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.