Chronological List of Addresses, Speeches and Letters 1940 - 1949
1940 - 1949
Buck, Pearl, “Address at Howard University—Fight Fascism at Home and Abroad,” June 5, 1942 Einstein, Albert, “To the United Nations…” 1947 Ickes, Harold, (Also known as: Harold LeClair Ickes, Honest Harold, Harold Le Clair Ickes) Calls for What is an American, May 18, 1941 Lewis, John L., Head of the Miners Union, Defends Coal Miners before Congress, Additional Background, April 3, 1947 Lindbergh, Charles, Defends Isolationism, April 23, 1941 Marshall, George C., “The Marshall Plan,” June 5, 1947 MacArthur, Douglas, “People of the Philippines, I Have Returned,” 1944 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, “Do not Forget Morality in the Pursuit of Scientists,” November 2, 1945 Robinson, Jackie, (Also known as: Jackie Robinson, John Roosevelt Robinson), Address to the House Un-American Activities Committee, July 18, 1949 Roosevelt, Eleanor, "Defends Civil Liberties to the ACLU", March 14, 1940 Roosevelt, Eleanor, “The Struggle for Human Rights,” September 28, 1948 Roosevelt, Franklin D., “The Arsenal of Democracy,” December 29, 1940 Roosevelt, Franklin D., “Declaration of war against Japan,” December 8, 1941 Roosevelt, Franklin D., State of the Union “Four Freedoms” Lend-Lease speech, January 6, 1941 Truman, Harry S., Radio address announcing Hiroshima bombing, August 6, 1945 Truman, Harry S., “Do-Nothing” Congress", October 7, 1948
Truman, Harry S., Address to Congress on Greece and Turkey, March 12, 1947
Source: Senator Robert Torricelli and Andrew Carroll, eds. In Our Own Words:Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century. New York: Washington Square Press Publication, 1999.
Buck, Pearl, “Address at Howard University—Fight Fascism at Home and Abroad,” June 5, 1942
Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck Contends That to Defeat Fascism Abroad, Americans Must Fight for Equality at Home.
When the United States officially announced its entry in World War II, sudden and sweeping charges were required in virtually all aspects of American life. Millions of soldiers had to be drafted. Food had to be rationed. An unprecedented number of planes, aircraft carriers, tanks, bombs, guns, and other weapons of war had to be built in an impossibly short amount of time. (The government ordered over $loo billion in war contracts in the first six months of 1942 alone, and the tax system consequently needed to be overhauled almost entirely.) For a country just awakening from an economic nightmare, the task ahead was both daunting and galvanizing. Many of the nation's most prominent social, religious, and political leaders encouraged citizens to unite solidly behind the war effort, while others used the war to accentuate what they saw as American hypocrisy They contended that the United States was willing to fight and spend lavishly for freedom overseas but not for those at home mired in poverty or victimized by racial discrimination. Pearl Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature and an adamant proponent of civil rights, believed the two positions were not mutually exclusive. In a June ,5, 1942, commencement .speech at Howard University, Buck, who spent most of her life in China, said that the defeat of fascism overseas would be a victory for human rights throughout the world, and she encouraged the graduating students to recognize their role in defeating oppression both overseas and within the United States.
I believe this is the first time in my life that I have ever made a commencement address. The invitations I have had I have refused until now because it has always seemed to me presumptuous to offer advice or even to forecast for those who have not yet entered in the sort of life that lies ahead of college. Life is so individual a thing in ordinary times, so much depends on the person who is to live it, that all I have ever felt I could say was easily said in a sentence: The only way to find out anything about life is to live it as heartily as you can. So what was the use of making a speech about what could be said in one sentence? But I accepted the invitation this particular year to this particular university for a very special reason: These are not ordinary times, and this is no ordinary graduating class....
I am asking today only one question: How can every citizen in this country fulfill his responsibility as a citizen of our democracy? I repeat, it is as a democracy that we will win this war. If we cease to be a democracy, we will not win this war, and there will not be any peace if we don't win this war. Therefore, it is not enough merely to join the army and the navy and the air force if they will have us, and to do nothing if they won't. It is not enough to pour our savings into war bonds. It is not enough to put our lives into factories and war work so far as we are allowed. We will not win this war unless we win it as a nation where human beings are equal and human rights are respected. The peace will be no peace unless it is based upon the principles of human equality.
In profound belief in democracy, thus in deepest love of our country-, let us now realize that when we work for democracy and our own nation we are in the most important sense working for victory in war and in peace.
Therefore, today I believe that discrimination in our country must go, because until it does, we will not have won the war. We cannot fight for freedom unless we fight for freedom for all. We are not better than fascists if we fight for freedom of one group and not another, for the benefit of one race and not another, for the aggrandizement of a part and not the betterment of the whole. And we must be better than fascists. We cannot allow in our nation the evil root of something which Hitler has developed into a system of slavery the like of which the world has never seen, where the individual is nothing but a piece of property seized and used and tossed aside by a robber government. Japan's militarists, too, have for generations conceived the individual to be nothing but a tool, and the history of Japan during the last four generations has been the history of the struggle between the individual and the possessor state. And the beginning of that struggle anywhere is always in the degradation of a class, the condemnation for some trivial cause of a group of individuals.
It is ironic that in Germany the death grip of the state today upon the individual arose not out of too much unity but too little. Germany has never really achieved a sense of nationhood. A loose handful of states, her people have longed for unity. But in the desire to be integrated into a nation, they have handed themselves over to a handful of persons who have wrecked them not only as a nation but as individuals.
We, too, are not a unified people. We have sprung from many sources and many places, and we too have a deep-seated longing for unity. Perhaps that is why we exalt more than most democracies in the power of our government. In a common government we find a sort of unity which otherwise we lack. Perhaps that is why we look to government instead of to our wise men, as the Chinese and Indians do. But this desire to be unified must not lead us in the directions of the Nazis, where first a race was despised and then where every individual who differed from the unifying force was eliminated. The danger of race prejudice always is that it tends to lump people together and ignore the individual. Any nation which tolerates prejudice against one group in its people carries inside itself the potentialities of developing fascism, as a persistent sore is always a potential cancer. It has to be watched, and the body is never safe until the sore is cut out.
The equality of opportunity, therefore, which you have not been given in your country has now become more than an individual handicap, more than a group misfortune. It has become a national danger of the sharpest sort, a rock upon which our whole nation may founder. It is now necessary that all of us who believe with all our hearts in democracy work together to bring about human equality in the world of which our nation is only a part....
We are in the midst of a struggle in the hour of change, when by action for freedom we can still shape the world toward freedom. We ought so to act that all we do is designed to break down that which denies equality and forbids freedom.
Therefore you are to be congratulated. You have come to your majority at a time in history when more than ever before all effort for freedom can count. You are trained, intelligent, and ready to work. You are citizens in a country which still allows free speech and individual effort. But most important of all-and here is your greatest advantage-you [as African Americans] belong to a group which more than any in the world knows what race prejudice is, and how even political freedom cannot do away with it, and you know that it must be done away with if democracy is to prevail. The white citizens of this country in their general ignorance cannot realize as clearly as you do how our nation is threatened by our inner division and what it means to the world if we do not achieve democracy. But you can realize it. You know what it does in your own lives, in your own minds and wills and characters. . . .
You are in a superior position in America: It is not you who bare the stigma of not practicing democracy. You have now the advantage over the white man. You can be free from hypocrisy. Do not for one moment, there- fore, accept the status which race prejudice puts upon you. Consider what you can do best and do it, determined never to yield to undemocratic behavior and prejudice which denies all that America means. You belong here in America. You have a purpose to fulfill in this country, and I am grateful today that the people of our country are of more races than one. It gives us matchless opportunity of working out upon our own soil the world problems of equality and of cooperation between different peoples. Do not yield to discouragement or to hopelessness and do not expect an easy life or seek a sheltered one. The times are demanding that every one of you thinks not of yourself or of your own race or group life, but of the life of the nation as a whole. All that we have done for democracy and for history will have been lost if we do not achieve a democracy now. . . .
You are not simply a group of people in one country. You are part o£ the great war of the peoples for freedom. They are not only colored peoples against white. There are many white people on your side and white people in many parts of the world who are subject, too, to tyrants. You must understand the meaning of the war, and you must wage it on its true scale. By linking your particular battle for your own place in your own country to the whole war for freedom and human equality in the world, you will enlarge your forces and strengthen your cause, and help to win the war for democracy.
And you must remember that if we are really to achieve human equality in the world the war must not degenerate into a war of the races or a war of East against West. Such a struggle against prejudices will win nothing. Your enemies are not of one nation. Your enemies are all those who do not believe in human equality, who judge a man by his skin and not by what he is as an individual. Your allies are those who believe in and practice human equality and who judge an individual solely by what he is and what he does. As simply as that you may know your enemies and your allies. You must not yield to race prejudice. It is wrong for you to hate the white man because he is white, as it is for him to hate you because you are not white. Keep yourselves free from jealousy and revenge that you may do your work in the world in this time....
As far as you are able really to believe in your own equality, so far will you be able to bring human equality about in our country and in the world. You will not grow bigger than your own feelings. You will not accomplish more than you are. This fight for equality begins in your own soul, and then it must spread as wide as the world. The battle against race prejudice is no longer a family quarrel in our own house. The great storm that now sweeps humanity has swept us all with it, and our own fight against discrimination has become part of the tremendous struggle for human freedom upon this globe.
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Source: http://neutrino.aquaphoenix.com/un-esa/ws1997-letter-einstein.html
Einstein, Albert, “To the United Nations…” 1947
United Nations World New York, October 1947, pp. 13-14 Open Letter
TO THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE UNITED NATIONS
By Albert Einstein
As I see it, this is the way for the nations of the world to break the vicious circle which threatens the continued existence of mankind, as no other situation in human history has ever done.
We are caught in a situation in which every citizen of every country, his children, and his life s work, are threatened by the terrible insecurity which reigns in our world today. The progress of technological development has not increased the stability and the welfare of humanity. Because of our inability to solve the problem of international organization, it has actually contributed to the dangers which threaten peace and the very existence of mankind.
The delegates of fifty-five Governments, meeting in the second General Assembly of the United Nations, undoubtedly will be aware of the fact that during the last two years - since the victory over the Axis powers - no appreciable progress has been made either toward the prevention of war or toward agreement in specific fields such as control of atomic energy and economic cooperation in the reconstruction of war-devastated areas.
The United Nations cannot be blamed for these failures. No international organization can be stronger than the constitutional powers given it, or than its component parts want it to be. As a matter of fact, the United Nations is an extremely important and useful institution provided the peoples and Governments of the world realize that it is merely a transitional system toward the final goal, which is the establishment of a supranational authority vested with sufficient legislative and executive powers to keep the peace. The present impact lies in the fact that there is no sufficient, reliable supra-national authority. Thus the responsible leaders of all Governments are obliged to act on the assumption of eventual war. Every step motivated by that assumption contributes to the general fear and distrust and hastens the final catastrophe. However, strong national armaments may be they do not create military security for any nation nor do they guarantee the maintenance of peace.
There can never be complete agreement on international control and the administration of atomic energy or on general disarmament until there is a modification of the traditional concept of national sovereignty. For as long as atomic energy and armaments are considered a vital part of national security no nation will give more than lip service to international treaties. Security is indivisible. It can be reached only when necessary guarantees of law and enforcement obtain everywhere, so that military security is no longer the problem of any single state. There is no compromise possible between preparation for war, on the one hand, and preparation of a world society based on law and order on the other.
Every citizen must make up his mind. If he accepts the premise of war, he must reconcile himself to the maintenance of troops in strategic areas like Austria and Korea; to the sending of troops to Greece and Bulgaria; to the accumulation of stockpiles of uranium by whatever means; to universal military training, to the progressive limitation of civil liberties. Above all, he must endure the consequences of military secrecy which is one of the worst scourges of our time and one of the greatest obstacles to cultural betterment.
If on the other hand every citizen realizes that the only guarantee for security and peace in this atomic age is the constant development of a supra-national government, then he will do everything in his power to strengthen the United Nations. It seems to me that every reasonable and responsible citizen in the world must know where his choice lies.
Yet the world at large finds itself in a vicious circle since the United Nations powers seem to be incapable of making up their minds on this score. The Eastern and Western blocs each attempt frantically to strengthen their respective power positions. Universal military training, Russian troops in Eastern Europe, United States control over the Pacific Islands, even the stiffening colonial policies of the Netherlands, Great Britain and France, atomic and military secrecy - are all part of the old familiar jockeying for position.
THE TIME has come for the United Nations to strengthen its moral authority by bold decisions. First, the authority of the General Assembly must be increased so that the Security Council as well as all other bodies of the United Nations will be subordinated to it. As long as there is a conflict of authority between the Assembly and the Security Council, the effectiveness of the whole institution will remain necessarily impaired.
Second, the method of representation at the United Nations should be considerably modified. The present method of selection by government appointment does not leave any real freedom to the appointee. Furthermore, selection by governments cannot give the peoples of the world the feeling of being fairly and proportionately represented. The moral authority of the United Nations would be considerable enhanced if the delegates were elected directly by the people. Were they responsible to an electorate, they would have much more freedom to follow their consciences. Thus we could hope for more statesmen and fewer diplomats.
Third, the General Assembly should remain in session throughout the critical period of transition. By staying constantly on the job, the Assembly could fulfill two major tasks: first it could take the initiative toward the establishment of a supra-national order; second, it could take quick and effective steps in all those danger areas (such as currently exist on the Greek border) where peace is threatened.
The Assembly, in view of these high tasks, should not delegate its powers to the Security Council, especially while that body is paralysed by the shortcomings of the veto provisions. As the only body competent to take the initiative boldly and resolutely, the United Nations must act with utmost speed to create the necessary conditions for international security by laying the foundations for a real world government.
OF COURSE there will be opposition. It is by no means certain that the USSR - which is often represented as the main antagonist to the idea of world Government - would maintain its opposition if an equitable offer providing for real security were made. Even assuming that Russia is now opposed to the idea of world Government, once she becomes convinced that world government is nonetheless in the making her whole attitude may change. She may then insist on only the necessary guarantees of equality before the law so as to avoid finding herself in perennial minority as in the present Security Council.
Nevertheless, we must assume that despite all efforts Russia and her allies may still find it advisable to stay out of such a world Government. In that case, and only after all efforts have been made in utmost sincerity to obtain the cooperation of Russia and her allies - the other countries would have to proceed alone. It is of the utmost importance that this partial world Government be very strong, comprising at least two-thirds of the major industrial and economic areas of the world. Such strength in itself would make it possible for the partial world Government to abandon military secrecy and all the other practices born of insecurity.
Such a partial world Government should make it clear from the beginning that its doors remain wide open to any non-member - particularly Russia - for participation on the basis of complete equality. In my opinion, the partial world Government should accept the presence of observers from non-member governments at all its meetings and constitutional conventions.
IN ORDER to achieve the final aim - which is one world, and not two hostile worlds - such a partial world Government must never act as an alliance against the rest of the world. The only real step toward world government is world Government itself.
In a world Government the ideological differences between the various component parts are of no grave consequence. I am convinced that the present difficulties between the USA and the USSR are not due primarily to ideological differences. Of course, these ideological differences are a contributing element in an already serious tension. But I am convinced that even if the USA and Russia were both capitalist countries - or communist, or monarchist, for that matter - their rivalries, conflicting interests and jealousies would result in strains similar to those existing between the two countries today.
The United Nations now and world Government eventually must serve one single goal the guarantee of the security, tranquillity, and the welfare of all mankind.
signed by A. Einstein
Note added
Further reading with reference to the above letter see Gerald Holton: Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought - Kepler to Einstein, Revised Edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1988.
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Source: http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/ickes.htm
Ickes, Harold, (Also known as: Harold LeClair Ickes, Honest Harold, Harold Le Clair Ickes) Calls for What is an American, May 18, 1941
This remarkable speech was delivered during an I am an American Day gathering in New York's Central Park by Harold Ickes, President Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior. It came at a perilous moment in history, May of 1941, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seemed headed toward possible world domination.
By this time, countries that had fallen to the Nazis included Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and areas in North Africa. Airfields and cities in England were now under ferocious air attack from the German Luftwaffe while wolf-packs of Nazi U-boats attempted to blockade the British Isles.
Many Americans, however, still questioned the wisdom and necessity of direct U.S. involvement in the European war. Pacifist sentiment was steadily growing, while at the same time Fascism was sometimes referred to as the "wave of the future" by respected Americans, buoyed in part by the ceaseless barrage of highly effective anti-democratic propaganda emanating from the Fascist countries of Europe including Germany.
In this speech, Harold Ickes counters that propaganda, defines what it means to be a free American, and offers a blunt assessment of the perilous future the United States would face standing alone against a victorious Hitler.
I want to ask a few simple questions. And then I shall answer them.
What has happened to our vaunted idealism? Why have some of us been behaving like scared chickens? Where is the million-throated, democratic voice of America?
For years it has been dinned into us that we are a weak nation; that we are an inefficient people; that we are simple-minded. For years we have been told that we are beaten, decayed, and that no part of the world belongs to us any longer.
Some amongst us have fallen for this carefully pickled tripe. Some amongst us have fallen for this calculated poison. Some amongst us have begun to preach that the "wave of the future" has passed over us and left us a wet, dead fish.
They shout--from public platforms in printed pages, through the microphones--that it is futile to oppose the "wave of the future." They cry that we Americans, we free Americans nourished on Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, hold moth-eaten ideas. They exclaim that there is no room for free men in the world any more and that only the slaves will inherit the earth. America--the America of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln and Walt Whitman--they say, is waiting for the undertaker and all the hopes and aspirations that have gone into the making of America are dead too.
However, my fellow citizens, this is not the real point of the story. The real point--the shameful point--is that many of us are listening to them and some of us almost believe them.
I say that it is time for the great American people to raise its voice and cry out in mighty triumph what it is to be an American. And why it is that only Americans, with the aid of our brave allies--yes, let's call them "allies"--the British, can and will build the only future worth having. I mean a future, not of concentration camps, not of physical torture and mental straitjackets, not of sawdust bread or of sawdust Caesars--I mean a future when free men will live free lives in dignity and in security.
This tide of the future, the democratic future, is ours. It is ours if we show ourselves worthy of our culture and of our heritage.
But make no mistake about it; the tide of the democratic future is not like the ocean tide--regular, relentless, and inevitable. Nothing in human affairs is mechanical or inevitable. Nor are Americans mechanical. They are very human indeed.
What constitutes an American? Not color nor race nor religion. Not the pedigree of his family nor the place of his birth. Not the coincidence of his citizenship. Not his social status nor his bank account. Not his trade nor his profession. An American is one who loves justice and believes in the dignity of man. An American is one who will fight for his freedom and that of his neighbor. An American is one who will sacrifice property, ease and security in order that he and his children may retain the rights of free men. An American is one in whose heart is engraved the immortal second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.
Americans have always known how to fight for their rights and their way of life. Americans are not afraid to fight. They fight joyously in a just cause.
We Americans know that freedom, like peace, is indivisible. We cannot retain our liberty if three-fourths of the world is enslaved. Brutality, injustice and slavery, if practiced as dictators would have them, universally and systematically, in the long run would destroy us as surely as a fire raging in our nearby neighbor's house would burn ours if we didn't help to put out his.
If we are to retain our own freedom, we must do everything within our power to aid Britain. We must also do everything to restore to the conquered peoples their freedom. This means the Germans too.
Such a program, if you stop to think, is selfishness on our part. It is the sort of enlightened selfishness that makes the wheels of history go around. It is the sort of enlightened selfishness that wins victories.
Do you know why? Because we cannot live in the world alone, without friends and without allies. If Britain should be defeated, then the totalitarian undertaker will prepare to hang crepe on the door of our own independence.
Perhaps you wonder how this could come about? Perhaps you have heard "them"--the wavers of the future--cry, with calculated malice, that even if Britain were defeated we could live alone and defend ourselves single handed, even against the whole world.
I tell you that this is a cold blooded lie.
We would be alone in the world, facing an unscrupulous military-economic bloc that would dominate all of Europe, all of Africa, most of Asia, and perhaps even Russia and South America. Even to do that, we would have to spend most of our national income on tanks and guns and planes and ships. Nor would this be all. We would have to live perpetually as an armed camp, maintaining a huge standing army, a gigantic air force, two vast navies. And we could not do this without endangering our freedom, our democracy, our way of life.
