Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (131 page)

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!…

This country is enjoying the greatest prosperity it has ever known because we have been following for sixteen years the policies inaugurated by Franklin D. 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 Eightieth “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 fifteen cents is too much for a loaf of bread, just do without it and wait until you can afford to pay fifteen cents for it.

If you don’t want to pay sixty 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 Eightieth “do-nothing” Congress in this campaign. I will tell you why I will talk about it. If two-thirds of the people stay at home again on election day as they did in 1946, and if we get another Republican Congress like the Eightieth Congress, it will be controlled by the same men who controlled that Eightieth 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 2. 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 sixty-one 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!

A concession speech must be graceful, brave, proud, and rueful; it must not be humble, envious, or vengeful, be filled with “if only’s, or reflect any of the qualities of the sore loser that lie within almost every loser. (“Show me a man who loses gracefully,” said an anonymous football coach, “and I’ll show you a loser.”) Churchill had said, “In defeat, defiance,” but he meant national defeat; in political defeat, defiance is bad form.

Here is the speech conceding victory to his opponent by Adlai Stevenson on November 5, 1952, in the ballroom of the Leland Hotel in Springfield, Illinois.

***

I HAVE A
statement that I should like to make. If I may, I shall read it to you.

My fellow citizens have made their choice and have selected General Eisenhower and the Republican party as the instruments of their will for the next four years.

The people have rendered their verdict, and I gladly accept it.

General Eisenhower has been a great leader in war. He has been a vigorous and valiant opponent in the campaign. These qualities will now be dedicated to leading us all through the next four years.

It is traditionally American to fight hard before an election. It is equally traditional to close ranks as soon as the people have spoken.

From the depths of my heart I thank all of my party and all of those independents and Republicans who supported Senator Sparkman and me.

That which unites us as American citizens is far greater than that which divides us as political parties.

I urge you all to give General Eisenhower the support he will need to carry out the great tasks that lie before him.

I pledge him mine.

We vote as many, but we pray as one. With a united people, with faith in democracy, with common concern for others less fortunate around the globe, we shall move forward with God’s guidance toward the time when his children shall grow in freedom and dignity in a world at peace.

I have sent the following telegram to General Eisenhower at the Commodore Hotel in New York: “The people have made their choice and I congratulate you. That you may be the servant and guardian of peace and make the vale of trouble a door of hope is my earnest prayer. Best wishes. Adlai E. Stevenson.”

Someone asked me, as I came in, down on the street, how I felt, and I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell—Abraham Lincoln. They asked him how he felt once after an unsuccessful election. He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.

Mercurial, shrewd, energetic, earthy, unpredictable, bullying—these were the adjectives used in the West about Nikita Khrushchev when he ran the Soviet Union from 1955 to 1964. In retrospect, he is seen as having been a liberalizing force, a Gorbachev precursor, though his administrative reforms did not liberate most of those in what Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn called the gulag, or system of prison camps, and his attempt to put missiles into Cuba brought the world to the brink of war.

In February of 1956, he laid out the case against Joseph Stalin to the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow. Its proceedings were secret, but the CIA obtained a transcript of Khrushchev’s “secret speech”—perhaps from a KGB source acting with tacit Kremlin approval—and leaked it to Western media. The accusation that Sergey Kirov of Leningrad had been murdered, placed within the context of Stalin’s other depredations, was a bombshell; the reference to the “doctors’ plot” to kill Stalin was another, because it exposed the dictator’s anti-Semitism.

Although Khrushchev blames Stalin for the phrase “enemy of the people,” that was the title of an Ibsen play; however, “cult of the individual” was popularized in the highly publicized “secret speech.”

***

COMRADES! IN THE
report of the Central Committee of the party at the twentieth congress, in a number of speeches by delegates to the Congress, as also formerly during the plenary CC/CPSU [Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union] sessions, quite a lot has been said about the cult of the individual and about its harmful consequences.

After Stalin’s death the Central Committee of the party began to implement
a policy of explaining concisely and consistently that it is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior.

Such a belief about a man, and specifically about Stalin, was cultivated among us for many years.

