“The trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. ‘We need solely to make up our own minds and to act.’ Don’t ask whether you need an umbrella. Go outside and stop the rain.
Here are some of the sorts of people who went out and stopped the rain in the nineteen-thirties: schoolteachers, city councillors, librarians, poets, union organizers, artists, precinct workers, soldiers, civil-rights activists, and investigative reporters.” The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore: The Last Time Democracy Almost Died: Learning from the upheaval of the nineteen-thirties.