Perhaps such is the America "they"--the wavers of the future--foresee. Perhaps such is the America that a certain aviator, with his contempt for democracy, would prefer. Perhaps such is the America that a certain Senator desires. Perhaps such is the America that a certain mail order executive longs for.
But a perpetually militarized, isolated and impoverished America is not the America that our fathers came here to build.
It is not the America that has been the dream and the hope of countless generations in all parts of the world.
It is not the America that one hundred and thirty million of us would care to live in.
The continued security of our country demands that we aid the enslaved millions of Europe--yes, even of Germany--to win back their liberty and independence. I am convinced that if we do not embark upon such a program we will lose our own freedom.
We should be clear on this point. What is convulsing the world today is not merely another old-fashioned war. It is a counter revolution against our ideas and ideals, against our sense of justice and our human values.
Three systems today compete for world domination. Communism, fascism, and democracy are struggling for social-economic-political world control. As the conflict sharpens, it becomes clear that the other two, fascism and communism, are merging into one. They have one common enemy, democracy. They have one common goal, the destruction of democracy.
This is why this war is not an ordinary war. It is not a conflict for markets or territories. It is a desperate struggle for the possession of the souls of men.
This is why the British are not fighting for themselves alone. They are fighting to preserve freedom for mankind. For the moment, the battleground is the British Isles. But they are fighting our war; they are the first soldiers in trenches that are also our front-line trenches.
In this world war of ideas and of loyalties we believers in democracy must do two things. We must unite our forces to form one great democratic international. We must offer a clear program to freedom-loving peoples throughout the world.
Freedom-loving men and women in every land must organize and tighten their ranks. The masses everywhere must be helped to fight their oppressors and conquerors.
We, free, democratic Americans are in a position to help. We know that the spirit of freedom never dies. We know that men have fought and bled for freedom since time immemorial. We realize that the liberty- loving German people are only temporarily enslaved. We do not doubt that the Italian people are looking forward to the appearance of another Garibaldi. We know how the Poles have for centuries maintained a heroic resistance against tyranny. We remember the brave struggle of the Hungarians under Kossuth and other leaders. We recall the heroic figure of Masaryk and the gallant fight for freedom of the Czech people. The story of the Yugoslavs', especially the Serbs' blows for liberty and independence is a saga of extraordinary heroism. The Greeks will stand again at Thermopylae, as they have in the past. The annals of our American sister-republics, too, are glorious with freedom-inspiring exploits. The noble figure of Simon Bolivar, the great South American liberator, has naturally been compared with that of George Washington.
No, liberty never dies. The Genghis Khans come and go. The Attilas come and go. The Hitlers flash and sputter out. But freedom endures.
Destroy a whole generation of those who have known how to walk with heads erect in God's free air, and the next generation will rise against the oppressors and restore freedom. Today in Europe, the Nazi Attila may gloat that he has destroyed democracy. He is wrong. In small farmhouses all over Central Europe, in the shops of Germany and Italy, on the docks of Holland and Belgium, freedom still lives in the hearts of men. It will endure like a hardy tree gone into the wintertime, awaiting the spring.
And, like spring, spreading from the South into Scandinavia, the democratic revolution will come. And men with democratic hearts will experience comradeship across artificial boundaries.
These men and women, hundreds of millions of them, now in bondage or threatened with slavery, are our comrades and our allies. They are only waiting for our leadership and our encouragement, for the spark that we can supply.
These hundreds of millions, of liberty-loving people, now oppressed, constitute the greatest sixth column in history. They have the will to destroy the Nazi gangsters.
We have always helped in struggles for human freedom. And we will help again. But our hundreds of millions of liberty-loving allies would despair if we did not provide aid and encouragement. The quicker we help them the sooner this dreadful revolution will be over. We cannot, we must not, we dare not delay much longer.
The fight for Britain is in its crucial stages. We must give the British everything we have. And by everything, I mean everything needed to beat the life out of our common enemy.
The second step must be to aid and encourage our friends and allies everywhere. And by everywhere I mean Europe and Asia and Africa and America.
And finally, the most important of all, we Americans must gird spiritually for the battle. We must dispel the fog of uncertainty and vacillation. We must greet with raucous laughter the corroding arguments of our appeasers and fascists. They doubt democracy. We affirm it triumphantly so that all the world may hear:
Here in America we have something so worth living for that it is worth dying for! The so-called "wave of the future" is but the slimy backwash of the past. We have not heaved from our necks the tyrant's crushing heel, only to stretch our necks out again for its weight. Not only will we fight for democracy, we will make it more worth fighting for. Under our free institutions, we will work for the good of mankind, including Hitler's victims in Germany, so that all may have plenty and security.
We American democrats know that when good will prevails among men there will be a world of plenty and a world of security.
In the words of Winston Churchill, "Are we downhearted," No, we arc not! But someone is downhearted! Witness the terrified flight of Hess, Hitler's Number Three Man. And listen to this--listen carefully:
"The British nation can be counted upon to carry through to victory any struggle that it once enters upon no matter how long such a struggle may last or however great the sacrifices that may be necessary or whatever the means that have to be employed; and all this even though the actual military equipment at hand may be utterly inadequate when compared with that of other nations."
Do you know who wrote that? Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. And do you know who took down that dictation? Rudolf Hess.
We will help to make Hitler's prophecy come true. We will help brave England drive back the hordes from Hell who besiege her and then we will join for the destruction of savage and blood-thirsty dictators everywhere. But we must be firm and decisive. We must know our will and make it felt. And we must hurry.
Harold Ickes - May 18, 1941
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Source: http://ww.historynow.org/teachers/seminar_docs/depression_doc7.html
Lewis, John L., Head of the Miners Union, Defends Coal Miners before Congress, Additional Background, April 3, 1947
Few public speakers generated more controversy than the head of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis. His grandiloquent oratory led to an effectiveness in leadership rarely attained in modern politics.In 1943, Lewis led over half-a-million mine workers on strike, demanding wage increases. The government called the strike illegal and ordered the miners back to work. Only 15,000 workers returned.The strike closed down steel mills for two weeks during the height of World War II; power shortages threatened to cripple the war effort.Lewis was vilified. Outside of his home in Alexandria, Virginia, students burned his effigy, and rocks were hurled through his window. Yet to miners, Lewis was a hero. "If John L. Lewis told us to go on strike tomorrow, we would go out, even if it meant going to prison for 20 years," a mine worker told The New York Times.In March of 1947, the United Mine Workers began new wage negotiations. Six days before the labor contract was set to expire, an explosion in Centralia, Illinois killed 111 miners. The union called a six-day strike to honor the dead. They also called for the ouster of Secretary of Interior J.A. Krug, whose office was responsible for inspecting the conditions of mines, and they looked to John L. Lewis to make their case to the nation.On April 3, 1947, Lewis testified before Congress. He spoke for five hours. Trained in the days before megaphones and electronic amplification, Lewis never tired.
Head of the Union Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, blasts Congress and the Federal Government for allowing coal miners to die,
Washington, D.C., April 3, 1947. Radio Interview
Lewis:Certainly the responsibility for safety in the coal mines covers a long trail. From the miner up through the minor mine officials, to the management of the company, the state legislatures, the inspection boss, the reviewing bodies in the state, the Federal Bureau of Mines and the Administrator of coal mines, who stands at the top, in this period of governmental seizure, with nothing to stop him from making coal mines safe except his lack of desire to do so.I said that these men at Centralia died through the criminal negligence of J. A. Krug, and I reiterate that statement now. And I shall prove it beyond peradventure at this hearing if the Committee will permit. I have not said that J. A. Krug, by an affirmative act, killed these men. I say that J.A. Krug, by his inaction, had permitted them to die. While he withheld from them succor that was within his power to give.[I] raise my voice in justice to the living and injustice to the memory of the dead, to ask for surcease to this blood letting.------If we must grind up human flesh and bone in the industrial machine...we owe protection to those men first, and we owe the security for their family if they die.------And God knows, sirs, you have your responsibility as that of public servants and an honorable Congressmen. [Lewis points finger directly at several Congressmen.]This isn't a question for revenge. The United Mine Workers is a law abiding institution. It's not a revolutionary organization. It's against those who promote disobedience to law and hope to achieve their objective by violence in this country. The United Mine Workers in this country have been fighting the Communist movement since its inception. It isn't a new thing with us. We're Americans. But let me say to you, sir, that this butchery of coal miners in the Krug slaughter-houses in the country does more to make Communistic adherence than anything else in this country. And these constant threats from Congress and from the financial press of this country, controlled by the larger interests, about putting labor in irons and then stringing them from a halter on Talvern Hill, that helps to make Communists, too.Is it any wonder that there is lamentation in the mining towns of this country? Is it any wonder that there is a spirit of rebellion against this condition manifested now by the memorial services and the prayers to high heaven that's going up from every mining community? Is it any wonder that women in the mining camps now are reluctant to see their men go to the mines next week when the memorial period is over? Consider the families.Who knows whose mine [it] will be tomorrow, or tonight? These are the imponderables. If we must grind up human flesh and bone in the industrial machine that we call modern America, then before God, I assert that those who consume the coal, and you and I who benefit from that service because we live in comfort, we owe protection to those men first, and we owe the security for their family if they die. I say it, I voice it, I proclaim it, and I care not who in heaven or hell opposes it!That's what I believe about that.
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Source: http://ww.historynow.org/teachers/seminar_docs/depression_doc7.html
Lindbergh, Charles, Defends Isolationism, April 23, 1941
delivered at an America First Committee meeting in New York City on April 23, 1941
The following resources are offered as a resource to understand Charles Lindbergh's involvement within the America First Committee prior to the start of World War II. This site does not support the content of some of the information below, however, the goal of this page is to offer a perspective of available information to make your own judgment.
New York City Speech:
There are many viewpoints from which the issues of this war can be argued. Some are primarily idealistic. Some are primarily practical. One should, I believe, strive for a balance of both. But, since the subjects that can be covered in a single address are limited, tonight I shall discuss the war from a viewpoint which is primarily practical. It is not that I believe ideals are unimportant, even among the realities of war; but if a nation is to survive in a hostile world, its ideals must be backed by the hard logic of military practicability. If the outcome of war depended upon ideals alone, this would be a different world than it is today.
I know I will be severely criticized by the interventionists in America when I say we should not enter a war unless we have a reasonable chance of winning. That, they will claim, is far too materialistic a viewpoint. They will advance again the same arguments that were used to persuade France to declare war against Germany in 1939. But I do not believe that our American ideals, and our way of life, will gain through an unsuccessful war. And I know that the United States is not prepared to wage war in Europe successfully at this time. We are no better prepared today than France was when the interventionists in Europe persuaded her to attack the Siegfried Line.
I have said before, and I will say again, that I believe it will be a tragedy to the entire world if the British Empire collapses. That is one of the main reasons why I opposed this war before it was declared, and why I have constantly advocated a negotiated peace. I did not feel that England and France had a reasonable chance of winning. France has now been defeated; and, despite the propaganda and confusion of recent months, it is now obvious that England is losing the war. I believe this is realized even by the British government. But they have one last desperate plan remaining. They hope that they may be able to persuade us to send another American Expeditionary Force to Europe, and to share with England militarily, as well as financially, the fiasco of this war.
I do not blame England for this hope, or for asking for our assistance. But we now know that she declared a war under circumstances led to the defeat of every nation that sided with her from Poland to Greece. We know that in the desperation of war England promised to all these nations armed assistance that she could not send. We know that she misinformed them, as she has misinformed us, concerning her state of preparation, her military strength, and the progress of the war.
In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda. I do not believe we should be too quick to criticize the actions of a belligerent nation. There is always the question whether we, ourselves, would do better under similar circumstances. But we in this country have a right to think of the welfare of America first, just as the people in England thought first of their own country when they encouraged the smaller nations of Europe to fight against hopeless odds. When England asks us to enter this war, she is considering her own future, and that of her Empire. In making our reply, I believe we should consider the future of the United States and that of the Western Hemisphere.
It is not only our right, but it is our obligation as American citizens to look at this war objectively, and to weigh our chances for success if we should enter it. I have attempted to do this, especially from the standpoint of aviation; and I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend.
I ask you to look at the map of Europe today and see if you can suggest any way in which we could win this war if we entered it. Suppose we had a large army in America, trained and equipped. Where would we send it to fight? The campaigns of the war show only too clearly how difficult it is to force a landing, or to maintain an army, on a hostile coast. Suppose we took our navy from the Pacific, and used it to convoy British shipping. That would not win the war for England. It would, at best, permit her to exist under the constant bombing of the German air fleet. Suppose we had an air force that we could send to Europe. Where could it operate? Some of our squadrons might be based in the British Isles; but it is physically impossible to base enough aircraft in the British Isles alone to equal in strength the aircraft that can be based on the continent of Europe.
I have asked these questions on the supposition that we had in existence an army and an air force large enough and well enough equipped to send to Europe; and that we would dare to remove our navy from the Pacific. Even on this basis, I do not see how we could invade the continent of Europe successfully as long as all of that continent and most of Asia is under Axis domination. But the fact is that none of these suppositions are correct. We have only a one-ocean navy. Our army is still untrained and inadequately equipped for foreign war. Our air force is deplorably lacking in modern fighting planes.
When these facts are cited, the interventionists shout that we are defeatists, that we are undermining the principles of Democracy, and that we are giving comfort to Germany by talking about our military weakness. But everything I mention here has been published in our newspapers, and in the reports of congressional hearings in Washington. Our military position is well known to the governments of Europe and Asia. Why, then, should it not be brought to the attention of our own people?
I say it is the interventionist in America, as it was in England and in France, who gives comfort to the enemy. I say it is they who are undermining the principles of Democracy when they demand that we take a course to which more than eighty percent of our citizens are opposed. I charge them with being the real defeatists, for their policy has led to the defeat of every country that followed their advice since this war began. There is no better way to give comfort to an enemy than to divide the people of a nation over the issue of foreign war. There is no shorter road to defeat than by entering a war with inadequate preparation. Every nation that has adopted the interventionist policy of depending on some one else for its own defense has met with nothing but defeat and failure.
When history is written, the responsibility for the downfall of the democracies of Europe will rest squarely upon the shoulders of the interventionists who led their nations into war uninformed and unprepared. With their shouts of defeatism, and their disdain of reality, they have already sent countless thousands of young men to death in Europe. From the campaign of Poland to that of Greece, their prophecies have been false and their policies have failed. Yet these are the people who are calling us defeatists in America today. And they have led this country, too, to the verge of war.
There are many such interventionists in America, but there are more people among us of a different type. That is why you and I are assembled here tonight. There is a policy open to this nation that will lead to success--a policy that leaves us free to follow our own way of life, and to develop our own civilization. It is not a new and untried idea. It was advocated by Washington. It was incorporated in the Monroe Doctrine.
Under its guidance, the United States became the greatest nation in the world. It is based upon the belief that the security of a nation lies in the strength and character of its own people. It recommends the maintenance of armed forces sufficient to defend this hemisphere from attack by any combination of foreign powers. It demands faith in an independent American destiny. This is the policy of the America First Committee today. It is a policy not of isolation, but of independence; not of defeat, but of courage. It is a policy that led this nation to success during the most trying years of our history, and it is a policy that will lead us to success again.
We have weakened ourselves for many months, and still worse, we have divided our own people by this dabbling in Europe's wars. While we should have been concentrating on American defense, we have been forced to argue over foreign quarrels. We must turn our eyes and our faith back to our own country before it is too late. And when we do this, a different vista opens before us. Practically every difficulty we would face in invading Europe becomes an asset to us in defending America. Our enemy, and not we, would then have the problem of transporting millions of troops across the ocean and landing them on a hostile shore. They, and not we, would have to furnish the convoys to transport guns and trucks and munitions and fuel across three thousand miles of water. Our battleships and submarines would then be fighting close to their home bases. We would then do the bombing from the air, and the torpedoing at sea. And if any part of an enemy convoy should ever pass our navy and our air force, they would still be faced with the guns of our coast artillery, and behind them, the divisions of our army.
The United States is better situated from a military standpoint than any other nation in the world. Even in our present condition of unpreparedness, no foreign power is in a position to invade us today. If we concentrate on our own and build the strength that this nation should maintain, no foreign army will ever attempt to land on American shores.
War is not inevitable for this country. Such a claim is defeatism in the true sense. No one can make us fight abroad unless we ourselves are willing to do so. No one will attempt to fight us here if we arm ourselves as a great nation should be armed. Over a hundred million people in this nation are opposed to entering the war. If the principles of Democracy mean anything at all, that is reason enough for us to stay out. If we are forced into a war against the wishes of an overwhelming majority of our people, we will have proved Democracy such a failure at home that there will be little use fighting for it abroad.
The time has come when those of us who believe in an independent American destiny must band together, and organize for strength. We have been led toward war by a minority of our people. This minority has power. It has influence. It has a loud voice. But it does not represent the American people. During the last several years, I have travelled over this country, from one end to the other. I have talked to many hundreds of men and women, and I have had letters from tens of thousands more, who feel the same way as you and I. Most of these people have no influence or power. Most of them have no means of expressing their convictions, except by their vote which has always been against this war. They are the citizens who have had to work too hard at their daily jobs to organize political meetings. Hitherto, they have relied upon their vote to express their feelings; but now they find that it is hardly remembered except in the oratory of a political campaign. These people--the majority of hard-working American citizens are with us. They are the true strength of our country. And they are beginning to realize, as you and I, that there are times when we must sacrifice our normal interests in life in order to insure the safety and the welfare of our nation.
Such a time has come. Such a crisis is here. That is why the America First Committee has been formed--to give voice to the people who have no newspaper, or news reel, or radio station at their command; to the people who must do the paying, and the fighting, and the dying, if this country enters the war.
Whether or not we do enter the war, rests upon the shoulders of you in this audience, upon us here on this platform, upon meetings of this kind that are being held by Americans in every section of the United States today. It depends upon the action we take, and the courage we show at this time. If you believe in an independent destiny for America, if you believe that this country should not enter the war in Europe, we ask you to join the America First Committee in its stand. We ask you to share our faith in the ability of this nation to defend itself, to develop its own civilization, and to contribute to the progress of mankind in a more constructive and intelligent way than has yet been found by the warring nations of Europe. We need your support, and we need it now. The time to act is here.
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SOURCE: http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/democrac/57.htm
Marshall, George C., The Marshall Plan, June 5, 1947
On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall spoke at Harvard University and outlined what would become known as the Marshall Plan. Europe, still devastated by the war, had just survived one of the worst winters on record. The nations of Europe had nothing to sell for hard currency, and the democratic socialist governments in most countries were unwilling to adopt the draconian proposals for recovery advocated by old-line classical economists. Something had to be done, both for humanitarian reasons and also to stop the potential spread of communism westward.
The United States offered up to $20 billion for relief, but only if the European nations could get together and draw up a rational plan on how they would use the aid. For the first time, they would have to act as a single economic unit; they would have to cooperate with each other. Marshall also offered aid to the Soviet Union and its allies in eastern Europe, but Stalin denounced the program as a trick and refused to participate. The Russian rejection probably made passage of the measure through Congress possible.
The Marshall Plan, it should be noted, benefited the American economy as well. The money would be used to buy goods from the United States, and they had to be shipped across the Atlantic on American merchant vessels. But it worked. By 1953 the United States had pumped in $13 billion, and Europe was standing on its feet again. Moreover, the Plan included West Germany, which was thus reintegrated into the European community. (The aid was all economic; it did not include military aid until after the Korean War.)
Aside from helping to put Europe back on its feet, the Marshall Plan led to the Schuman Plan, which in turn led to Euratom, then the Coal and Iron Community and the Common Market, and pointed to what may yet evolve into an economically and politically united Europe. In many ways, the Marshall Plan satisfied both those who wanted our foreign policy to be generous and idealistic and those who demanded realpolitik; it helped feed the starving and shelter the homeless, and at the same time stopped the spread of communism and put the European economy back on its feet.
For further reading: John Gimbel, The Origins of the Marshall Plan (1976); Imanuel Wexler, The Marshall Plan Revisited (1983); Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan (1987).
THE MARSHALL PLAN
I need not tell you gentlemen that the world situation is very serious. That must be apparent to all intelligent people. I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. Furthermore, the people of this country are distant from the troubled areas of the earth and it is hard for them to comprehend the plight and consequent reaction of the long-suffering peoples, and the effect of those reactions on their governments in connection with our efforts to promote peace in the world.
