Quotes from Nicholas Lemann

You can't create a successful politics of support for public education on the basis of asking voters not to care about skills, and tests that measure skills, at all.

The cotton gin made it possible to grow medium- and short-staple cotton commercially, which led to the spread of the cotton plantation from a small coastal area to most of the South. As cotton planting expanded, so did slavery, and slavery's becoming the central institution of the Southern economy was the central precondition of the Civil War. What

AMERICANS ARE imbued with the notion that social systems proceed from ideas, because that is what happened at the founding of our country. The relationship of society and ideas can work the other way around, though: people can create social systems first and then invent ideas that will fulfill their need to feel that the world as it exists makes sense.

What the mechanical cotton picker did was make obsolete the sharecropper system, which arose in the years after the Civil War as the means by which cotton planters' need for a great deal of cheap labor was satisfied.

In 1940, 77 per cent of black Americans still lived in, the South—49 per cent in the rural South. The invention of the cotton picker was crucial to the great migration by blacks from the Southern countryside to the cities of the South, the West, and the North. Between 1910 and 1970, six and a half million black Americans moved from the South to the North; five million of them moved after 1940, during the time of the mechanization of cotton farming.

The leading planter families of the Delta consider themselves to be members of the Southern upper class—which is to say that they are Episcopalian, of British or Scotch-Irish extraction, and had ancestors living in the upper South before 1800—

The black population of Chicago grew from 44,000 in 1910 to 109,000 in 1920, and then to 234,000 in 1930. A local commission on race relations reported that 50,000 black people had moved to Chicago from the South in eighteen months during the war. The

Sharecroppers traded at a plantation-owned commissary, often in scrip rather than money. (Martin Luther King, Jr., on a visit to an Alabama plantation in 1965, was amazed to meet sharecroppers who had never seen United States currency in their lives.)

In the way that everything on Wall Street was rank-ordered, with a heavy overlay of social class, trading was a lower activity than what Morgan Stanley did, the province of smaller and, to be frank about it, Jewish firms, in the same way that having clients who were in retailing or media, rather than industry, was lower, and also Jewish.

In May 1919 Berle, assuming the stagy veneer of cynicism of a disappointed crusader, wrote his father, "I have come to the conclusion that no statement of ideals by anybody will ever get any reaction from me again. If I can trust myself I shall be happy; if I trust anyone else I shall be a fool.

Political leadership is about achieving tangible good results that make a difference in people's lives, not offering a message of unity, respect, and honor (though that's nice, too). It's not useful to understand world affairs in the broadest possible terms, as a struggle between good and evil.

Educated middle-class people such as the young Adolf Berle had been raised on the idea that American civilization was at heart one of small-town merchants and independent farmers. Now