence of blacks in the United States and thought expatriation was the only long-term solution. James Monroe was such an ardent champion of colonization that the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his efforts. As for Roger Taney, as chief justice he wrote in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 what may be the harshest federal government pronouncement on blacks ever written: Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they have no rights which a White man is bound to respect.” Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—“a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he expressed himself unambiguously: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more outspoken, and made his position clear in the very first debate: “For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any form. I believe that this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.

Even if his talk carried him to Paris, for example, to a place like the Faubourg Montmartre, he spiced and flavored it with his Attic ingredients, with thyme, sage, tufa, asphodel, honey, red clay, blue roofs; acanthus trimmings, violet light, hot rocks, dry winds, dust, rezina, arthritis and the electrical crackle that plays over the low hills like a swift serpent with a broken spine. He was a strange contradiction, even in his talk. With his snake-like tongue which struck like lightning, with fingers moving nervously, as though wandering over an imaginary spinet, with pounding, brutal gestures which somehow never smashed anything but simply raised a din, with all the boom of surf and the roar and sizzle and razzle-dazzle, if you suddenly observed him closely you got the impression that he was sitting there immobile, that only the round falcon's eye was alert, that he was a bird which had been hypnotized, or had hypnotized itself, and that his claws were fastened to the wrist of an invisible giant, a giant like the earth. All this flurry and din, all these kaleidoscopic prestidigitations of his, was only a sort of wizardry which he employed to conceal the fact that he was a prisoner—that was the impression he gave me when I studied him, when I could break the spell for a moment and observe him attentively. But to break the spell, required a power and a magic almost equal to his own; it made one feel foolish and impotent, as one always does when one succeeds in destroying the power of illusion. Magic is never destroyed —the most we can do is to cut ourselves off, amputate the mysterious antennae which serve to connect us with forces beyond our power of understanding.

Sir, I had rather be right than to be President.

John Pierpont Morgan, dios de la banca. Andrew Carnegie, dios del acero. William Henry Vanderbilt, dios de los ferrocarriles. John Jacob Astor, dios de la especulación inmobiliaria. John Davison Rockefeller, dios del petróleo. Y Henry Clay Frick, dios del carbón. Estas son las seis divinidades mayores de Nueva York, las seis cabezas de Moloch.

We sat together in three leather chairs next to a painting of nineteenth-century statesman Henry Clay and turned the conversation to Scouting and citizenship.

Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), the industrialist and prodigious art collector. It is said that he liked to wander through his gallery at night in quiet contemplation.

Most of us, even in this digital age, know what a grandfather clock is – but do you know how they got their name? They were once known as long-case clocks, but in 1876 American songwriter Henry Clay Work wrote the song that would give birth to the name that we know them by today: “My Grandfather’s Clock”.

Randolph, having provoked the challenge, could not decline it. As much as he hated Clay’s politics he had a sneaking admiration for him personally—Black George, after all, was a good-natured knave—and had been heard to say, “I prefer to be killed by Clay to any other death.”33 The two men met, with their seconds, on the Virginia side of the Potomac on April 8. Neither was experienced with dueling pistols. Both missed on the first exchange of shots at ten paces. This was enough to satisfy the code duello, but it did not satisfy Clay. He insisted on another round, and Randolph consented. Clay then put his bullet through the long, voluminous white coat Randolph wore for the occasion. Uninjured, and drained of any desire to injure Clay, he fired into the air, dropped his pistol, came forward, extended his hand and said, “You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay.” Taking his hand, Clay replied, “I am glad the debt is no greater.” (Rebecca Gratz, one of Clay’s friends, remarked, “It would be well if he gave him [Randolph] a strait jacket. “)34 In the sensation produced by the duel no one blamed Clay but many, including some of his best friends, felt he should have consulted his discretion rather than his courage and found some other way of dealing with Randolph. Clay’s sense of honor was never in question; the duel, while unnecessary to prove that, dramatized the very traits of anger and unruliness that he most needed to erase from the public image. It did not quiet Randolph. He liked Clay too much to kill him, yet continued his shrill attack; and when he died seven years later left instructions that he be buried facing west—not east as customary—so as to keep an eye on Henry Clay.35

I prefer the troubled ocean of war...to the tranquil, putrescent pool of ignominious peace.