In considering the requirements for the rehabilitation of Europe the physical loss of life, the visible destruction of cities, factories, mines, and railroads was correctly estimated, but it has become obvious during recent months that this visible destruction was probably less serious than the dislocation of the entire fabric of European economy. For the past 10 years conditions have been highly abnormal. The feverish maintenance of the war effort engulfed all aspects of national economics. Machinery has fallen into disrepair or is entirely obsolete. Under the arbitrary and destructive Nazi rule, virtually every possible enterprise was geared into the German war machine. Long-standing commercial ties, private institutions, banks, insurance companies and shipping companies disappeared, through the loss of capital, absorption through nationalization or by simple destruction. In many countries, confidence in the local currency has been severely shaken. The breakdown of the business structure of Europe during the war was complete.
Recovery has been seriously retarded by the fact that 2 years after the close of hostilities a peace settlement with Germany and Austria has not been agreed upon. But even given a more prompt solution of these difficult problems, the rehabilitation of the economic structure of Europe quite evidently will require a much longer time and greater effort than had been foreseen.
There is a phase of this matter which is both interesting and serious. The farmer has always produced the foodstuffs to exchange with the city dweller for the other necessities of life. This division of labor is the basis of modern civilization. At the present time it is threatened with breakdown. The town and city industries are not producing adequate goods to exchange with the food-producing farmer. Raw materials and fuel are in short supply. Machinery is lacking or worn out. The farmer or the peasant cannot find the goods for sale which he desires to purchase. So the sale of his farm produce for money which he cannot use seems to him unprofitable transaction. He, therefore, has withdrawn many fields from crop cultivation and is using them for grazing. He feeds more grain to stock and finds for himself and his family an ample supply of food, however short he may be on clothing and the other ordinary gadgets of civilization. Meanwhile people in the cities are short of food and fuel. So the governments are forced to use their foreign money and credits to procure these necessities abroad. This process exhausts funds which are urgently needed for reconstruction. Thus a very serious situation is rapidly developing which bodes no good for the world. The modern system of the division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of breaking down.
The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for the next 3 or 4 years of foreign food and other essential products -- principally from America -- are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help, or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character.
The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole. The manufacturer and the farmer throughout wide areas must be able and willing to exchange their products for currencies the continuing value of which is not open to question.
Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist. Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a piecemeal basis as various crises develop. Any assistance that this Government may render in the future should provide a cure rather than a mere palliative. Any government that is willing to assist in the task of recovery will find full cooperation, I am sure, on the part of the United States Government. Any government which maneuvers to block the recovery of other countries cannot expect help from us. Furthermore, governments, political parties, or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States.
It is already evident that, before the United States Government can proceed much further in its efforts to alleviate the situation and help start the European world on its way to recovery, there must be some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation and the part those countries themselves will take in order to give proper effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this Government. It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program so far as it may be practical for us to do so. The program should be a joint one, agreed to by a number, if not all European nations.
An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied. Political passion and prejudice should have no part. With foresight, and a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibilities which history has clearly placed upon our country, the difficulties I have outlined can and will be overcome.
Source: Congressional Record, 30 June 1947.
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SOURCE: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/filmmore/reference/primary/macspeech03.html
MacArthur, Douglas, People of the Philippines, 1944
MacArthur uttered these dramatic words to Filipinos just moments after he waded ashore at Red Beach, during the height of the fiercely contested Leyte invasion. With his feet finally back on Philipppine soil, and his pledge at last being fulfilled, MacArthur spoke with great emotion:
TO THE PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES:
I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil -- soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples. We have come, dedicated and committed, to the task of destroying every vestige of enemy control over your daily lives, and of restoring, upon a foundation of indestructible, strength, the liberties of your people.
At my side is your President, Sergio Osmena, worthy successor of that great patriot, Manuel Quezon, with members of his cabinet. The seat of your government is now therefore firmly re- established on Philippine soil.
The hour of your redemption is here. Your patriots have demonstrated an unswerving and resolute devotion to the principles of freedom that challenges the best that is written on the pages of human history. I now call upon your supreme effort that the enemy may know from the temper of an aroused and outraged people within that he has a force there to contend with no less violent than is the force committed from without.
Rally to me. Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on. As the lines of battle roll forward to bring you within the zone of operations, rise and strike. Strike at every favorable opportunity. For your homes and hearths, strike! For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike! In the name of your sacred dead, strike! Let no heart be faint. Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of divine God points the way. Follow in His Name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!
Douglas MacArthur
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Source: Torricelli, Senator Robert and Carroll, Andrew, eds. In Our Own Words:Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century. New York: Washington Square Press Publication, 1999.
Oppenheimer, J. Robert, Do not Forget Mortality in the Pursuit of Scientists, November 2, 1945
With tens of millions of soldiers and civilians dead throughout the world, World War 11 had officially come to an end. But the legacy of the war would haunt future generations, and no threat was more ominous than the proliferation of nuclear arms. The scientists and engineers who created the first atomic bombs were aware o f the enormous moral questions these weapons raised, and two of the men most responsible for their development-J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein--were especially concerned about the military implications of nuclear power. In the desert laboratory of Los Alamos, New Mexico, it was Oppenheimer who led the team that built the bombs dropped on Japan Racked with guilt, he resigned his position and later fought the creation of the even more powerful hydrogen bomb. (Oppenheimer's antagonists were so enraged by his protests that they accused him of being an agent for the Soviet Union. After a 1954 hearing, Oppenheimer was cleared of being a spy but nevertheless deemed a' "security risk. ") On November 2, 1945, Oppenheimer addressed the Association of Los Alamos Scientists on the responsibilities of scientists to expand the boundaries of knowledge but, in doing so, to recognize as well that they are human beings whose discoveries can have grave results.
The reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works, that it is good to find out what the realities are, that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.
There has been a lot of talk about the evil of secrecy, of concealment, of control, of security. Some of that talk has been on a rather low plane, limited really to saying that it is difficult or inconvenient to work in a world where you are not free to do what you want. I think that the talk has been justified, and that the almost unanimous resistance of scientists to the imposition of control and secrecy is a justified position, but I think that the reason may he a little deeper. I think that it comes from the fact that secrecy strikes at the very root of what science is, and what it is for. It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that it is good to learn. It is not good to be a scientist, and it is riot possible, unless you think that it is of the highest value to share your knowledge, to share it with anyone who is interested. It is riot possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences. And, therefore, I think that this resistance which we feel and see all around us to anything which is an attempt to treat science of the future as though it were rather a dangerous thing, a thing that must be watched and managed, is resisted riot because of its inconvenience--I think that we are in a position where we must be willing to take on any inconveniences- but resisted because it is based on a philosophy incompatible with that by which we live, and learned to live in the past.
There are many people who try to wriggle out of this. They say the real importance of atomic energy does not lie in the weapons that have been made. The real importance lies in all the great benefits which atomic energy, which the various radiations, will bring to mankind. There may be some truth in this. I am sure that there is truth in it, because there has never in the past been a new field opening up where the real fruits of it have not been invisible at the beginning. I have a very high confidence that the fruits-the so called peacetime applications-of atomic energy will have in them all we think and more. There are others who try to escape the immediacy of this situation by saying that, after all, war has always been very terrible; after all, weapons have always gotten worse and worse; that this is just another weapon and it doesn't create a great change; that they are not so bad; bombings have been bad in this war and this is not a change in that it just adds a little to the effectiveness of bombing; that some sort of protection will be found. i think that these efforts to diffuse and weaken the nature of the crisis make it only more dangerous. I think it is for us to accept it as a very grave crisis, to realize that these atomic weapons which we have started to make are very terrible, that they involve a change, that they are not just a slight modification-to accept this, and to accept it with the necessity for those transformations in the world that will make it possible to integrate these developments into human life....
I think that we have no hope at all if we yield in our belief in the value of science, in the good that it can be to the world to know about reality, about nature, to attain a gradually greater and greater control of nature, to learn, to teach, to understand. I think that if we lose our faith in this, we stop being scientists. We sell out our heritage. We lose what we have most of value for this time of crisis.
But there is another thing: We are not only scientists. We are men, too. We cannot forget our dependence on our fellow men. I mean not only our material dependence, without which no science would be possible, and without which we could not work; I mean also our deep moral dependence, in that the value of science must lie in the world of men, that all our roots lie there. These are the strongest bonds in the world, stronger than those even that bind us to one another. These are the deepest bonds that bind us to our fellow men.
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Source: Senator Robert Torricelli and Andrew Carroll, eds. In Our Own Words:Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century. New York: Washington Square Press Publication, 1999.
Robinson, Jackie, (Also known as: Jackie Robinson, John Roosevelt Robinson), Address to the House Un-American Activities Committee, July 18, 1949
World-Renowned Performer Paul Robeson Adamantly Defends His Love for the Soviet Union and Its Government Major-League Baseball Player Jackie Robinson Appears Before the House Un-American Activities Committee to Comment on Robeson's Remarks.
Scholar, athlete, and internationally renowned performer Paul Robeson was arguably the most famous African American 0f the 1930s and 1940s. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate and football star of Rutgers University in 1919, Robeson went on to Columbia University Law School in New York, where he began acting in community theaters. He soon found himself 0n Broadway and, with n0 formal training, became a celebrated actor and bass singer. Robeson's meteoric career suddenly began to plunge, however, when he expressed pro-communist sentiments. The first of eight children born into a lower class family, Robeson sympathized with the plight of working people everywhere, and he believed the Soviet Union had created a social and political system superior to America's. Criticism of Robeson turned to sheer hatred and harassment when, at the Paris Peace Conference of 1949, he purportedly stated that, should the United States and the Soviet Union evergo to war, it was "inconceivable that American Negroes would fight with those who have oppressed them for generations against the Soviet Union, which, in a generation, has raised them to a position of equality. " (Robeson later said the statement was taken out 0f context.) After being reported in the United States, the remarks sparked a national boycott against Robeson, and violence erupted at two 0f his concerts. Not all 0f Robeson's fans turned 0n him, however, and many organized a welcome-home rally for him in New York City 0n June 19, 1949. Robeson used the opportunity to discuss his travels abroad and express once again his love for the Soviet Union.
My last weeks abroad were spent in these countries to the east, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and finally the Soviet Union. Here thousands of people-men, women, children-cried to me to thank progressive America for sending one of its representatives, begged me so to take back their love, their heartfelt understanding of the suffering of their Negro brothers and sisters, that I wept time and time again. Whole nations of people gave me a welcome I can never forget-a welcome not for me, Paul Robeson, but in your name, the name of the Negro people of America, of the colonies, in the name of the progressive America of Wallace and the Progressive Party, and in the name of the twelve Communist leaders. Outstanding people in the government treated me with the greatest respect and dignity because I represented you, but there were no calls from the American embassies.
Here in these countries are the people. Their spokesmen are in the forefront of our struggle for liberation- on the floor of the United Nations, in the highest councils of world diplomacy. Here in the Soviet Union, in Czechoslovakia, in battered but gallant Warsaw with its brave saga of the ghetto are the nations leading the battle for peace and freedom. They were busy building, reconstructing, and the very mention of war caused one to look at you as if you were insane.
I was in Stalingrad. I saw a letter from President Roosevelt no equivocation here. It said that in Stalingrad came the turning point in the battle for civilization. I stood in the little rectangle where the heroic people of Stalingrad fought with their backs to the mighty Volga and saved us-saved you and me from Hitler's wrath. We loved them then. What has happened to us? For they are the same, only braver. 'Midst their ruins, they sing and laugh and dance. Their factories are restored So percent above prewar. I sang at their tractor factory and saw a tractor-not a tank coning off the line every fifteen minutes. It was a factory built by Soviet hands, Soviet brains, Soviet know-how.
They want peace and an abundant life. Freedom is already theirs. The children cried, "Take back our love to the Negro children and the working-class children" And they clasped and embraced me literally and symbolically for you. I love them.
Here is a whole one-sixth of the earth's surface, including millions of brown, yellow, and black people who would be Negroes in America and subject to the same awful race prejudice that haunts us. In this Soviet Union, the very term backward country is an insult, for in one generation former colonial peoples have been raised to unbelievable industrial and social levels. It is indeed a vast new concept of democracy And these achievements make completely absurd the solemn pronouncements that it will take several generations, maybe hundreds of years, before we Negro people in the West Indies, Africa, and America can have any real control over our own destiny.
Here is a white nation which is now doing honor to our poet Pushkin, one of the greatest poets in history, the Soviet people's and our proud world possession. Could I find a monument to Pushkin in a public square of Birmingham or Atlanta or Memphis, as one stands in the center of Moscow? No. One perhaps to Goethe, but not to the dark-skinned Pushkin.
Yes, I love this Soviet people more than any other nation, because of their suffering and sacrifices for us, the Negro people, the progressive people, the people of the future in this world.
At the Paris Peace Conference, I said it was unthinkable that the Negro people of America or elsewhere in the world could be drawn into war with the Soviet Union. I repeat it with a hundredfold emphasis.They will not.
And don't ask a few intellectuals who are jealous of their comfort. Ask the sugar workers whom I saw starving in Louisiana, the workers in the cotton lands and the tobacco belts in the South. Ask the sugar workers in Jamaica. Ask the Africans in Malan's SouthAfrica. Ask them if they will struggle for peace and friendship with the Soviet people, with the peoples of China and the new democracies, or if they will help their imperialist oppressors to return them to an even worse slavery The answer lies there in the millions of my struggling people, not only the 14 million in America, but the 40 million in the Caribbean and Latin America and the 150 million in Africa. No wonder all the excitement! For one day this mighty mass will strike for freedom, and a new strength like that of gallant China will add its decisive weight to insuring a world where all men can be free and equal.
I am born and bred in the America of ours. I want to love it. I love a part of it. But it's up to the rest of America when I shall love it with the same intensity that I love the Negro people from whom I spring, in the way that I love progressives in the Caribbean, the black and Indian peoples of South and Central America, the peoples of China and Southeast Asia-yes, suffering people the world over-and in the way that I deeply and intensely love the Soviet Union. That burden of proof rests upon America.
Now these peoples of the Soviet Union, of the new eastern democracies, of progressive western Europe, and the representatives of the Chinese people whom I met in Prague and Moscow, were in great part communists. They were the first to die for our freedom and for the freedom of all mankind. So I'm not afraid of communists. No, far from that. I will defend them as they defended us, the Negro people. And I stand firm and immovable by the side of that great leader who has given his whole life to the struggle of the American working class.... Their struggle is our struggle.
But to fulfill our responsibilities as Americans, we must unite, especially we Negro people. We must know our strength. We are the decisive force. That's why they terrorize us. That's why they fear us. And if we unite in all our might, this world can fast be changed. Let us create that unity now. And this important, historic role of the Negro people our white allies here must fully comprehend. This means increasing understanding of the Negro, his tremendous struggle, his great contributions, his potential for leadership at all levels in the common task of liberation. It means courage to stand by our side whatever the consequences, as we the Negro people fulfill our historic duty in freedom's struggle.
If we unite, we'll get our law against lynching, our right to vote and to labor. Let us march on Washington, representing 14 million strong. Let us push aside the sycophants who tell us to be quiet.
The so-called western democracies including our own, which so fiercely exploits us and daily denies us our simple constitutional guarantees can find no answer before the bar of world justice for their treatment of the Negro people. Democracy indeed! We must have the courage to shout at the top of our voices about our injustices and we must lay the blame where it belongs and where it has belonged for over three hundred years of slavery and misery: right here on our own doorstep, not in any far away place. This is the very time when we can win our struggle.
And we cannot win it by being lured into any kind of war with our closest friends and allies throughout the world. For any kind of decent life, we need, we want, and we demand our constitutional rights right here in America. We do not want to die in vain any more on foreign battlefields for Wall Street and the greedy supporters of domestic fascism. If we must die, let it be in Mississippi or Georgia! Let it be wherever we are lynched and deprived of our rights as human beings!
Let this be a final answer to the warmongers. Let them know that we will not help to enslave our brothers and sisters and eventually ourselves. Rather, we will help to insure peace in our time, the freedom and liberation of the Negro and other struggling peoples, and the building of a world where we can all walk in full equality and full human dignity.
Theater houses and concert halt's soon closed their doors to Robnson, libraries banned his books, and radio stations refused to play his records, which counted in the hundreds. Robeson's comments also entangled another of America's great African American heroes, Jackie Robinson, in the controversy. Major- league baseball was segregated until Robinson broke the color barrier and joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Although hate mail and taunts from fans were a common occurrence, many Americans admired Robinson for his talent and his courage. After Robeson's pro-communist remarks in Paris, Robinson was asked to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee to attest to the loyalty of all black Americans. Although he was privately disgusted by the nature of the request, Robinson believed he could respond in a way that would both defuse mounting racial tensions over the issue and satisfy the committee, as well as his own conscience. On July 18, 1949, Robinson made the following statement.
I've been asked to express my views on Paul Robeson's statement in Paris to the effect that American Negroes would refuse to fight in any war against Russia because we love Russia so much. I haven't any comment to make except that the statement, if Mr. Robeson actually made it, sounds very silly to me. But he has a right to his personal views, and if he wants to sound silly when he expresses them in public, that's his business and not mine. He's still a famous ex-athlete and a great singer and actor.
I understand that there are some few Negroes who are members of the Communist Party, and in event of war with Russia, they would probably act just as any other Communists would. So would members of other minority and majority groups. There are some colored pacifists, and they'd act just like pacifists of any color. And most Negroes-and Italians and Irish and Jews and Swedes and Slavs and other Americans- would act just as all these groups did in the last war: They'd do their best to help their country stay out of war. If unsuccessful, they'd do their best to help their country win the war-against Russia or any other enemy that threatened us.
This isn't said as any defense of the Negro's loyalty, because any loyalty that needs defense can't amount to much in the long run. And no one has ever questioned my race's loyalty except a few people who don't amount to very much.
What I'm trying to get across is that the American public is off on the wrong foot when it begins to think of radicalism in terms of any special minority group. It is thinking of this sort that gets people scared because one Negro speaking to a communist group in Paris threatens an organized boycott by fifteen million members of his race.
I can't speak for any fifteen million people more than any other one person can, but I know that I've got too much invested for my wife and child and myself in the future of this country, and I and other Americans of many races and faiths have too much invested in our country's welfare for any of us to throw it away because of a siren song sung in bass.
I am a religious man. Therefore I cherish America, where I am free to worship as I please, a privilege which some countries do not give. And I suspect that 999 out of almost any thousand colored Americans you meet will tell you the same thing.
At a news conference in New York on July 20, Paul Robeson was asked to respond to Jackie Robinson s comments. "I am not going to permit the issue to boil down to a personal feud between myself and Jackie," Robeson replied. "To do that would be to do exactly what the other group wants us to do." Robeson then added, "The committee's efforts to make the loyalty of the Negro people an issue is an insult. How do they dare question our loyalty? I challenge the loyalty of the Un-American Activities Committee. "It was a challenge that many Americans, both black and white, would become particularly concerned with in the decade to come.
