Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History Read online

  The business aspect of the Fourth of July is not perfect as it stands. See what it costs us every year with loss of life, the crippling of thousands with its fireworks, and the burning down of property. It is not only sacred to patriotism and universal freedom but to the surgeon, the undertaker, the insurance offices—and they are working it for all it is worth.

  I am pleased to see that we have a cessation of war for the time. This coming from me, a soldier, you will appreciate. I was a soldier in the southern war for two weeks, and when gentlemen get up to speak of the great deeds our army and navy have recently done, why, it goes all through me and fires up the old war spirit. I had in my first engagement three horses shot under me. The next ones went over my head, the next hit me in the back. Then I retired to meet an engagement.

  I thank you, gentlemen, for making even a slight reference to the war profession, in which I distinguished myself, short as my career was.

  President Calvin Coolidge Affirms His Faith in Massachusetts

  “Have faith in Massachusetts.”

  “It appeared to me in January, 1914,” wrote Coolidge in his 1929 autobiography, “that a spirit of radicalism prevailed which unless checked was likely to prove very destructive…. What was needed was a restoration of confidence in our own institutions and in each other, on which economic progress might rest.”

  In taking the chair of the Massachusetts senate, the Vermonter who would become the thirtieth president made what he described as “a short address, which [he] had carefully prepared, appealing to the conservative spirit of the people.” The speech was widely remarked in Republican circles; it was circulated at the party’s national convention in Chicago in 1920, and helped get him on the Harding ticket.

  “Keep Cool with Coolidge” was the slogan he ran on in 1924, having succeeded Harding; the reputation for taciturnity was a source of both admiration and scorn. Dorothy Parker declared him “weaned on a pickle,” and although President Reagan hung the Coolidge portrait in the Cabinet Room, his reputation today is that of an inarticulate sourpuss. Few of those who put him down, however, could write the sort of direct, powerful prose in the address that launched his national career, and which is printed here in its entirety.

  The sentences are short and declarative. The argument marches steadily to its conclusion. The paragraph that begins, “Do the day’s work…,” is as punchy and sensible as any delivered by a U.S. politician. French philosopher Buffon wrote, “The style is the man himself,” meaning that the expression reveals the person, and nowhere is that more true than in this exposition of limited government by a man who limited what he had to say to what he thought strictly necessary.

  ***

  I THANK YOU—with gratitude for the high honor given, with appreciation for the solemn obligations assumed—I thank you.

  This commonwealth is one. We are all members of one body. The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together. Industry cannot flourish if labor languish. Transportation cannot prosper if manufactures decline. The general welfare cannot be provided for in any one act, but it is well to remember that the benefit of one is the benefit of all, and the neglect of one is the neglect of all. The suspension of one man’s dividends is the suspension of another man’s pay envelope.

  Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. That state is most fortunate in its form of government which has the aptest instruments for the discovery of laws. The latest, most modern, and nearest perfect system that statesmanship has devised is representative government. Its weakness is the weakness of us imperfect human beings who administer it. Its strength is that even such administration secures to the people more blessings than any other system ever produced. No nation has discarded it and retained liberty. Representative government must be preserved.

  Courts are established, not to determine the popularity of a cause, but to adjudicate and enforce rights. No litigant should be required to submit his case to the hazard and expense of a political campaign. No judge should be required to seek or receive political rewards. The courts of Massachusetts are known and honored wherever men love justice. Let their glory suffer no diminution at our hands. The electorate and judiciary cannot combine. A hearing means a hearing. When the trial of causes goes outside the courtroom, Anglo-Saxon constitutional government ends.

  The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act or resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service. It can, of course, care for the defective and recognize distinguished merit. The normal just care for themselves. Self-government means self-support.

  Man is born into the universe with a personality that is his own. He has a right that is founded upon the constitution of the universe to have property that is his own. Ultimately, property rights and personal rights are the same thing. The one cannot be preserved if the other be violated. Each man is entitled to his rights and the rewards of his service, be they never so large or never so small.

  History reveals no civilized people among whom there were not a highly educated class, and large aggregations of wealth, represented usually by the clergy and the nobility. Inspiration has always come from above. Diffusion of learning has come down from the university to the common school—the kindergarten is last. No one would now expect to aid the common school by abolishing higher education.

  It may be that the diffusion of wealth works in an analogous way. As the little red schoolhouse is builded in the college, it may be that the fostering and protection of large aggregations of wealth are the only foundation on which to build the prosperity of the whole people. Large profits mean large payrolls. But profits must be the result of service performed. In no land are there so many and such large aggregations of wealth as here; in no land do they perform larger service; in no land will the work of a day bring so large a reward in material and spiritual welfare.