To some extent, each administration from Jefferson onward had replaced officeholders, but the tradition had persisted from the colonial era that only bad behavior, and certainly not political affiliation, merited removal from office. Adams, much to Clay’s chagrin, had resisted removing even open turncoats, such as McLean. In that respect, the advent of Jackson’s presidency did mark an acute change. Jackson claimed he was cleansing corruption, but some of the rogues he rewarded hardly provided convincing proof of his regard for honest government. Old Hickory’s spontaneous inclination to punish opponents and Van Buren’s appreciation for the power of patronage helped to magnify as well as systemize the Spoils System. McLean

The American people did not care. That kind of popularity sooner or later assumes its own dynamic and generates its own magnetism. Some people saw early on that this unlikely man was becoming irresistibly emblematic to the American people. Some of these visionaries were longtime friends, some were political opportunists jumping on an accelerating bandwagon, but they all whispered the word “presidency” in Jackson’s ear. They became his handlers as well as his supporters, taking on the task of shaping him to match the image the people had already embraced. In July 1822, his handlers persuaded the Tennessee legislature to nominate him for the presidency, but political observers outside Tennessee interpreted it as a meaningless tribute to an aging hero.

The war with Mexico fiercely divided the American people. While the majority supported the war, a loud minority despised it, and their rancor filled the newspapers and the debates in the houses of Congress. A newly elected congressional representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, declared: ‘The war with Mexico was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the president.’ Lincoln challenged Polk on the issue that American blood had been shed on American soil and implied that the American troops were the aggressors. He charged that Polk desired ‘military glory … that serpent’s eye which charms to destroy … I more than suspect that Polk is deeply conscious of being in the wrong and that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.’ However, like many critics of the war, Lincoln voted for an appropriations bill to support military operations. An Illinois newspaper responded to Lincoln’s fulminations by branding him a ‘second Benedict Arnold,’ and Lincoln was defeated for reelection. Comparing Lincoln to Arnold was perhaps the most vicious charge that could then be made against an American. General Arnold has been a trusted favorite of George Washington during the American Revolutionary War. In August 1780 he had turned traitor and attempted to turn over the American army’s position at West Point to the British in exchange for money and a brigadier’s commission in the British army. His act of treachery was discovered but he was able to escape to safety behind British lines. Henry Clay, a former senator from Kentucky and unsuccessful candidate for president, often called the ‘Great Pacificator’ or the ‘Great Compromiser’ for his efforts to hold the Union together, spoke out forcefully: ‘The Mexican war,’ he said, ‘is one of unnecessary and offensive aggression … Mexico is defending her firesides, her castles, and her altars, not we.’ Representative

He shouted, “Free trade! Free trade! The call for free trade, is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child, in its nurse’s arms, for the moon or the stars that glitter in the firmament of heaven. It never existed; it never will exist.” Instead of liberating American commerce, free trade would only place the nation “under the commercial dominion of Great Britain.”76 Clay’s seemingly interminable blizzard

The Bank, said the message, was unconstitutional because Jackson said it was. It dismissed Chief Justice John Marshall’s decision in McCulloch v. Maryland by insisting that the president was the equal and possibly the superior of the judiciary in weighing the constitutionality of legislation.

Twenty years earlier, he had shaped the faction opposed to Andrew Jackson into a political party. Its members became known as Whigs because just as the Whigs of England had objected to the unchecked power of the throne, the American Whigs resisted “King Andrew’s” excessive assumption of authority. Abraham

The idea for the convention did not originate with Clay—early that summer, William Henry Harrison’s Ohio supporters were urging one to nominate their man—but Clay approved of it as a way to fend off Webster.9 The idea made political sense, because it was the best way to avoid the chaotic multiple candidacies of 1836. Yet

A campaign based on issues had revealed itself to be nothing more than a sure way to lose elections.103

An indignant Jackson and his supporters formed the Democratic Party, while his opponents coalesced into a rival Whig Party. These were the two parties that dominated American politics for the next few decades, until the Whig Party collapsed and the Republican Party was founded. The Whigs, led by the stalwart Henry Clay, provided modest though largely ineffective resistance to Jackson. Until the founding of the Republican Party, however, there was no party in America strong enough to stop the thieving Democrats.

Thomas Jefferson, who advocated expulsion of blacks from the United States in order to save the nation; and Kentuckian Henry Clay, who had established the American Colonization Society, which had moved thousands of free blacks into what is now Liberia—Lincoln soon laid out his own resettlement plans. He had selected Chiriquí,

Lincoln had shown his hand early in the war. Heavily influenced by two of his intellectual heroes—Thomas Jefferson, who advocated expulsion of blacks from the United States in order to save the nation; and Kentuckian Henry Clay, who had established the American Colonization Society, which had moved thousands of free blacks into what is now Liberia—Lincoln soon laid out his own resettlement plans. He had selected Chiriquí, a resource-poor area in what is now Panama, to be the new home for millions of African Americans.

I consider us all as one family, all as friends, all as brethren. I consider us all as united in one common destiny, and those efforts which I shall continue to employ will be to keep us together as one family, in concord and harmony; and above all, to avoid that direful day when one part of the Union can speak of the other as an enemy.