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SOURCE: http://www.infoplease.com/t/hist/preserve-civil-liberties/index.html
Roosevelt, Eleanor, Defends Civil Liberties to the ACLU, March 14, 1940
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am glad you gave an award to the press tonight, because that gave them the opportunity to tell us just what they could do. Now we have come here tonight because of civil liberties. I imagine a great many of you could give my talk far better than I could, because you have had first-hand knowledge in the things you have had to do in Chicago over the years to preserve civil liberties. Perhaps, however, I am more conscious of the importance of civil liberties in this particular moment of our history than anyone else, because as I travel through the country and meet people and see things that have happened to little people, I realize what it means to democracy to preserve our civil liberties. All through the years we have had to fight for civil liberty, and we know that there are times when the light grows rather dim, and every time that happens democracy is in danger. Now, largely because of the troubled state of the world as a whole, civil liberties have disappeared in many other countries. It is impossible, of course, to be at war and to keep freedom of the press and freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. They disappear automatically. And so in many countries where ordinarily they were safe, today they have gone. In other countries, even before war came, not only freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech disappeared, but freedom of religion disappeared. And so we know that here in this country, we have a grave responsibility. We are at peace. We have no reason for the fears which govern so many other peoples throughout the world; therefore, we have to guard the freedoms of democracy. "Civil Liberties" emphasizes the liberty of the individual. In many other forms of governments the importance of the individual has disappeared. The individual lives for the state. Here in a democracy, the government still exists for the individual, but that does not mean that we do not have to watch and that we do not have to examine ourselves to be sure that we preserve the civil liberties for all our people, which are the basis of our democracy. Now, you know if we are honest with ourselves, in spite of all we have said, in spite of our Constitution, many of us in this country do not enjoy real liberty. For that reason we know that everywhere in this country every person who believes in democracy has come to feel a real responsibility to work in his community and to know the people of his community, and to take the trouble to try to bring about the full observance for all our people of their civil liberties. I think I will tell you a little story that brought home to me how important it was that in every community there should be someone to whom people could turn, who were in doubt as to what were their rights under the law, when they couldn't understand what was happening to them. I happen to go every now and then to a certain mining community and in that mining community there are a number of people who came to this country many years ago. They have been here so many years that they have no other country. This is their country. Their children have been born here. They work here. They have created great wealth for this country, but they came over at a time when there was not very much feeling of social responsibility about giving them the opportunity to learn the language of the country to which they had come, or telling them how to become citizens, or teaching about the government of this country. I had contact with a family where the man had been here over thirty-five years, and the first time I went to see him in his house it came about this way: I was standing with a group of people, and a young girl with arms full of packages came along the road. She stopped to look at me and said, "Why, you are Mrs. Roosevelt. My mama say, "She is happy if you come to her house'." I said, "Where is her house?" "Up the run." So I walked with her and when I got to the house a Polish woman was sitting at the table. The girl walked in and said, "Mama, this is Mrs. Roosevelt," and the woman got up and threw both arms around me, and I was kissed on both cheeks. She told me she had been expecting me to come for a long time. She wanted me to come because she wanted me to see how really nice her house was, and we went through the four rooms, and it was nice. She had made crochet pieces which decorated every table. The bedspreads were things of real beauty. We admired everything together. We came back to the kitchen and she said, "You eat with us?" and I said, "No, I just had breakfast." She wouldn't let me leave without eating something, so we had a piece of bread there together. Six months later I came back, and I went again to visit my friend. The minute I crossed the threshold, I knew something had happened in that house. It was quite dark. In a few minutes the old man came through from the back room, and he said; "Mrs. Roosevelt, you have come. I have wanted to ask you something for a long time. The mine, it close down, no more work. I work on W.P.A. for a time, and then they tell me I no citizen. Mrs. Roosevelt, I vote. I vote often. Why I no citizen?" There was nobody that stood out in the community that he dared trust, that he felt he could go to find out what his rights were, or what he should do. Well, of course, it was true he had never become a citizen. His children were born in this country; they were citizens, but he was not. And they had lived, those two people, by being allowed by the county to take in four old men who would have gone otherwise to the county poor house. Six people were living on the allowance for those four old men. The allowance was pitifully small. As I looked at the stove at what they were going to have for supper, I realized the woman wouldn't again say, "Sit down and eat." There wasn't enough for a stranger, and that was the breakdown of her morale. It hurt you. Something was wrong with the spirit of America that an injustice like that could happen to a man who, after all, worked hard and contributed to the wealth of the country. It should have been somebody's business, first of all, to see that he learned the English language well enough to find things out for himself. Secondly, when he was in trouble, to fight for his rights and to tell him how to go about to remedy what was wrong. I felt there was something wrong with any community where you had to wait many months for a stranger to come to listen to your story and help you straighten out what was a manifest injustice. He couldn't be on W.P.A. He could start out to become a citizen, and he could get relief and, at least, have the feeling that there was an interest on the part of someone in justice. I think that is, perhaps, one of the greatest things that the civil liberties committees do, and I wish we had one in every place throughout the country--one group of people who really care when things go wrong and do something when there is an infringement of the individual's rights. There are many times when even with freedom of the press and freedom of speech, it is hard to get a hearing for certain causes. I often think that we, all of us, should think very much more carefully than we do about what we mean by freedom of speech, by freedom of the press, by freedom of assembly. I sometimes am much worried by the tendency that you find today in our country only to think that these are rights for the people who think as we do. Some people seem to think these rights are not for people who disagree with them. I believe that you must apply to all groups the right to all forms of thought, to all forms of expression. Otherwise, you practically refuse to trust people to choose for themselves what is wise and what is right, and in doing that you deny the possibility of a democratic form of government. You have to be willing to listen or to allow people to state any point of view they may have, to say anything they may believe, and trust that when everyone has had his say, when there has been free discussion and really free expression in an influenced press, in the end the majority of the people will have the wisdom to decide what is right. We have to have faith that even when the majority seems to decide as we think wrongly, we still believe the fundamental principles that we have laid down, and we wait for the day to come when the thing that we believe is right becomes the majority decision of the people. Well, of course, that means that we have to have a real belief that people have sufficient intelligence to live in a democracy, and that is something which we are really testing out in this country today, because we are the only great democracy, and we are the only great democracy that is at peace and that can go on and live in what we consider a normal and free way of living. It is only here that people don't have to tremble when they say what they think. I don't know how many of you have read a book that I have been reading, but I think it is a most vivid picture of the kind of fear that has gradually come to all the people of Europe. It is Stricken Field by Martha Gellhorn, a young woman who was a war correspondent. The story was put in novel form and is about the taking over of Czechoslovakia. Certain people in Czechoslovakia were considered dangerous to the new regime--and the whole description is horrible of what they call "going underground," living in hiding, afraid to speak to each other, afraid to recognize each other on the streets, for fear they would be tortured to death. Only great fear could bring people to treat other people like that, and I can only say that it seems to me that we should read as vivid a story as this now, just to make us realize how important it is, that for no reason whatsoever, we allow ourselves to be dominated by fears so that we curtail civil liberties. Let us see that everybody who is really in danger in our community has, at least, his or her day in court. Constituted authority has to work under the law. When the law becomes something below the surface, hidden from the people, something which is underground, so to speak, and over which the people no longer hold control, then all of us are in danger. The minute we deny any rights... to any citizen, we are preparing the way for the denial of those rights to someone else. Never before was it so important that every individual should carry his share of responsibility and see that we do obey the laws, live up to the Constitution, and preserve everyone of those precious liberties which leave us free as individuals. One of the things that we have to be particularly alive to today is the growth of religious prejudice and race prejudice. Those are two things which are a great menace because we find that in countries where civil liberties have been lost, both religious and race prejudice have been rampant. I think it would be well for us, if we could define what we mean when we say that we believe in religious freedom. I sat at a desk in a political campaign once. I was running the office dealing with women for the National Democratic Committee. Over my desk came literature and material which I did not suppose any one would print in the United States, and much of it was written and published by people who belong to various religious denominations. It seems to me that the thing we must fix in our minds is that from the beginning, this country was founded on the right of all people to worship God as they saw fit, and if they do not wish to worship, they are not forced to worship. That is a fundamental liberty. When religion begins to take part in politics, we violate something which we have set up, which is a division between church and state. As far as having respect for the religion of other people and leaving them to live their lives the way they wish, we should teach that to every child. Every child should know that his religion is his own and nobody else has the right to question it. In addition to that, I think we should begin much earlier to teach all the children of our nation what a wonderful heritage they have for freedom. For freedom from prejudice, because they live in a nation which is made up of a great variety of other nations. They have before them and around them every day the proof that people can understand each other and can live together amicably, and that races can live on an equal basis, even though they may be very different in background, very different in culture. We have an opportunity to teach our children how much we have gained from the coming to this land of all kinds of races, how much it has served in the development of the land. Somehow I think we have [also] failed in many ways in bringing it early enough to children how great is their obligation to the various strains that make up the people of the United States. Above all, there should never be race prejudice here; there should never be a feeling that one strain is better than another. Indians are the only real inhabitants of the country who have a right to say that they own this country! I think this is the reason that we should preserve freedom of mind on the things which are basic to civil liberties. And it should be easy for us to live up to our Constitution. I am very much interested to find that in our younger generation, however, there is a greater consciousness of what civil liberties really mean, and I think that is one of the hopeful things in the world today, that youth is really taking a tremendous interest in the preservation of civil liberties. It is a very hard period in the world for youth because they are faced with new kinds of problems. We don't know the answers to many of the problems that face us today and neither do the young people, and the problems are very much more important to the young because they must start living. We have had our lives. The young people want to begin, and they can't find a way to get started. Perhaps that has made them more conscious of civil liberties. Perhaps that is why when you get a group of them together you find them fighting against the prejudices which have grown up in our country, against the prejudices which have made it hard for the minority groups in our country. The other night someone sent up a question to me: "What do you think should be done about the social standing of the Negro race in this country?" Well now, of course, I think the social situation is one that has to be dealt with by individuals. The real question that we have to face in this country is what are we doing about the rights of a big minority group as citizens in our democracy. That we have to face. Any citizen in this country is entitled to equality before the law; to equality of education; to equality at earning a living, as far as his abilities have made it possible for him to do; to equality of participation in government so that he or she may register their opinion in just the way that any other citizens do. Now those things are basic rights, belonging to every citizen in every minority group, and we have an obligation, I think, to stand up and be counted when it comes to the question of whether any minority group does not have those rights as citizens in this country. The minute we deny any rights of this kind to any citizen, we are preparing the way for the denial of those rights to someone else. We have to make up our minds what we really believe. We have to decide whether we believe in the Bill of Rights, in the Constitution of the United States, or whether we are going to modify it because of the fears that we may have at the moment. Now I listened to the broadcast this afternoon with a great deal of interest. I almost forgot what a fight had been made to assure the rights of the working man. I know there was a time when hours were longer and wages lower, but I had forgotten just how long that fight for freedom, to bargain collectively, and to have freedom of assembly, had taken. Sometimes, until some particular thing comes to your notice, you think something has been won for every working man, and then you come across as I did the other day a case where someone had taken the law into his own hands and beaten up a labor organizer. I didn't think we did those things any more in this country, but it appears that we do. Therefore, someone must be always on the lookout to see that someone is ready to take up the cudgels to defend those who can't defend themselves.
That is the only way we are going to keep this country a law-abiding country, where law is looked upon with respect and where it is not considered necessary for anybody to take the law into his own hands. The minute you allow that, then you have acknowledged that you are no longer able to trust in your courts and in your law-enforcing machinery, and civil liberties are not very well off when anything like that happens; so I think that after listening to the broadcast today, I would like to remind you that behind all those who fight for the Constitution as it was written, for the rights of the weak and for the preservation of civil liberties, we have a long line of courageous people, which is something to be proud of and something to hold on to. Its only value lies, however, in the fact that we profit by example and continue the tradition in the future. We must not let those people back of us down; we must have courage; we must not succumb to fears of any kind; and we must live up to the things that we believe in and see that justice is done to the people under the Constitution, whether they belong to minority groups or not. This country is a united country in which all people have the same rights as citizens. We are grateful that we can trust in the youth of the nation that they are going on to uphold the real principles of democracy and put them into action in this country. They are going to make us an even more truly democratic nation.
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SOURCE: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/eleanorroosevelt.htm
Roosevelt, Eleanor, The Struggle for Human Rights, September 28, 1948
I have come this evening to talk with you on one of the greatest issues of our time -- that is the preservation of human freedom. I have chosen to discuss it here in France, at the Sorbonne, because here in this soil the roots of human freedom have long ago struck deep and here they have been richly nourished. It was here the Declaration of the Rights of Man was proclaimed, and the great slogans of the French Revolution -- liberty, equality, fraternity -- fired the imagination of men. I have chosen to discuss this issue in Europe because this has been the scene of the greatest historic battles between freedom and tyranny. I have chosen to discuss it in the early days of the General Assembly because the issue of human liberty is decisive for the settlement of outstanding political differences and for the future of the United Nations.
The decisive importance of this issue was fully recognized by the founders of the United Nations at San Francisco. Concern for the preservation and promotion of human rights and fundamental freedoms stands at the heart of the United Nations. Its Charter is distinguished by its preoccupation with the rights and welfare of individual men and women. The United Nations has made it clear that it intends to uphold human rights and to protect the dignity of the human personality. In the preamble to the Charter the keynote is set when it declares: "We the people of the United Nations determined...to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and...to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom." This reflects the basic premise of the Charter that the peace and security of mankind are dependent on mutual respect for the rights and freedoms of all.
One of the purposes of the United Nations is declared in article 1 to be: "to achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion."
This thought is repeated at several points and notably in articles 55 and 56 the Members pledge themselves to take joint and separate action in cooperation with the United Nations for the promotion of "universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion."
The Human Rights Commission was given as its first and most important task the preparation of an International Bill of Rights. The General Assembly, which opened its third session here in Paris a few days ago, will have before it the first fruit of the Commission's labors in this task, that is the International Declaration of Human Rights.
The Declaration was finally completed after much work during the last session of the Human Rights Commission in New York in the spring of 1948. The Economic and Social Council has sent it without recommendation to the General Assembly, together with other documents transmitted by the Human Rights Commission.
It was decided in our Commission that a Bill of Rights should contain two parts:
1. A Declaration which could be approved through action of the Member States of the United Nations in the General Assembly. This declaration would have great moral force, and would say to the peoples of the world "this is what we hope human rights may mean to all people in the years to come." We have put down here the rights that we consider basic for individual human beings the world over to have. Without them, we feel that the full development of individual personality is impossible.
2. The second part of the bill, which the Human Rights Commission has not yet completed because of the lack of time, is a covenant which would be in the form of a treaty to be presented to the nations of the world. Each nation, as it is prepared to do so, would ratify this covenant and the covenant would then become binding on the nations which adhere to it. Each nation ratifying would then be obligated to change its laws wherever they did not conform to the points contained in the covenant.
This covenant, of course, would have to be a simpler document. It could not state aspirations, which we feel to be permissible in the Declaration. It could only state rights which could be assured by law and it must contain methods of implementation, and no state ratifying the covenant could be allowed to disregard it. The methods of implementation have not yet been agreed upon, nor have they been given adequate consideration by the Commission at any of its meetings. There certainly should be discussion on the entire question of this world Bill of Human Rights and there may be acceptance by this Assembly of the Declaration if they come to agreement on it. The acceptance of the Declaration, I think, should encourage every nation in the coming months to discuss its meaning with its people so that they will be better prepared to accept the covenant with a deeper understanding of the problems involved when that is presented, we hope, a year from now and, we hope, accepted.
The Declaration has come from the Human Rights Commission with unanimous acceptance except for four abstentions -- the U.S.S.R., Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia. The reason for this is a fundamental difference in the conception of human rights as they exist in these states and in certain other Member States in the United Nations.
In the discussion before the Assembly, I think it should be made crystal clear what these differences are and tonight I want to spend a little time making them clear to you. It seems to me there is a valid reason for taking the time today to think carefully and clearly on the subject of human rights, because in the acceptance and observance of these rights lies the root, I believe, of our chance of peace in the future, and for the strengthening of the United Nations organization to the point where it can maintain peace in the future.
We must not be confused about what freedom is. Basic human rights are simple and easily understood: freedom of speech and a free press; freedom of religion and worship; freedom of assembly and the right of petition; the right of men to be secure in their homes and free from unreasonable search and seizure and from arbitrary arrest and punishment.
We must not be deluded by the efforts of the forces of reaction to prostitute the great words of our free tradition and thereby to confuse the struggle. Democracy, freedom, human rights have come to have a definite meaning to the people of the world which we must not allow any nation to so change that they are made synonymous with suppression and dictatorship.
There are basic differences that show up even in the use of words between a democratic and a totalitarian country. For instance "democracy" means one thing to the U.S.S.R. and another the U.S.A. and, I know, in France. I have served since the first meeting of the nuclear commission on the Human Rights Commission, and I think this point stands out clearly.
The U.S.S.R. Representatives assert that they already have achieved many things which we, in what they call the "bourgeois democracies" cannot achieve because their government controls the accomplishment of these things. Our government seems powerless to them because, in the last analysis, it is controlled by the people. They would not put it that way -- they would say that the people in the U.S.S.R. control their government by allowing their government to have certain absolute rights. We, on the other hand, feel that certain rights can never be granted to the government, but must be kept in the hands of the people.
For instance, the U.S.S.R. will assert that their press is free because the state makes it free by providing the machinery, the paper, and even the money for salaries for the people who work on the paper. They state that there is no control over what is printed in the various papers that they subsidize in this manner, such, for instance, as a trade-union paper. But what would happen if a paper were to print ideas which were critical of the basic policies and beliefs of the Communist government.? I am sure some good reason would be found for abolishing the paper.
It is true that they have been many cases where newspapers in the U.S.S.R. have criticized officials and their actions and have been responsible for the removal of those officials, but in doing so they did not criticize anything which was fundamental to Communist beliefs. They simply criticized methods of doing things, so one must differentiate between things which are permissible, such as criticism of any individual or of the manner of doing things, and the criticism of a belief which would be considered vital to the acceptance of Communism.
What are the differences, for instance, between trade-unions in the totalitarian states and in the democracies? In the totalitarian state a trade-union is an instrument used by the government to enforce duties, not to assert rights. Propaganda material which the government desires the workers to have is furnished by the trade-unions to be circulated to their members.
Our trade-unions, on the other hand, are solely the instrument of the workers themselves. They represent the workers in their relations with the government and with management and they are free to develop their own opinions without government help or interference. The concepts of our trade-unions and those in totalitarian countries are drastically different. There is little mutual understanding.
I think the best example one can give of this basic difference of the use of terms is “the right to work.” The Soviet Union insists that this is a basic right which it alone can guarantee because it alone provides full employment by the government. But the right to work in the Soviet Union means the assignment of workers to do whatever task is given to them by the government without an opportunity for the people to participate in the decision that the government should do this. A society in which everyone works is not necessarily a free society and may indeed be a slave society; on the other hand, a society in which there is widespread economic insecurity can turn freedom into a barren and vapid right for millions of people.
We in the United States have come to realize it means freedom to choose one’s job, to work or not to work as one desires. We, in the United States, have come to realize, however, that people have a right to demand that their government will not allow them to starve because as individuals they cannot find work of the kind they are accustomed to doing and this is a decision brought about by public opinion which came as a result of the great depression in which many people were out of work, but we would not consider in the United States that we had gained any freedom if we were compelled to follow a dictatorial assignment to work where and when we were told. The right of choice would seem to us an important, fundamental freedom.
I have great sympathy with the Russian people. They love their country and have always defended it valiantly against invaders. They have been through a period of revolution, as a result of which they were for a time cut off from outside contact. They have not lost their resulting suspicion of other countries and the great difficulty is today that their government encourages this suspicion and seems to believe that force alone will bring them respect.
We, in the democracies, believe in a kind of international respect and action which is reciprocal. We do not think others should treat us differently from the way they wish to be treated. It is interference in other countries that especially stirs up antagonism against the Soviet Government. If it wishes to feel secure in developing its economic and political theories within its territory, then it should grant to others that same security. We believe in the freedom of people to make their own mistakes. We do not interfere with them and they should not interfere with others.
The basic problem confronting the world today, as I said in the beginning, is the preservation of human freedom for the individual and consequently for the society of which he is a part. We are fighting this battle again today as it was fought at the time of the French Revolution and as the time of the American Revolution. The issue of human liberty is as decisive now as it was then. I want to give you my conception of what is meant in my country by freedom of the individual.
Long ago in London during a discussion with Mr. Vyshinsky, he told me there was no such things as freedom for the individual in the world. All freedom of the individual was conditioned by the rights of other individuals. That of course, I granted. I said: “We approach the question from a different point of view/ we here in the United Nations are trying to develop ideals which will be broader in outlook, which will consider first the rights of man, which will consider what makes man more free; not governments, but man.”
The totalitarian state typically places the will of the people second to decrees promulgated by a few men at the top.
Naturally there must always be consideration of the rights of others; but in a democracy this is not a restriction. Indeed, in our democracies we make our freedoms secure because each of us is expected to respect the rights of others and we are free to make our own laws. Freedom for our peoples is not only a right, but also a tool. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of information, freedom of assembly--these are not just abstract ideals to us; they are tools with which we create a way of life, a way of life in which we can enjoy freedom.
Sometimes the processes of democracy are slow, and I have knows some of our leaders to say that a benevolent dictatorship would accomplish the ends desired in a much shorter time than it takes to go through the democratic processes of discussion and the slow formation of public opinion. But there is no way of insuring that a dictatorship will remain benevolent or that power once in the hands of a few will be returned to the people without struggle or revolution. This we have learned by experience and we accept the slow processes of democracy because we know that shortcuts compromise principles on which no compromise is possible.
The final expression of the opinion of the people with us is through free and honest elections, with valid choices on basic issues and candidates. The secret ballot is an essential to free elections but you must have a choice before you. I have heard my husband say many times that a people need never lose their freedom if they kept their right to a secret ballot and if they used that secret ballot to the full. Basic decisions of our society are made through the expressed will of the people. That is why when we see these liberties threatened, instead of falling apart, our nation becomes unified and our democracies come together as a unified group in spite of our varied backgrounds and many racial strains.
