Pride

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  In 1895 he had been made Junior Gentleman of the Chamber. From 1896 to 1904 he lectured on criminal law at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence (Pravovedenie) in St. Petersburg. Gentlemen of the Chamber were supposed to ask permission of the “Court Minister” before performing a public act. This permission my father did not ask, naturally, when publishing in the review Pravo his celebrated article “The Blood Bath of Kishinev” in which he condemned the part played by the police in promoting the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. By imperial decree he was deprived of his court title in January 1905, after which he severed all connection with the Tsar’s government and resolutely plunged into antidespotic politics, while continuing his juristic labors. From 1905 to 1915 he was president of the Russian section of the International Criminology Association and at conferences in Holland amused himself and amazed his audience by orally translating, when needed, Russian and English speeches into German and French and vice-versa. He was eloquently against capital punishment. Unswervingly he conformed to his principles in private and public matters. At an official banquet in 1904 he refused to drink the Tsar’s health. He is said to have coolly advertised in the papers his court uniform for sale. From 1906 to 1917 he co-edited with I. V. Hessen and A. I. Kaminka one of the few liberal dailies in Russia, the Rech (“Speech”) as well as the jurisprudential review Pravo. Politically he was a “Kadet,” i.e. a member of the KD (Konstitutsionno-demokraticheskaya partiya), later renamed more aptly the party of the People’s Freedom (partiya Narodnoy Svobodï). With his keen sense of humor he would have been tremendously tickled by the helpless though vicious hash Soviet lexicographers have made of his opinions and achievements in their rare biographical comments on him. In 1906 he was elected to the First Russian Parliament (Pervaya Duma), a humane and heroic institution, predominantly liberal (but which ignorant foreign publicists, infected by Soviet propaganda, often confuse with the ancient “boyar dumas”!). There he made several splendid speeches with nationwide repercussions. When less than a year later the Tsar dissolved the Duma, a number of members, including my father (who, as a photograph taken at the Finland Station shows, carried his railway ticket tucked under the band of his hat), repaired to Vyborg for an illegal session. In May 1908, he began a prison term of three months in somewhat belated punishment for the revolutionary manifesto he and his group had issued at Vyborg. “Did V. get any ‘Egerias’ [Speckled Woods] this summer?” he asks in one of his secret notes from prison, which, through a bribed guard, and a faithful friend (Kaminka), were transmitted to my mother at Vyra.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 5: Further, as a kingdom is the best form of government, so is tyranny the most corrupt. But when the Lord appointed the king, He established a tyrannical law; for it is written (1 Kings 8:11): “This will be the right of the king, that shall reign over you: He will take your sons,” etc. Therefore the Law made unfitting provision with regard to the institution of rulers. On the contrary, The people of Israel is commended for the beauty of its order (Num. 24:5): “How beautiful are thy tabernacles, O Jacob, and thy tents.” But the beautiful ordering of a people depends on the right establishment of its rulers. Therefore the Law made right provision for the people with regard to its rulers. I answer that, Two points are to be observed concerning the right ordering of rulers in a state or nation. One is that all should take some share in the government: for this form of constitution ensures peace among the people, commends itself to all, and is most enduring, as stated in Polit. ii, 6. The other point is to be observed in respect of the kinds of government, or the different ways in which the constitutions are established. For whereas these differ in kind, as the Philosopher states (Polit. iii, 5), nevertheless the first place is held by the “kingdom,” where the power of government is vested in one; and “aristocracy,” which signifies government by the best, where the power of government is vested in a few. Accordingly, the best form of government is in a state or kingdom, where one is given the power to preside over all; while under him are others having governing powers: and yet a government of this kind is shared by all, both because all are eligible to govern, and because the rules are chosen by all. For this is the best form of polity, being partly kingdom, since there is one at the head of all; partly aristocracy, in so far as a number of persons are set in authority; partly democracy, i.e. government by the people, in so far as the rulers can be chosen from the people, and the people have the right to choose their rulers.

