Plain Speaker
Gould was noted for speaking his mind plainly and frankly. In a 1929 newspaper interview, he described Sen. George W. Norris of Nebraska as a "bitter, sour old man with not a good word for anybody" and said Sen. Thomas J. Walsh of Montana "hasn't got a kindly thought in his system". Both men were famous progressives, and such statements perhaps reveal Gould's instinctive conservatism as much as their clashing temperaments. Gould was particularly suspicious of the Midwest and West for wanting to wrest too much power from the Eastern states, and from New England in particular. But he also derided his own political skills, saying "the fact of the matter is that I'm not cut out for politics, I want to get back to my railroad and the pine forests of Maine." His favorite politician was Calvin Coolidge and one of his best friend in the Senate was a Democrat, Senator Joseph E. Ransdell of Louisiana.
Read more about this topic: Arthur R. Gould
Famous quotes containing the words plain and/or speaker:
“I don’t choose to say much upon this head,
I’m a plain man, and in a single station,
But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)