There are two things I can promise you.  Though he is technically Forlorn, he’s always followed pack rules.  He has no issue with humans.  With him, you are safe.  His control over the change is unusually strong.” When over stimulated, the change could burst upon a werewolf with less than adequate control.  Sam had drilled that into me when I first started hanging out with Paul and Henry unsupervised.  He didn’t want me to freak out if one of them went wolf on me for no reason.  He’d stressed that whether in their fur or in their skin, they had the same intelligence and instinct.  The change was just a defense mechanism because in their fur, they had teeth and claws to fight.  So, what he meant was Clay had control, and he kept his emotions in check. “And he won’t give up,” Sam added. Clay hadn’t been looking for a Mate like most werewolves did once they reached puberty.  Did that give me any advantage?  I doubted it.  Sam had repeatedly stressed that instinct ruled this business.  And fighting instinct proved extremely difficult for werewolves.  So Sam’s final warning was a given.  Once they scented their Mate, they couldn’t turn back. 

The Compromise of 1850 was authored by the legendary Whig politician Henry Clay. In addition to admitting California to the Union as a free state to balance with Texas, it allowed Utah and New Mexico to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of what became known as “popular sovereignty”, which meant the settlers could vote on whether their state should be a free state or slave state. Though a Whig proposed popular sovereignty in 1850, popular sovereignty as an idea would come to be championed by and associated with Democratic Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas.  The Compromise also abolished the slave trade – though not the existence of slavery itself – in Washington, D.C.

The “East Asian development model” is an adaptation of the strategy advocated by German economist Friedrich List (1789–1846), which in turn drew inspiration from the “American System” created in the early United States by Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay. The United States and Bismarck’s Germany (which adopted much of List’s program) were the two most successful “catch-up” economies of the nineteenth century. Japan’s first modernization drive, which turned it from an agrarian feudal state to Asia’s first industrial power in the decades after 1870, more or less copied the German model.17

Strictly as a thief, Nick Velvet is today’s heir apparent to the crown worn by such Napoleons of knavery as Grant Allen’s illustrious Colonel Clay (1897), E. W. Homung’s cricketer-cracksman A. J. Raffles (1899), O. Henry’s gentle Jeff Peters (1908), George Randolph Chester’s get-rich-quick Wallingford (1908), Frederick Irving Anderson’s infallible Godahl (1914) and notorious Sophie Lang (1925), Edgar Wallace’s forthright Four Square Jane (1929), Leslie Charteris’ saintly Simon Templar (1933), and Roy Vickers’ ethereal Fidelity Dove (1935).

My Father gave In charge to me This child of earth E'en from its birth, To serve and save, Alleluia, And saved is he. This child of clay To me was given, To rear and train By sorrow and pain In the narrow way, Alleluia, From earth to heaven.

Henry was dead. He was dead in real life. Dead meant no tomorrow. Dead. Dead meant polished coffins with shiny handles that no one wanted. It meant heavy clay and darkness. His coffin was made and lay waiting for him. Dead. It had been made while he'd eaten his breakfast. It had been made and laying waiting while he'd read his composition this afternoon in class.

Sooner or later the average child comes to feel that, the fewer questions he asks, the more of a man he will be; and so he represses his impulse to inquire into the nature and purpose and meaning of that which newly interests him until, perhaps, he is no longer curious concerning that which he does not understand, or is hopeless of any satisfaction being given to him concerning the many problems which perplex his wondering mind. By the time he has reached young manhood, he who was full of questions in order that he might have knowledge, seems to be willing to live and die in ignorance, rather than to make a spectacle of himself by multiplying questions that may be an annoyance to others, or that may be deemed a source of discredit to himself.

Clay trudged to the rear of the midway and the sanctuary of his trailer. He contemplated the warnings that littered his road to perdition: a call for a U-turn when he got puffed up with false pride. A sharp curve in the road had tried to turn him away from his sinful pursuit of the almighty dollar. He’d crossed that blighted bridge going a hundred miles an hour and had stood helpless as the grotesque outstretched arms of salvation struggled in vain to pull him back.

