Politics & Power Quote by Bainbridge Colby

A remarkably tidy piece of democratic propaganda: build factories, keep the peace, and everything runs on the quiet fuel of people who know better. Colby’s line flatters “citizenship” by treating it less like a legal status than a kind of civic literacy, a baseline competence without which the American machine - social order and industrial output alike - can’t reliably function. That pairing is the tell. He doesn’t say America is founded on capital, labor, or even law; he says its structure rests on citizens who are “enlightened,” a word that smuggles in schooling, newspapers, informed voting, and the disciplined habit of thinking past impulse.

The subtext is cautionary. If citizenship is the foundation, then ignorance is not merely a private failing but a structural threat: the kind that can warp markets, empower demagogues, and turn labor conflict into something uglier. Colby’s era makes the anxiety legible. A Progressive-leaning public servant speaking in the early 20th century is living amid mass immigration, rapid industrial consolidation, strikes, the Red Scare, and the aftermath of World War I - a moment when elites and reformers alike worried that democracy could be outpaced by modernity’s speed.

The rhetorical move is elegant because it makes “enlightenment” sound like common sense while quietly prescribing a program: civic education, responsible media, and a populace trained to adjudicate complexity. It’s less a compliment than an ultimatum: if Americans want prosperity and stability, they must earn them at the ballot box and in the public square, not just on the assembly line.