Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History

by Unknown

  It seeks peace with the industrial world. It seeks cooperation and mutuality of effort with the agricultural population. It would avoid strikes. It would have its rights determined under the law by the peaceful negotiations and contract relationships that are supposed to characterize American commercial life.

  Until an aroused public opinion demands that employers accept that rule, labor has no recourse but to surrender its rights or struggle for their realization with its own economic power.

  Labor, like Israel, has many sorrows. Its women weep for their fallen, and they lament for the future of the children of the race. It ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table and who has been sheltered in labor’s house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.

  I repeat that labor seeks peace and guarantees its own loyalty, but the voice of labor, insistent upon its rights, should not be annoying to the ears of justice nor offensive to the conscience of the American people.

  FDR Reminds the Daughters of the American Revolution about Their Lineage

  “Remember always that all of us… are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”

  This talk is remembered as the “My fellow immigrants” speech, as if President Roosevelt had startled his audience with the salutation “My fellow immigrants”—which he did not. Yet the theme of the brief remarks was tastefully shocking: that the conservative, wellborn audience, which considered him “a traitor to his class” for his social legislation, should not forget its immigrant heritage. He was conducting a modern revolution in the New Deal, and he forced the listeners to recall the word “revolution” in their organization’s title.

  The day before, on April 20, 1938, the DAR had adopted resolutions contrary to his leftist programs, but had applauded his plans to expand the navy. He seized on this approval to end his carefully considered “unprepared” remarks in an upbeat way, lest his gentle chastisement appear to be what it was.

  ***

  I COULDN’T LET a fifth year go by without coming to see you. I must ask you to take me just as I am, in a business suit—and I see you are still in favor of national defense—take me as I am, with no prepared remarks. You know, as a matter of fact, I would have been here to one of your conventions in prior years—one or more—but it is not the time that it takes to come before you and speak for half an hour, it is the preparation for that half hour. And I suppose that for every half-hour speech that I make before a convention or over the radio, I put in ten hours preparing it.

  So I have to ask you to bear with me, to let me just come here without preparation to tell you how glad I am to avail myself of this opportunity, to tell you how proud I am, as a revolutionary descendant, to greet you.

  I thought of preaching on a text, but I shall not. I shall only give you the text, and I shall not preach on it. I think I can afford to give you the text because it so happens, through no fault of my own, that I am descended from a number of people who came over in the Mayflower. More than that, every one of my ancestors on both sides—and when you go back four generations or five generations it means thirty-two or sixty-four of them—every single one of them, without exception, was in this land in 1776. And there was only one Tory among them.

  The text is this: remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

  I am particularly glad to know that today you are making this fine appeal to the youth of America. To these rising generations, to our sons and grandsons and great-grandsons, we cannot overestimate the importance of what we are doing in this year, in our own generation, to keep alive the spirit of American democracy. The spirit of opportunity is the kind of spirit that has led us as a nation—not as a small group but as a nation—to meet the very great problems of the past.

  We look for a younger generation that is going to be more American than we are. We are doing the best that we can, and yet we can do better than that, we can do more than that, by inculcating in the boys and girls of this country today some of the underlying fundamentals, the reasons that brought our immigrant ancestors to this country, the reasons that impelled our revolutionary ancestors to throw off a fascist yoke.

  We have a great many things to do. Among other things in this world is the need of being very, very certain, no matter what happens, that the sovereignty of the United States will never be impaired.

  There have been former occasions, conventions of the Daughters of the American Revolution, when voices were raised, needed to be raised, for better national defense. This year, you are raising those same voices and I am glad of it. But I am glad also that the government of the United States can assure you today that it is taking definite, practical steps for the defense of the nation.

  Walter Lippmann Scores His Generational Cohort for Having Taken “the Easy Way”

  “‘For every good that you wish to preserve, you will have to sacrifice your comfort and your ease. There is nothing for nothing any longer.’”

  Walter Lippmann helped found the progressive magazine the New Republic; he became the most influential “serious” newspaper columnist from 1931 to his retirement in 1967, and was the man to whom the epithet “pundit”—in Hindi, “learned man”; in American English, “sage commentator”—was most often applied. In his book The Good Society, he set forth a political philosophy based on a moral order; his intellectualism, internationalist bent, and aristocratic nature earned the respect of the nation’s leaders, whose confidences he tended to keep in return for an opportunity to advise in private.

  In the summer of 1940, world war was on the horizon. Lippmann, who himself had underestimated the threat of Hitler, recognized the danger that his generation of leaders had failed to counter. He spoke to the Harvard class of 1910’s thirtieth reunion to brace them and himself for the storm to come. This text is from the Lippmann papers at the Yale library, which includes the speaker’s editing. A despairing line, “I do not know whether we shall see again in our lives a peace that we shall believe can last,” is crossed out.

