Success Quote by William Dean Howells

Howells nails the politics of labeling in one clean, two-clause sentence: “reformer” and “crank” aren’t diagnoses of merit so much as social verdicts. The line works because it turns what sounds like an objective distinction into a mirror of taste and power. Your “dream” isn’t evaluated in a vacuum; it’s processed through the audience’s comfort level, class interests, and sense of what counts as “reasonable.” Approval baptizes you as visionary. Dislike demotes you to nuisance.

The slyness is in the pronouns. “We” does the judging, “a man” does the dreaming. That imbalance is the point: institutions rarely argue with new ideas on purely intellectual grounds when they can instead manage them reputationally. Call someone a reformer and you invite them into the civic story of progress; call them a crank and you quarantine them as eccentric, unserious, possibly unwell. It’s a rhetorical shortcut that saves the public the trouble of engaging the actual proposal.

Howells, writing in an America crowded with late-19th-century “dreamers” (labor organizers, Populists, utopians, suffragists, anti-monopolists), watched reform become a branding war. The era’s anxieties about social upheaval made “crank” a handy containment strategy. His intent isn’t to canonize every dream; it’s to expose the lazy moral sorting mechanism that decides who gets heard. The subtext: today’s crank is often just a reformer whose constituency hasn’t arrived yet.