Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (99 page)

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 suffering 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.

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.”

***

WE ARE HERE
to make a choice between the quick and the dead. That is our business.

Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work our salvation. If we fail, then we have damned every man to be the slave of fear. Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect world peace or world destruction.

Science has torn from nature a secret so vast in its potentialities that our minds cower from the terror it creates. Yet terror is not enough to inhibit the use of the atomic bomb. The terror created by weapons has never stopped man from employing them. For each new weapon a defense has been produced, in time. But now we face a condition in which adequate defense does not exist.

Science, which gave us this dread power, shows that it can be made a giant help to humanity, but science does not show us how to prevent its baleful use. So we have been appointed to obviate that peril by finding a meeting of the minds and the hearts of our peoples. Only in the will of mankind lies the answer.

In this crisis we represent not only our governments but, in a larger way, we represent the peoples of the world. We must remember that the peoples do not belong to the governments, but that the governments belong to the peoples. We must answer their demands; we must answer the world’s longing for peace and security.

In that desire the United States shares ardently and hopefully. The search of science for the absolute weapon has reached fruition in this country. But she stands ready to proscribe and destroy this instrument—to lift its use from death to life—if the world will join in a pact to that end.

In our success lies the promise of a new life, freed from the heart-stopping fears that now beset the world. The beginning of victory for the great ideals for which millions have bled and died lies in building a workable plan. Now we approach the fulfillment of the aspirations of mankind. At the end of the road lies the fairer, better, surer life we crave and mean to have.

Only by a lasting peace are liberties and democracies strengthened and deepened. War is their enemy. And it will not do to believe that any of us can escape war’s devastation. Victor, vanquished, and neutrals alike are affected physically, economically, and morally.

Against the degradation of war we can erect a safeguard. That is the guerdon for which we reach. Within the scope of the formula we outline here, there will be found, to those who seek it, the essential elements of our purpose. Others will see only emptiness. Each of us carries his own
mirror in which is reflected hope—or determined desperation—courage or cowardice.

There is famine throughout the world today. It starves men’s bodies. But there is a greater famine—the hunger of men’s spirit. That starvation can be cured by the conquest of fear, and the substitution of hope, from which springs faith—faith in each other; faith that we want to work together toward salvation; and determination that those who threaten the peace and safety shall be punished.

The peoples of these democracies gathered here have a particular concern with our answer, for their peoples hate war. They will have a heavy exaction to make of those who fail to provide an escape. They are not afraid of an internationalism that protects; they are unwilling to be fob-bled off by mouthings about narrow sovereignty, which is today’s phrase for yesterday’s isolationism.

The basis of a sound foreign policy, in this new age, for all the nations here gathered, is that: anything that happens, no matter where or how, which menaces the peace of the world, or the economic stability, concerns each and all of us.

That, roughly, may be said to be the central theme of the United Nations. It is with that thought we gain consideration of the most important subject that can engage mankind—life itself.

Now, if ever, is the time to act for the common good. Public opinion supports a world movement toward security. If I read the signs aright, the peoples want a program, not composed merely of pious thoughts, but of enforceable sanctions—an international law with teeth in it.

We of this nation, desirous of helping to bring peace to the world and realizing the heavy obligations upon us, arising from our possession of the means for producing the bomb and from the fact that it is part of our armament, are prepared to make our full contribution toward effective control of atomic energy.

But before a country is ready to relinquish any winning weapons, it must have more than words to reassure it. It must have a guarantee of safety, not only against the offenders in the atomic area, but against the illegal users of other weapons—bacteriological, biological, gas—perhaps—why not?—against war itself.

In the elimination of war lies our solution, for only then will nations cease to compete with one another in the production and use of dread “secret” weapons which are evaluated solely by their capacity to kill. This devilish program takes us back not merely to the Dark Ages but from cosmos to chaos. If we succeed in finding a suitable way to control atomic weapons, it is reasonable to hope that we may also preclude the use of
other weapons adaptable to mass destruction. When a man learns to say “A” he can, if he chooses, learn the rest of the alphabet, too.

Let this be anchored in our minds: