Speech or Document 6

RIGHTEOUS PEACE AND NATIONAL UNITY

FROM A SPEECH MADE AT DETROIT, MAY   19, 1916

I HAVE been very reluctant to make speeches during these weeks immediately preceding the National Nominating Conventions, because it is very difficult to make people understand that speeches at such a time are not of the ordinary political type made in the interest of some particular individual's candidacy.  But I finally determined that I would come here to Michigan to say certain things which I believe should be said at this time.  What I have to say to you will not be in the interest of any man, and least of all, of myself.  It will not refer to the candidacy of any individual.  It will not refer to the policy of any party, save as such party policy may, and ought to, vitally concern the welfare of the nation.  My speech will be devoted exclusively to certain great principles which should be fundamental in this giant democratic commonwealth of ours.  Wherever I touch on an individual, it will be because I can not make my meaning clear, save by speaking of individuals who embody or typify certain movements.

In the history of this country this is the third great crisis and it coincides with a tremendous world crisis.  The issue is: are we prepared with a sane and lofty idealism to fit ourselves to render great service to mankind by rendering ourselves fit for our own service, or are we content to avoid effort and labor in the present by preparing to tread the path that China has trodden? We must choose one course or the other.  We1 shall gain nothing by making believe that we can avoid choosing either course.  At present the attitude of many of our politicians in Congress and outside strongly resembles the attitude of many of the politicians in the gold and silver controversy of twenty years ago.  At that time the free silver men were bold and insistent, just as the professional pacifists are today.  At that time, as today, the great bulk of the politicians, not only in the Democratic Party but in the Republican Party, were at first mortally afraid to offend the free silver men.  They made every effort to compromise, and to take some position that should not be either for gold or for silver.  Above all they strove to avoid the use of the word "gold." The fifty-one Republicans who, the other day, voted against an adequate Army are the spiritual successors of the Republicans who, twenty years ago, in Congress voted for all kinds of half measures which they hoped would convince the free silver people that we were to have the unlimited coinage of silver, and would convince the other people that we were not to have it.  The older among you of course remember how at that day the politicians squirmed in their effort to prevent the Republican National Convention from using the word " gold "; how they demanded that instead we should use some such expression as " having each dollar equally as good as every other dollar "; how they sought to evade facing the issue.

But when the time came, when the lines were drawn, and the battle was on, it became perfectly evident that the only way to beat the free silver people was to come straight out for the gold standard without equivocation or timidity.  The effort to avoid a fight on the currency, and make the fight only on the tariff was a failure.  The gold men stood for a high tariff; but first and foremost they made the fight on the issue of maintaining and securing the gold standard, the sound money standard; and if they had tried double dealing and hesitation and equivocation they would have lost, and they would have deserved to lose.  Let us today profit by their example.

In any serious crisis there are always men who try to carry water on both shoulders.  These men try to escape the hard necessity of choice between two necessarily opposite alternatives, by trying to work up some compromise.  In actual practice, this compromise usually proves to combine with exquisite nicety all the defects and none of the advantages of both courses.  It is true that in ordinary political matters compromise is essential.  It is true that in ordinary times it is essential.  But there come great crises when compromise is either impossible or fatal.  This is one of those crises.  There is no use in saying that we will fit ourselves to defend ourselves a little, but not much.  Such a position is equivalent to announcing that, if necessary, we shall hit, but that we shall only hit soft.  The only right principle is to prepare thoroughly or not at all.  The only right principle is to avoid hitting if it is possible to do so, but never under any circumstances to hit soft.  To go to war a little, but not much, is the one absolutely certain way to ensure disaster.  To prepare a little but not much, stands on a par with a city developing a fire department which, after a fire occurs, can put it out a little, but not much.

