Speech or Document 7

NATIONAL PREPAREDNESS — MILITARY — INDUSTRIAL — SOCIAL

FROM A SPEECH MADE AT KANSAS CITY, MAY 30, I9l6

I COME to Kansas City, here in the Great West, to speak on Memorial Day to the farmers and merchants and wage workers and manufacturers who dwell west of the Mississippi.  What I have to say to you is exactly what I should say to your fellows who dwell on the Atlantic Coast, or on the Pacific Slope, or beside the Great Lakes, or on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.  My message is a message to all Americans.  My appeal is to the spirit of thorough-going Americanism in all our people in whatever portion of the land they dwell.  In thanking all the organizations — business, political and social — whose invitation I have accepted, including my comrades of the Spanish War, I know that none of you will object to my putting first the Grand Army of the Republic and the Confederate Veterans.  I come here to speak on behalf of the spirit which, in the early sixties, burned in the hearts of men who wore the blue and of the men who wore the gray.  In what I have to say I shall appeal with equal emphasis to the soul qualities of the men who followed Grant and of the men who followed Lee; of all who, in the great crisis, proved their truth by their endeavor and showed themselves willing to sacrifice everything for the right, as God gave them to see the right.  But I make no appeal to the spirit of the peace-at-any-price men of '61 to '65.  I ask that we in this generation prove ourselves the spiritual heirs both of the men who wore the blue and of the men who wore the gray.  But I make no appeal to the memory of the copperhead pacifists who put peace above duty, who put love of ease and love of money-getting before devotion to country, and whose convictions were too weak to stir to action their tepid souls.

This is one of the great years of decision in our national history.  The way in which we now decide will largely determine whether we are to go forward in righteousness and power or backward in degradation and weakness.  We are face to face with elemental facts of right and wrong, of force or feebleness.  According to the spirit in which we face these facts and govern our actions, we shall determine whether in the future we shall enjoy a growing national life or suffer a lingering national decay.

First and foremost, friends, I ask you to beware of the false prophets, both the prophets of sordid materialism, and the prophets of that silly sentimentalism which refuses to look truths in the face if the truths are unpleasant.  We can not meet the future either by mere gross materialism or by mere silly sentimentalism; above all we can not meet it if we attempt to balance gross materialism in action by Silly sentimentalism in words.  In actual practice the professional pacifists do not serve good.  They serve evil.  They do not serve high ideals.  It is not righteous to fail to fight on behalf of assailed righteousness.  Such a course probably means sheer cowardice, and certainly means moral surrender.  The men who are the torch carriers of world civilization are those, and only those, who acknowledge the supreme duty of protecting sacred spiritual things when attacked.  In actual practice the professional pacifist is merely the tool of the sensual materialist who has no ideals, whose shriveled soul is wholly absorbed in automobiles, and the movies, and money making, and in the policies of the cash register and the stock ticker, and the life of fatted ease.

Two years ago any number of persons were assuring us that the day of great wars had passed; that it was impossible that there ever should be great wars again; that preparedness brought on war; that we did not need to take any steps in our own defense; that the capitalists of the world, because high finance had become internationalized, would never permit a great war; that the opinion of the civilized world was enough to stop all international outrages.  This was only two years ago.  During these two years we have seen the most destructive war in all history waged on a wider scale than ever in history before.  Never before has there been such slaughter as has been compressed into the last twenty-two months; and, alas that it should be written, the brutality, the ruthlessness, the disregard for International Law, and the callous and calculated atrocities committed on non-combatants, including women and children, have been such as the civilized world has not even approached during the past century.

Two years ago the false prophets who said that there never would be another war were applauded by all our people who were wholly absorbed in money-getting; by all who cared only for lives of soft ease and vapid pleasure; by all who liked to satisfy their emotions cheaply and safely by applauding high sounding phrases; and by the great mass of well meaning men who had not thought out the matter with conscientious thoroughness.

Let us not be misled again.  Undoubtedly as soon as this war ends all the well-meaning, shortsighted persons, who two years ago said there never would be a war again, and who have been obliged to be silent on this particular point during the past two years, will once more begin their shrill pipings that the last war has occurred.  Once more they will demand or announce the invention of some patent device by which strong and ruthless and cunning men will be held in place by timid men without any preparedness, without any display of courage or acceptance of endurance, risk, labor and hardship.

When this war is over it is possible that some one of the combatants, being fully armed, will assail us because we offer ourselves as a rich and helpless prize.  On the other hand it is also possible that there will be temporary exhaustion among the combatants, and a willingness, even on the part of the most brutal and ruthless, to go through the form of saying that they are peaceful and harmless.  In such event there will be real danger lest our people be influenced by the foolish apostles of unpreparedness to accept this condition as permanent, and once more to shirk our duty of getting ready.