In the United States we have a capitalistic economy. That is because public opinion favors that type of economy under the conditions in which we live. But we have imposed certain restraints; for instance, we have antitrust laws. These are the legal evidence of the determination of the American people to maintain an economy of free competition and not to allow monopolies to take away the people’s freedom.
Our trade-unions grow stronger because the people come to believe that this is the proper way to guarantee the rights of the workers and that the right to organize and to bargain collectively keeps the balance between the actual producer an the investor of money and the manage in industry who watches over the man who works with this hands and who produces the materials which are out tangible wealth.
In the United States we are old enough not to claim perfection. We recognize that we have some problems of discrimination but we finds steady progress being made in the solution of these problems. Through normal democratic processes we are coming to understand our needs and how we can attain full equality for all our people. Free discussion on the subject is permitted. Our Supreme Court has recently rendered decisions to clarify a number of our laws to guarantee the rights of all.
The U.S.S.R. claims it has reached a point where all races within her borders are officially considered equal and have equal rights and they insist that they have no discrimination where minorities are concerned.
This is a laudable objective but there are other aspects of the development of freedom for the individual which are essential before the mere absence of discrimination is worth much, and these are lacking in the Soviet Union. Unless they are being denied freedoms which they want and which they see other people have, people do not usually complain of discrimination. It is these other freedoms -- the basic freedoms of speech, of the press, of religion and conscience, of assembly, of fair trial and freedom from arbitrary arrest and punishment, which a totalitarian government cannot safely give its people and which give meaning to freedom from discrimination.
It is my belief, and I am sure it is also yours, that the struggle for democracy and freedom is a critical struggle, for their preservation is essential to the great objective of the United Nations to maintain international peace and security. Among free men the end cannot justify the means. We know the patterns of totalitarianism -- the single political party, the control of schools, press, radio, the arts, the sciences, and the church to support autocratic authority; these are the age-old patterns against which men have struggled for three thousand years. These are the signs of reaction, retreat, and retrogression. The United Nations must hold fast to the heritage of freedom won by the struggle of its people; it must help us to pass it on to generations to come.
The development of the ideal of freedom and its translation into the everyday life of the people in great areas of the earth is the product of the efforts of many peoples. It is the fruit of a long tradition of vigorous thinking and courageous action. No one race and on one people can claim to have done all the work to achieve greater dignity for human beings and great freedom to develop human personality. In each generation and in each country there must be a continuation of the struggle and new steps forward must be taken since this is preeminently a field in which to stand still its to retreat.
The field of human rights is not one in which compromise on fundamental principles are possible. The work of the Commission on Human Rights is illustrative. The Declaration of Human Rights provides: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own.” The Soviet Representative said he would agree to this right if a single phrase was added to it --”in accordance with the procedure laid down in the laws of that country.” It is obvious that to accept this would be not only to compromise but to nullify the right stated. This case forcefully illustrates the importance of the proposition that we must ever be alert not to compromise fundamental human rights merely for the sake of reaching unanimity and thus lose them.
As I see it, it is not going to be easy to attain unanimity with respect to our different concepts of government and human rights. The struggle is bound to be difficult and one in which we must be firm but patient. If we adhere faithfully to our principles I think it is possible for us to maintain freedom and to do so peacefully and without recourse to force.
The future must see the broadening of human rights throughout the world. People who have glimpsed freedom will never be content until they have secured it for themselves. In a truest sense, human rights are a fundamental object of law and government in a just society. Human rights exist to the degree that they are respected by people in relations with each other and by governments in relations with their citizens.
The world at large is aware of the tragic consequences for human beings ruled by totalitarian systems. If we examine Hitler’s rise to power, we see how the chains are forged which keep the individual a slave and we cans e many similarities in the way things are accomplished in other countries. Politically men must be free to discuss and to arrive at as many facts as possible and there must beat least a two-party system in a country because when there is only one political party, too many things can be subordinated to the interests of that one party and it becomes a tyrant and not an instrument of democratic government.
The propaganda we have witnessed in the recent past, like that we perceive in these days, seeks to impugn, to undermine, and to destroy the liberty and independence of peoples. Such propaganda poses to all peoples the issue whether to doubt their heritage of rights and therefore to compromise the principles by which they live, or try to accept the challenge, redouble their vigilance, and stand steadfast in the struggle to maintain and enlarge human freedoms.
People who continue to be denied the respect to which they are entitled as human beings will not acquiesce forever in such denial.
The Charter of the United Nations is a guiding beacon along the way to the achievement of human rights and fundamental freedoms throughout the world. The immediate test is not only to the extent to which human rights and freedoms have already been achieved, but the direction in which the world is moving. Is there a faithful compliance with the objectives of the Charter if some countries continue to curtail human rights and freedoms instead of to promote the universal respect for an observance of human rights and freedoms for all as called for by the Charter?
The place to discuss the issue of human rights is in the forum of the United Nations. The United Nations has been set up as the common meeting ground for nations, where we can consider together our mutual problems and take advantage of our differences in experience. It is inherent in our firm attachment to democracy and freedom that we stand always ready to use the fundamental democratic procedures of honest discussion and negotiation. It is now as always our hope that despite the wide differences in approach we face in the world today, we can with mutual good faith in the principles of the united Nations Charter, arrive at a common basis of understanding.
We are here to join the meetings of this great international Assembly which meets in your beautiful capital of Paris. Freedom for the individual is an inseparable part of the cherished traditions of France. As one of the Delegates from the United States I pray Almighty God that we may win another victory here for the rights and freedoms of all men.
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SOURCE: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrarsenalofdemocracy.html
Roosevelt, Franklin D., The Arsenal of Democracy, December 29, 1940
My friends:
This is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security; because the nub of the whole purpose of your President is to keep you now, and your children later, and your grandchildren much later, out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence, and all of the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours.
Tonight, in the presence of a world crisis, my mind goes back eight years to a night in the midst of a domestic crisis. It was a time when the wheels of American industry were grinding to a full stop, when the whole banking system of our country had ceased to function. I well remember that while I sat in my study in the White House, preparing to talk with the people of the United States, I had before my eyes the picture of all those Americans with whom I was talking. I saw the workmen in the mills, the mines, the factories, the girl behind the counter, the small shopkeeper, the farmer doing his Spring plowing, the widows and the old men wondering about their life's savings. I tried to convey to the great mass of American people what the banking crisis meant to them in their daily lives.
Tonight, I want to do the same thing, with the same people, in this new crisis which faces America. We met the issue of 1933 with courage and realism. We face this new crisis, this new threat to the security of our nation, with the same courage and realism. Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now. For on September 27th, 1940 -- this year -- by an agreement signed in Berlin, three powerful nations, two in Europe and one in Asia, joined themselves together in the threat that if the United States of America interfered with or blocked the expansion program of these three nations -- a program aimed at world control -- they would unite in ultimate action against the United States.
The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world. It was only three weeks ago that their leader stated this: "There are two worlds that stand opposed to each other." And then in defiant reply to his opponents he said this: "Others are correct when they say: 'With this world we cannot ever reconcile ourselves.''' I can beat any other power in the world." So said the leader of the Nazis.
In other words, the Axis not merely admits but the Axis proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy -- their philosophy of government -- and our philosophy of government. In view of the nature of this undeniable threat, it can be asserted, properly and categorically, that the United States has no right or reason to encourage talk of peace until the day shall come when there is a clear intention on the part of the aggressor nations to abandon all thought of dominating or conquering the world.
At this moment the forces of the States that are leagued against all peoples who live in freedom are being held away from our shores. The Germans and the Italians are being blocked on the other side of the Atlantic by the British and by the Greeks, and by thousands of soldiers and sailors who were able to escape from subjugated countries. In Asia the Japanese are being engaged by the Chinese nation in another great defense. In the Pacific Ocean is our fleet.
Some of our people like to believe that wars in Europe and in Asia are of no concern to us. But it is a matter of most vital concern to us that European and Asiatic war-makers should not gain control of the oceans which lead to this hemisphere. One hundred and seventeen years ago the Monroe Doctrine was conceived by our government as a measure of defense in the face of a threat against this hemisphere by an alliance in Continental Europe. Thereafter, we stood guard in the Atlantic, with the British as neighbors. There was no treaty. There was no "unwritten agreement." And yet there was the feeling, proven correct by history, that we as neighbors could settle any disputes in peaceful fashion. And the fact is that during the whole of this time the Western Hemisphere has remained free from aggression from Europe or from Asia.
Does anyone seriously believe that we need to fear attack anywhere in the Americas while a free Britain remains our most powerful naval neighbor in the Atlantic? And does anyone seriously believe, on the other hand, that we could rest easy if the Axis powers were our neighbors there? If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the Continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Austral-Asia, and the high seas. And they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere. It is no exaggeration to say that all of us in all the Americas would be living at the point of a gun -- a gun loaded with explosive bullets, economic as well as military. We should enter upon a new and terrible era in which the whole world, our hemisphere included, would be run by threats of brute force. And to survive in such a world, we would have to convert ourselves permanently into a militaristic power on the basis of war economy.
Some of us like to believe that even if Britain falls, we are still safe, because of the broad expanse of the Atlantic and of the Pacific. But the width of those oceans is not what it was in the days of clipper ships. At one point between Africa and Brazil the distance is less than it is from Washington to Denver, Colorado, five hours for the latest type of bomber. And at the north end of the Pacific Ocean, America and Asia almost touch each other. Why, even today we have planes that could fly from the British Isles to New England and back again without refueling. And remember that the range of the modern bomber is ever being increased.
During the past week many people in all parts of the nation have told me what they wanted me to say tonight. Almost all of them expressed a courageous desire to hear the plain truth about the gravity of the situation. One telegram, however, expressed the attitude of the small minority who want to see no evil and hear no evil, even though they know in their hearts that evil exists. That telegram begged me not to tell again of the ease with which our American cities could be bombed by any hostile power which had gained bases in this Western Hemisphere. The gist of that telegram was: "Please, Mr. President, don't frighten us by telling us the facts." Frankly and definitely there is danger ahead -- danger against which we must prepare. But we well know that we cannot escape danger, or the fear of danger, by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our heads.
Some nations of Europe were bound by solemn nonintervention pacts with Germany. Other nations were assured by Germany that they need never fear invasion. Nonintervention pact or not, the fact remains that they were attacked, overrun, thrown into modern slavery at an hour's notice -- or even without any notice at all. As an exiled leader of one of these nations said to me the other day, "The notice was a minus quantity. It was given to my government two hours after German troops had poured into my country in a hundred places." The fate of these nations tells us what it means to live at the point of a Nazi gun.
The Nazis have justified such actions by various pious frauds. One of these frauds is the claim that they are occupying a nation for the purpose of "restoring order." Another is that they are occupying or controlling a nation on the excuse that they are "protecting it" against the aggression of somebody else. For example, Germany has said that she was occupying Belgium to save the Belgians from the British. Would she then hesitate to say to any South American country: "We are occupying you to protect you from aggression by the United States"? Belgium today is being used as an invasion base against Britain, now fighting for its life. And any South American country, in Nazi hands, would always constitute a jumping off place for German attack on any one of the other republics of this hemisphere.
Analyze for yourselves the future of two other places even nearer to Germany if the Nazis won. Could Ireland hold out? Would Irish freedom be permitted as an amazing pet exception in an unfree world? Or the islands of the Azores, which still fly the flag of Portugal after five centuries? You and I think of Hawaii as an outpost of defense in the Pacific. And yet the Azores are closer to our shores in the Atlantic than Hawaii is on the other side.
There are those who say that the Axis powers would never have any desire to attack the Western Hemisphere. That is the same dangerous form of wishful thinking which has destroyed the powers of resistance of so many conquered peoples. The plain facts are that the Nazis have proclaimed, time and again, that all other races are their inferiors and therefore subject to their orders. And most important of all, the vast resources and wealth of this American hemisphere constitute the most tempting loot in all of the round world.
Let us no longer blind ourselves to the undeniable fact that the evil forces which have crushed and undermined and corrupted so many others are already within our own gates. Your government knows much about them and every day is ferreting them out. Their secret emissaries are active in our own and in neighboring countries. They seek to stir up suspicion and dissension, to cause internal strife. They try to turn capital against labor, and vice versa. They try to reawaken long slumbering racial and religious enmities which should have no place in this country. They are active in every group that promotes intolerance. They exploit for their own ends our own natural abhorrence of war. These trouble-breeders have but one purpose. It is to divide our people, to divide them into hostile groups and to destroy our unity and shatter our will to defend ourselves.
There are also American citizens, many of them in high places, who, unwittingly in most cases, are aiding and abetting the work of these agents. I do not charge these American citizens with being foreign agents. But I do charge them with doing exactly the kind of work that the dictators want done in the United States. These people not only believe that we can save our own skins by shutting our eyes to the fate of other nations. Some of them go much further than that. They say that we can and should become the friends and even the partners of the Axis powers. Some of them even suggest that we should imitate the methods of the dictatorships. But Americans never can and never will do that.
The experience of the past two years has proven beyond doubt that no nation can appease the Nazis. No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb. We know now that a nation can have peace with the Nazis only at the price of total surrender. Even the people of Italy have been forced to become accomplices of the Nazis; but at this moment they do not know how soon they will be embraced to death by their allies.
The American appeasers ignore the warning to be found in the fate of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and France. They tell you that the Axis powers are going to win anyway; that all of this bloodshed in the world could be saved, that the United States might just as well throw its influence into the scale of a dictated peace and get the best out of it that we can. They call it a "negotiated peace." Nonsense! Is it a negotiated peace if a gang of outlaws surrounds your community and on threat of extermination makes you pay tribute to save your own skins? For such a dictated peace would be no peace at all. It would be only another armistice, leading to the most gigantic armament race and the most devastating trade wars in all history. And in these contests the Americas would offer the only real resistance to the Axis power. With all their vaunted efficiency, with all their parade of pious purpose in this war, there are still in their background the concentration camp and the servants of God in chains.
The history of recent years proves that the shootings and the chains and the concentration camps are not simply the transient tools but the very altars of modern dictatorships. They may talk of a "new order" in the world, but what they have in mind is only a revival of the oldest and the worst tyranny. In that there is no liberty, no religion, no hope. The proposed "new order" is the very opposite of a United States of Europe or a United States of Asia. It is not a government based upon the consent of the governed. It is not a union of ordinary, self-respecting men and women to protect themselves and their freedom and their dignity from oppression. It is an unholy alliance of power and pelf to dominate and to enslave the human race.
The British people and their allies today are conducting an active war against this unholy alliance. Our own future security is greatly dependent on the outcome of that fight. Our ability to "keep out of war" is going to be affected by that outcome. Thinking in terms of today and tomorrow, I make the direct statement to the American people that there is far less chance of the United States getting into war if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat, submit tamely to an Axis victory, and wait our turn to be the object of attack in another war later on.
If we are to be completely honest with ourselves, we must admit that there is risk in any course we may take. But I deeply believe that the great majority of our people agree that the course that I advocate involves the least risk now and the greatest hope for world peace in the future.
The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security. Emphatically, we must get these weapons to them, get them to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war which others have had to endure.
Let not the defeatists tell us that it is too late. It will never be earlier. Tomorrow will be later than today.
Certain facts are self-evident.
In a military sense Great Britain and the British Empire are today the spearhead of resistance to world conquest. And they are putting up a fight which will live forever in the story of human gallantry. There is no demand for sending an American expeditionary force outside our own borders. There is no intention by any member of your government to send such a force. You can therefore, nail, nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth. Our national policy is not directed toward war. Its sole purpose is to keep war away from our country and away from our people.
Democracy's fight against world conquest is being greatly aided, and must be more greatly aided, by the rearmament of the United States and by sending every ounce and every ton of munitions and supplies that we can possibly spare to help the defenders who are in the front lines. And it is no more un-neutral for us to do that than it is for Sweden, Russia, and other nations near Germany to send steel and ore and oil and other war materials into Germany every day in the week.
We are planning our own defense with the utmost urgency, and in its vast scale we must integrate the war needs of Britain and the other free nations which are resisting aggression. This is not a matter of sentiment or of controversial personal opinion. It is a matter of realistic, practical military policy, based on the advice of our military experts who are in close touch with existing warfare. These military and naval experts and the members of the Congress and the Administration have a single-minded purpose: the defense of the United States.
This nation is making a great effort to produce everything that is necessary in this emergency, and with all possible speed. And this great effort requires great sacrifice. I would ask no one to defend a democracy which in turn would not defend every one in the nation against want and privation. The strength of this nation shall not be diluted by the failure of the government to protect the economic well-being of its citizens. If our capacity to produce is limited by machines, it must ever be remembered that these machines are operated by the skill and the stamina of the workers.
As the government is determined to protect the rights of the workers, so the nation has a right to expect that the men who man the machines will discharge their full responsibilities to the urgent needs of defense. The worker possesses the same human dignity and is entitled to the same security of position as the engineer or the manager or the owner. For the workers provide the human power that turns out the destroyers, and the planes, and the tanks. The nation expects our defense industries to continue operation without interruption by strikes or lockouts. It expects and insists that management and workers will reconcile their differences by voluntary or legal means, to continue to produce the supplies that are so sorely needed. And on the economic side of our great defense program, we are, as you know, bending every effort to maintain stability of prices and with that the stability of the cost of living.
Nine days ago I announced the setting up of a more effective organization to direct our gigantic efforts to increase the production of munitions. The appropriation of vast sums of money and a well-coordinated executive direction of our defense efforts are not in themselves enough. Guns, planes, ships and many other things have to be built in the factories and the arsenals of America. They have to be produced by workers and managers and engineers with the aid of machines which in turn have to be built by hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the land. In this great work there has been splendid cooperation between the government and industry and labor. And I am very thankful.
American industrial genius, unmatched throughout all the world in the solution of production problems, has been called upon to bring its resources and its talents into action. Manufacturers of watches, of farm implements, of Linotypes and cash registers and automobiles, and sewing machines and lawn mowers and locomotives, are now making fuses and bomb packing crates and telescope mounts and shells and pistols and tanks.
But all of our present efforts are not enough. We must have more ships, more guns, more planes -- more of everything. And this can be accomplished only if we discard the notion of "business as usual." This job cannot be done merely by superimposing on the existing productive facilities the added requirements of the nation for defense. Our defense efforts must not be blocked by those who fear the future consequences of surplus plant capacity. The possible consequences of failure of our defense efforts now are much more to be feared. And after the present needs of our defense are past, a proper handling of the country's peacetime needs will require all of the new productive capacity, if not still more. No pessimistic policy about the future of America shall delay the immediate expansion of those industries essential to defense. We need them.
I want to make it clear that it is the purpose of the nation to build now with all possible speed every machine, every arsenal, every factory that we need to manufacture our defense material. We have the men, the skill, the wealth, and above all, the will. I am confident that if and when production of consumer or luxury goods in certain industries requires the use of machines and raw materials that are essential for defense purposes, then such production must yield, and will gladly yield, to our primary and compelling purpose.
So I appeal to the owners of plants, to the managers, to the workers, to our own government employees to put every ounce of effort into producing these munitions swiftly and without stint. With this appeal I give you the pledge that all of us who are officers of your government will devote ourselves to the same whole-hearted extent to the great task that lies ahead.
As planes and ships and guns and shells are produced, your government, with its defense experts, can then determine how best to use them to defend this hemisphere. The decision as to how much shall be sent abroad and how much shall remain at home must be made on the basis of our overall military necessities.
We must be the great arsenal of democracy.
For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.
We have furnished the British great material support and we will furnish far more in the future. There will be no "bottlenecks" in our determination to aid Great Britain. No dictator, no combination of dictators, will weaken that determination by threats of how they will construe that determination. The British have received invaluable military support from the heroic Greek Army and from the forces of all the governments in exile. Their strength is growing. It is the strength of men and women who value their freedom more highly than they value their lives.
I believe that the Axis powers are not going to win this war. I base that belief on the latest and best of information.
We have no excuse for defeatism. We have every good reason for hope -- hope for peace, yes, and hope for the defense of our civilization and for the building of a better civilization in the future. I have the profound conviction that the American people are now determined to put forth a mightier effort than they have ever yet made to increase our production of all the implements of defense, to meet the threat to our democratic faith.
As President of the United States, I call for that national effort. I call for it in the name of this nation which we love and honor and which we are privileged and proud to serve. I call upon our people with absolute confidence that our common cause will greatly succeed.