There are, at this time, two great issues before us, both inseparably bound together.  They are the issues of Americanism and Preparedness.  As a people we have to decide whether we are to be in good faith a people and able and ready to take care of ourselves; or whether we doubt our national unity and fear to prepare, and intend instead to trust partly to a merciful Providence and partly to elocutionary ability in high places.  Those in power at Washington have taken the latter position.  The followers of Mr.  Ford in the Republican primaries have taken what is in reality the same position.  What stand do the opponents of this position intend to take? The advocates of unpreparedness, the advocates of sham-preparedness, and the peace-at-any-price men all advocate what is in reality the same policy.  Those who stand against such a policy are not to be excused if they stand so half-heartedly that the people do not recognize much difference between themselves and their opponents.  Why should the people change their government if they are merely to change slightly the degree of unpreparedness? The only sufficient reason for a change would be to inaugurate a policy of real and thoroughgoing preparedness from the top to the bottom, preparedness to defend ourselves in war, preparedness to do well and justly our normal work of peace.  We must make this nation as strong as are its convictions in reference to right and wrong.  It little matters what our ideals may be and what achievements we may hope for, if these ideals and achievements can not be reduced to action.  The events of the past, and the events of today, show that national ideals amount to nothing if the nation lacks the power to maintain them against opposition.  .  .  .

Now as to the pacifists.  They have told us that if we remain helpless, w« shall escape all difficulties with other nations and earn their good will.  Let them ponder on what has happened in Mexico today.  Let them ponder our relations at this moment with Germany and the other great powers engaged in the world war.  They will then realize the utter futility of their hopes.  For nearly five years we have followed the principles of the pacifists as regards Mexico.  We have not ourselves prepared; but we have helped the Mexicans to prepare by furnishing them arms and munitions.  We have tamely submitted to the murder of our men and the rape of our women.  We have permitted foreigners to be plundered in Mexico and our own people to be plundered in Mexico; and murder has been added to plunder.  Many of our troops have been shot.  While we have been nominally at peace with Mexico, the Mexicans have killed more American citizens than the Spaniards killed in the entire Spanish war.  Moreover, when the Spanish war was through, it was through; and Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines were started on a career of peace and prosperity such as had never been known in all their history.  But in Mexico, after all the bloodshed, the trouble has only begun, and we are no nearer a solution than we were three years and a quarter ago.

I call the attention of the pacifists to the fact that we have not avoided trouble in Mexico.  On the contrary, although we are assured that we are at peace with Mexico, we have killed and wounded nearly as many Mexicans as were killed and wounded among the Spaniards when our armies in the Spanish War took Santiago and Manila.  We have not gained the good will of the Mexicans.  They hate us and despise us infinitely more than they hated us five years ago — at which time they did not despise us at all.  The policy of pacifism has been practically applied in Mexico and it has resulted in incalculable loss of life and property.  It has gained us the utter contempt of the people with whom we dealt; and it has brought us to the verge of war with them.

Exactly the same thing is true as regards Germany.  For sixteen months we have been employed in sending Germany ultimatum after ultimatum in monotonous succession, while Germany in equally monotonous succession sank ship after ship, drowning our men, women and children by the hundreds.  (I use the word “ultimatum " in the sense that it has been given by our practice with both Mexico and .Germany during the past three years — for under this condition an ultimatum is a note which is not ultimate, but an invitation to further correspondence, and is on no account to be translated into action.) We have suffered as a nation from prolonged and excessive indulgence in note-writing; and incidentally we have made the discovery that note-writing is not an antidote to murder.  The pacifists assured us that note-writing and similar intellectual exercises would avert all difficulties and keep foreign nations feeling friendly toward us.  As a matter of fact, while we have been writing these notes, the loss of life among non-combatant men, women and children on the ships which were torpedoed and about which we wrote notes, has exceeded the total number of lives lost in both the Union and Confederate navies during the entire Civil War.  Think of that, friends! Such has been the net result of our note-writing; and incidentally we have incurred the contemptuous dislike of all the great powers engaged in the war.  As regards the loss of American lives, and the sinking of these ships, I hold Germany less responsible than I hold this nation.  Germany is engaged in a life and death struggle; and we need not expect that she will forego any advantage which the weakness or timidity of our nation, of this republic, offers her.  I firmly believe that if at the outset we had clearly made it evident that our words would be translated into deeds; that our first ultimatum sixteen months ago was really an ultimatum, Germany would have yielded, the Lusitania and the other ships would not have been sunk, and all the lamentable loss of life would have been avoided.  It is our own attitude of culpable weakness and timidity — an attitude assumed under the pressure of the ultra-pacifists — which is primarily responsible for this dreadful loss of life, and for our national humiliation.

We have suffered a loss of friendly feeling with each of the countries at war, and we have been within grave danger of trouble that would eventually lead to our being dragged into war with one or more of them.  I would rather go to war than permit our women and children to be killed.  But it is a crime against this nation that our own supine folly, our weakness and vacillation, our utter failure to prepare, should expose us to the possibility of war without having made us ready for war.  If, as soon as the great war broke out, our navy had been mobilized, and a competent man put at the head of the Navy Department (appointed for national and service reasons, instead of purely political reasons), and if we had begun vigorously to prepare, and had shown that we meant what we said, the Lusitania would never have been sunk; no power would have infringed on our rights; and we should today be absolutely free from all danger of war.  .  .  .

I wish to say a special word to my fellow Americans who are in the whole or in part of German blood.  I very heartily admire them.  I believe in them.  I understand the difficulties under which they have labored during the last twenty-two months.  I sympathize with, I feel for them, even although I feel that many of them are not taking the position they ought to take.  I know that what I preach to them is hard doctrine.  But I believe it to be a doctrine necessary for them, and for all their — and my — fellow countrymen.  I do not address them as German-Americans, for I hold that here in the United States ruin will come to the country in which our children and children's children are to live — your children's children and mine, friends — if we permit ourselves to be sundered one from the other by the lines either of creed or of national origin.

I shall speak a word of my own ancestry to illustrate the points I am about to make.  Some two centuries and a half ago there were certain Dutch immigrants, mechanics and small merchants, in New York City, which was then called New Amsterdam.  There were in Eastern Pennsylvania two German peasant farmers who were among the founders of Gerrnantown, having been driven out of the Palatinate when it was ravaged by the armies of Louis XIV; and west of them in Pennsylvania lived certain Irish, Welsh and English immigrants, the latter being Quakers.  In South Carolina and Georgia were certain Scotch and French Huguenot farmers.  These men and women left many descendants who intermarried with one another.  Of these descendants I am one.  My ancestors originally came from different countries, professed different creeds and spoke different tongues.  But they became Americans and nothing else; and as the generations succeeded one another they did the ordinary work of American life.  These ancestors of mine did the same tasks that fell to the lot of the ancestors of all of us who are of the old colonial stocks.  All of these men, your ancestors, friends, and mine, could do their duty only so long as they acted purely as Americans.  They fought in the War of the Revolution and again in the War of 1812; and they did not inquire whether the foreign foes whom Washington assailed were Germans, as at Trenton, or British, as at Princeton, or French, like those whom he fought near Pittsburg in his youth.  If these old time Americans had kept apart from one another and had made their loyalty a loyalty to the countries from which they came, and not to this new great republic, and if their fellow citizens of that day had done the same thing, there would not be any United States now, and there would be no Americans to feel either pride or shame in what our people do.

My plea is that all our citizens today shall act in the spirit of the men of many different race strains — the Washingtons, Adamses and Lees, the Schuylers and Sullivans; the Carrolls and Muhlenbergs, the Marions and Herkimers — who disregarded all questions of national origin and became Americans and nothing else when they founded this country.

I make the same plea precisely to the Americans of German birth or descent that I always have made and always shall make to all Americans, no matter what their creed or their national origin.  I am exactly as much opposed to English-Americans as to German-Americans.  I oppose all kinds of hyphenated Americanism.  I ask my fellow-Americans who are partly or wholly of German blood to show the foreign foes of America who, from abroad, instigate and guide our traitors at home — and above all I ask them to show these traitors at home — that the immense majority of Americans of German descent, whether naturalized or native born, are loyal Americans and nothing else and that they stand for the honor and the interest of the United States should to shoulder with all other good Americans of no matter what creed or national origin.  Americanism is a matter of the spirit, not of birthplace or descent.  Among the best Americans I have ever known, among the man closest to me in social and political life, are, and have been, men born in, or men whose fathers were born in, Germany, Ireland, the Scandinavian kingdoms, and other European countries.  They stand on an exact level with the other Americans, whose ancestors were here in Colonial times.  We are all part of the same people.

We all stand together for our common flag and our common country.  We must so prepare that this country will be a good place in which the children's children of all of us shall live; and to do this we must so prepare that we can repel all foreign foes and preserve the inestimable right of settling for ourselves the fate of this mighty democratic Republic.  But the essence of this policy of full preparedness, which remember is not only military but at least as much industrial and social, is that it is purely defensive, and is the best possible assurance of peace.  No nation will ever attack a unified and prepared America.