Augustus Foster Quotes
This [Washington and Congress] is a miserable place, but the elect of all the states are assembled in it, and really such a gang to have the affairs of an empire ... entrusted to them, makes one shudder. Imagination is dead in this country—with neither to be found nor is it understood among them.... There are about five persons who look like gentlemen. All the rest come in the filthiest dresses and are well indeed if they look like farmers—but most seem to be apothecaries and attorneys.
Augustus Foster, 1780-1848, Secretary of the British Legation to the United States, Letter to the Dutchess of Devonshire, February 8, 1805
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
1st Viscount Bolingbroke. See {627799} for the origin of the bias against merchants and money men. It also represents a rigidity of class structure that characterized England until very recently. The landed gentry were the first class citizens. Usually titles went with the land. In America, someone who would be successful as a merchant or a banker could achieve the highest of social status and political influence. This was not true in England where a merchant that was far more wealthy than a landed lord was not accepted by the aristocracy.
He was not very good at it. Taft was an excellent Supreme Court Justice, and had good management skills, but could never get the hang of relating to people—the electorate or the Congress. He is the only major party presidential candidate to come in 3rd, and he was the incumbent. Administratively, he had not been a bad President but his poor people skills required him to pander to the right wing base of his own party and this angered his former mentor Theodore Roosevelt who ran against Taft in the Republican primary. Taft moved to the right still further and so angered TR that he ran against Taft as an independent in the general election. Woodrow Wilson won, but Roosevelt came in second and beat Taft handily.
In general this is true when the public is aware and focused on an issue. However, most of the work of Congress is unknown to most voters and it is there that the money is so influential.
This quotation is very important because it illustrates in the first of our great national political debates, the same views held by extreme, right wing anti-government, and Tea Party adherents regarding government in general and taxation in particular. Singletary turned out to have been absolutely right about the inadequacy of import duties as a federal revenue source although it took many decades and a changing world to make that come to pass. Note also that there was then, as there is today among the extreme right, a deep suspicion and antipathy toward intellectuals—“men of learning” as well as the elites. Some saw the Constitution as a plot of the elite to capture control of the government to the exclusion of the poor and average man. That has always been a problem but these roots are deep in American history. See {634235} and {634238} for more of his arguments at the Ratification Convention.
She was one of the very few remaining bi Partisan Republicans. There had been a de facto purge of liberal Republicans from the party.
Historically, for many Americans the educated were considered as elite in a very positive sense. Other people at other times saw educated elites as dangerous to religion and conservatism. Here the educate are described as an “aristocracy” and the only aristocracy that was acceptable and desirable
Sir Augustus John Foster, 1st Baronet, GCH PC was a British diplomat and politician. Born into a notable British family, Foster served in a variety of diplomatic functions in continental Europe and the United States, interrupted by a short stint as a Member of Parliament. He wrote about his American experiences in Notes on the United States of America.
