Monday, April 2, 2012

Teddy Roosevelt disses the OWS movement

Did Teddy Roosevelt have something to say about the OWS movement over a hundred years before the first disgruntled professional activist set foot in Zuccotti Park?

Okay, not really.

He was talking about the supporters of the Democratic nominee for President in the election of 1896, William Jennings Bryan, as quoted in Richard Zacks book Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York:

Not only do [Bryan supporters] wish to repudiate their debts, but they really believe that somehow they are executing righteous justice on the moneyed oppressor.
And,
They feel the eternal and inevitable injustice of life, they do not realize and will not realize how that injustice is aggravated by their own extraordinary folly, and they wish , if they cannot lift themselves, at least to strike down those who are more fortunate or more prosperous.