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  The term “bigwig” came about because of the habit of the European male aristocracy of wearing enormous fake hair. In the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century men’s wigs were parted in the middle, with twin peaks on either side of the part, and curls cascading to the shoulder and beyond. A satirist described the appearance of the face as but “a small pimple in the midst of a vast sea of hair.” When John Travolta gets himself ready for the disco floor in Saturday Night Fever, he warns his father, “Don’t touch the hair.” Rock and roll heroes don’t seem to get anywhere without eye-catching do’s. James Brown explained that when people ask why he wears his hair so high; “I tell them so people won’t say where he is, but THERE he is.” The Beatles were first made recognizable by their mop tops. Long hair later signaled male rebellion, the counterculture, and Samson-like power. In John Waters’s hilarious send-up of sixties hairstyles, Hairspray, Debbie Harry’s hair is so big, she can conceal a bomb beneath it. Over the course of history women have extended their hair in every possible direction. When the Infanta Maria Theresa arrived in France to marry Louis XIV in the mid-seventeenth century, she wore her hair low on top, medium in length but extremely wide at the side, a style that can be seen in the paintings of Diego Velasquez. Three centuries later, some American bouffants in the mid-1950s were said to be as much as fourteen inches wide. The wide do is less popular than long flowing tresses or piling the hair skyward. The tallest hair was created by European aristocrats in the late eighteenth century. Hair had become a work of art among aristocratic women, and it was stuffed with wool or horsehair pads or wires and kept in place by pomade and flour, and decorated with tiny ornaments depicting landscapes and battle scenes. In 1780 the doorway of St. Paul’s Cathedral had to be raised four feet to accommodate big-haired women. Women had to crouch in carriages because their heads were too big to sit, and they had to sleep on their backs in order not to ruin the do. Let Your Hair Down Hair on our head grows about half an inch a month. It grows fastest in young adults, and fastest of all in girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, and slows down in middle age. If left uncut, hair naturally grows to about two or three feet before falling out. According to a 1949 report in the Toronto Star, the longest hair on record belonged to an Indian monk named Swami Pandarassannadhi with twenty-six feet of hair—about the length of hair that a fifty-year-old man would have if he never cut it and it never fell out.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " Yes, sire," replied the bastard, " by words and by presents only ; but if your majesty pleases, the ceremony shall be completed." The king looked down, and without saying another word returned to the chateau. On arriving there, he called for the captain of his guards, and ordered him to arrest the bastard. However, one of the friends of the latter, who guessed the kmg's intention, sent him warn- ing to get out of the way, and retire to one of his houses which was not far off, promising that if the king should send in search of him, as he expected would be the case, he should have prompt notice, so that he might quit the kingdom ; and that, should matters be more favourable, he would send him word to return. The bastard took his friend's advice, and made such good speed that the captain of the guards did not find him. Meanwhile, the king and queen having conferred to- gether as to what should be done with the poor lady who had the honour to be their relation, it was decided, at the queen's suggestion, that she should be sent back to her father, who should be made acquainted with the I Third day \ QUEEr^ OF NAVARRE. 209 truth of the matter. Before she went away, several ec- clesiastics and people of sage counsel went to see her, and represented to her that, being engaged only by word of mouth, the marriage could easily be dissolved, pro- vided both parties were willing, and that it was the king's pleasure she should do so, for the honour of the house to which she belonged ; but she replied that she was ready to obey the king in all things, provided conscience was not implicated ; but what God had joined, men could not put asunder. She besought them not to ask of her a thing so unreasonable. " If the love and the good-will which are founded only on the fear of God," she added, " are a true and solid bond of marriage, then am I so closely bound that neither steel, nor fire, nor water can loose me. Death alone can do so, and to it alone will I surrender my ring and my oath ; so, gentlemen, I beg you will say no more to me on the subject." She had so much steadfastness, that she would rather die, and keep her word, than live after having broken it.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Next day I led Reece and the Boss straight to the farmer’s place, but to my surprise he told me that I had agreed to give him two dollars a head, whereas I had bargained with him for only one dollar. His son backed up the farmer’s statement and the Irish helper declared that he was sorry to disagree with me, but I was mistaken; it was two dollars I had said. They little knew the sort of men they had to deal with. “Where are the cattle?” Ford asked, and we went down to the pasture where they were penned. “Count them, Harris,” said Ford, and I counted six hundred and twenty head. Fifty odd had disappeared, but the farmer wanted to persuade me that I had counted wrongly. Ford went about and soon found a rough lean-to stable where there were thirty more head of Texan cattle. These were driven up and soon disappeared in the herd; Reece and I began to move the herd towards the entrance. The farmer declared he would not let us go, but Ford looked at him a little while and then said very quietly, “You have stolen enough cattle to pay you. If you bother with us, I will make meat of you—see!—cold meat”, and the farmer moved aside and kept quiet. That night we had a great feast and the day after Ford announced that he had sold the whole of the cattle to two hotel proprietors and got nearly as much money as if we had not lost a hoof. My five thousand dollars became six thousand, five hundred. The courage shown by the common people in the fire, the wild humor coupled with the consideration for the women, had won my heart. This is the greatest people in the world, I said to myself, and was proud to feel at one with them. * * * ON THE TRAIL! Chapter VIII. Prompted by Dell, before leaving Chicago I bought some books for the winter evenings, notably Mill’s “Political Economy”; Carlyle’s “Heroes and Hero Worship” and “Latter Day Pamphlets”; Col. Hay’s “Dialect Poems”, too and three medical books, and took them down with me to the ranch. We had six weeks of fine weather, during which I broke in horses under Reece’s supervision, and found out that gentleness and especially carrots and pieces of sugar were the direct way to the heart of the horse; discovered, too, that a horse’s bad temper and obstinacy were nearly always due to fear. A remark of Dell that a horse’s eye had a magnifying power and that the poor, timid creatures saw men as trees walking, gave me the clue and soon I was gratified by Reece saying that I could “gentle” horses as well as anyone on the ranch, excepting Bob.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  15 As Elvis became the “country squire” of Graceland, middle-class Americans found themselves promoting the merits of suburbia more generally. Vice President Richard Nixon, for one, saw the expanding housing market as a powerful tool in waging Cold War diplomacy. In 1959, the world’s two superpowers agreed to a cultural exchange: the Soviets prepared an exhibit on Sputnik and space exploration, which was put on display in New York City; for its part, the United States chose an earthbound emblem of its national pride, a typical ranch-style home, which was set up in Sokolniki Park for the edification of Russian crowds. 