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Source: http://www.classbrain.com/artteenst/publish/article_119.shtml
Roosevelt, Franklin D., Declaration of war against Japan, December 8, 1941
Transcript of Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Japan (1941)
Mr. Vice President, and Mr. Speaker, and Members of the Senate and House of Representatives:
Yesterday, December 7, 194a date which will live in infam the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that Nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American Island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.
It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.
The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.
Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.
Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our Nation.
As Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense.
But always will our whole Nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.
No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us. Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.
With confidence in our armed force with the unbounding determination of our people we will gain the inevitable triumph- so help us God.
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
Transcription courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.
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SOURCE: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrarsenalofdemocracy.html
Roosevelt, Franklin D., State of the Union “Four Freedoms” Lend-Lease speech, January 6, 1941
Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, members of the 77th Congress:
I address you, the members of this new Congress, at a moment unprecedented in the history of the union. I use the word “unprecedented” because at no previous time has American security been as seriously threatened from without as it is today.
Since the permanent formation of our government under the Constitution in 1789, most of the periods of crisis in our history have related to our domestic affairs. And, fortunately, only one of these -- the four- year war between the States -- ever threatened our national unity. Today, thank God, 130,000,000 Americans in 48 States have forgotten points of the compass in our national unity.
It is true that prior to 1914 the United States often has been disturbed by events in other continents. We have even engaged in two wars with European nations and in a number of undeclared wars in the West Indies, in the Mediterranean and in the Pacific, for the maintenance of American rights and for the principles of peaceful commerce. But in no case had a serious threat been raised against our national safety or our continued independence.
What I seek to convey is the historic truth that the United States as a nation has at all times maintained opposition -- clear, definite opposition -- to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past. Today, thinking of our children and of their children, we oppose enforced isolation for ourselves or for any other part of the Americas.
That determination of ours, extending over all these years, was proved, for example, in the early days during the quarter century of wars following the French Revolution. While the Napoleonic struggles did threaten interests of the United States because of the French foothold in the West Indies and in Louisiana, and while we engaged in the War of 1812 to vindicate our right to peaceful trade, it is nevertheless clear that neither France nor Great Britain nor any other nation was aiming at domination of the whole world.
And in like fashion, from 1815 to 1914 -- ninety-nine years -- no single war in Europe or in Asia constituted a real threat against our future or against the future of any other American nation.
Except in the Maximilian interlude in Mexico, no foreign power sought to establish itself in this hemisphere. And the strength of the British fleet in the Atlantic has been a friendly strength; it is still a friendly strength.
Even when the World War broke out in 1914, it seemed to contain only small threat of danger to our own American future. But as time went on, as we remember, the American people began to visualize what the downfall of democratic nations might mean to our own democracy.
We need not overemphasize imperfections in the peace of Versailles. We need not harp on failure of the democracies to deal with problems of world reconstruction. We should remember that the peace of 1919 was far less unjust than the kind of pacification which began even before Munich, and which is being carried on under the new order of tyranny that seeks to spread over every continent today. The American people have unalterably set their faces against that tyranny.
I suppose that every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world -- assailed either by arms or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace. During 16 long months this assault has blotted out the whole pattern of democratic life in an appalling number of independent nations, great and small. And the assailants are still on the march, threatening other nations, great and small.
Therefore, as your President, performing my constitutional duty to "give to the Congress information of the state of the union," I find it unhappily necessary to report that the future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders.
Armed defense of democratic existence is now being gallantly waged in four continents. If that defense fails, all the population and all the resources of Europe and Asia, and Africa and Austral-Asia will be dominated by conquerors. And let us remember that the total of those populations in those four continents, the total of those populations and their resources greatly exceed the sum total of the population and the resources of the whole of the Western Hemisphere -- yes, many times over.
In times like these it is immature -- and, incidentally, untrue -- for anybody to brag that an unprepared America, single-handed and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world.
No realistic American can expect from a dictator’s peace international generosity, or return of true independence, or world disarmament, or freedom of expression, or freedom of religion -- or even good business. Such a peace would bring no security for us or for our neighbors. Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
As a nation we may take pride in the fact that we are soft-hearted; but we cannot afford to be soft- headed. We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal preach the "ism" of appeasement. We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.
I have recently pointed out how quickly the tempo of modern warfare could bring into our very midst the physical attack which we must eventually expect if the dictator nations win this war.
There is much loose talk of our immunity from immediate and direct invasion from across the seas. Obviously, as long as the British Navy retains its power, no such danger exists. Even if there were no British Navy, it is not probable that any enemy would be stupid enough to attack us by landing troops in the United States from across thousands of miles of ocean, until it had acquired strategic bases from which to operate.
But we learn much from the lessons of the past years in Europe -- particularly the lesson of Norway, whose essential seaports were captured by treachery and surprise built up over a series of years. The first phase of the invasion of this hemisphere would not be the landing of regular troops. The necessary strategic points would be occupied by secret agents and by their dupes -- and great numbers of them are already here and in Latin America. As long as the aggressor nations maintain the offensive they, not we, will choose the time and the place and the method of their attack.
And that is why the future of all the American Republics is today in serious danger. That is why this annual message to the Congress is unique in our history. That is why every member of the executive branch of the government and every member of the Congress face great responsibility, great accountability. The need of the moment is that our actions and our policy should be devoted primarily -- almost exclusively -- to meeting this foreign peril. For all our domestic problems are now a part of the great emergency.
Just as our national policy in internal affairs has been based upon a decent respect for the rights and the dignity of all our fellow men within our gates, so our national policy in foreign affairs has been based on a decent respect for the rights and the dignity of all nations, large and small. And the justice of morality must and will win in the end.
Our national policy is this:
First, by an impressive expression of the public will and without regard to partisanship, we are committed to all-inclusive national defense.
Secondly, by an impressive expression of the public will and without regard to partisanship, we are committed to full support of all those resolute people everywhere who are resisting aggression and are thereby keeping war away from our hemisphere. By this support we express our determination that the democratic cause shall prevail, and we strengthen the defense and the security of our own nation.
Third, by an impressive expression of the public will and without regard to partisanship, we are committed to the proposition that principles of morality and considerations for our own security will never permit us to acquiesce in a peace dictated by aggressors and sponsored by appeasers. We know that enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom.
In the recent national election there was no substantial difference between the two great parties in respect to that national policy. No issue was fought out on this line before the American electorate. And today it is abundantly evident that American citizens everywhere are demanding and supporting speedy and complete action in recognition of obvious danger.
Therefore, the immediate need is a swift and driving increase in our armament production. Leaders of industry and labor have responded to our summons. Goals of speed have been set. In some cases these goals are being reached ahead of time. In some cases we are on schedule; in other cases there are slight but not serious delays. And in some cases -- and, I am sorry to say, very important cases -- we are all concerned by the slowness of the accomplishment of our plans.
The Army and Navy, however, have made substantial progress during the past year. Actual experience is improving and speeding up our methods of production with every passing day. And today's best is not good enough for tomorrow.
I am not satisfied with the progress thus far made. The men in charge of the program represent the best in training, in ability, and in patriotism. They are not satisfied with the progress thus far made. None of us will be satisfied until the job is done.
No matter whether the original goal was set too high or too low, our objective is quicker and better results.
To give you two illustrations:
We are behind schedule in turning out finished airplanes. We are working day and night to solve the innumerable problems and to catch up.
We are ahead of schedule in building warships, but we are working to get even further ahead of that schedule.
To change a whole nation from a basis of peacetime production of implements of peace to a basis of wartime production of implements of war is no small task. And the greatest difficulty comes at the beginning of the program, when new tools, new plant facilities, new assembly lines, new shipways must first be constructed before the actual material begins to flow steadily and speedily from them.
The Congress of course, must rightly keep itself informed at all times of the progress of the program. However, there is certain information, as the Congress itself will readily recognize, which, in the interests of our own security and those of the nations that we are supporting, must of needs be kept in confidence.
New circumstances are constantly begetting new needs for our safety. I shall ask this Congress for greatly increased new appropriations and authorizations to carry on what we have begun.
I also ask this Congress for authority and for funds sufficient to manufacture additional munitions and war supplies of many kinds, to be turned over to those nations which are now in actual war with aggressor nations. Our most useful and immediate role is to act as an arsenal for them as well as for ourselves. They do not need manpower, but they do need billions of dollars’ worth of the weapons of defense.
The time is near when they will not be able to pay for them all in ready cash. We cannot, and we will not, tell them that they must surrender merely because of present inability to pay for the weapons which we know they must have.
I do not recommend that we make them a loan of dollars with which to pay for these weapons -- a loan to be repaid in dollars. I recommend that we make it possible for those nations to continue to obtain war materials in the United States, fitting their orders into our own program. And nearly all of their material would, if the time ever came, be useful in our own defense.
Taking counsel of expert military and naval authorities, considering what is best for our own security, we are free to decide how much should be kept here and how much should be sent abroad to our friends who, by their determined and heroic resistance, are giving us time in which to make ready our own defense.
For what we send abroad we shall be repaid, repaid within a reasonable time following the close of hostilities, repaid in similar materials, or at our option in other goods of many kinds which they can produce and which we need.
Let us say to the democracies: "We Americans are vitally concerned in your defense of freedom. We are putting forth our energies, our resources, and our organizing powers to give you the strength to regain and maintain a free world. We shall send you in ever-increasing numbers, ships, planes, tanks, guns. That is our purpose and our pledge."
In fulfillment of this purpose we will not be intimidated by the threats of dictators that they will regard as a breach of international law or as an act of war our aid to the democracies which dare to resist their aggression. Such aid -- Such aid is not an act of war, even if a dictator should unilaterally proclaim it so to be.
And when the dictators -- if the dictators -- are ready to make war upon us, they will not wait for an act of war on our part.
They did not wait for Norway or Belgium or the Netherlands to commit an act of war. Their only interest is in a new one-way international law, which lacks mutuality in its observance and therefore becomes an instrument of oppression. The happiness of future generations of Americans may well depend on how effective and how immediate we can make our aid felt. No one can tell the exact character of the emergency situations that we may be called upon to meet. The nation's hands must not be tied when the nation's life is in danger.
Yes, and we must prepare, all of us prepare, to make the sacrifices that the emergency -- almost as serious as war itself -- demands. Whatever stands in the way of speed and efficiency in defense, in defense preparations of any kind, must give way to the national need.
A free nation has the right to expect full cooperation from all groups. A free nation has the right to look to the leaders of business, of labor, and of agriculture to take the lead in stimulating effort, not among other groups but within their own group.
The best way of dealing with the few slackers or trouble-makers in our midst is, first, to shame them by patriotic example, and if that fails, to use the sovereignty of government to save government.
As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone. Those who man our defenses and those behind them who build our defenses must have the stamina and the courage which come from unshakable belief in the manner of life which they are defending. The mighty action that we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all the things worth fighting for.
The nation takes great satisfaction and much strength from the things which have been done to make its people conscious of their individual stake in the preservation of democratic life in America. Those things have toughened the fiber of our people, have renewed their faith and strengthened their devotion to the institutions we make ready to protect.
Certainly this is no time for any of us to stop thinking about the social and economic problems which are the root cause of the social revolution which is today a supreme factor in the world. For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.
The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:
Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
Jobs for those who can work.
Security for those who need it.
The ending of special privilege for the few.
The preservation of civil liberties for all.
The enjoyment -- The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.
These are the simple, the basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.
Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement. As examples:
We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.
We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.
We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.
I have called for personal sacrifice, and I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my budget message I will recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying for today. No person should try, or be allowed to get rich out of the program, and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.
If the Congress maintains these principles the voters, putting patriotism ahead pocketbooks, will give you their applause.
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called “new order” of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution, a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.
This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women, and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.
To that high concept there can be no end save victory.
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SOURCE: http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/small/mb10-3.htm
Truman, Harry S., Radio address announcing Hiroshima bombing, August 6, 1945
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SOURCE: http://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=1977&st=&st1
Truman, Harry S., “Do-Nothing” Congress", October 7, 1948
227. Rear Platform and Other Informal Remarks in Pennsylvania and New Jersey October 7, 1948
[1.] BRIDGEPORT, PENNSYLVANIA ( Rear platform, 9:40 a.m.)
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, and fellow Democrats of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania:
I can't tell you how I appreciate this wonderful turnout in this great industrial center in Pennsylvania at this time of day. It shows to me very plainly that you are really interested in the coming campaign. It shows to me that you want to find out just exactly what the issues are, and that you want to see what your President looks like, you want to know what he stands for, and then you can go to the polls on November 2d and vote intelligently for your own interests.
Now, there are a number of issues in this campaign, but there is only one fundamental issue and that is the people against the special interests.
The Democratic Party represents the people. The Republican Party does now and always has represented the special interests.
Among the first things they did when they got control of the Congress of the United States--that awful 80th Congress which has shown conclusively that they are for the special interests--was to pass a rich man's tax bill for themselves, and to begin to take liberties away from labor.
The Democratic platform is for the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, and if you will elect a Democratic Congress, send Harry Keller to Congress from this district, and that will help, because if we get a Democratic Congress we will work on that Taft-Hartley bill in your interests. If you send a Republican Congress, they will take the rest of your liberties away from you.
I have been trying to get this Congress to do something in the public interest. They met first in January 1947, and I went to them with a Message on the State of the Union asking for certain things. They didn't do anything I talked with them about. Then in November 1947 I called a special session and asked them to do certain things about prices, and in the interests of the general public. They did nothing. Then in my Message on the State of the Union in 1948, I put the same proposition up to them. They did nothing.
Then they went to Philadelphia, and they wrote the most hypocritical platform that has ever been put before the public. I called them back into session to do some of the things they said they were for. Do you know what they did? They went home without doing a single, solitary thing; and now they think they are going to fool the people.
They did nothing about prices. You know, Taft said that if we would let the price controls off, everything would level off, particularly clothing. Now, all you people who have to buy clothing for your children starting school this fall, know exactly what the situation is--that prices went up, and up, and up--went through the roof. Didn't hurt Mr. Taft or the economic royalists.
Remember those things now when you go to the polls on the 2d of November, and watch what I am saying to you people. They dare not answer me. They are afraid to get on the issues. They talk about home, and mother, what a nice country it is, "you can trust us." You can't trust 'era. The 80th Congress proved that. That Congress was a special interests Congress. It had more lobbyists around its doors than any other Congress that has ever met in the history of the United States.
Don't send back another one like that, at the polls on the 2d of November. Just to be sure you are right, vote the straight Democratic ticket, and then you will have a State administration and a national administration that is in the interests of the people and not the special interests.
[2.] READING, PENNSYLVANIA (11:10 a.m.)
Mr. Mayor, Mr. Chairman, distinguished guests:
It certainly is a pleasure and a privilege for me to be back in Reading once more. I spent a most pleasant evening and day here on March 2, 1944, when I was just a plain Senator from Missouri, and I was highly entertained and shown the beauty spots of the city by Daniel Hoch, who was my host on that occasion. I addressed the Traffic Club here and explained to them something about what the accidents in this country were costing the United States.
Now, this time I've come back to Reading and I find that the Volunteer Firemen of America are meeting here. I regret exceedingly that in the town where I grew up they didn't have a volunteer fire company or I certainly would have belonged to it. But that's been remedied. Here is what I received this morning: "Mr. President: At a regular meeting of the Rainbow Fire Company No. 1 of Reading, Pennsylvania, held on the above date, the following resolution was unanimously passed: 'Resolved that Harry S. Truman, the honorable and worthy President of the United States of America, be made an honorary member of the Rainbow Fire Company No. 1 of the City of Reading, Pennsylvania.'"
Now, I--with another honor which was conferred upon me--can claim, I think, citizenship in Reading. I received a gold card at the station from the America's Club, which Samuel J. Tilden came here to address when he was running for President back in the seventies. Now, I'm a member of the America's Democratic Club, the oldest one in the country, and I am a member of the Volunteer Firemen's Association of the Reading Fire Company No. 1, which puts me in the National Association of Firemen. I think now I can proceed on a firefighting, whirlwind campaign, just like I have been in all along.
This is a wonderful reception from a wonderful town. I am more than glad that I decided to get off the train and come up here. I don't believe they could have gotten all these thousands and thousands of people around that station. It looks to me-measuring the people by the acre--it looks to me like there are 5 or 6 acres of people here this morning. I am glad so many of you want to see the President, to hear him tell the truth about the issues in this campaign.
I want to congratulate the Democrats on having out-registered the Republicans here two to one. That sure is a record. It's no good, though, if you don't get out on election day.
Some fine people come from this part of the country. One of my good friends was born near here, General Tooey Spaatz, who commanded the greatest air force that was ever assembled in the history of the world. Because of that, the Government of the United States made him a four-star General for life with full pay. That's a very great honor, and General Spaatz deserved it.
Then you have another very able man from this district, George Rhodes over here. And I'm sure you're going to send him to Congress from this district so that when Congress meets in January, we can eradicate some of the terrible things that that awful 80th Congress did to us.
There's one big issue in this campaign. That's whether the country is going to be run for the benefit of all the people by the Democrats, or whether it's going to be run for just a few special interest groups by the Republicans.
The Democrats believe we can keep our prosperity and have it fairly equally distributed.
You know, at this time the farmers have the greatest income in the history of the world. The farmers are getting a fair share of the income of this country. Last year we had an income of $217 billion in this country, and it was reasonably fairly distributed. The farmers got their share, the workingman got his share. Everybody--small business, big business, and all the businesses, all the white-collar people and everybody else got a reasonably fair share of that income.
Now, if the Republicans would have listened to me, it would have been much more fairly distributed. But they didn't, as I'll tell you a little bit more about later on.
I've been fighting for laws to curb high prices and see that everybody gets what he needs at prices he can afford to pay.
The Republicans don't want any price control for one very simple reason: the higher the prices go up, the bigger the profits for the corporations.
Just think of this: the profits of corporations have gone up 70 percent since the Republicans killed OPA. When we had price control in 1943 and 1944 the corporations earned twice what they did before the war, and in 1947 they had the greatest income, after taxes, in the history of the country. And that income is much greater this year. Last year it was $17 billion and it is estimated to be over $20 billion this year.
I think the American people are more interested in lower prices than they are in big profits, and I'm going to continue the fight for price control from here on.
Now we have another situation. Take a look at the record of the Republicans on minimum wage laws. I believe that minimum wages should be raised to at least 75 cents an hour. But the Republicans say $16 a week is enough, and in the 80th Congress they wouldn't touch the 40 cent minimum wage, although I asked them time and again to raise that minimum wage. The Republicans were too busy in the 80th Congress even to consider raising wages, but they weren't too busy to pass the Taft-Hartley law.
I want to raise minimum wages because it will help workers who are just barely getting along under today's Republican high prices. But I want to raise the minimum wages because it will also help the people all over the country, and particularly here in Reading. It will end the unfair competition that you are now getting from low-wage areas.
Let's take a quick look at another issue in this campaign. I wish I had time to thrash them all out for you but this is another in which you are interested: that is, housing.
The Democrats believe the Federal Government ought to step in and meet the acute housing shortage that exists all over the country. But the Republicans don't want to do anything to help clear the slums, build more rural housing, or build low-rent city housing. Now, those things are absolutely necessary for the welfare of this country, and that doesn't mean that that is going to cost the taxpayers more money because those are investments, and over a long period of time, the investment of the Federal Government can be amortized in such a way that everybody will benefit--everybody but the real estate lobbies who have been trying to get away from that sort of thing.
There's one thing for you to do if you want to get some help on high prices and housing and on minimum wage laws and other things that are needed. That is to be sure that on the morning of November 2d, you get out to the polls and you vote early, and vote a straight Democratic ticket, and then the country will be in safe hands and I won't be troubled with the housing shortage--I can still stay in the White House another 4 years if you do that.
I can't thank you enough for this wonderful turnout. As I say, I wish I wasn't on such a tight schedule. I would like to stay here all day. Thank you very much.
[3.] ALLENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA (Rear platform, 1 p.m.)
Thank you very, very much. I certainly do appreciate most highly this wonderful turnout here in Allentown. I think every time I go into a town that I will never see another turnout like it, yet the next one is just as great or better than the one before. Isn't that wonderful
I want to compliment this great city. This is the first time I have been met by a mounted color guard. I appreciate it most highly. You know, when I met your Mayor this morning, I had some detailed information about Allentown, and it made the statement at the head of the information, that Allentown is
254 feet above sea level. Immediately, there began an argument between the Mayor of Pittsburgh and the Mayor of Allentown as to which town was the higher. I don't know which won, but the Mayor fell out with me when I said Allentown had only 92,000 people and he said there were 125,000 people in Allentown. Well, of course, that is the Mayor's privilege. I imagine he is right.