Adams disagreed. “I told Calhoun I could not see things in the same light.” And as he later reflected on the day’s discussion, he realized how thoroughly he disagreed with nearly everything Calhoun and the other Southerners said by way of defense of slavery. “It is, in truth, all perverted sentiment—mistaking labor for slavery, and dominion for freedom. The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls. In the abstract, they admit that slavery is an evil, they disclaim all participation in the introduction of it, and cast it all upon the shoulders of our old Grandam Britain. But when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. They fancy themselves more generous and noble-hearted than the plain freemen who labor for subsistence. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee’s manners, because he has no habit of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat negroes like dogs. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice; for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin? It perverts human reason, and reduces man endowed with logical powers to maintain that slavery is sanctioned by the Christian religion, that slaves are happy and contented in their condition, that between master and slave there are ties of mutual attachment and affection, that the virtues of the master are refined and exalted by the degradation of the slave; while at the same they vent execrations upon the slave-trade, curse Britain for having given them slaves, burn at the stake negroes convicted of crimes for the terror of the example, and write in agonies of fear at the very mention of human rights as applicable to men of color.” Adams had never pondered slavery at such length, and the experience made him fear for the future of the republic. “The impression produced upon my mind by the progress of this discussion is that the bargain between freedom and slavery contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious, inconsistent with the principles upon which alone our Revolution can be justified; cruel and oppressive, by riveting the chains of slavery, by pledging the faith of freedom to maintain and perpetuate the tyranny of the master; and grossly unequal and impolitic, by admitting that slaves are at once enemies to be kept in subjection, property to be secured or restored to their owners, and persons not to be represented themselves, but for whom their masters are privileged with nearly a double share of representation. The consequence has been that this slave representation has governed the Union.

These divisions rose to crisis proportions in every denomination, provoking Sen. Henry Clay to wonder, “If our religious men cannot live together in peace, what can be expected of us politicians, very few of whom profess to be governed by the great principles of love?

Wikipedia: Party System There have been at least six different party systems throughout the history of the United States: First Party System: This system can be considered to have developed as a result of the factions in the George Washington administration. The two factions were Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists and Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party. The Federalists argued for a strong national government with a national bank and a strong economic and industry system. The Democratic-Republicans argued for a limited government, with a greater emphasis on farmers and states' rights. After the 1800 presidential election, the Democratic-Republicans gained major dominance for the next twenty years, and the Federalists slowly died off. Second Party System: This system developed as a result of the one party rule of the Democratic-Republicans not being able to contain some of the most pressing issues of the time, namely slavery. Out of this system came the Whig Party and Henry Clay's American System. Wealthier people tended to support the Whigs, and the poorer tended to support the Democrats. During the Jacksonian era, his Democratic Party evolved from Democratic-Republicans. The Whig party began to break apart into factions, mainly over the issue of slavery. This period lasted until 1860. Third Party System: Beginning around the time of the start of the Civil War, this system was defined by bitter conflict and striking party differences and coalitions. These coalitions were most evidently defined by geography. The South was dominated by the Democrats who opposed the ending of slavery, and the North, with the exception of some major political machines, was dominated by the Republicans, who supported ending slavery. This era was a time of extreme industrial and economic expansion. The Third Party System lasted until 1896. Fourth Party System: This era was defined by Progressivism and immigration, as well as the political aftermath of the American Civil War. Northeastern business supported the Republicans while the South and West supported the Democrats. Immigrant groups were courted by both parties. The Fourth Party System came to an end around 1932. Fifth Party System: This system was defined by the creation of the New Deal Coalition by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression. This coalition supporting new social welfare programs brought together many under-privileged, working class, and minority groups including unions, Catholics, and Jews. It also attracted African-Americans, who had previously largely supported the Republican Party due to Lincoln's freeing of the slaves. This era lasted approximately until early-mid 1970s. Sixth Party System: The transition to this system appears to have begun with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the Democrats subsequently losing their long dominance of the South in the late 1960s, with the GOP adopting the southern strategy leading to Republican dominance as evidenced by election results.

Randolph

Rothschilds’ pour over $3,000,000 into the campaign of President Jackson’s opponent, the Republican, Senator Henry Clays, President Jackson is re-elected by a landslide in November. However, President Jackson knows the battle is only beginning, and following his victory he states, “The hydra of corruption is only scotched, not dead!

stoodAloof from streets, encompass’d with a wood.Dryden.2. Applied to persons, it often insinuates caution and circumspection. Turn on the bloody hounds with heads of steel,And make the cowards stand aloof at bay.Shak.Henry VI. Going northwards, aloof, as long as they had any doubt of being pursued, at last when they were out of reach, they turned and crossed the ocean to Spain.Bacon. The king would not, by any means, enter the city, until he had aloof seen the cross set up upon the greater tower of Granada, whereby it became Christian ground.Bacon’sHen. VII. Two pots stood by a river, one of brass, the other of clay. The water carried them away; the earthen vessel kept aloof from t’other.L’Estrange’sFables. The strong may fight aloof; Ancæus try’dHis force too

In Clay’s time the federal government issued only metal money: gold and silver coins, called specie. Paper currency was the responsibility of banks, which promised to redeem their notes in specie.