  ***

  I THINK I am speaking for all of you when I say that we have come here in order that we may pause for a moment in which to fortify our faith and to renew our courage and to make strong our spirit.

  We have come back to Harvard and when we go away, we shall have realized what ordinary words can scarcely make real to us: we shall realize what it is that is threatened with destruction, what it is that we are called upon to defend. We walk again through the Yard and we shall think of the three centuries during which on this ground men have believed in the dignity of the human soul, and how, believing this, they have cherished, and labored patiently in, the great central tradition of the Western world. This memory will fortify our faith, and we shall say to ourselves that this glory, which is ours, this glory which we have known since our youth, this glory which has given to each of us whatever there is in him that matters at all, we shall say that this glory shall not perish from the earth.

  We have come back here, along with those we love, to see one another again. And by being together we shall remember that we are part of a great company, we shall remember that we are not mere individuals isolated in a tempest, but that we are members of a community—that what we have to do, we shall do together, with friends beside us. And their friendliness will quiet our anxieties, and ours will quiet theirs. And as they live up to what we expect of them, we shall find the resolution to live up to what they expect of us. And so we shall renew our courage, and we shall find the strength that we shall need.

  I am speaking solemnly because this is a solemn hour in the history of the modern world. No one here today will imagine he can divert himself by forgetting it. But though the world roars and rages about us, we must secure our peace of mind, a quiet place of tranquillity and of order and of purpose within our own selves. For it is doubt and uncertainty of purpose and confusion of values which unnerves men. Peac
e of mind comes to men only when, having faced all the issues clearly and without flinching, they have made their decision and are resolved.

  For myself I like to think these days of the words of Washington which Gouverneur Morris reported, words spoken when the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia seemed about to fail: Washington, said Morris, “was collected within himself. His countenance had more than usual solemnity, His eye was fixed, and seemed to look into futurity.” “It is,” said he, “too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted. Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. If to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hands of God.”

  Upon the standard to which the wise and honest generation must now repair, it is written, “You have lived the easy way; henceforth, you will live the hard way.” It is written, “You came into a great heritage made by the insight and the sweat and the blood of inspired and devoted and courageous men; thoughtlessly and in utmost self-indulgence you have all but squandered this inheritance. Now only by the heroic virtues which made this inheritance can you restore it again.” It is written, “You took the good things for granted. Now you must earn them again.” It is written, “For every right that you cherish, you have a duty which you must fulfill. For every hope that you entertain, you have a task that you must perform. For every good that you wish to preserve, you will have to sacrifice your comfort and your ease. There is nothing for nothing any longer.”

  For twenty years the free peoples of the Western world took the easy way, ourselves more lightheartedly than any others. That is why we were stricken. That is why the defenses of Western civilization crumbled. That is why we find ourselves today knowing that we here in America may soon be the last stronghold of our civilization—the citadel of law and of liberty, of mercy and of charity, of justice among men and of love and of good will.

  We are defending that citadel; we have made it the center of the ultimate resistance to the evil which is devastating the world. But more than that, more than the center of resistance, we mean to make it the center of the resurrection, the source of the energies by which the men who believe as we do may be liberated, and the lands that are subjugated redeemed, and the world we live in purified and pacified once more. This is the American destiny, and unless we fulfill that destiny we shall have betrayed our own past and we shall make our own future meaningless, chaotic, and low.

  But we shall not resist the evil that has come into the world, nor prepare the resurrection in which we believe, if we continue to take, as we have taken so persistently, the easy way in all things. Let us remind ourselves how in these twenty years we have at the critical junctures taken always the road of the least effort and the method of the cheapest solution and of greatest self-indulgence.

  In 1917–1918, we participated in a war which ended in the victory of the free peoples. It was hard to make a good and magnanimous peace. It was easier to make a bad and unworkable peace. We took the easiest way.

  Having sacrificed blood and treasure to win the war, having failed to establish quickly and at the first stroke a good and lasting peace, it was too hard, it was too much trouble to keep on trying. We gave up. We took the easy way, the way that required us to do nothing, and we passed resolutions and made pious declarations saying that there was not going to be any more war, that war was henceforth outlawed.

  Thus we entered the postwar twenties, refusing to organize the peace of the world because that was too much trouble, believing—because that was no trouble at all—that peace would last by declaring that it ought to last. So enchanted were we with our own noble but inexpensive sentiments that, though the world was disorganized and in anarchy, we decided to disarm ourselves and the other democracies. That was also the easy way. It saved money. It saved effort.

  In this mood we faced the problems of reconstruction from the other war. It was too much trouble to make a workable settlement of reparations and of the war debts. It was easier to let them break down and wreck the finances of the world. We took the easier way. It was too much trouble to work out arrangements for the resumption of trade because it was too much trouble to deal with the vested interests and the lobbyists and the politicians. It was easier to let the trade of the world be strangled by tariffs, quotas, and exchange controls. And we took the easy way. It was easier to finance an inflationary boom by cheap money than it was to reestablish trade based upon the exchange of goods. We indulged ourselves in the inflationary boom and let it run (because it was too much trouble to check it) into a crash that threw about twenty-five millions, here and abroad, out of work, and destroyed the savings of a large part of the people of all countries.

