Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (98 page)

Now that I have but a minute left, I want to say that I suppose my family is listening in on the radio in New Orleans, and I will say to my wife and three children that I am entirely well and hope to be home before many more days, and I hope they have listened to my speech tonight, and I wish them and all of their neighbors and friends everything good that may be had.

I thank you, my friends, for your kind attention, and I hope you will enroll with us, take care of your own work in the work of this government, and share or help in our Share Our Wealth Societies.

“I have pleaded your case,” the president of the United Mine Workers told his rank and file, “not in the tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.”

This son of a Welsh immigrant miner steeped his oratory in biblical cadences and metaphors; his sonorous voice was especially effective on
radio. John L. Lewis formed the Committee for Industrial Organization in 1935 (renamed Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1938) because he believed that the American Federation of Labor was failing the industrial workers, and he was not afraid to ignite the public wrath with strikes.

In this speech, delivered September 3, 1937, he responded to a flip “a plague on both your houses” comment by Franklin Roosevelt with his allusion to “one who has been sheltered in labor’s house,” a nice juxtaposition of tropes. The speech had force in the writing—“No tin hat brigade of goose-stepping vigilantes or bibble-babbling mob of blackguarding and corporation-paid scoundrels will prevent the onward march of labor” has a ring to it. But the address gained in the delivery; Lane Kirkland, when he was president of the AFL-CIO, upon hearing the cue “many sorrows” at a dinner, would adopt a deep voice and deliver the penultimate paragraph of John L. Lewis’s most memorable speech.

***

THE UNITED STATES
Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and similar groups representing industry and financial interests are rendering a disservice to the American people in their attempts to frustrate the organization of labor and in their refusal to accept collective bargaining as one of our economic institutions.

These groups are encouraging a systematic organization under the sham pretext of local interests. They equip these vigilantes with tin hats, wooden clubs, gas masks, and lethal weapons and train them in the arts of brutality and oppression.

No tin hat brigade of goose-stepping vigilantes or bibble-babbling mob of blackguarding and corporation-paid scoundrels will prevent the onward march of labor, or divert its purpose to play its natural and rational part in the development of the economic, political, and social life of our nation.

Unionization, as opposed to communism, presupposes the relation of employment; it is based upon the wage system, and it recognizes fully and unreservedly the institution of private property and the right to investment profits. It is upon the fuller development of collective bargaining, the wider expansion of the labor movement, the increased influence of labor in our national councils, that the perpetuity of our democratic institutions must largely depend.

The organized workers of America, free in their industrial life, conscious partners of production, secure in their homes, and enjoying a decent standard of living, will prove the finest bulwark against the intrusion of alien doctrines of government.

Do those who hatched this foolish cry of communism in the CIO fear the increased influence of labor in our democracy? Do they fear its influence will be cast on the side of shorter hours, a better system of distributed employment, better homes for the underprivileged, Social Security for the aged, a fairer distribution of our national income? Certainly the workers that are being organized want a voice in the determination of these objectives of social justice.

Certainly labor wants a fairer share of the national income. Assuredly labor wants a larger participation in increased productive efficiency. Obviously the population is entitled to participate in the fruits of the genius of our men of achievement in the field of material sciences.

Labor has suffered just as our farm population has suffered from a viciously unequal distribution of the national income. In the exploitation of both classes of workers has been the source of panic and depression, and upon the economic welfare of both rests the best assurance of a sound and permanent prosperity.

Under the banner of the Committee for Industrial Organization, American labor is on the march. Its objectives today are those it had in the beginning: to strive for the unionization of our unorganized millions of workers and for the acceptance of collective bargaining as a recognized American institution.

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.

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 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. Peace 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.”