16 Speaking at the opening ceremony in Moscow, Nixon took stock of the thirty-one million American families that owned homes, the forty-four million citizens who drove fifty-six million cars, and the fifty million who watched their own television sets. At this opportunistic moment, the vice president did his best to wear multiple hats, sounding on the one hand like a Madison Avenue ad man, and on the other as a prophet of the new middle class. Either way, he explicitly denied being representative of a shallow materialism. The real wonder of America’s achievement, he professed, was that the “world’s largest capitalist country” had “come closest to the ideal of prosperity for all in a classless society.” These words strike at the heart of the matter. For Nixon, the United States was more than a land of plenty. Democratic in its collective soul, it had nearly achieved a kind of utopia. For the first time in history, capitalism was not the engine of greed, aimed at monopolizing wealth and resources; free enterprise in the 1950s was a magic elixir that was succeeding in erasing class lines, especially through home ownership, or so he wanted it understood. 17 The Nixons sold themselves as the perfect suburban family. Not long before his Moscow trip, the vice president and his family took a trip to Disneyland, which made the front pages. During the 1960 campaign, when Nixon contested John F. Kennedy for the presidency, it was Pat Nixon who praised her husband (and included herself) as the personification of the American dream. In anticipation of her husband’s nomination, she told reporters that their success embodied the promise of the postwar generation, “where people of humble circumstances can go up the ladder through sheer hard work and obtain what they work for.” If she happened to become First Lady, she said, she would be the first “working girl” ever to inhabit the White House. Republican marketers used Pat aggressively, producing tons of campaign materials that included badges, flags, brochures, combs, jewelry, and a variety of buttons, all of which boosted Pat as the ideal suburban homemaker. Party organizers stormed the barricades of suburban shopping centers with “Patmobiles” and “Pat Parades.” Unlike a stunning young Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy decked out in “French couture,” Pat Nixon picked her clothing off the store racks and chose those items she could easily pack.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  He made a rather long talk, telling us that the difficulty of deciding had been unusually great, for there was practical equality between two boys: indeed he might have awarded the scholarship to No. 9 (my number) and not to No. 1, on the sheer merit of the work, but when he found that the one boy was under fifteen while the other was eighteen and ready for the University, he felt it only right to take the view of the Head-Master and give the Scholarship to the older boy, for the younger one was very sure to win it next year and even next year he would still be too young for University life. He therefore gave the Scholarship to Gordon and the second prize of ten pounds to Harris. Gordon stood up and bowed his thanks while the whole school cheered and cheered again: then the Examiner called on me. I had taken in the whole situation. I wanted to get away with all the money I could and as soon as I could. My cue was to make myself unpleasant: accordingly, I got up and thanked the Examiner, saying that I had no doubt of his wish to be fair, “but”, I added, “had I known the issue was to be determined by age, I should not have entered. Now I can only say that I will never enter again”, and I sat down. The sensation caused by my little speech was a thousand times greater than I had expected. There was a breathless silence and mute expectancy. The Cambridge Professor turned to the Head of the school and talked with him very earnestly, with visible annoyance, indeed, and then rose again. “I must say”, he began, “I have to say”, repeating himself, “that I feel the greatest sympathy with Harris. I was never in so embarrassing a position. I, I must leave the whole responsibility with the Head-Master. I can’t do anything else, unfortunately!” and he sat down, evidently annoyed. The Doctor got up and made a long hypocritical speech: It was one of those difficult decisions one is forced sometimes to make in life: he was sure that everyone would agree that he had tried to act fairly, and so far as he could make it up to the younger boy, he certainly would: he hoped next year to award him the Scholarship with as good a heart as he now gave him his cheque; and he fluttered it in the air. The Masters all called me and I went up to the platform and accepted the cheque, smiling with delight, and when the Cambridge Professor shook hands with me and would have further excused himself, I whispered shyly, “it’s all right, Sir, I’m glad that you decided as you did.” He laughed aloud with pleasure, put his arm round my shoulder and said:

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  The new imperative held that as much as the Anglo-Saxon American’s racial stock was of superior characteristics, all that was left to do was outbreed all other races. According to the political arithmetic of 1851, the United States would surpass Europe in importance by 1870, “numbering 100,000,000 of free and energetic men of our own race and blood.” Those of “Anglo-Saxon descent, impregnated with its sturdy qualities of heart and brain,” would put Great Britain and the United States on a course of global dominance, “as representatives of this advancing stock.” 7 Sheer demographic superiority was reinforced by the second ruling premise of the new thinking: national greatness rested on the laws of bloodlines and hereditary transmission. Learned traits such as a love of liberty, and racial exclusivity, were now assumed to be passed from one generation to the next. In the essay entitled “The Education of the Blood” (1837), one advocate asserted that the knowledge of one generation was literally retained in the atmosphere, and that the aptitude for learning entered the bloodstream and became “part of our physical constitution and is transmitted to our descendants.” Simply taking the savage from his mother in the forest and placing him in civilization would fail to convert him; his “blood must be trained and educated, generation after generation must accumulate receptivity as the Anglo-Saxon race has done.” The same author compared the phenomenon to the less attractive inheritance of insanity, passed on through the father’s line and “imbibed with our mother’s milk.” Bloodlines revealed everything: a nation was only as great as its pedigree. America’s destiny was determined by large land acquisitions and infused in its people’s blood. 8 This fascination with blood was pervasive in antebellum literature. Southerners were enamored with horse breeding as reflected in the periodical American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine. In 1834, it recorded that “American blood” (i.e., “American thoroughbreds”) had achieved a quality of blood as excellent as any in the world. Avid readers knew the pedigree of the most celebrated American horses, learned the long list of sires, while breeders kept and published the records of the “American stud book” to avoid a spurious issue. 9 Horses and humans were identical in this regard. Scottish physiologist Alexander Walker revived the debate between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson over whether human beings should breed to “improve the race.” In Intermarriage (1838), he strongly encouraged the practice of choosing spouses according to the same natural laws that applied to horse breeding. American health reformers such as Orson Squire Fowler, in Hereditary Descent (1848), recommended the breeding of children with desirable qualities. He emphasized the golden rule of animal breeders: attending to pedigree. No longer measured by wealth or family name, the only pedigree that mattered was long-lived ancestors and a sound physical constitution untainted with hereditary disease or “bad blood.”

