Leadership Quote by Spiro T. Agnew

Agnew’s line turns lived misery into a visual cliche, and that’s the point. “I’ve been in many of them” is credentialing-by-tour: a quick claim to firsthand knowledge that preempts objections from people who actually live there. Then comes the flattening move: “if you’ve seen one city slum you’ve seen them all.” It’s not an observation so much as a permission slip to stop looking. The phrase treats poverty as interchangeable scenery, a repeating pattern you can recognize from the car window and then file away.

The intent is bureaucratic emotional management. By declaring slums basically identical, Agnew drains them of local causes, political histories, and specific actors who might be held responsible. It’s a rhetorical shortcut that swaps analysis for fatigue: why investigate housing policy, segregation, deindustrialization, policing, or municipal disinvestment if the problem is a generic “slum” that reproduces itself everywhere? The subtext is that remedial efforts are either futile or wasteful, because what you’re confronting isn’t a solvable set of conditions but a type of place - and, by implication, a type of people.

In the late-1960s/early-1970s political context, this posture dovetails with the era’s backlash politics: law-and-order messaging, skepticism toward Great Society programs, and a growing suburban audience primed to see cities as a single cautionary tale. Agnew’s genius here is grimly efficient: he collapses complexity into sameness, and sameness into distance. If all slums are “the same,” then none of them have to be understood, and understanding is where accountability begins.