Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History

by Unknown

  There are only two ways you can vote this year. You can be progressive or reactionary. Whether you vote Republican or Democratic it does not make a difference, you are voting reactionary.

  Now, the Democratic party in its platform and through the utterances of Mr. Wilson has distinctly committed itself to the old flintlock, muzzle-loaded doctrine of states’ rights, and I have said distinctly we are for people’s rights…. I ask you to look at our declaration and hear and read our platform about social and industrial justice and then, friends, vote for the Progressive ticket without regard to me, without regard to my personality—for only by voting for that platform can you be true to the cause of progress throughout this Union. [Helped off platform.]

  Claude Bowers Conjures the Ghosts of Democrats Past to Keynote a Convention

  “A clear call comes to us today to fight anew under the Jeffersonian banner, with the Jacksonian sword, and in the Wilsonian spirit, and, crashing the gates of privilege, make Jeffersonian democracy a living force again in the lives and homes of men.”

  A good keynote address is at once a leisurely evocation of the glory of a partisan past and a brief promise of a glorious future. In the television age, it is also a showcase for a promising young politician, and a party’s presentation of what it considers the best image of the party to the public. A keynoter is usually not assigned to deal with the central issue of the time, its key note; rather, it is the orator’s job at the start of a gathering of partisans to uplift, exhort, and galvanize the troops.

  An example of this kind of keynote address is that of Claude Bowers at the 1928 Democratic National Convention in Houston. That convention nominated Al Smith to face Herbert Hoover, just nominated by the Republicans in Kansas City to succeed Calvin Coolidge. Bowers (1878–1958) was a political columnist for the New York Journal and a popular historian, whose best-known works were The Party Battles of the Jackson Era and Jefferson and Hamilton (he revered Jefferson and despised Hamilton). He later served as FDR’s ambassador to Spain during its civil war and to Chile in the 1940s.

  The orator associates the Republicans with Hamilton and dissociates them from their Lincoln; he foresees a “plunderbund,” or association of predators, if the opposition stays in power; and he makes the coming political contest an Armageddon between the forces of good and evil: “They are led by money-mad cynics and scoffers—and we go forth to battle for the cause of man.” It made everybody in the hall feel good.

  ***

  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN of the Convention:

  The American Democracy has mobilized today to wage a war of extermination against privilege and pillage. We prime our guns against autocracy and bureaucracy. We march against that centralization which threatens the liberties of the people. We fight for the republic of the fathers, and for the recovery of the covenant from the keeping of a caste and class. We battle for the honor of the nation, besmirched and bedraggled by the most brazen and shameless carnival of corruption that ever blackened the reputation of a decent and self-respecting people.

  We stand for the spirit of the preamble of the Declaration that is made a mockery; for the Bill of Rights that is ignored; for the social and economic justice which is refused; for the sovereign right of states that are denied; and for a return to the old-fashioned civic integrity of a Jackson, a Tilden, a Cleveland, and a Wilson. We stand for the restoration of the government to the people who built it by their bravery and cemented it with their blood….

  The issues are as fundamental as they were when Jefferson and Hamilton crossed swords more than a century ago. To understand the conflicting views of these two men on the functions of government is to grasp the deep significance of this campaign.

  Now, Hamilton believed in the rule of an aristocracy of money, and Jefferson in a democracy of men.

  Hamilton believed that governments are created for the domination of the masses, and Jefferson that they are created for the service of the people.

  Hamilton wrote to Morris that governments are strong in proportion as they are made profitable to the powerful; and Jefferson knew that no government is fit to live that does not conserve the interest of the average man.

  Hamilton proposed a scheme for binding the wealthy to the government by making government a source of revenue to the wealthy; and Jefferson unfurled his banner of equal rights.

  Hamilton would have concentrated authority remote from the people, and Jefferson would have diffused it among them.

  Hamilton would have injected governmental activities into all the affairs of men; and Jefferson laid it down as an axiom of freedom that “that government is best which governs least.”

  Just put a pin in this: there is not a major evil of which the American people are complaining now that is not due to the triumph of the Hamiltonian conception of the state. And the tribute to Hamilton at Kansas City was an expression of fealty to him who thought that governments are strong in proportion as they are made profitable to the powerful; who proposed the plan for binding the wealthy; who devised the scheme to tax the farm to pay the factory; and whose purpose was to make democracy in America a mockery and a sham.

  Thus we are challenged once more to a conflict on the fundamentals; and a clear call comes to us today to fight anew under the Jeffersonian banner, with the Jacksonian sword, and in the Wilsonian spirit, and, crashing the gates of privilege, make Jeffersonian democracy a living force again in the lives and homes of men….

  You cannot believe with Lincoln in a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and with Hamilton in a government of the wealthy, by the influential, and for the powerful.

  There are Lincoln Republicans and Hamilton Republicans, but never the twain shall meet….

  What a majestic figure was he who led us in those fruitful years! The cold, even light of his superb intellect played upon the most intricate problems of the times, and they seemed to solve themselves. He lifted the people to such heights of moral grandeur as they had never known before; and his name and purpose made hearts beat faster in lowly places where his praise was sung in every language in the world. And when at length, his body broken, but his spirit soaring still, he fell stricken, while still battling for his faith, there passed to time and to eternity and to all mankind the everlasting keeping of the immortal memory of Woodrow Wilson.

  We submit that a party that stands for that democracy which is inseparable from the liberties of men, and has given a Jefferson, a Jackson, and a Wilson to the service of mankind, has earned the right, in times like these, to the cooperation of independents and progressives in the struggle for the preservation of popular government, and the purging of the nation of that corruption which has made America a byword and a hissing in the very alleys of the world….