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 3: Just as heresy is so called from its being a choosing [*From the Greek {airein} [hairein], to cut off], so does sect derive its name from its being a cutting off [secando], as Isidore states (Etym. viii, 3). Wherefore heresy and sect are the same thing, and each belongs to the works of the flesh, not indeed by reason of the act itself of unbelief in respect of its proximate object, but by reason of its cause, which is either the desire of an undue end in which way it arises from pride or covetousness, as stated in the second objection, or some illusion of the imagination (which gives rise to error, as the Philosopher states in Metaph. iv; Ed. Did. iii, 5), for this faculty has a certain connection with the flesh, in as much as its act is independent on a bodily organ. Whether heresy is properly about matters of faith?Objection 1: It would seem that heresy is not properly about matters of faith. For just as there are heresies and sects among Christians, so were there among the Jews, and Pharisees, as Isidore observes (Etym. viii, 3,4,5). Now their dissensions were not about matters of faith. Therefore heresy is not about matters of faith, as though they were its proper matter. Objection 2: Further, the matter of faith is the thing believed. Now heresy is not only about things, but also about works, and about interpretations of Holy Writ. For Jerome says on Gal. 5:20 that “whoever expounds the Scriptures in any sense but that of the Holy Ghost by Whom they were written, may be called a heretic, though he may not have left the Church”: and elsewhere he says that “heresies spring up from words spoken amiss.” [*St. Thomas quotes this saying elsewhere, in Sent. iv, D, 13, and [2401]TP, Q[16], A[8], but it is not to be found in St. Jerome’s works.] Therefore heresy is not properly about the matter of faith. Objection 3: Further, we find the holy doctors differing even about matters pertaining to the faith, for example Augustine and Jerome, on the question about the cessation of the legal observances: and yet this was without any heresy on their part. Therefore heresy is not properly about the matter of faith. On the contrary, Augustine says against the Manichees [*Cf. De Civ. Dei xviii, 51]: “In Christ’s Church, those are heretics, who hold mischievous and erroneous opinions, and when rebuked that they may think soundly and rightly, offer a stubborn resistance, and, refusing to mend their pernicious and deadly doctrines, persist in defending them.” Now pernicious and deadly doctrines are none but those which are contrary to the dogmas of faith, whereby “the just man liveth” (Rom. 1:17). Therefore heresy is about matters of faith, as about its proper matter.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Secondly, such like correction becomes unseemly, on account of the scandal which ensues therefrom, if the corrector’s sin be well known, because it would seem that he corrects, not out of charity, but more for the sake of ostentation. Hence the words of Mat. 7:4, “How sayest thou to thy brother?” etc. are expounded by Chrysostom [*Hom. xvii in the Opus Imperfectum falsely ascribed to St. John Chrysostom] thus: “That is—‘With what object?’ Out of charity, think you, that you may save your neighbor?” No, “because you would look after your own salvation first. What you want is, not to save others, but to hide your evil deeds with good teaching, and to seek to be praised by men for your knowledge.” Thirdly, on account of the rebuker’s pride; when, for instance, a man thinks lightly of his own sins, and, in his own heart, sets himself above his neighbor, judging the latter’s sins with harsh severity, as though he himself were just man. Hence Augustine says (De Serm. Dom. in Monte ii, 19): “To reprove the faults of others is the duty of good and kindly men: when a wicked man rebukes anyone, his rebuke is the latter’s acquittal.” And so, as Augustine says (De Serm. Dom. in Monte ii, 19): “When we have to find fault with anyone, we should think whether we were never guilty of his sin; and then we must remember that we are men, and might have been guilty of it; or that we once had it on our conscience, but have it no longer: and then we should bethink ourselves that we are all weak, in order that our reproof may be the outcome, not of hatred, but of pity. But if we find that we are guilty of the same sin, we must not rebuke him, but groan with him, and invite him to repent with us.” It follows from this that, if a sinner reprove a wrongdoer with humility, he does not sin, nor does he bring a further condemnation on himself, although thereby he proves himself deserving of condemnation, either in his brother’s or in his own conscience, on account of his previous sin. Hence the Replies to the Objections are clear. Whether one ought to forbear from correcting someone, through fear lest he become worse?Objection 1: It would seem that one ought not to forbear from correcting someone through fear lest he become worse. For sin is weakness of the soul, according to Ps. 6:3: “Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am weak.” Now he that has charge of a sick person, must not cease to take care of him, even if he be fractious or contemptuous, because then the danger is greater, as in the case of madmen. Much more, therefore should one correct a sinner, no matter how badly he takes it.