Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Ambrose

Ambrose’s line is a small autobiography masquerading as a footnote about faculty politics, and it works because it compresses a whole mid-century intellectual genealogy into two brisk sentences. He isn’t simply reporting that his teachers disliked “big business”; he’s tracing how ideas get inherited, normalized, and taught as common sense. The key detail is the 1930s schooling: an era stamped by the Depression, the New Deal, labor militancy, and a widely shared suspicion that corporate power had helped break the economy and then insulated itself from consequences. If you learned your economics and civics in that decade, anti-corporate reflexes weren’t edgy; they were survival logic.

The subtext is Ambrose positioning himself as both insider and witness. He names the bias without theatrics, which lets him claim credibility: he knows the academic mood because he was formed by it, but he also stands slightly apart, describing it with a historian’s cool distance. “Scornful of, even hated” escalates from intellectual disdain to moral disgust, suggesting that the posture wasn’t purely analytical. It was emotional, almost tribal, a campus identity as much as a critique.

Context matters here because Ambrose came of age in the postwar boom, when “big business” also meant prosperity, mass employment, and American power. His observation hints at a friction in mid-century classrooms: Depression-era skepticism taught to students living in a country that looked, at least on the surface, like capitalism had redeemed itself. The intent feels less like nostalgia than a quiet warning about how yesterday’s crises keep writing today’s syllabi.