Politics & Power Quote by Knute Nelson

“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.