  Have faith in Massachusetts. In some unimportant detail some other states may surpass her, but in the general results, there is no place on earth where the people secure, in a larger measure, the blessings of organized government, and nowhere can those functions more properly be termed self-government.

  Do the day’s work. If it be to protect the rights of the weak, whoever objects, do it. If it be to help a powerful corporation better to serve the people, whatever the opposition, do that. Expect to be called a standpatter, but don’t be a standpatter. Expect to be called a demagogue, but don’t be a demagogue. Don’t hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don’t hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table. Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. Don’t hurry to legislate. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation.

  We need a broader, firmer, deeper faith in the people—a faith that men desire to do right, that the commonwealth is founded upon a righteousness which will endure, a reconstructed faith that the final approval of the people is given not to demagogues, slavishly pandering to their selfishness, merchandising with the clamor of the hour, but to statesmen, ministering to their welfare, representing their deep, silent, abiding convictions.

  Statutes must appeal to more than material welfare. Wages won’t satisfy, be they never so large. Nor houses; nor lands; nor coupons, though they fall thick as the leaves of autumn. Man has a spiritual nature. Touch it, and it must respond as the magnet responds to the pole. To that, not to selfishness, let the laws of the commonwealth appeal. Recognize the immortal worth and dignity of man. Let the laws of Massachusetts proclaim to her humblest citizen, performing the most menial task, the recognition of his manhood, the recognition that all men are peers, the humblest with the most exalted, the recognition that all work is glorified. Such is the path to equality before the law. Such is the foundation of liberty under the law. Such is the su
blime revelation of man’s relation to man—democracy.

  Interior Secretary Harold Ickes Lashes Isolationists and Defeatists

  “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.”

  Harold Ickes was a Chicago lawyer and newspaper reporter with a flair for plain speaking and an instinct for the killing phrase. He styled himself a “curmudgeon”; when he resigned from Harry Truman’s cabinet over the selection of a Truman friend to be undersecretary of the navy, he entered political phrasemaking immortality with “I am against government by crony.”

  As Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, the outspoken Ickes was point man attacking the New Deal’s detractors. As World War II began, he took on Senator Burton K. Wheeler and members of the America First Committee, getting out in front of FDR in castigating the isolationists. In 1940, poet Anne Morrow Lindbergh, like her husband, Charles, impressed by Germany’s power, wrote a long essay titled “The Wave of the Future,” which many readers took as an apologia for fascism. In his May 18, 1941, “I Am an American Day” speech on the Central Park Mall in New York City, Ickes made the case for intervention and chose as his villain “the wavers of the future.” The sentences are short, declarative, punchy, answering simple self-directed questions: “Do you know why? Because we cannot live in the world alone….” The accusations admit no pussyfooting: “I tell you that this is a cold-blooded lie.” It is a classic of rock-’em, sock-’em political oratory with an undercurrent of idealism.

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  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….

  We should be clear on this point. What is convulsing the world today is not merely another old-fashioned war. It is a counterrevolution 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….

  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 onl
y 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 will help brave England drive back the hordes from hell who besiege her, and then we will join for the destruction of savage and bloodthirsty dictators everywhere. But we must be firm and decisive. We must know our will and make it felt. And we must hurry.

  Judge Learned Hand Evokes the Spirit of Liberty

  “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right….”

  The influential jurist with the unlikely but appropriate name Learned Hand served as presiding judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals from 1939 to 1951, and as senior judge for a decade after. Though never appointed to the Supreme Court, he was able, through his two thousand decisions, to uphold the liberty of the individual and to show that the written and the spoken word did not need the most august forum to have an impact on the law.

  Toward the end of World War II, Judge Hand spoke at an “I Am an American Day” ceremony in New York City’s Central Park. Instead of a rousing, patriotic address, he delivered a thoughtful credo that profoundly moved the audience; when his “Spirit of Liberty” speech was widely reprinted, the judge took care to add a footnote crediting historian H. G. Wells for a thought on which he bottomed the line about how Jesus “taught mankind a lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten”; the Wells phrasing was “whose pitiless and difficult doctrine of self-abandonment and self-forgetfulness we can neither disregard nor yet bring ourselves to obey.” Such scrupulous attribution of an idea is rare, but it was characteristic of Judge Hand, who was careful about not stealing anything.