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  This whole complex of symptoms is seen in an exquisite way in lunatic asylums, which always contain some patients who are literally mad with conceit, and whose fatuous expression and absurdly strutting or swaggering gait is in tragic contrast with their lack of any valuable personal quality. It is in these same castles of despair that we find the strongest examples of the opposite physiognomy, in good people who think they have committed 'the unpardonable sin' and are lost forever, who crouch and cringe and slink from noticean, d are unable to speak aloud or look us in the eye. Like fear and like anger, in similar morbid conditions, these opposite feelings of Self may be aroused with no adequate exciting cause. And in fact we ourselves know how the barometer of our self-esteem and confidence rises and falls from one day to another through causes that seem to be visceral and organic rather than rational, and which certainly answer to no corresponding variations in the esteem in which we are held by our friends. Of the origin of these emotions in the race, we can speak better when we have treated of— 3. SELF-SEEKING AND SELF-PRESERVATION. These words cover a large number of our fundamental instinctive impulses. We have those of bodily self-seeking, those of social self-seeking, and those of spiritual self-seeking. All the ordinary useful reflex actions and movements of alimentation and defence are acts of bodily self-preservation. Fear and anger prompt to acts that are useful in the same way. Whilst if by self-seeking we mean the providing for the future as distinguished from maintaining the present, we must class both anger and fear with the hunting, the acquisitive, the home-constructing and the tool-constructing instincts, as impulses to self-seeking of the bodily kind. Really, however, these latter instincts, with amativeness, parental fondness, curiosity and emulation, seek not only the development of the bodily Self, but that of the material Self in the widest possible sense of the word. Our social self-seeking, in turn, is carried on directly through our amativeness and friendliness, our desire to please and attract notice and admiration, our emulation and jealousy, our love of glory, influence, and power, and indirectly through whichever of the material self-seeking impulses prove serviceable as means to social ends. That the direct social self-seeking impulses are probably pure instincts is easily seen. The noteworthy thing about the desire to be 'recognized' by others is that its strength has so little to do with the worth of the recognition computed in sensational or rational terms. We are crazy to get a visiting-list which shall be large, to be able to say when any one is mentioned, "Oh!

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  They were as much the offspring of the North American continent as their forward-looking southern siblings, endowed with the same traits and ambitions. 48 As he conjured an embryonic people, Paine gave consideration to one more element that impinges on our study of class. He was thoroughly convinced that independence would eliminate idleness. Like Franklin, he projected a new continental order in which poverty was diminished. “Our present numbers are so happily proportioned to our wants,” he wrote, “that no man need be idle.” There were enough men to raise an army and engage in trade: enough, in other words, for self-sufficiency. The land would only continue to be wasted if “lavished by a king on his worthless dependents.” (Here, Paine did take a swipe at the old Pennsylvania proprietors.) With room to grow, the infant nation would reach new heights by displaying a manly, youthful spirit of commerce that Londoners once possessed but had since lost. The Revolution would end petty quarrels between colonies that had been nurtured in a culture of imperial dependence. Only through independence could America achieve its natural potential for commercial growth. 49 For a long time, Great Britain “engrossed us,” Paine explained, proud to be part of his adopted home, his American asylum. The government in London and the Crown were controlling land and resources of the North American continent for selfish purposes. But now the United Colonies were awake to a new reality: the British monopoly had run its course. Anything less than complete independence would be “like wasting an estate on a suit at law, to regulate the trespasses of a tenant, whose lease is just expiring.” Wasting an estate. Britain’s lease was up. 50 In advocating for an American breed bent on productivity and expansion, Paine’s richly evocative language of waste, idleness, breeding, and engrossing of land fed excitable minds. Knowing his impressionable audience, he compared the coming Revolution to Noah and the great flood: it would give birth to a “race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe,” their “portion of freedom” to be passed on to future generations. Population would grow and flourish as long as Americans filled the continent and harvested its resources for export. Paine’s economic heroes were overseas merchants, commercial farmers, shipbuilders, inventors, and property-owning and property-protecting Americans—but decidedly not the landless poor. 51 “Britain and America are now distinct empires,” declared Paine in 1776. Six years later, as the war was coming to an end, he would still be defending the distinct American breed. “We see with other eyes,” he wrote, “we hear with other ears, and think with other thoughts than those formerly used.” 52 To his credit, Paine held nothing back in poking holes in the dogma of hereditary monarchy. But with his broad swipes at royalty, he obscured other forms of injustice. He too loosely clothed the language of class in the garb of continental races and commercial impulses.