  Having got to that, it was too hard to liquidate the inflation. It was easier to cover up the inflation and pretend that it did not exist. So we took the easier way—we maintained the tariffs, we maintained the wage costs and the overhead expenditures of the boom, and thus made it impossible to recover from the crash.

  The failure of the recovery produced at the foundations of Western civilization a revolutionary discontent. It was easy to be frightened by the discontent. So we were properly frightened. But it was hard to make the effort and the sacrifice to remedy the discontent. And because it was hard, we did not do it. All that we did was to accuse one another of being economic royalists on the one hand, economic lunatics on the other. It was easier to call names than it was to do anything else, and so we called names.

  Then out of this discontent there was bred in the heart of Europe and on the edge of Asia an organized rebellion against the whole heritage of Western civilization. It was easy to disapprove, and we disapproved. But it was hard to organize and prepare the resistance: that would have required money and effort and sacrifice and discipline and courage. We watched the rebellion grow. We heard it threaten the things we believe in. We saw it commit, year after year, savage crimes. We disliked it all. But we liked better our easygoing ways, our jobs, our profits, and our pleasures, and so we said, It is bad, but it won’t last; it is dangerous, but it can’t cross the ocean; it is evil, but if we arm ourselves, and discipline ourselves, and act with other free peoples to contain it and hold it back, we shall be giving up our ease and our comfort, we shall be taking risks, and that is more trouble than we care to take.

  So we are where we are today. We are where we are because whenever we had a choice to make, we have chosen the alternative that required the least effort at the moment. There is organized mechanized evil loose in the world. But what has made possible its victories is the lazy, self-indulgent materialism, the amiable, lackadaisical, footless, confused complacency of the free nations of the world. They have dissipated, like wastrels and drunkards, the inheritance of freedom and order that came to them from hardworking, thrifty, faithful, believing, and brave men. The disaster in the midst of which we are living is a disaster in the character of men. It is a catastrophe of the soul of a whole generation which had forgotten, had lost, and had renounced the imperative and indispensable virtues of laborious, heroic, and honorable men.

  To these virtues we shall return in the ordeal through which we are now passing, or all that still remains will be lost and all that we attempt, in order to defend it, will be in vain. We shall turn from the soft vices in which a civilization decays, we shall return to the stern virtues by which a civilization is made, we shall do this because, at long last, we know that we must, because finally we begin to see that the hard way is the only enduring way.

  You had perhaps hoped, as I did when we came together for our twenty-fifth reunion, that tonight we should have reached a point in our lives when we could look forward in a few more years to retiring from active responsibility in the heat of the day, and could look forward to withdrawing into the calm of a cooler evening. You know that that is not to be. We have not yet earned our right to rest at ease. When we think of the desperate misery and the awful sufferin
g that has befallen the people of France and of Great Britain and of Austria and Czechoslovakia and Poland and Denmark and Norway and the Netherlands and Belgium, we shall not, I hope, complain or feel sorry for ourselves.

  I like to think—in fact, I intend to go away from here thinking—that having remembered the past we shall not falter, having seen one another again, we shall not flinch.

  Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch Offers America’s First Plan to Control Nuclear Weapons

  “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead.”

  The self-made millionaire financier was chosen by President Wilson to head the War Industries Board during World War I; for the rest of his long life (he died in 1965, at ninety-four), Bernard Baruch preferred the role of unofficial, behind-the-scenes presidential adviser. In Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, can be found the “Bernard M. Baruch Bench of Inspiration”; with ostentatious humility, he frequently held court there.

  Appointed in 1946 by President Truman to present the U.S. plan for control of atomic energy to the UN, Baruch turned to Herbert Bayard Swope, three-time Pulitzer Prize—winning reporter and editor who was his lifelong friend and publicist, to draft a speech. Swope (who pointed out to me in 1952 that Baruch credited him with the coinage of the phrase “cold war”) put the story in the lead by posing a life-and-death choice: “the quick [living] and the dead” is a biblical phrase that occurs in Acts 10:42 and 1 Peter 4:5. It was picked up by Shakespeare in Hamlet, to be said by Laertes as he leaps into the grave of his sister, Ophelia: “Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead….”

  The speech was delivered to a UN meeting in New York’s Hunter College gymnasium on June 14, 1946. The plan it introduced was vetoed by the Soviet Union, which soon developed its own nuclear weapons; at that point, U.S. disarmament policy could no longer be so forthright. However, the Swope-turned phrases are timeless—“better pain as the price of peace than death as the price of war”—and the world came to realize that “we are now facing a problem more of ethics than of physics.”