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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Joseph Gurney Cannon (1836–1926)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 308
AUTHOR: Joseph Gurney Cannon (1836–1926)
QUOTATION: Not one cent for scenery.
ATTRIBUTION: Representative JOSEPH G. CANNON, squelching a request for funds for some modest Federal undertaking in conservation.—Blair Bolles, Tyrant from Illinois, p. 119 (1951).

“Uncle Joe” Cannon, who was Speaker of the House 1903–1911, served in the House for 46 years.

President Lyndon B. Johnson quoted Cannon at the signing ceremony making Assateague Island a national seashore area, September 21, 1965: “Conservation has been in eclipse in this country ever since Theodore Roosevelt’s day. It had barely gotten off the ground when Uncle Joe Cannon, the Speaker of the House in those days, issued his ultimatum: ‘Not 1 cent for scenery.’ Well, today we are repealing Cannon’s law. We are declaring a new doctrine of conservation.”—Congressional Record, September 21, 1965, vol. 111, p. 24540.
SUBJECTS: Conservation