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  I will speak what appears to be right, and if the despot says, then I will put you to death, I will reply, 'When did I ever tell you that I was immortal? You will do your part and I mine; it is yours to kill and mine to die intrepid; yours to banish, mine to depart untroubled.' How do we act in a voyage? We choose the pilot, the sailors, the hour. Afterwards comes a storm. What have I to care for? My part is performed. This matter belongs to the pilot. But the ship is sinking; what then have I to do? That which alone I can do— submit to being drowned without fear, without clamor or accusing of God, but as one who knows that what is born must likewise die." [264] This Stoic fashion, though efficacious and heroic enough in its place and time, is, it must be confessed, only possible as an habitual mood of the soul to narrow and unsympathetic characters. It proceeds altogether by exclusion. If I am a Stoic, the goods I cannot appropriate cease to be my goods, and the temptation lies very near to deny that they are goods at all. We find this mode of protecting the Self by exclusion and denial very common among people who are in other respects not Stoics. All narrow people intrench their Me, they retract it,—from the region of what they cannot securely possess. People who don't resemble them, or who treat them with indifference, people over whom they gain no influence, are people on whose existence, however meritorious it may intrinsically be, they look with chill negation, if not with positive hate. Who will not be mine I will exclude from existence altogether; that is, as far as I can make it so, such people shall be as if they were not. [265] Thus may a certain absoluteness and definiteness in the outline of my Me console me for the smallness of its content. Sympathetic people, on the contrary, proceed by the entirely opposite way of expansion and inclusion. The outline of their self often gets uncertain enough, but for this the spread of its content more than atones. Nil humani a me alienum. Let them despise this little person of mine, and treat me like a dog, I shall not negate them so long as I have a soul in my body.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  8 The purest expression of Franklin’s reproductive philosophy came in his 1747 satire “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker.” Appearing before a judge, Polly was found guilty of having borne an illegitimate child for the fifth time. Speaking in her own defense, Miss Baker described herself as an industrious woman: “I have brought Five fine Children into the World, at the Risque of my Life; I have maintain’d them well by my own Industry, without burthening the Township.” Her self-confidence was bolstered by the knowledge of her patriotic service. She had added to the “Number of the King’s Subjects, in a new Country that really wants People.” She should be praised, not punished, was the message. Baker’s plight was not of her own doing. She wanted to be married; she wanted to display the “Industry, Frugality, Fertility, and Skill in Oeconomy, appertaining to a good Wife’s Character.” Was it her fault that bachelors abounded? she pleaded. How could her action be considered sinful when one gazed on the “admirable workmanship” of God in creating her beautiful children? Had she not fulfilled her higher duty, “the first and great Command of Nature, and of Nature’s God, Encrease and Multiply?” As Franklin saw it, God and nature were on the side of Miss Baker, and foolish laws and outdated church sanctions on the other. To make his point, he added a humorous coda: the judge who heard her speech was convinced and he married her himself the next day. 9 Franklin’s offbeat story touched on all the points that he was trying to prove by demographic calculations and point-by-point reasoning in his “Observations.” The two essays should be read side by side. Nor was it an accident that he named his character Baker, a sly reference to the womb as an oven, a popular jest among English writers at the time. For Franklin, a man of both science and commerce, reproductive labor was work and should be valued as such. By adding to the “numbers of the King’s subjects,” reproductive labor was an imperial asset. It also made sense for Franklin to target bachelors in his tale. In the American colonies and in England, the unmarried man of means was a scandalous figure. He was ridiculed as a hermaphrodite, as half man, half woman; his prescribed punishment, as one New York newspaper demanded, should be to have half of his beard shaved from his face to indicate his diminished manliness. Others felt he should lose his inheritance. In the same way that land could be left fallow, human fertility could be wasted. Having no children, wasting their seed, bachelors indulged in the worst kind of reproductive idleness.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  You are now, my son, at the age where you can enjoy the fruits of education begin to reap what your parents bestowed upon you. It may serve you as a piece of advice that at your age, both in Bergen and in Antwerp, I always made it my concern to make myself official and pleasant to my principals , which was to my greatest advantage. Aside from the honorable convenience of closer contact with the family of the board of directors, one creates a supporting advocate in the principal if the eventuality, which is to be avoided if possible but nonetheless possible, should occur that a mistake has occurred in the business or that the principal’s satisfaction is at odds since left a lot to be desired. – As to your business plans for the future, my son, I am delighted by the lively interest that is expressed in them, although I cannot fully agree with them. You are of the opinion that the sale of those products that the area around our hometown produces, such as: grain, rapeseed, hides and skins, wool, oil, oil cake, bones, etc., is the most natural, most sustainable business in your hometown and you think to yourself in addition to the commission trade, preferably turn to that branch. I have also occupied myself with this idea at a time when competition in this line of business was very slight (while it has now grown considerably) and, as far as there was space and opportunity, made some experiments. The main purpose of my trip to England was to look for connections for my undertakings in this country as well. To this end I went up to Scotland and made some useful acquaintances, but soon recognized the dangerous character that the export business there carried in itself, which is why further cultivation of the same was subsequently omitted, especially since I was always mindful of the admonition, which our ancestor, the founder of the company, bequeathed to us: "My son, take pleasure in doing business during the day, but only do such that we can sleep peacefully at night!" I intend to keep this principle sacred until the end of my life, although one can have doubts here and there in the face of people who seem to drive better without such principles. I am thinking of Strunck & Hagenstrom, who are eminently growing, while our affairs are all too quiet. You know the house hasn't grown since the downsizing as a result of your grandfather's death, and I pray to God I'll be able to leave you the business at least as it is now. I have an experienced and thoughtful helper in Mr. Marcus, the general manager. If only your mother's family would keep their pennies a little better together; the inheritance will be of such great importance to us! I am extremely overwhelmed with business and civic work.