Social Role and Later Life
Peckham was one of the most famed New York City lawyers of his time, and an active participant in New York City politics and society. He presided over social events as a member and president of the City Club, and advocated for reform of "municipal degradation":
- "The issue is simply one of men. You cannot remedy matters by law nor by system, you have got to remedy it by the simple expedient of turning out the maladministrators and putting in their places men who are honest and capable. We must organize a power that will overcome present conditions and put in office men who are capable and aggressively so. Vice, that has awakened such an outburst of public opinion, is but one of the things that must go."
Peckham is buried in the Peckham family plot at Albany Rural Cemetery, along with his wife, Annie Aertsen Keasbey (1826, Salem, New Jersey – October 30, 1916), whom he married in 1855. His father, who was lost at sea, also has a cenotaph there.
Read more about this topic: Wheeler Hazard Peckham
Famous quotes containing the words social, role and/or life:
“...A shadow now occasionally crossed my simple, sanguine, and life enjoying mind, a notion that I was never really going to accomplish those powerful literary works which would blow a noble trumpet to social generosity and noblesse oblige before the world. What? should I find myself always planning and never achieving ... a richly complicated and yet firmly unified novel?”
—Sarah N. Cleghorn (1876–1959)
“A few [women] warrant our attention not because they have the answer but because they have rejected the mentality that insists there must be one answer. What makes them role models is not how much or how little they work, how many or how few hats they wear, but rather how well they understand, and accept, that for all rewards there will be commensurate sacrifice; for all gains, some loss; for any pleasure, some pain.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)