Success Quote by George Haven Putnam

The line lands with the weary bluntness of someone who has traded speeches for logistics. Putnam isn’t trying to inspire; he’s documenting a failure of persuasion that has stretched from day one into an institutional habit. “So trying” does quiet work here: it signals sustained effort, but also a creeping disbelief that effort should still be necessary. The speaker is past the phase of optimism and into the era of memo-grade honesty.

The key move is the pronoun math. “We” reads like a committee, a regiment, a board - an organized entity that expects its structure to confer legitimacy. “Them” is left strategically vague, which widens the indictment: superiors who won’t authorize, politicians who won’t fund, allies who won’t commit, the public that won’t buy the argument. That vagueness isn’t laziness; it’s a tell. When you can’t name the obstacle, it’s often because the obstacle is diffuse power, the kind you can’t confront directly without consequences.

“As of the very beginning of our organization” turns the sentence into a miniature institutional history: the organization was founded with a mission that required outside belief, and it has been stuck pleading for recognition ever since. The phrase “but with no success” is almost aggressively unadorned, the opposite of patriotic varnish. For a soldier, that plainness is subtextual: persuasion has limits, and the battlefield of policy and perception doesn’t reward valor.

Contextually, Putnam’s era sat amid post-Civil War professionalization and public skepticism toward permanent institutions. The quote captures a modern anxiety before the modern age fully arrives: the sense that even organized competence can’t force consent.