I'm awfully glad to be able to talk with you just a few minutes about the issues in this campaign. You know, you never get a chance to hear those issues unless you listen to the remarks of the Democratic side of the program, because the press is very careful to make you believe there are no issues in this campaign.
The Democrats in this campaign are fighting for continued prosperity for all the people, but the Republican Party believes in the trickle down theory. They think that if a few people on the top of the heap are well off, some prosperity may trickle down to you and me. Now that is what Joe Grundy preaches all the time. That is what he believes in. That is why he is such a power in the Republican Party. He is one of the pillars of that great organization--I call it great because they might, like they did in the 80th Congress, get control of this Republic and then where would the common people be ?
The Democratic Party since the days of Jefferson has always believed in and fought for all the people; and if you want to be sure that these policies are carried out in the interests of the people, you had better send Wynn James, Jr. to the Congress from this district--and I believe that is what you are going to do.
I would like to tell you about the fights the Democrats are making for more houses, lower prices, better labor laws, and many others; but unfortunately there isn't time for all that. I will just tell you about one of those issues, and then I hope you will get interested in it and inform yourselves on the facts about the others.
I want to tell you about the battle the Democrats have been fighting for a decent minimum wage. The minimum wage law in our history was put through under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 protects nearly 20 million workers. Twenty million men and women know there is a 40-cent floor below which their Government will not permit their wages to fall. Even when the law was being passed, the Republicans fought it tooth and toenail. Sixty-one percent of the House Republicans and 87 percent of the Senate Republicans voted against it; but the Democrats voted for it by an overwhelming majority and it passed both Houses.
By the end of the war, increases in the cost of living had made the 40 cent minimum wage obsolete. Now that is only $16 a week--40 cents an hour is only $16 a week. I wonder how many of you--if you are single--could live on $16 a week? Yet, the Republicans think you ought to live on $16 a week and support a family.
I asked for an increase to protect the standard of living of 5 million workers at the bottom of the economic ladder, and ever since then I have been fighting for at least a minimum wage of 75 cents an hour; but the Republicans and their big business allies are still fighting against the minimum wage--94 percent of them voted against increasing even to 60 cents an hour when it came before the Senate last year.
Maybe the Republicans think $24 a week is too good a wage for the average man. That is what 60 cents an hour would mean-they think $24 a week is too much for the ordinary fellow to get.
You people of Allentown are going to have to decide on November 2d whether or not you want a higher minimum wage law that will help everybody. It would help these people at the bottom who are having a hard time getting along, and it would help the high wage areas to stay away from unfair competition with the cheap wage areas. You are going to decide whether or not you want a decent housing program. You know, I made a recommendation for a housing program for this great country of ours to meet the situation, and which would require about an million houses between now and 1960--20 million dwellings, I will say, not houses, we want low-rent houses as well as dwellings. The Republicans have said that that is a socialistic approach, although it is an approach which would give us the necessary housing to meet our terrible shortage. Joe Grundy says that that is socialistic, and Mr. Taft had his name on that bill and I understand Joe Grundy turned him down because he said Taft was sponsoring a socialistic housing bill. Taft came back to the Senate and voted against his own bill.
You are going to have to decide whether or not you want to bring prices down. We have all learned from experience that a Republican President and a Republican Congress won't do anything on any of these matters.
Now, if you want to protect yourselves and vote for your own interest, let me advise you what to do on November 2d. Get out there to the polls early in the morning and vote the straight Democratic ticket, and you will be voting for yourselves and your own interest--and you will put me in the position where I won't be up against the housing shortage, I can stay in the White House another 4 years.
[4.] BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA (At the railroad station, 1:40 p.m.)
Congressman Walter, and fellow Democrats of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania:
I can't tell you how very much I appreciate this wonderful welcome. I think every time I stop, I've seen the biggest crowd, and they get bigger and bigger and bigger. The people of Pennsylvania apparently are just as much interested in the issues in this campaign as the people of every other State.
I was told, when I started for Pennsylvania, that people would not be interested in seeing and hearing the President. What a mistake that was!
Tad Walter told me what wonderful people he had here in Bethlehem. I can well believe it. If you send him back to the Congress for the 9th term, it will be proof that you're not only fine people, but that you know what's good for you as well.
I have seen a lot of this country in the last 3 weeks and it looks exceedingly prosperous. More people have jobs than ever before in the history of our country. Over 61 million people are working now. Here in eastern Pennsylvania I understand there is even a labor shortage. There are more jobs than there are people to fill them. That's a record.
Compare that with 1932 when half your population didn't have jobs, and then see whether you want to go back to that or not. That's what 16 years of Democratic administrations have done for the whole country.
It wasn't that way in 1932 after 12 years of Republican rule. And yet there are a few people who seem to want to let the Republicans wreck the country again.
Well, two-thirds of you stayed at home-you didn't, here--but two-thirds of the people of the United States stayed at home in 1946 and they put in the Republican "donothing" Both Congress that has already done as much wrecking as it possibly can. Don't let that happen again.
I know you're not going to let it happen because you were not in that two-thirds. You sent Tad Walter back to the Congress-the right sort of a man.
High prices are a real threat to every one of us because if they aren't checked, they will lead straight to another bust, like we had under Herbert Hoover. But the Republicans absolutely refuse to act. The Democratic program of price control during the war kept a ceiling on prices. Everybody got what he needed at a fair price, and he got his share of what was to be distributed. The Republicans killed price control and they refused to do anything to help slow down the fantastic increases in the cost of living. I even called two special sessions of that 80th Republican Congress and asked for price control laws. Both times I asked for price control each year in the Message on the State of the Union.
My great running-mate, Albert Barkley, forced a showdown in the special session last July. He put my price control program directly before the Senate. He forced the Republicans to stand up and be named if they were going to vote against this bill to keep prices down. Believe it or not, 98 percent of the Republicans in Congress stood up and voted against controlling prices.
You here will determine on election day what kind of government you're going to have during the next 4 years. If you want to, you can turn your Government over to those who like inflation and high prices because they are thinking of making more money at your expense. Or, you can send an administration and a Congress to Washington that will extend social security, keep down the cost of living and not kick labor unions in the face, but help them move forward to greater things.
All I ask you and all your friends and neighbors is just to look at the record. If you look at the record, you can't help but go to the polls on election day, as you have usually done here in this district, only do it with a more overwhelming majority this time. Vote the straight Democratic ticket and let us have a Government that believes in the welfare of the people, and not a Government that believes in the welfare of special interests.
It's a wonderful thing, a wonderful thing to have you turn out like this at this time of day. It shows that you are interested in the issues in this campaign. It shows that the Republicans are not fooling you a bit, and I'm glad of that.
[5.] EASTON, PENNSYLVANIA (2:15 p.m.)
Congressman Walter, and fellow Democrats of Easton, Pennsylvania:
It has been a very great privilege to me to travel through Pennsylvania this morning, and to receive such a warm and cordial welcome. Everywhere I have been, it has been just like this, and I appreciate it more than I can tell you.
I want to say to you, also, incidentally, that it is a great surprise to some people.
I have been getting welcomes similar to this all over the United States. All over the United States-- everywhere I have been-people have displayed interest in the issues that are now before the country, and I have been trying to place those interests before the people in such a manner that they can understand that there is just one big issue, and that is the people against special privilege. When you analyze the whole thing, that is the issue. I am on a crusade now from one end of the country to the other to let people know just exactly what that means to them.
This is your interest. This is your interest in this campaign. This is the most important campaign that we will have in the next 25 or 30 years, and it will have repercussions for just that long.
You must weigh your interests in the balance and decide whether you want to vote for yourselves and for the welfare of the country, or whether you want to vote for special privilege and send back another Congress that will be just as "no account" as the Both Congress has been. That Congress, in my opinion, from a domestic standpoint has done the country almost irreparable injury; and if you endorse that program, the one they tried to put through, you will certainly do the country an injury from which it will be a long time recovering.
The Democrats, now, came into office in 1933 when Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as President of the United States. That administration and all the Democratic administrations since that time have been putting legislation on the books in the interests of the people as a whole.
In 1932, the farmers were all broke. One hundred and twenty-three thousand of them were moved off their farms because they couldn't pay the interest on their mortgages. Last year, the farmers had the biggest income they ever had in their history, and there were less than 800 foreclosures in 1947.
In 1932, there were between 12 and 15 million people out of work. In 1947 and 1948, there are more than 61 million people at work. I think that is the best answer to this Republican program, that we ought to change it back to the 1920's. Is that what you want to do?
I say you can't afford to do that. I say your own interest is the interest of this country. We are endeavoring now to assume the leadership which we should have assumed in world affairs in 1920; and a prosperous economy in the United States of America is necessary for world peace and world leadership.
I have spent the whole 3 years since I have been President of the United States in trying to attain a peaceful world. The United Nations is the background and the backbone of that peaceful world. I have given it every support I possibly can. I was present at San Francisco when the charter was signed. I have made the appointments of delegates in the United Nations on a bipartisan basis, and we are supporting a bipartisan foreign policy, which means the welfare of the world as a whole. That bipartisan foreign policy was inaugurated by President Roosevelt and a Democratic administration.
Don't let anybody tell you anything different on that.
I am urging you--I am urging you to come out on the second day of November and show the world that you believe in the welfare of the United States and in the welfare of the world; and you can do that by sending Tad Waiter back to Congress with the biggest majority he ever had, and by voting a Democratic ticket straight in Pennsylvania.
Now if you do that, a lot of people are troubled with the housing shortage, and I have been trying to remedy that. But the Republicans would not agree to it. If you go out and vote the Democratic ticket straight, your President won't be troubled with the housing shortage, he will still be in the White House for another 4 years.
Now, I am very sorry to inform you that my daughter had to go to Missouri, and she cannot appear at this time. I hope sometime she can come up here and see you, but she made some engagements before this trip was planned and organized and she had to keep her engagements. She is just as sorry as her mother and I are that she is not here today.
I appreciate again your cordial welcome and the wonderful reception I have received in this great State of Pennsylvania. I believe that Pennsylvania is going to wake up at last and go Democratic.
Thank you.
[6.] ELIZABETH, NEW JERSEY (5:10 p.m.)
Mr. Mayor, Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, and Democrats of Elizabeth, New Jersey:
I appreciate very much this very cordial welcome which you have accorded me. This is my first stop in the great State of New Jersey, and it is right in line with the other first stops. In every State, through which I have been, they were all just like this. People want to see their President, they want to hear what their President has to say; and I can't tell you how very much I thank you for that interest.
You are here because you are interested in the issues of this campaign. You know, as all the citizens of this great country know, that the election is not all over but the shouting. That is what they would like to have you believe, but it isn't so-it isn't so at all. The Republicans are trying to hide the truth from you in a great many ways. They don't want you to know the truth about the issues in this campaign. The big fundamental issue in this campaign is the people against the special interests. The Democratic Party stands for the people. The Republican Party stands, and always has stood, for special interests. They have proved that conclusively in the record that they made in this "do-nothing" Congress.
The Republican Party candidates are going around talking to you in high-sounding platitudes trying to make you believe that they themselves are the best people to run the Government. Well now, you have had experience with them running the Government. In 1920 to 1932, they had complete control of the Government. Look what they did to it!
They started again in 1946, when twothirds of the people in the United States stayed at home and allowed a third of the people to send that Congress which we now have down to Washington. They immediately began to try to undo all the good things that the Democrats have been doing for you for the last 14 years.
You get the truth if you listen to your candidates--Archie Alexander, one of the finest young men I know, is going all over this State telling you the facts. You ought to send him to the Senate. He is the Democratic candidate for the Senate from this great State, and he is so good that the Republican paper, the New York Herald Tribune, said about Mr. Alexander, that he possesses superior qualifications.
Of course, I think all the candidates on the Democratic ticket always do have superior qualifications, or they wouldn't be on the Democratic ticket. This country is enjoying the greatest prosperity it has ever known because we have been following for 16 years the policies inaugurated by Franklin I). Roosevelt. Everybody benefited from these policies--labor, the farmer, businessmen, and white-collar workers.
We want to keep that prosperity. We cannot keep that if we don't lick the biggest problem facing us today, and that is high prices.
I have been trying to get the Republicans to do something about high prices and housing ever since they came to Washington. They are responsible for that situation, because they killed price control, and they killed the housing bill. That Republican 80th "do-nothing" Congress absolutely refused to give any relief whatever in either one of those categories.
What do you suppose the Republicans think you ought to do about high prices?
Senator Taft, one of the leaders in the Republican Congress, said, "If consumers think the price is too high today, they will wait until the price is lower. I feel that in time the law of supply and demand will bring prices into line."
There is the Republican answer to the high cost of living.
If it costs too much, just wait.
If you think 15 cents is too much for a loaf of bread, just do without it and wait until you can afford to pay 15 cents for it.
If you don't want to pay 60 cents a pound for hamburger, just wait.
That is what the Republican Congress thought you ought to do, and that is the same Congress that the Republican candidate for President said did a good job.
Some people say I ought not to talk so much about the Republican 80th "donothing" Congress in this campaign. I will tell you why I will talk about it. If twothirds of the people stay at home again on election day as they did in 1946, and if we get another Republican Congress like the 80th Congress, it will be controlled by the same men who controlled that 80th Congress-the Tabers, and the Tafts, the Martins and the Hallecks would be the bosses. The same men would be the bosses the same as those who passed the Taft-Hartley Act, and passed the rich man's tax bill, and took social security away from a million workers.
Do you want that kind of administration? I don't believe you do--I don't believe you do.
I don't believe you would be out here interested in listening to my outline of what the Republicans are trying to do to you if you intended to put them back in there.
When a bunch of Republican reactionaries are in control of the Congress, then the people get reactionary laws. The only way you can get the kind of Government you need is by going to the polls and voting the straight Democratic ticket on November 2d. Then you will get a Democratic Congress and I will get a Congress that will work with me. Then we will get good housing at prices we can afford to pay; and repeal of that vicious Taft-Hartley Act; and more social security coverage; and prices that will be fair to everybody; and we can go on and keep 61 million people at work; we can have an income of more than $217 billion, and that income will be distributed so that the farmer, the workingman, the white-collar worker, and the businessman get their fair share of that income.
That is what I stand for.
That is what the Democratic Party stands for.
Vote for that, and you will be safe!
[7.] NEWARK, NEW JERSEY (At the Mosque, 9:06 p.m.)
Mr. Mayor, Mr. Chairman, Monsignor Kelly, distinguished guests, and fellow Democrats of this great city of Newark:
You have given me a wonderful reception, the kind of reception I knew I would get here in this great city. I have been here before and I had a reception that a Senator is entitled to, but nothing like this.
I have heard rumors down in Washington that the Democratic Party is going to get this same kind of a turnout at the polls on November 2d. Am I right?
Remember, now, keep that promise. That means that the next United States Senator from New Jersey is going to be Archie Alexander. That means that here in Newark you're going to send Peter Rodino to the Congress, and Hugh Addonizio and Harry Dudkin to the House of Representatives. Every one of these men deserves your support. They will fight your battle in Washington, and how that fight needs to be made nobody knows better than I do. They will fight your battle there, and men like them all over the Nation will be fighting that battle--and will win that battle if you're behind us--the battle for the people, a fight which started with Jefferson, continued with Jackson, was won by Franklin Roosevelt in 1934.
There was a sad thing in connection with that: two-thirds of the voters of the United States stayed at home in 1946, and the Republicans who slipped in on that minority vote have started to turn the clock back to the 1920's--and further, if you let them do it. I don't believe you're going to let them do it.
I've seen in this country on my recent trip the most prosperous that the sun has ever shone upon. Well, if the voters do their duty we can continue that situation in this country and keep on working, and I hope successfully, for peace in the world.
I would rather have peace in the world than to be President of the United States. I've spent all my time working for peace in this world, and I shall continue to do just that. That's the most important thing with which we are faced.
Now, I'm in this fight because it is in the nature of a crusade. This is a fight for the people against special interests, and if the people support me in that fight--and I believe they're going to do it--the Government of the United States will continue to be in the hands of the people, where it belongs.
Now, one of the basic propositions is our welfare as a Nation, and our prosperity as a Nation. When someone asks, "Why can't we keep our prosperity under the Republicans?" the answer to that question should be obvious. But in case there is still any doubt in anyone's mind let me speak just a little plainly tonight and try to set you straight.
The Republicans are committed to a program that benefits special interests, the powers of big business and monopoly. The only people who have prosperity under the Republicans are those who live on the fat profits made by exploiting the workers, farmers, and the common, everyday citizen. Need I remind you of what was going on here in this great city back in the Republican Hoover depression? You know what was going on. People were walking up and down the streets hunting for jobs. People were being evicted from their homes. Farmers were being thrown off their farms. Factories were closed. They gave you breadlines instead of pay lines. Remember that. That's what you're faced with now, if you let these special privilege fellows get control of ours.
The fundamental difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties is clear, and the record is there for all to see. Look at the record in the field of labor. The Democratic Party wrote the Wagner Labor Relations Act on the law books of our country in 1935, and I was there to help put it through the Senate. Every real American has been proud of the record labor has made under the provisions of this monumental labor law.
Back before the Wagner Act the union membership in this country was only about 3 million. Today nearly 17 million industrious, patriotic, hard-working Americans are proud of their membership in the AF of L and CIO and many independent unions.
The average wage of workers in this country is three times what it was before the Wagner Act became a law. The high wages earned by our people are a tremendous factor in maintaining prosperity. High wages mean great purchasing power, and great purchasing power means that our factories and our farms will run at full production-and that's what the Democratic Party stands for.
Now, what is the Republican attitude toward labor? One of the first acts of the Republican 80th Congress was to take steps to destroy the Wagner Act. The Republicans in Congress did this by passing the Taft- Hartley Act. The Taft-Hartley Act was passed for one main reason--to weaken the strength of our labor unions so that ultimately wages could be forced down. That's the theory of big business, which controls the Republican Party. Big business operates on a policy that if you can force wages down you can increase the already tremendous corporation profits--and that's what the Republican Party is interested in.
I reject this Republican policy of trying to force wages down as a fallacy. I shall fight with all my strength not only to keep wages up but to increase them.
Now, the old elephant never seems to learn anything. He has fixed ideas. He's trying to make you believe he has the new look, but he hasn't. That Republican policy of forcing wages down causes the purchasing power of our workers to drop. This leads to distress on farms and it closes factories and puts people out of work in the city.
To maintain high wages, to keep our prosperity, to look ahead to an even higher standard of living you must vote the Democratic ticket. Don't forget that.
I wish I could stand here all evening and discuss the differences between the Democratic policy and the Republican policy. There is another issue, however, between the Democrats and the Republicans that I would like to discuss for just a little bit, and that's the housing issue.
You have a serious housing shortage here in Newark. The same problem exists in practically every community in this country. The need is so great that private industry and the States cannot handle it. In this audience are veterans with wives and children. They need decent homes for their families but they can't find them. I've received letters from all over the country asking for help in finding homes. I went to the 80th Congress and told them the story. I asked for a law which would permit the Federal Government to give aid in building low-cost rental housing, the kind of housing that would contain decent living quarters for $50 or $60 a month. Now, that "donothing" Republican Both Congress just laughed at me.
The Republican leadership wouldn't give the American people the kind of housing they need because the rich real estate lobby opposed it.
The Hoover slogan, if you remember, back in 1929 and 1930 was, "Two cars in every garage." The Republican slogan today is, "Two families in every garage."
That terrible real estate lobby is made up of the wealthy interests who are perfectly satisfied with the housing shortage because it keeps rents up and profits higher. The Republican leadership had a clear choice between the need of the people and the greed of the lobby. They failed the people--and our housing shortage continued.
But you can correct it. If the people elect a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress we'll break that housing shortage in spite of the real estate lobby. And we'll do a lot of other things that are in the interest and the welfare of the people as a whole.
This is a decision that will affect several generations to come if you make the wrong decision. We are the leaders of the world, this great country of ours--the greatest republic that the sun has ever shone upon- and the reason for its greatness is because the power of government is reposed in you. You are the Government if you exercise your privilege. You folks are going to determine on election day what kind of government we'll have in Washington.
You want a government with a positive program, an administration and a Congress devoted to the people's interests and not to special interests. You want a government concerned with human rights and health and education and housing and the cost of living of this great people of ours.