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Poverty was once again being blamed on questionable breeding, and hard work was proclaimed as the means through which strong families put down solid roots and achieved upward mobility. To Frazier, welfare and day care were necessary if one were to be able to hold a job and feed a family. Starvation was a real danger—indeed the poor in South Carolina were still battling parasites like hookworm. 12 During the ethnic revival that urbanites celebrated in the 1970s, hardworking Greeks and Italians and Chinese propped up family tradition, as neighborhood restaurants in Chinatowns grew in popularity. The celebratory impulse over ethnic cooking was a middle-class phenomenon, and poverty was softened when it could be seen through the hazy glow of times gone by. The ethic of hard work itself was now engrafted onto ethnic and family genealogical trees. Past poverty was no encumbrance; roots, whatever they were, were not a stain upon the present. In summing up Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers (1976), an affectionate story of the ethnic life of Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one reviewer concluded, “Everybody wants a ghetto to look back on.” 13 When it led to social mobility, ethnic identity was seen as a positive attribute. Unappealing (or un-American) idiosyncracies were cleaned up; the food, literature, music, and dress promoted; and the whole ethnicity set apart from the diseased and dirty huddled masses who came through Ellis Island. Heritage, like historic memory itself, is always selective. Ethnics and poor folk can be admired from afar, or from a temporal distance, as long as doing so ensures the supremacy of the middle class in the narrative. People can choose to treasure those parts of their heritage that they see as favorable and wish to keep, jettisoning what unpleasant truths they would prefer to forget. The same impulses would soon be used to refashion the redneck and embrace white trash as an authentic heritage. It was moonshiners known for trippin’ whiskey and outrunnin’ the law who started the rough and wild sport of stock car racing. By the seventies, with money from Detroit automobile companies and celebrity drivers, an outlaw sport had become NASCAR, the tamer pastime of arriviste middle-class Americans. Meanwhile, country crooners Johnny Russell and Vernon Oxford released the hit singles “Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer” (1973) and “Redneck! (The Redneck National Anthem)” (1976). Vernon Oxford defined “redneck” as “someone who enjoys country music and likes to drink beer.” In 1977, the year Elvis died, the new queen of country rock music, Dolly Parton, was featured in the elite fashion magazine Vogue. “Redneck chic” (the cleaned-up redneck) reached Hollywood in the 1981 film Urban Cowboy, in which Jersey boy John Travolta took on the role of hard-hat- wearing, honky-tonk-loving Texas two-stepper Buford Davis.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  And it began Tony Buddenbrook's third marriage. Yes, that term was correct, and the senator himself had called the matter by that name one Thursday when the wine taverns were not present, which Frau Permaneder had put up with happily. In fact, all the worries of the household fell on her, but she also claimed joy and pride for herself, and one day, when she unexpectedly ran into Consul Julchen Möllendorpf, née Hagenström, on the street, she looked at her like that triumphant and challenging expression on her face that Frau Möllendorpf knew how to greet her first... Pride and joy in her expression and demeanor turned to solemn solemnity as she showed around the relatives who came to inspect the new home, while Erika Weinschenk himself almost appeared as an admiring guest. Pulling the train of her dressing gown behind her, her shoulders raised a little, her head leaning back and on her arm the key basket decorated with satin bows - she adored satin bows - Frau Antonie showed the visitors the furniture, the portieres, the transparent china, the sparkling silverware, the large oil paintings that the director had acquired: nothing but still lifes of food and naked female figures, because that was Hugo Weinschenk's taste - and her movements seemed to say: Look, I've made it there again in life. It's almost as elegant as Grünlich's and certainly more elegant than Permaneder's! The old consul came, dressed in gray and black striped silk, wafting a subtle scent of patchouli around her, her bright eyes roving calmly over everything and, without voicing aloud admiration, displayed an appreciative satisfaction. The senator came with his wife and child, amused himself with Gerda at Tony's blissful arrogance, and with difficulty prevented her from suffocating her adored little Hanno with currant bread and port wine... The Buddenbrook ladies came, who unanimously remarked that everything was so beautiful that they for their part, modest girls like you don't want to live in it... Poor Klothilde came, grey, patient and gaunt, let herself go laughed at her and drank four cups of coffee, after which she praised everything else in long, friendly words...