I wish to say, with all the emphasis in my power, that if peace in Europe should come tomorrow, it ought not, in the smallest degree, to affect our policy of preparedness.  As a matter of fact, we probably can not now prepare in any way what will have a material effect upon the present war.  Our folly has been such that it is now too late for us to do this.  All we can now do is to prepare so that the war shall leave no aftermath of horror and disaster for our nation.  If we fail so to prepare then assuredly some day we or our children will have bitter cause to rue our folly, and to remember too late the words of old Sir Thomas Browne: " For since we can not be wise by teachings .  .  .  there is an unhappy necessity that we must smart in our own skins."

I wish especially to call the attention of all people who may be momentarily misled by the statements of the peace-at-any-price men, the professional pacifists of today, to the actual results of our policy of unpreparedness.  Twenty-two months have gone by since this war began.  Nearly five years have gone by since the revolution in Mexico loosed on Americans in Mexico, and on Americans on our own side of the border, the forces of murder and misrule.  Yet, during these five years we have taken no efficient steps to control the situation in Mexico, and during these twenty-two months, since the world has been in such a cataclysm of fear and blood as never before in its history, we of this Republic, with literally astounding folly, with a folly criminal from the national standpoint, have refused in any way to prepare.  The professional pacifists said, and even now say, that such preparedness would have invited trouble with Mexico and trouble with Germany and perhaps with other old world powers.  Look at the facts! We kept ourselves helpless to do justice to or for Mexico; we refused to make ready in any way to protect our citizens in Mexico, or even on our own side of the Mexican border.  We submitted tamely to the murder of our men and the rape of our women.  We bore with spiritless submission outrages upon outrages, until the number of our citizens killed mounted into the hundreds.  Yet, so far from securing the good-will of the Mexicans, this policy of unpreparedness and of tame submission to insult and injury, merely aroused both their anger and contempt to such a degree that we are now engaged in a harassing little war along the border.

We have not the forces to make that war effective.  We have actually drained the Coast Artillery from the seaboard defense, to serve as infantry down on the Mexican border.  This nation of one hundred million people with a territory as large as all Europe and more wealth than any other nation in the world possesses, has to strip its seacoast forts of their defenders and put these defenders at work which they are not trained to do.  Even thus we are wholly unable to make good our complete lack of preparedness.

If at the outset, if three years ago, we had resolutely and with foresight prepared to act, and then, if necessary, acted, in Mexico, that country would today be as peaceful and prosperous as Cuba — where we actually did take the very action I advocate for Mexico.  If, the instant that the great war broke out in July, 1914, our fleet had been mobilized, a competent man put at the head of the Navy Department, our army put into proper trim, and steps taken by our representatives at Washington, both Executive and Legislative, to show that we were making ready to meet any exigency that arose, there would have been no trouble of any kind with any belligerent.  Of course, when we submitted to wrongdoing from one side, we invited a repetition of that wrong-doing by that side, and the infliction of similar wrongs by the other side.  The thousands of non-combatants, men, women and children, including many hundreds of American men, women and children, who have been killed on the high seas, owe the loss of their lives primarily to the supine inaction of this nation; to our failure to prepare, and our failure in instant insistence on our own rights and on those rights of others which we had guaranteed to protect.

Military preparedness is only one side of all around preparedness.  It would be worthless unless based on industrial preparedness, and both would be worthless unless based on preparedness of the soul and the spirit.  You men who wore the Blue and the Gray, when once the war was over, turned to the farm and the shop and the counting house, and again took up your life work of earning your living and supporting your families, and making provision for the generation that was to come after you.  You did this work thoroughly, as you had thoroughly done the work of war.

Our people of today must apply your spirit to the changed circumstances of today.  It is never possible to treat the past as giving the exact precedent for given action in the present.  But the spirit shown by the men who in the great crisis in the past rose level to those crises, must be shown by the men of the present in the crisis of the present.  In this country we have the double duty of training ourselves so as to be willing to die for the country and of developing our internal policy so as to make the country worth living in.  In the long run the country must be worth living in if it is worth dying for.

In order to make this country worth living in we must develop a real national purpose controlled not only by moral motives but by cool intelligence.  If our people put a premium upon the demagogue by supporting the man who makes impossible promises, and who either does not attempt to reduce these promises to action, or else fails in attempting to do so, then we shall go down.  The people must choose as their executive and legislative leaders at Washington men absolutely national in spirit; men whose theory of government is as far as the poles from the pork-barrel theory — and this, whether the pork-barrel be considered from a personal, political or sectional standpoint — men who look forward and not back; men who face the facts as they actually are.  After this war we shall see a new Europe; a Europe energetically developing new social and economic means of meeting new problems.  If, under these circumstances, we take refuge in formulae dug out as fossils from the workings of principles in the past, instead of developing these principles so as to meet the future, we shall be as foolish as if we were to arm our soldiers with flintlocks and send them against an army possessing machine guns, high power rifles, and modern artillery.  The time for flintlock theories of statesmanship in this country is past.  The end we have in view is a high and fine national life based on an industrial efficiency which shall be accompanied by social and economic justice.  Military preparedness against war is merely a means to this end.  But it is an indispensable means.  We are not fit to be free men unless we show the forethought and will power necessary to insure that we ourselves shall have the right to decide our own destinies, and not be forced helplessly to submit to have them decided by alien conquerors.