Politics & Power Quote by Emanuel Celler

March 1933 is less a date than a pivot point: the moment America stopped pretending the old rules were still adequate. Emanuel Celler, a hard-nosed New Deal congressman, frames Franklin Roosevelt’s opening act as a “revolution” not of flags and barricades, but of behavior and belief. “In manner, in mores” is doing quiet heavy lifting. He’s signaling that the shift wasn’t only administrative; it was psychological. Citizens who’d been trained to treat government as a distant night watchman were suddenly asked to see it as an active architect of daily life.

The most telling move is the leap from “black or white” to “color.” Celler isn’t just praising policy; he’s celebrating a new permission structure. In the early Depression, politics had been trapped in moral binaries: balanced budgets versus irresponsibility, self-reliance versus “handouts.” The first Hundred Days broke that frame with experimentalism - bank holidays, emergency agencies, public works - a kind of pragmatic improvisation that made ideology look thin. “Color” implies options, gradients, solutions that don’t fit pre-approved categories.

There’s also subtextual defensiveness, typical of a politician selling a big expansion of state power: calling it a revolution in “definition” suggests legitimacy through necessity. If the government’s job has changed, then objections rooted in older definitions can be dismissed as nostalgic, even negligent. Celler’s sentence functions as propaganda with a pulse: it romanticizes bureaucracy as cultural rebirth, turning policy into a story of national reanimation.