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Politics & Power Quote by Knute Nelson

"Mess is fairly good. It is like what is found in American hotels except for cake and pie"

About this Quote

“Mess is fairly good” is the kind of lukewarm praise that lands like a small insult, then keeps landing because of the comparison that follows. Knute Nelson, a politician trained in the art of calibrated approval, offers a review that’s less about food than about standards, identity, and the quiet competitiveness of everyday life in the early 20th-century American orbit.

The word “mess” is doing double duty. It’s literal military/shipboard dining language, but it also carries the faintest whiff of disorder and austerity. Nelson’s “fairly good” isn’t delight; it’s tolerance. Then comes the punch: it’s like American hotels “except for cake and pie.” That exception matters. Cake and pie aren’t nutrition; they’re reassurance. They signal abundance, comfort, and the social theater of being well looked after. By naming dessert, Nelson isn’t just complaining about a menu item; he’s marking the boundary between acceptable hospitality and the version of America he expects to be performed for him.

There’s an immigrant’s sensibility in the subtext, too. Nelson, Norwegian-born and Minnesota-made, helped shape a Midwest that was both proud of its plainness and hungry for the polish of national respectability. The line reads like a dispatch from a world where “American” is already a benchmark and where the absence of sweetness becomes shorthand for the absence of ease. It’s a tiny cultural critique delivered in the safest political register: mild, wry, and pointedly specific.

Quote Details

TopicFood
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Nelson, Knute. (2026, January 17). Mess is fairly good. It is like what is found in American hotels except for cake and pie. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/mess-is-fairly-good-it-is-like-what-is-found-in-76556/

Chicago Style
Nelson, Knute. "Mess is fairly good. It is like what is found in American hotels except for cake and pie." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/mess-is-fairly-good-it-is-like-what-is-found-in-76556/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Mess is fairly good. It is like what is found in American hotels except for cake and pie." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/mess-is-fairly-good-it-is-like-what-is-found-in-76556/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2026.

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Mess is fairly good like American hotels except cake and pie - Knute Nelson
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About the Author

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Knute Nelson (February 2, 1843 - April 28, 1923) was a Politician from USA.

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