america

A tribute, published October 22, 1931, to Thomas Alva Edison upon his death: More than any other man, Mr. Edison lifted us out of the material surroundings of the Middle Ages. For most part, his inventions were spectacular in that they served to effect the emancipation of humanity and at the same time made possible mass production, greater factories, new and faster transportation methods, speedier distribution of commodities and a general increase in the happiness and higher standards of living for the peoples of the world. His inventions have provided employment directly for more than a million persons and many millions are employed because of their indirect benefits. It has been recorded that the investment value of all the undertakings rooted in his inventions equals the value of all the gold mined in the world since Columbus discovered America. Thomas A. Edison, whom we revered for his simplicity and his greatness, has passed on, but his name and his achievements remain to be magnified in the light of their untold benefits to future generations.

When I speak about the future development of our business, I want to include every other business in the United States. In my judgment, every legitimate business in our country today has a far better future ahead of it than it has ever had before.

A message regarding the annual convention of the Advertising Federation of America in NYC, June 14-18, 1931. Advertising has illuminated the path of progress. . . . In building up desire, advertising has spurred new endeavors. It is their creative work, their dynamic presentations of products, their ability to teach and educate which have made each of us desire better things. And in the fulfillment of our desires, we have reached for and attained higher pinnacles in living standards and a clearer conception of the values of life itself.

Had the white settlers in North America called the natives 'Americans' instead of 'Indians', the early Americans could not have said that the 'only good Indian is a dead Indian' and could not have deprived them so easily of their lands and lands and lives. Robbing people of their proper names is often the first step in robbing them of their property, liberty, and life.

The United States of America will sound as pompously in the world or in history as The Kingdom of Great Britain.

It is the object only of war that makes it honorable. And if there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engages.

Uncritical reverence for the Founding Fathers was less ubiquitous while they actually lived. . . . "The Reign of Terror that raged in America during the latter end of the Washington Administration, and the whole of that of Adams, is enveloped in mystery to me. That there were men in the Government hostile to the representative system, was once their toast, though it is now their overthrow, and therefore the fact is established against them."

Not a place on earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wreangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry, too.

The efforts of certain Christian factions to cast themselves as the inheritors of America's Judaeo-Christian tradition find little support in the embarrassing heterodoxy of this Founding Father: "But the greatest of all reformers of the depraved religion of his own country was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable as the diamond from the dunghill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man; outlines which it is lamentable he did not live to fill up. . . . The establishment of the innocent and genuine character of this benevolent moralist, and the rescuing it from the imputation of imposture, which has resulted from artificial systems, invented by ultra-Christian sects, unauthorized by a single word ever uttered by him, is a most desirable object. . . ."