THE "LIVING HISTORY A\V ARDS" TO AMERICANS WHO SHAPED THE COURSE OF OUR TIMES PRESENTED BY THE RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF AMERICA AT ITS 25TH AN NIVERSARY DINNER THIS BOOK HAS BEEN PREPARED AS A REMEMBRANCE OF THE OCCASION FOR MEMBERS OF THE INSTITUTE I WA075 =THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON DC 18 404PM= CARL HOVGARD, PRESIDENT THE RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF AMERICA, INC. IT IS A PLEASURE TO SEND GREETINGS TO THOSE ATTENDING THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY DINNER OF THE RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF AMERICA. I JOIN IN SALUTING THE DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE WHO ARE TO RECEIVE YOUR LIVING HISTORY AWARD. THEY REPRESENT A TRUE CROSS-SECTION OF AMERICAN LEADERSHIP DURING THE PAST TWENTY-FIVE CRITICAL YEARS . DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER * * * * * The Program, * * * * * LIVING HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL YEARS 1935-1960 Grand Ballroom, \Valdo1j-Astoria Hotel, N ew York City National Anthem U.S. NAVY BAND Presiding LEO CHERNE Address DR. ALLAN NEVINS Narration CHET HUNTLEY LEO CHERNE: Ladies and Gentlemen, this evening we salute those who played so significant a role in shaping the major events of our history. Their individual importance is such that the presence here of so many of these celebrated leaders of American life is history itself. Before each of the dis­ tinguished men and women being honored is a sterling silver medallion. There are also medallions for other living Americans who shaped our history but could not be here this evening; a State dinner at the White House required the attend­ ance of the Vice President, the Secretary of State, and Robert Frost. Illness, age or pressing responsibility at the last moment prevented several others from receiving our tribute personally. And now, may I present a man who has influenced our history by re­ capturing it. Dean of American historians, twice recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for American History, Professor Allan Nevins ... 2 A Time of Greatness "LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN," runs the call of Ecclesiasticus. "The Lord manifested in them great glory, even His mighty power from the beginning: "Such as did bear rule in their kingdoms, And were men r enowned for their power, Giving counsel b y their understanding . Wise were their words in their instruction." It was a h appy inspiration which h as l ed the Research Institute o f America, in celebration of NEVI NS, eminent historian, begins their quarter century o f s owing a nd reaping, to PnoF. ALLAN ory Awards bring together this assemblage of l eaders, and the presentation of the Living Hist thus verify the assertion of E ccles iasticus: "All at the Research Institute 25th anniversary dinner. these were honored in their generation, and were a g lory in their day." When Emerson said that history is the product of a s mall body o f stout African rulers taking o ffi ce in freshly liberated and earnes t p ersons, he had in mind such a lands. In imagination, we see the explosion group as this; for h ere a re s tout and earnes t m en brighter than a thousand suns. Threading o ur and women, representative o f the molders of way back through these a rdors a nd endurances, our Ameri can p ast, a nd o f the c reators o f our sorrows a nd exultations , we place ourselves in future. the s trange world of 1 935. This occasion bids us review a crowded quar­ Strange indeed! Here a t h ome, Admiral Byrd ter century of world affairs ; a period s o crowded, in 1935 w as r etuming from two years under the indeed, that it defi es brief r eview. By a mighty South Pole to tell Americans that they could eff ort of the memory w e can summon b ack to lay cl aim to a vast area of Antarctica. Enrico our ears some o f the confused sounds o f the Fermi was pressing his pioneer work in the time. We can h ear the bell s o f ~I a dri d ringing effects o f n eutron bombardment. D epression for the e ntrance of Franco, the frantic c rowds still gripped the land, and the discouraging f act shouting in Hitler's Sport Palast, the tramp of wres tled with the hopeful effort. As the NRA Nazi l egions e ntering V ienna, the wa il of sirens went down, c hild toil ers again trudged the in Coventry, the growl of Winston Churchill's path to the fa ctory door, but President Roosevelt defi ance over the radio, the e xploding bombs of was telling the g reatest crowd ever gathered fl eets that grappled at ~Iidw ay all unseen b y in Los Angeles that "we have come through each other, the fanfare