At the present we are concerned with a question which has immense importance for the party now and for the future—[we are concerned] with how the cult of the person of Stalin has been gradually growing, the cult which became at a certain specific stage the source of a whole series of exceedingly serious and grave perversions of party principles, of party democracy, of revolutionary legality….

Because of the fact that not all as yet realize fully the practical consequences resulting from the cult of the individual, the great harm caused by the violation of the principle of collective direction of the party, and because of the accumulation of immense and limitless power in the hands of one person, the Central Committee of the party considers it absolutely necessary to make the material pertaining to this matter available to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In December 1922, in a letter to the party congress, Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] wrote, “After taking over the position of secretary general, Comrade Stalin accumulated in his hands immeasurable power, and I am not certain whether he will be always able to use this power with the required care.”

This letter, a political document of tremendous importance, known in the party history as Lenin’s “testament,” was distributed among the delegates to the Twentieth Party Congress.

It was precisely during this period (1935–1937–1938) that the practice of mass repression through the government apparatus was born, first against the enemies of Leninism—Trotskyites, Zinovievites, Bukharinites, long since politically defeated by the party, and subsequently also against many honest Communists, against those party cadres who had borne the heavy load of the civil war, and the first and most difficult years of industrialization and collectivization, who actively fought against the Trotskyites and the rightists for the Leninist party line.

Stalin organized the concept “enemy of the people.” This term automatically rendered it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man or men engaged in a controversy be proven; this term made possible the use of the most cruel repression, violating all norms of revolutionary legality,
against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin, against those who were only suspected of hostile intent, against those who had bad reputations in the main, and in actuality, the only proof of guilt used, against all norms of current legal science, was the “confession” of the accused himself; and, as subsequent probing proved, “confessions” were acquired through physical pressures against the accused.

It was determined that of the 139 members and candidates of the party’s Central Committee who were elected at the seventeenth congress, 98 persons, that is, 70 percent, were arrested and shot (mostly in 1937–38).

The same fate met not only the Central Committee members but also the majority of the delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress. Of 1,966 delegates with either voting or advisory rights, 1, 108 persons were arrested on charges of antirevolutionary crimes, that is, decidedly more than a majority. This very fact shows how absurd, wild, and contrary to common sense were the charges of counterrevolutionary crimes made, as we now see, against a majority of participants at the seventeenth party congress.

After the criminal murder of Sergey M. Kirov, mass repressions and brutal acts of violation of Socialist legality began….

Now, when the cases of some of these so-called “spies” and “saboteurs” were examined, it was found that all their cases were fabricated. Confessions of guilt of many arrested and charged with enemy activity were gained with the help of cruel and inhuman tortures.

Comrade Eikhe was arrested April 29, 1938, on the basis of slanderous materials, without the sanction of the prosecutor of the USSR, which was finally received fifteen months after the arrest.

Eikhe was forced under torture to sign ahead of time a protocol of his confession prepared by the investigative judges in which he and several other eminent party workers were accused of anti-Soviet activity.

On October 1, 1939, Eikhe sent his declaration to Stalin in which he categorically denied his guilt and asked for an examination of his case. In the declaration he wrote, “There is no more bitter misery than to sit in the jail of a government for which I have always fought.”

On February 4 Eikhe was shot. It has been definitely established now that Eikhe’s case was fabricated; he has been posthumously rehabilitated….

The power accumulated in the hands of one person, Stalin, led to serious consequences during the great patriotic war.

A cable from our London embassy dated June 18, 1941, stated, “As of now Cripps is deeply convinced of the inevitability of armed conflict between Germany and the USSR which will begin not later than the
middle of June. According to Cripps, the Germans have presently concentrated 147 divisions (including air force and service units) along the Soviet borders.”

Despite these particularly grave warnings, the necessary steps were not taken to prepare the country properly for defense and to prevent it from being caught unawares.

When the Fascist armies had actually invaded Soviet territory and military operations began, Moscow issued the order that Stalin, despite evident facts, thought that the war had not yet started, that this was only a provocative action on the part of several undisciplined sections of the German army, and that our reaction might serve as a reason for the Germans to begin the war.