Politicians From California

"Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask for a moment of silence here in this chamber to remember our fallen colleague, my predecessor representing the San Francisco Peninsula in Congress, Leo Ryan, and to honor his work for justice and human rights."

"Leo Ryan's life and his deeds are about a life that was so much more than Guyana. He was relentless in his search for answers, answers that were not readily available by just asking questions...We remember him today because his story is so much like those of most Americans; we want to believe the best and we sometimes hear the worst."

"As his colleagues have noted in their tribute to him, it was typical of Leo Ryan's concern for his constituents that he would investigate personally the rumors of mistreatment in Jonestown that reportedly affected so many from his district. Leo Ryan is the 88th recipient of a Congressional Gold Medal and only the 4th Member of Congress to receive this high honor from his colleagues."

"Representative Leo J. Ryan understood the manipulation phenomena people were describing to him and he lost his life in a Guyanese jungle investigating how Jim Jones "bent minds.""

"How much longer, for instance, can we continue to crowd more and more people into this world? How much longer can we afford to wage senseless, destructive wars? How long can we permit the uncontrolled use of the earth's resources when there is no possibility of replacing them? Indeed, how long will it be before we have completely used up everything our lives depend on? These issues are the politics of the future. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have begun to spell out in substantive fashion the means by which we can control population growth, environmental problmes, and the conservation of our natural resources."

"John F. Kennedy's death was as personal a body blow to most of the nation's young people. Why? It seems to me that the answer is simple: He was the symbol of the new generation grasping the tiller of the ship of state for the first time, and finding it exhilarating, exciting, challenging. He knew that there is an element of danger in accepting a challenge — in taking a risk that is beyond what is expected of you, beyond what you may expect of yourself."

"Thank you for your very detailed letter regarding Scientology. We haven't yet found a way to attack these jackals who feed on children and young adults who are too emotionally weak to stand by themselves when they reach the age of consent. It's too bad there isn't a 20th Century Charles Dickens to write about the terrible destruction of these 20th Century fagins who make themselves rich while they destroy the psyche of so many. At the present time, I can only encourage you to do more of what you have been doing."

"Mr. Speaker, the activities of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church continue to cause distress for many of us. As you know, the House Subcommittee on International Organizations, chaired by my distinguished colleague, Donald Fraser, is investigating allegations of close ties between the Reverend Moon and some of his organizations and the South Korean government, including the KCIA. As a member of the subcommittee, I am, of course, disturbed over such allegations. My greatest concern, however, is for those young people who have been converted by these religious cults and for their parents, who have suffered the loss of their children. One of these parents, Mrs. Ida Watson Camburn of Sunnyvale, Calif., brought to my attention the testimony of John G. Clark, Jr., M.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, before a Vermont Senate committee, which was investigating religious cults. Dr. Clark's remarks, based on 2 ½ years of research, deal with the effects of some religious cults on the mental and physical health and welfare of their converts. I highly recommend his conclusions to my colleagues."

"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That (a) the President of the United States is authorized to present, on behalf of the Congress, a gold medal of appropriate design to the family of the late Honorable Leo J. Ryan in recognition of his distinguished service as a Member of Congress and the fact of his untimely death by assassination while performing his responsibilities as a Member of the United States House of Representatives."

"I stand here before you in absolute awe of the fact that Congressman Ryan, Patricia's father, gave his life in an attempt to rescue victims from another dangerous cult. Looking at the politicians who serve in our Congress today, should make everyone realize what a rare man Leo Ryan was. I greatly admire him."

"Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask for a moment of silence here in this chamber to remember our fallen colleague, my predecessor representing the San Francisco Peninsula in Congress, Leo Ryan, and to honor his work for justice and human rights."

"The more I have been attacked for my views and actions, the more I've stood up to it, and the more support I have received."

"First, there are good people out there; they just don’t make so much of a racket. Second, if you don’t make waves, then the bad guys don’t get washed overboard. And third, nobody bothers to bad-mouth you unless they’re afraid of you. So think of it as kind of a compliment."

"I have to say that after chemotherapy, Barbara Boxer just isn't that scary anymore."

"There's so much revenue that comes in from a cap-and-trade system that you can really go to a person in a congressional district and get enough votes there by saying, ‘What do you need? What do you want?’"

"I've always said you that need to keep it on the table and you need to look at these things because now people are dying because of this administration. And, you know, that's what -- that's the truth. And they won't change course. They're ignoring the Congress. They keep signing -- these signing statements, which mean that he's decided not to enforce the law. This is as close as we've ever come to a dictatorship."

"Upton Sinclair had come along, a young man with a mighty determination, and against heavy odds forced the publication of his novel, The Jungle, based upon his first-hand observations of the conditions under which meat was packed in the Chicago stockyards and under which the workers there lived. And President Theodore Roosevelt, who had testified that he would as soon have eaten his old hat as the canned meat furnished the American troops by the Chicago packers in 1898, appointed a commission to investigate Sinclair's charges."

"I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author’s political views."

"I have regarded you, not as a novelist, but as an historian; for it is my considered opinion, unshaken at 85, that records of fact are not history. They are only annals, which cannot become historical until the artist-poet-philosopher rescues them from the unintelligible chaos of their actual occurrence and arranges them in works of art. When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to your novels. They object that the people in your books never existed; that their deeds were never done and their sayings never uttered. I assure them that they were, except that Upton Sinclair individualized and expressed them better than they could have done, and arranged their experiences, which as they actually occurred were as unintelligible as pied type, in significant and intelligible order."

"Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle at a time when Lincoln Steffens was writing about the political evils of the day and during the muckraking period of Ray Stannard Baker, and others. Sinclair was the only one of these muckrakers who drew the logical political conclusions. At the end of The Jungle he advocated socialism as the remedy for the terrible conditions in industry under private ownership."

"If you are not too much mesmerized by the naïveté with which Mr. Sinclair describes the world of wealth and power - he has the innocent leer of a small-boy socialist watching a capitalist strip-tease - Wide Is the Gate is an easy way to refresh your knowledge of historical events not very distant in memory."

"We also learned an important lesson from Sinclair's campaign. Sinclair had been a socialist ever since the Debs era. He had run for office on the Socialist ticket many times without much success. In 1934, to the dismay of his comrades in the Socialist Party, and to our contempt, he decided to run for the Democratic nomination for governor in California. He put together a ticket called End Poverty in California, or EPIC, which took as its slogan "production for use, not profit," and advocated state-sponsored cooperative enterprises. The EPIC movement swept the Democratic Party, gained Sinclair the Democratic nomination (if not, ultimately, the governorship), and roused enormous popular enthusiasm. We would have nothing to do with the Democratic Party, and so we were left on the outside, denouncing the movement. We called him a "social fascist," which was terrible nonsense. (Lest it be thought that such sectarianism was solely a CP attribute, it's worth remembering that the Socialist Party expelled Sinclair for his act of heresy.) Our position was that you could not reform a capitalist party, that nothing could be gained through the two-party system."

"My concept of what it meant to be a revolutionary was based on a montage of the organizers from the Sinclair novels, along with my childhood memories from Denver."

"I did not want to say these unpleasant things, but you have written to me, asking my opinion, and I give it to you, flat. If you would get over two ideas — first that any one who criticizes you is an evil and capitalist-controlled spy, and second that you have only to spend a few weeks on any subject to become a master of it — you might yet regain your now totally lost position as the leader of American socialistic journalism."

"He (Sinclair) is in the doghouse here because he relentlessly sheds light on the hurly-burly dark side of American life."

"I look upon Upton Sinclair as one of the greatest novelists in the world, the Zola of America."

"Mr. Sinclair would have died in obscurity but for “The Jungle,” which didn’t move a hair upon the heads of the Armours, but netted the author a large sum and a reputation. He may now write the most stupid stuff, sure of finding a market. Yet there is not a workingman anywhere so cringing before respectability as Mr. Sinclair."

"I am against the violation of civil rights by Hitler and Mussolini as much as you are, and well you know it. But I am also against the wholesale murders, confiscations and other outrages that have gone on in Russia. I think it is fair to say that you pseudo-communists are far from consistent here. You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist."

"Private ownership of tools, a basis of freedom when tools are simple becomes a basis of enslavement when tools are complex."

"It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it the "cooler," and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest."

"[H]ere are three sentences for you to paste in your hat and learn by heart. First: Credit is the life blood of industry, and the control of credit is the control of all society. Second: The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery. And Third: The American banking system is the most perfect contrivance yet devised by the human brain for making the rich richer and the poor poorer."

"An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain."

"Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his being has come."

"Wherever there was a group of people, and a treasure to be administered, there Peter knew was backbiting and scandal and intriguing and spying, and a chance for somebody whose brains were "all there.""

"What Fielding was to the eighteenth century and Dickens to the nineteenth, Sinclair is to our own. The overwhelming knowledge and passionate expression of specific wrongs are more stirring, more interesting, and also more taxing than the cynical censure of Fielding and the sentimental lamentations of Dickens."

"Upton Sinclair's victory is astounding. It bears him out in his early assurance of success and his insistence from the beginning that he sensed a ground swell of revolt against the present order. It is the more remarkable because of the widespread belief that the red scare following the general strike had so aroused California that there was a reaction against the radicalism of Mr. Sinclair. . . . He [will] win others to his belief that the economic and political jungle we live in today is no more necessary and inevitable than were the foul horrors of that human cesspool of the stockyards which he-to his everlasting honor-revealed in his most famous book, "The Jungle.""

"Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters."

"In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus, we are told how the devil took him up into a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and the devil said unto him: "All this power will I give unto thee, and the glory of them, for that is delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou, therefore, wilt worship me, all shall be thine." Jesus, as we know, answered and said "Get thee behind me, Satan!" And he really meant it; he would have nothing to do with worldly glory, with "temporal power;" he chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death of a disturber of the peace. And for two or three centuries his church followed in his footsteps, cherishing his proletarian gospel. The early Christians had "all things in common, except women;" they lived as social outcasts, hiding in deserted catacombs, and being thrown to lions and boiled in oil. But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces which battle for him. He failed to get Jesus, but he came again, to get Jesus' church. He came when, through the power of the new revolutionary idea, the Church had won a position of tremendous power in the decaying Roman Empire; and the subtle worm assumed the guise of no less a person than the Emperor himself, suggesting that he should become a convert to the new faith, so that the Church and he might work together for the greater glory of God. The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious for their organization, fell for this scheme, and Satan went off laughing to himself. He had got everything he had asked from Jesus three hundred years before; he had got the world's greatest religion."

"The methods by which the "Empire of Business" maintains its control over journalism are four: First, ownership of the papers; second, ownership of the owners; third, advertising subsidies; and fourth, direct bribery. By these methods there exists in America a control of news and of current comment more absolute than any monopoly in any other industry."

"The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion, ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed by it — and that it cultivates the source from which its nourishment is derived."

"There would be dreamers of dreams and seers of visions and hearers of voices; readers of the entrails of beasts and interpreters of the flight of birds; there would be burning bushes and stone tablets on mountain-tops, and inspired words dictated to aged disciples on lonely islands. There would arise special castes of men and women, learned in these sacred matters; and these priestly castes would naturally emphasize the importance of their calling, would hold themselves aloof from the common herd, endowed with special powers and entitled to special privileges. They would interpret the oracles in ways favorable to themselves and their order; they would proclaim themselves friends and confidants of the god, walking with him in the night-time, receiving his messengers and angels, acting as his deputies in forgiving offenses, in dealing punishments and in receiving gifts. They would become makers of laws and moral codes. They would wear special costumes to distinguish them, they would go through elaborate ceremonies to impress their followers, employing all sensuous effects, architecture and sculpture and painting, music and poetry and dancing, candles and incense and bells and gongs."

"The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence."

"The reader will understand that I despise these "yellows"; they are utterly without honor, they are vulgar and cruel; and yet, in spite of all their vices, I count them less dangerous to society than the so-called "respectable" papers, which pretend to all the virtues, and set the smug and pious tone for good society — papers like the "New York Tribune" and the "Boston Evening Transcript" and the "Baltimore Sun," which are read by rich old gentlemen and maiden aunts, and can hardly ever be forced to admit to their columns any new or vital event or opinion. These are "kept" papers, in the strictest sense of the term, and do not have to hustle on the street for money. They serve the pocketbooks of the whole propertied class — which is the meaning of the term "respectability" in the bourgeois world. On the other hand the "yellow" journals, serving their own pocketbooks exclusively, will often print attacks on vested wealth, provided the attacks are startling and sensational, and provided the vested wealth in question is not a heavy advertiser."

"I discover that hardly a week passes that some one does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting."

"Over the vast plain I wander, observing a thousand strange and incredible and terrifying manifestations of the Bootstrap-lifting impulse. There is, I discover, a regular propaganda on foot; a long time ago — no man can recall how far back — the Wholesale Pickpockets made the discovery of the ease with which a man's pockets could be rifled while he was preoccupied with spiritual exercises, and they began offering prizes for the best essays in support of the practice. Now their propaganda is everywhere triumphant, and year by year we see an increase in the rewards and emoluments of the prophets and priests of the cult. The ground is covered with stately temples of various designs, all of which I am told are consecrated to Bootstrap-lifting."

"Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence? What are we to say when we see asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of the rich? What are we to say when we see idealism become hypocrisy, and the moral and spiritual heritage of mankind twisted to the knavish purposes of class-cruelty and greed? What I say is — Bootstrap-lifting!"

"A new burst of rage swept over him — What did it matter whether it was true or not — whether anything was true or not? What did it matter if anybody had done all the hideous and loathsome things that everybody else said they had done? It was what everybody was saying! It was what everybody believed — what everybody was interested in! It was the measure of a whole society — their ideals and their standards! It was the way they spent their time, repeating nasty scandals about each other; living in an atmosphere of suspicion and cynicism, with endless whispering and leering, and gossip of low intrigue."

"He was burning with a sense of outrage. He had been tricked and made a fool of; he had been used and flung aside. And now there was nothing he could do — he was utterly helpless. What affected him most was his sense of the overwhelming magnitude of the powers which had made him their puppet; of the utter futility of the efforts that he or any other man could make against them. They were like elemental, cosmic forces; they held all the world in their grip, and a common man was as much at their mercy as a bit of chaff in a tempest."

"I'm going to stop squandering money for things I don't want. I'm going to stop accepting invitations, and meeting people I don't like and don't want to know. I've tried your game — I've tried it hard, and I don't like it; and I'm going to get out before it's too late. I'm going to find some decent and simple place to live in; and I'm going down town to find out if there isn't some way in New York for a man to earn an honest living!"

"When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity ; he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence. To-day we read about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with entire seriousness—that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only explanation available. The story of the hero who slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of early times."