that w elcomed Patton's stormy seas into fair weather." Many an artist, racing c olumns into Paris, the whistles that blew many a writer and scholar, worked in poverty. all over Ameri ca when J apan surrendered. But Andrew ,V. .Vlellon was confirming his g ift By a s imilar mighty effort we can bring back to the nation of the most valu able of all modern to o ur eyes a thousand once-vivid scenes: ragged art collections, George Gershwin was putting Am ericans in dejected so up-lines, Neville "Porgy and Bess" on the s tage, and Ellen Chamberlain returning fr om Munich, the League Glasgow, Sinclair Lewis, and Willa Cather holding its last m elancholy session, Queen were all publishing novels. Wilhelmina fl eein g into England, Pearl Harbor In short, these New D eal years were to Am eri­ full of ruined b attleships, British-American con­ cans what Charles Dickens had s aid the French voys b attling torpedoes in Arctic seas, tanks Revolution years were to Englishmen: the worst flaming in the Libyan d esert, the s layers of of times and the bes t of times. Even those who millions led in gyves before a g rim international took the darker vi ew could see that they were tribunal, a new congress o f n ations meeting on yeasty with new forces and visibly g rowing the East Ri ver, and, only yesterday, Asian ·and better . .. 3 Just over the horizon, in some Old World Lands, challenges that Spanish armies in Holland and the in this year 1935, it was plainly the worst of times. Armada on the ocean presented to the very life of Dictatorships in Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan English civilization. This we should remember as tightened their strangling grip on liberty at home, we think of the unprecedented magnitude of our and carried the torch of aggression abroad. Flames challenge. Faced timidly, it is appalling, but faced smouldered in Manchuria, and Bared angrily in with valor and purpose, it should be exhilarating. Abyssinia. At home, one of the strangest facts of The world problem we cannot solve alone, for this near yet remote time was the pertinacity with other nations are involved. But we can do our share which many Americans, facing the portents, veiled by making America ever stronger at home, culturally their eyes like noonday owls. While Congress passed and spiritually as well as materially, and by the the Neutrality Act and the Senate gave its final persevering exhibition of wise and generous policies rejection to the World Court, men pulled the blanket abroad. vVe earned our international leadership not of isolation over their heads. They had yet to learn by wealth but character, and by character alone that for nations no less than individuals it is perdi­ we can keep it. tion to be safe - safe, selfish, and stupid -when We can play our part more effectively if we for principle they should risk all. remember that the founders of the republic and A thunderbolt shattered that illusion. Mankind its best subsequent captains had a firm sense of again struck its tents, and took up an agonizing national destiny. The concept of this destiny was forced march. Of the central event in the years stated by Jefferson and Madison, was enlarged by which followed there can be no question whatever. Lincoln, and enlarged yet again by Wilson. We can Arthur Koestler has written that for him the year help ourselves, also, if we bear in mind that the 1960 means the year 15 P.H.- Post Hiroshima; nation has always been happiest, not when it was the fifteenth year of a new age. The full significance inertly complacent, not when it lowered its stand­ of the advent of the atomic power era we have not ards, as it has sometimes done within memory, but yet grasped, any more than men earl y in the six­ when it was in the full tide of anxious struggle. teenth century grasped the full significance of It is happiest when it is in a dynamic and not Columbus's discovery of the New World. everthe­ static mood, when it is repudiating a false sense of less, we can already perceive that Hiroshima, above arrival and struggling to reach fresh goals. all else, has given the twenty-five years we review At the beginning of our quarter century, in 1936, their special quality. This quarter century is not Franklin D. Roosevelt made a speech entitled, "The one of mere crowded events in the old sense; it is Spirit of Social Pioneering is Only Beginning." Co­ the quarter century of a supreme challenge. Since operative pioneering, he implied, could keep alive Hiroshima, we are challenged to establish world the sense of risk, adventure, and hope that had order and solidarity, or see world destruction draw once gone into individual pioneering.