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Associationists would have it that they are, on the other hand, secondary phenomena arising from a rapid computation of the sensible pleasures or pains to which our prosperous or debased personal predicament is likely to lead, the sum of the represented pleasures forming the self-satisfaction, and the sum of the represented pains forming the opposite feeling of shame. No doubt, when we are self-satisfied, we do fondly rehearse all possible rewards for our desert, and when in a fit of self-despair we forebode evil. But the mere expectation of reward is not the self-satisfaction, and the mere apprehension of the evil is not the self-despair, for there is a certain average tone of self-feeling which each one of us carries about with him, and which is independent of the objective reasons we may have for satisfaction or discontent. That is, a very meanly-conditioned man may abound in unfaltering conceit, and one whose success in life is secure and who is esteemed by all may remain diffident of his powers to the end. One may say, however, that the normal provocative of self-feeling is one's actual success or failure, and the good or bad actual position one holds in the world. "He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum, and said what a good boy am I." A man with a broadly extended empirical Ego, with powers that have uniformly brought him success, with place and wealth and friends and fame, is not likely to be visited by the morbid diffidences and doubts about himself which he had when he was a boy. "Is not this great Babylon, which I have planted?"[262] Whereas he who has made one blunder after another, and still lies in middle life among the failures at the foot of the hill, is liable to grow all sicklied o'er with self-distrust, and to shrink from trials with which his powers can really cope. The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and abasement are of a unique sort, each as worthy to be classed as a primitive emotional species as are, for example, rage or pain. Each has its own peculiar physiognomical expression. In self-satisfaction the extensor muscles are innervated, the eye is strong and glorious, the gait rolling and elastic, the nostril dilated, and a peculiar smile plays upon the lips. This whole complex of symptoms is seen in an exquisite way in lunatic asylums, which always contain some patients who are literally mad with conceit, and whose fatuous expression and absurdly strutting or swaggering gait is in tragic contrast with their lack of any valuable personal quality.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  At Graceland, Presley added a three-television console like the one LBJ had in the Oval Office; “the King” also hung in his home an “All the Way with LBJ” bumper sticker from the 1964 presidential campaign, and posed for a publicity photo with the president’s daughter, Lynda Bird Johnson, who at the time was dating the actor George Hamilton. Presley and Johnson at first seem to be the oddest of couples—but they had more in common than their separate celebrity worlds would suggest. Both became national figures who challenged—whose very lives disrupted—the historically toxic characterization of poor whites. 1 When Elvis stormed onto the national scene in 1956, he seemed to be doing everything he could to act nonwhite. He openly embraced black musical style, black pompadour hair, and flashy outfits that had been associated with blacks as well. His gyrations caused his critics to compare his wildly sexualized dancing to the “hootchy-kootchy,” or burlesque striptease, and the rebellious zoot suit crowd. His phenomenal fame and adoring fans helped to propel him to The Ed Sullivan Show, and from there to the silver screen. He soon owned a stable of Cadillacs. Elvis had achieved what no white trash working-class male had ever dreamt possible: he was at once cool and sexually transgressive and a “country boy.” No longer a freakish rural outcast, as in the past, Elvis was a “Hillbilly Cat,” someone many teenage boys wished they could be. 2 Lyndon Johnson’s sudden elevation to the office of chief executive on November 22, 1963, came as a great shock to the nation. Eerily replaying what had happened a century earlier, a second unelected Johnson entered the presidency after a shocking assassination. But this time, instead of the sorrow- laden, war-weary Lincoln, the nation had lost the vigorous, photogenic, East Coast elite John F. Kennedy. In the wake of tragedy, the seasoned southern politician pursued an aggressive legislative agenda in favor of civil rights and social reform—the most dramatic foray since FDR. The “Great Society,” as his vast array of programs became known, called for the elimination of poll taxes and voting discrimination, the promotion of education and health care funding, and daring new programs in an effort to eradicate poverty. Yet what made LBJ different from his Democratic predecessor was the necessity that he reinvent himself by shedding the predictable trappings of a southern backwater identity— which he did without unlearning his famous Texan drawl. The accidental president had to transform how he was perceived on television, how he was judged by Washington reporters, how he was received as a national leader. Though Johnson had a proven record as a New Dealer and modern progressive, on the national stage he was still regarded as a regional figure. He refused to go easy on white rule in the South.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  It was an extremely solemn day when, after the first breakfast, the Consul took him down to the office to present him to Herr Marcus, the manager, Herr Havermann, the cashier, and the rest of the staff, with whom he had actually long been good friends was; when he sat in his swivel chair at the desk for the first time, busily busy stamping, arranging, copying, and when his father took him down the Trave in the afternoon to the warehouses "Linde", "Oak", "Lion" and "Whale" led, where Thomas had actually been at home for a long time, but where he was now introduced as an employee ... He was devoted to the task and imitated the quiet and tenacious industry of his father, who worked with clenched teeth and wrote many a prayer for help in his diary; because it was a matter of recovering the important funds that had been lost when the old man died in the "company," that idolized concept... One evening, very late, in the landscape room, he went into quite some detail with the consul about the circumstances. It was half past eleven and the children and Mamsell Jungmann were sleeping outside in the rooms in the corridor, because the second floor was now empty and was only occasionally used by strangers. The Consul was sitting on the yellow sofa next to her husband, who, cigar in mouth, was surveying the city's listings. She bent over a piece of silk embroidery, her lips moving lightly as she counted a series of stitches with the needle. Beside her, on the dainty sewing table with gold ornaments, the six candles of a candelabrum were burning; the chandelier hung unused. Johann Buddenbrook, who was approaching his mid-forties, had aged visibly in recent years. His small, round eyes seemed to be set even deeper, the large, curved nose, like his cheekbones, stood out even more sharply, and a powder puff seemed to have lightly touched his ash-blonde, carefully parted hair a couple of times on the temples. The Consul, for her part, was in her late thirties, but she carefully preserved her unpretty, yet brilliant appearance best, and her matt white complexion with a few freckles had lost none of its tenderness. Her reddish, elaborately styled hair was illuminated by the candlelight. As she let her very light blue eyes slide a little aside, she said: 'One thing I wanted you to consider, my dear Jean, is whether it might not be wise to hire a servant... I've come to this conclusion. When I think of my parents..." The Consul lowered the newspaper to his knees, and as he took the cigar from his mouth his eyes widened, for it was a question of spending money. "Yes, my dear and esteemed Bethsy," he began, drawing out the salutation as he needed to organize his objections. 'A servant?