  Never in a century has there been such a call to us to battle for the faith of our fathers as there is today; and never has the control of government been so completely concentrated in the hands of a willing caste as now. The dreams of the Hamiltonians have literally come true while the people slept. They wanted organized wealth in possession of the government—and we have it. They wanted the sovereign rights of states denied—and we have it. They wanted bureaucratic agents swarming over the land like the locusts of Egypt—and we have it. They wanted government made profitable to the powerful—and we have it. They wanted, through administration, to make a mockery of democracy—and we have it. The Hamiltonian state is necessarily a temple of gold resting on the bowed back of peasants in other people’s fields—and we almost have that now. They would deify dollars and minimize men, limit self-government and centralize power, cripple democracy, empower bureaucracy, welcome plutocracy—and we will soon have that, too.

  Give the plunderbund but eight years more of such governmental cooperation, and a combination of power companies will put a few men in control of the public utilities of a mighty empire. Make no mistake about it—that is the great Jacksonian struggle of tomorrow. And with that sinister possibility upon us, the people mus
t determine whether they will entrust their interest to those who believe that governments are strong in proportion as they are made profitable to the powerful or to the Jeffersonians, who believe that governments are created for the service of mankind. Once in possession and entrenched, the plunderbund of the power monopoly cannot be dislodged by the fighting force of a dozen Andrew Jacksons….

  We are mobilized to lead the people back to the old paths of constitutional liberty and to the good way. We are going back—back to the old landmarks of liberty and equality when ordinary men had rights that even power respected; when justice, not privilege, was the watchword of the state; when the preamble of the declaration and the bill of rights had meaning; when the nation embraced every section and every class….

  Our principles have been written in the triumphs of the people and baptized in the blood of our bravest and our best. Jefferson phrased them, Jackson vitalized them, Wilson applied them, and we go forth to battle for them now.

  We face a foe grown arrogant with success. It were infamy to permit the enemy to divide us, or divert us, on the eve of such a battle. Issues are involved that go to the determination of the future of our institutions and our children. The call that comes to us is as sacred as the cause of humanity itself. From the grave at the Hermitage comes the solemn warning that no party ever won or deserved to win that did not organize and fight unitedly for victory—and we shall thus organize and fight. This is a unique campaign….

  And we shall win because our cause is just. The predatory forces before us seek a triumph for the sake of the sacking. Their shock troops are the Black Horse Cavalry whose hoofbeats have made hideous music on Pennsylvania Avenue during the last eight years. They are led by money-mad cynics and scoffers—and we go forth to battle for the cause of man. In the presence of such a foe “he who dallies is a dastard and he who doubts is damned.” In this convention we close debate and grasp the sword. The time has come. The battle hour has struck. “Then to your tents, O Israel!”

  President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Instills Confidence in a Depression-Racked Nation

  “This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

  Two emotions—despair and panic—gripped the nation in the depression winter of 1932–33. One out of four workers could not find a job; world grain prices were at a 300-year low; governors of thirty-eight states had closed the banks. In the preceding summer, the Democratic candidate, in his acceptance speech, had promised “a new deal for the American people” and had won the election in a popular landslide, but in the long interregnum between November and March he had not worked with the defeated President Hoover to help revive the economy or refortify spirits. In Europe, fascism was on the rise, and in the United States, the desire for a “man on horseback” to take charge of a moribund America was a threat—indeed, the strongest applause in the new president’s speech came after the line warning he might call for “broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency.”

  Franklin D. Roosevelt, who moved from the New York governorship to the presidency at age fifty-one, had no dictatorship in mind; instead, he saw the need for a dramatic infusion of confidence with a ringing speech, followed by a great show of government activity, to shake the nation out of its mental as well as economic depression. He had in mind some banking regulation and a mild stimulus, with cuts in federal payrolls offset by increases in relief payments—relatively conservative steps in retrospect, considering the scope of the crisis, but seen as daring at the time.

  Working from a draft prepared by Columbia University professor Raymond Moley, one of his “brain trusters,” he wrote out a speech designed to lift spirits. The public had derided his predecessor’s efforts on that score as “Prosperity is just around the corner”; FDR added his scorn to the failed exhortations, but was not afraid to offer “Plenty is at our doorstep.” The most famous line, about “fear itself,” is sometimes attributed to FDR’s reading of Henry David Thoreau’s “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear,” and a nearly identical line can be found in Sir Francis Bacon’s works, but Professor Moley told the anthologist in 1966 that the line was submitted by Louis Howe, the gnomic Roosevelt adviser, who saw the phrase in a newspaper ad a few weeks before the inaugural.

  The speech opens with an attack on “the money changers” who had been driven from the temple—a biblical allusion to an act by Jesus—which made the bankers and the moneyed class in general the already routed villain, An “action program” is promised, but not specified; a moral lesson is drawn, frowning at the previous decade’s “mad chase of evanescent profits”; a martial call for discipline and sacrifice is made, the metaphor extended with “I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack….” Then comes the warning that if this plan doesn’t work, he will ask Congress for greater power to bring “discipline and direction under leadership,” because the people have made him “the present instrument of their wishes.”

  The general promise to do something—to stop the drift and reverse direction—coupled with the steel in the speech of the imposition of “discipline” into the chaos, and the vigor of the voice heard on radio, had an electric effect on popular opinion. The bold tone and buoyant delivery encouraged people parched for hope.

  ***

  THIS IS A day of national consecration.

  I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

  In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

  More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

  Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty, and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

  True, they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortat
ions, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

  The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

  Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellowmen.

  Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

  Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This nation asks for action, and action now.

  Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.