In 1946 two-thirds of you stayed at home and didn't vote. We got that awful 80th Congress as a result. And you got just what you deserved because you didn't exercise your rights. A man who doesn't exercise the privilege of franchise on election day is a shirker and he has no right to kick about the sort of government he gets if he doesn't vote himself.
Now, you can't afford to shirk your duty as a citizen this time. You have a privilege under the Constitution to participate in your Government. You owe it to yourself to exercise that privilege in your own self- interest.
When you go to the polls and vote the Democratic ticket on the second of November you're not only voting for me for President and for all those good men for public office but you're voting for yourselves and your own interests. Just keep that in mind.
Now, if you do that and do your duty we won't appease the special interests. We'll be in a position so that the special interests will have to go along with the people and take up their fair share, just as the people will get their fair share. That won't be the case if you let the Republicans in.
We have got a fight to make, as I said in the beginning. We will fight for our rights as decent, patriotic, God-fearing men and women who want security and peace and freedom for now and for all time. That's the issue with which you are faced.
[8.] JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY (To State party representatives and labor leaders, 10 p.m.)
Mr. Chairman, Congressman Hart, the city Mayor, Mayor Hague, Senator Moore, the candidate for Governor:
I don't think there's any doubt but what New Jersey will stay where it belongs--in the Democratic column. New Jersey has never deserved anything but a Democratic administration because the Democrats stand for the people.
I hope that you will send a congressional delegation to Washington this time with whom I can work. You've got one man there that I can work with all right, but you've got one or two I can't work with.
I am highly pleased, highly honored, and it has been one of the grandest days I have had on the whole tour. Every time I go into a State I say, "Well, this one can't be as good as the other one." Then each one gets better. There is a buildup my friends.
We are going to win this election because we're right and they're wrong.
[9.] JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY (At Lincoln High School, 10:37 p.m.)
Thank you very much. I can't tell you, I can't even begin to express my appreciation for this Jersey City reception, and I want to pay my tribute to you, Mayor, and my good friend, Frank Hague, who got this thing up in so good a fashion. This is something to write home about. I have been in Rio de Janeiro, I have been in Mexico City, I have been in New York City, and in Los Angeles and San Francisco and Seattle and Denver. Call the roll of all the great cities in the country, and this tops them all. And, in each instance, I thought the next one could never be outdone, but here it is.
Your enthusiasm shows that you take your politics seriously. That's the way it ought to be, because politics is your business. Politics is government, and you are the Government if you exercise the privilege delegated to you in this great Republic of ours. If you don't take an interest in your Government and elect the right people, you have nobody to blame but yourselves.
Now, in 1946 only one-third of the people of the United States who had the right, exercised that privilege to vote. And look what you got. And you didn't deserve a bit of sympathy for getting it because you did it to yourselves. You can't do that this year. I am warning you, the people of the United States, that the voters are not going to make the same mistake this year that they made in 1946. This time you are going to come out and vote.
The registration is up in almost every State in the country. Labor has been doing great work towards getting out the vote. The workers know that they are in a fight to protect their basic rights.
This is everybody's fight. It's not labor's fight alone. It's also the fight of the white-collar worker, the professional man, the farmer, and all the people in the United States--the fight to preserve the gains made since 1933, when President Roosevelt took office. It's a fight to buildup a greater future for all the people of the United States.
We are going to win that fight. We must win that fight. Too much is at stake in this election, my friends, to be indifferent about it. Don't make the mistake of thinking it makes no difference to you whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in control of the National Government--and don't let any of your friends make that mistake. Remember what the last Republican administration did to you in 12 years: depression, unemployment, foreclosures and evictions, bank failures, veterans selling apples. They were told that they were going to be put into business. Well, they went into business-at the street corner selling apples. We have tried to profit from that experience in this Democratic administration.
And what did the Republicans do to help it? Did the Republican leaders care what happened to you in the depression ? Did the Republican administration provide the jobs you needed? Did they save your homes or protect your bank deposits? They either didn't care what happened to you or they didn't know what to do about it. They just sat and waited for prosperity to come from around the corner.
The Democrats took action. Prosperity couldn't get around the corner until it had some help. It took a government that cared about the people, that had faith in the people. It took a government that was willing to try new ideas. It took a government that put human rights above property rights. You got that kind of government when you elected Franklin Roosevelt.
There is a basic difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties. The difference between the Republican way of meeting a depression and the Democratic way of meeting a depression is typical of the fundamental differences between the two parties. The Democratic Party has always been the party of progress and liberalism, the party that puts human rights first. The Republican Party has always been dominated by the forces of reaction. They want to go back to their own peculiar concept of government, even though it is completely out of line with modern conditions.
The people of this country can hope to get forward-looking government only through the Democratic Party.
The best way to decide how to vote is on the record: first, I want to emphasize again that what the Government does makes a great difference to you in your everyday life. It touches every individual in this Nation; two, you can do more for yourselves by going to the polls to vote on election day than you can possibly do any other way.
This is your fight. I am only waking you up to the fact that it is your fight. You better get out and help me win this fight or you're going to be the loser, not I. If you vote the Democratic ticket, you vote for yourselves and you vote for your best interest, and you want to be sure to vote the way that will do you the most good for yourselves and for the country. The only intelligent way to vote is on the basis of the record. I want to see it done that way because I know that our party has the best record.
The record shows a clear pattern. You hear a lot of speeches that try to confuse the record, but the main outline of the record is clear. The Republican Party has consistently worked for big business. The Democratic Party has consistently worked for all the people.
Now, let us take the question of high prices. I don't need to tell you how big a problem high prices are and how much they hurt you. During the war, when it was a harder job than it is now, the Democratic administration and a Democratic Congress stabilized prices. The Democrats protected you against excessive prices until the Republicans in Congress led a successful fight to destroy price control. That Republican 80th Congress has repeatedly refused to restore the power to hold down prices. They have protected the excessive profits for big business but they haven't protected the buying power of your wages and salaries.
The record is clearest of all a little further along. Republican favoritism for big business is shown most clearly by repeated attacks on the workers. This affects all workers, whether or not they are members of unions. Big business wants to keep wages low.
For years the Republican Party has been the ally of big business. The workingmen and women have turned to the Democratic Party, which has always been the workingman's friend.
Labor suffered under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The false prosperity of the 1920's crumbled because workers, along with farmers, were getting the little end of the stick. The Republicans would like to give the farmers and the workers the little end of the stick again. If you are fool enough to accept that little end again, you ought to have it.
That era of the 1920's was the era of the open shop and the yellow-dog contract; and the reckless use of labor injunctions. The strength of labor unions was reduced to less than 3 million members. Sweat shops abounded and child labor was the order of the day. When the crash came, labor suffered the brunt of it.
In 1932, more than 12 million men and women were unemployed. Wages-for those lucky enough to have jobs--were about 45 cents an hour.
In 1933, this Government got a President and a Congress with a heart. They cared something about labor. They cared something about the farmers. They cared something about the people--more than they did about money.
The Democratic Party set out to do something for the people and did it. We did something for labor, not at the expense of anybody else but to round out a program for the good of all the people. We gave real protection to the right of workers to join together in their own unions. We gave national recognition to the right of collective bargaining. We established a minimum wage and outlawed the sweat shops. We saved homes from foreclosures and helped to provide new homes on terms that workers could afford.
If you remember, back in 1932, 123,000 farmers were kicked off their farms. Last year, there were less than 800 who couldn't pay the interest on their mortgage. People were pushed out of their homes so fast that when the Democrats came in, they had to form the great Home Owners Loan Corporation which saved millions of homes for millions of people. The Republicans didn't do anything about it.
We provided protection against the loss of earnings due to old age and death.
The Democratic Party gave the country a New Deal. And that New Deal paid off too. It was good for the country. It was good for labor. It was good for the farmer. It was good for every citizen in the United States.
There is this difference: We have 61 million, nearly 62 million people at work in this country today. There is nobody walking the streets, hunting for a job. If a man wants a job, he has the opportunity. The farmers are in the most prosperous condition they have ever been in in the history of the world--and they are not in that condition at the expense of the country. Farmers and labor go along side by side, and when they are both prosperous the whole country is prosperous and everybody profits by it. The big corporations that they talk so much about have made more money in the last three than they ever made before in history--and that's money made after taxes. And yet they cry about it and say that we are trying to hold them down. Why, they are in better condition now than they have ever been in history.
Now, when a man does work these days, his hourly pay is about three times as much as it was in 1932. Now, labor unions have 16 million members, and that's a good thing for the whole country. Some people have complained that the Democratic Party paid too much attention to the things that labor wanted. I'm going to confess something to you; I've gotten a lot of advice from labor leaders, and most of it has been good advice. When it wasn't good, I didn't take it. They have the welfare of the country at heart just as much as anybody--and I will say, a great deal more than a lot of people. And I intend to keep getting advice like that for the next 4 years.
One of the worst things that ever happened was the election of that Both Congress. That interrupted our progress.
I have talked a lot about this Republican, "do-nothing" 80th Congress, and there is a very good reason for my talking about them. That Congress has shown clearly what we can expect from the Republican Party. That's the reason I've been going after them hammer and tongs.
So far as labor is concerned, the Republicans made this very clear. They passed the Taft-Hartley to weaken the strength of labor unions. They refused to increase the minimum wage above 40 cents an hour, although 40 cents will only buy about as much as 23 cents would buy when the minimum wage law was first passed. They wrecked the Labor Department. This tells you what to expect from them in the future.
They have done the same thing to the farmer. They started in to wreck the farmer, just as they have tried to wreck the laborer.
And the record of the 80th Congress is the handwriting on the wall--"MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN." They better beware.
Do you want an even stronger labor legislation than the Taft-Hartley law? Do you? Then you better not vote the Republican ticket. Do you want to return to sweat shop wages in the United States? All right-vote Democratic. Do you want your social security benefits endangered? Well then, you better not vote Republican. Do you want to play second fiddle to big business? All right--vote the Democratic ticket on the second of November.
The Democratic Party offers you another choice. You can apply the same test to the Democratic Party that you apply to the Republican Party. What does the Democratic Party promise you, and does its past performance back up those promises? The record of the Democratic Party is a record of performance. All we ask is that you look at the record. The record shows that you can count on the Democratic Party because it is your party, the people's party.
What do you want your Government to do ? Do you think the minimum wage ought to be more than 40 cents an hour? All right--vote the Democratic ticket. Do you think the Taft-Hartley Act ought to be replaced by a law that gives labor a fair deal ? All right, remember--vote the Democratic ticket on the second of November. Do you feel that social security benefits ought to be increased? Vote Democratic. Do you believe in a government that puts people ahead of property, that thinks the little fellow has just as many rights as the big fellow? All right--then you better vote the Democratic ticket.
Now, this, my friends, is a great Nation. This is the greatest Nation in the history of the world, the greatest Republic the sun has ever shown upon, and we got that way because we have a government of and by and for the people.
This Government believes in ideals that are an inspiration to people all over the world. Our great economic strength is the bulwark of democracy through the whole world. Our opportunities and our obligations extend far beyond our own shores. We can contribute as no other nation ever could to building a peaceful world. And, my friends, peace in the world comes before everything else.
I wish to repeat: I work for peace and I pray for peace because it's much more important to have peace in this world than for me to be President of the United States. But, we can make our full contribution to peace only if we maintain a strong and vigorous democracy at home. To do that, we must fight for the great causes in which we so deeply believe--for equal treatment and equal opportunity for all the people. A return to reactionary government in the United States would be a tragedy not only for this country but for the whole world and every person in the world.
My friends, we just can't let that happen. It will not happen if the people of America turn out in full force on election day. That, my friends, is your sacred duty. You owe that to the country.
Remember, the second of November is the day of destiny. Be sure you vote on that day and send this country down the right road.
NOTE; In the course of his remarks on October 7 the President referred to Democratic candidates for Representative Harry Keller, George M. Rhodes, and Wynn James, Jr., Mayor John F. Davis of Reading, former Representative Daniel K. Hoch, Mayor Donald V. Hock of Allentown, Mayor David L. Lawrence of Pittsburgh, former Senator Joseph R. Grundy, and Representative Francis E. Walter, all of Pennsylvania; Democratic candidates for Representative Peter W. Rodino, Jr., Hugh J. Addonizio, and Harry Dudkin, Mayor James T. Kirk of Elizabeth, Democratic candidate for Senator Archibald S. Alexander, Mayor Vincent J. Murphy of Newark, Representative Edward J. Hart, Mayor Frank H. Eggers of Jersey City, former Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City, former Senator A. Harry Moore, and Democratic candidate for Governor Elmer Wene, all of New Jersey; Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio; Representative John Taber of New York; Representative Joseph W. Martin, Jr., of Massachusetts; and Representative Charles A. Halleck of Indiana.
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SOURCE: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/trudoc.htm
Truman, Harry S., Address to Congress on Greece and Turkey, March 12, 1947
Truman Doctrine PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN'S ADDRESS BEFORE A JOINT SESSION OF CONGRESS, MARCH 12, 1947
Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Congress of the United States:
The gravity of the situation which confronts the world today necessitates my appearance before a joint session of the Congress. The foreign policy and the national security of this country are involved.
One aspect of the present situation, which I wish to present to you at this time for your consideration and decision, concerns Greece and Turkey.
The United States has received from the Greek Government an urgent appeal for financial and economic assistance. Preliminary reports from the American Economic Mission now in Greece and reports from the American Ambassador in Greece corroborate the statement of the Greek Government that assistance is imperative if Greece is to survive as a free nation.
I do not believe that the American people and the Congress wish to turn a deaf ear to the appeal of the Greek Government.
Greece is not a rich country. Lack of sufficient natural resources has always forced the Greek people to work hard to make both ends meet. Since 1940, this industrious and peace loving country has suffered invasion, four years of cruel enemy occupation, and bitter internal strife.
When forces of liberation entered Greece they found that the retreating Germans had destroyed virtually all the railways, roads, port facilities, communications, and merchant marine. More than a thousand villages had been burned. Eighty-five per cent of the children were tubercular. Livestock, poultry, and draft animals had almost disappeared. Inflation had wiped out practically all savings.
As a result of these tragic conditions, a militant minority, exploiting human want and misery, was able to create political chaos which, until now, has made economic recovery impossible.
Greece is today without funds to finance the importation of those goods which are essential to bare subsistence. Under these circumstances the people of Greece cannot make progress in solving their problems of reconstruction. Greece is in desperate need of financial and economic assistance to enable it to resume purchases of food, clothing, fuel and seeds. These are indispensable for the subsistence of its people and are obtainable only from abroad. Greece must have help to import the goods necessary to restore internal order and security, so essential for economic and political recovery.
The Greek Government has also asked for the assistance of experienced American administrators, economists and technicians to insure that the financial and other aid given to Greece shall be used effectively in creating a stable and self-sustaining economy and in improving its public administration.
The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists, who defy the government's authority at a number of points, particularly along the northern boundaries. A Commission appointed by the United Nations security Council is at present investigating disturbed conditions in northern Greece and alleged border violations along the frontier between Greece on the one hand and Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia on the other.
Meanwhile, the Greek Government is unable to cope with the situation. The Greek army is small and poorly equipped. It needs supplies and equipment if it is to restore the authority of the government throughout Greek territory. Greece must have assistance if it is to become a self-supporting and self- respecting democracy.
The United States must supply that assistance. We have already extended to Greece certain types of relief and economic aid but these are inadequate.
There is no other country to which democratic Greece can turn.
No other nation is willing and able to provide the necessary support for a democratic Greek government.
The British Government, which has been helping Greece, can give no further financial or economic aid after March 31. Great Britain finds itself under the necessity of reducing or liquidating its commitments in several parts of the world, including Greece.
We have considered how the United Nations might assist in this crisis. But the situation is an urgent one requiring immediate action and the United Nations and its related organizations are not in a position to extend help of the kind that is required.
It is important to note that the Greek Government has asked for our aid in utilizing effectively the financial and other assistance we may give to Greece, and in improving its public administration. It is of the utmost importance that we supervise the use of any funds made available to Greece; in such a manner that each dollar spent will count toward making Greece self-supporting, and will help to build an economy in which a healthy democracy can flourish.
No government is perfect. One of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected. The Government of Greece is not perfect. Nevertheless it represents eighty-five per cent of the members of the Greek Parliament who were chosen in an election last year. Foreign observers, including 692 Americans, considered this election to be a fair expression of the views of the Greek people.
The Greek Government has been operating in an atmosphere of chaos and extremism. It has made mistakes. The extension of aid by this country does not mean that the United States condones everything that the Greek Government has done or will do. We have condemned in the past, and we condemn now, extremist measures of the right or the left. We have in the past advised tolerance, and we advise tolerance now.
Greece's neighbor, Turkey, also deserves our attention.
The future of Turkey as an independent and economically sound state is clearly no less important to the freedom-loving peoples of the world than the future of Greece. The circumstances in which Turkey finds itself today are considerably different from those of Greece. Turkey has been spared the disasters that have beset Greece. And during the war, the United States and Great Britain furnished Turkey with material aid.
Nevertheless, Turkey now needs our support.
Since the war Turkey has sought financial assistance from Great Britain and the United States for the purpose of effecting that modernization necessary for the maintenance of its national integrity.
That integrity is essential to the preservation of order in the Middle East.
The British government has informed us that, owing to its own difficulties can no longer extend financial or economic aid to Turkey.
As in the case of Greece, if Turkey is to have the assistance it needs, the United States must supply it. We are the only country able to provide that help.
I am fully aware of the broad implications involved if the United States extends assistance to Greece and Turkey, and I shall discuss these implications with you at this time.
One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. This was a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan. Our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations.
To ensure the peaceful development of nations, free from coercion, the United States has taken a leading part in establishing the United Nations, The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members. We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.
The peoples of a number of countries of the world have recently had totalitarian regimes forced upon them against their will. The Government of the United States has made frequent protests against coercion and intimidation, in violation of the Yalta agreement, in Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria. I must also state that in a number of other countries there have been similar developments.
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.
The world is not static, and the status quo is not sacred. But we cannot allow changes in the status quo in violation of the Charter of the United Nations by such methods as coercion, or by such subterfuges as political infiltration. In helping free and independent nations to maintain their freedom, the United States will be giving effect to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
It is necessary only to glance at a map to realize that the survival and integrity of the Greek nation are of grave importance in a much wider situation. If Greece should fall under the control of an armed minority, the effect upon its neighbor, Turkey, would be immediate and serious. Confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East.
Moreover, the disappearance of Greece as an independent state would have a profound effect upon those countries in Europe whose peoples are struggling against great difficulties to maintain their freedoms and their independence while they repair the damages of war.
It would be an unspeakable tragedy if these countries, which have struggled so long against overwhelming odds, should lose that victory for which they sacrificed so much. Collapse of free institutions and loss of independence would be disastrous not only for them but for the world. Discouragement and possibly failure would quickly be the lot of neighboring peoples striving to maintain their freedom and independence.
Should we fail to aid Greece and Turkey in this fateful hour, the effect will be far reaching to the West as well as to the East.
We must take immediate and resolute action.
I therefore ask the Congress to provide authority for assistance to Greece and Turkey in the amount of $400,000,000 for the period ending June 30, 1948. In requesting these funds, I have taken into consideration the maximum amount of relief assistance which would be furnished to Greece out of the $350,000,000 which I recently requested that the Congress authorize for the prevention of starvation and suffering in countries devastated by the war.
In addition to funds, I ask the Congress to authorize the detail of American civilian and military personnel to Greece and Turkey, at the request of those countries, to assist in the tasks of reconstruction, and for the purpose of supervising the use of such financial and material assistance as may be furnished. I recommend that authority also be provided for the instruction and training of selected Greek and Turkish personnel.
Finally, I ask that the Congress provide authority which will permit the speediest and most effective use, in terms of needed commodities, supplies, and equipment, of such funds as may be authorized.
If further funds, or further authority, should be needed for purposes indicated in this message, I shall not hesitate to bring the situation before the Congress. On this subject the Executive and Legislative branches of the Government must work together.
This is a serious course upon which we embark.
I would not recommend it except that the alternative is much more serious. The United States contributed $341,000,000,000 toward winning World War II. This is an investment in world freedom and world peace.
The assistance that I am recommending for Greece and Turkey amounts to little more than 1 tenth of 1 per cent of this investment. It is only common sense that we should safeguard this investment and make sure that it was not in vain.
The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive.
The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.
If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world -- and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.
Great responsibilities have been placed upon us by the swift movement of events.
I am confident that the Congress will face these responsibilities squarely.
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