Address by Former President Hoover
June 27, 1944
Delegates and guests of the Republican Convention:
We meet at a difficult time for a political convention. Millions of sons of both Republicans and Democrats are fighting and dying side by side for the freedom of mankind. But it is the part of freedom for which they fight that we should carry on at home. Nothing could be a greater shock to freedom than for us to suspend the national election or the soul-searching criticism which will make the more sure that the war will be won and freedom preserved.
Tonight, I propose to speak to you upon some larger forces which are contending in this world convulsion. And the direction our country should take if freedom of men is to be preserved.
You will, I am sure, permit me to claim some personal experience with these larger forces which are today dominating mankind.
Like most of you coming from forebears to whom hard work was the price of existence, I worked with my hands for my daily bread. I have tasted the despair of fruitless search for a job. I have seen the problems of labor both as a workman and as a manager of industry. Long before the First World War professional work took me to many lands under many governments, both of free men and tyrannies. I dealt with the poverty and squalor of Asia and the frozen class barriers of Europe. I participated on behalf of my country in the First World War. I saw the untold destruction and misery from that war. I dealt with famine among millions. I dealt with violence and revolution. I saw the degeneration and regeneration of nations. I saw intimately the making of the peace treaty of Versailles.
And in all those years of travel to every corner of the earth I landed a hundred times on the shores of my country. Every time it was with deep emotion and gratitude. Emotion, because here was the sanctuary of real freedom. Here was a land of opportunity, a land of wider spread comfort; a land of greater kindliness; a land of self-reliance and self-respect among men. And gratitude, because I had been born in this land.
During another twelve years I was placed by my countrymen where I had to contend with peace and war and where I had to deal with the hurricanes of social and economic destruction which were its aftermaths. I have had to deal with explosion of Asiatic antagonism to the West. I have seen the rising tide of totalitarianism sweeping over the world.
Why do I recite all of this? Because the experience that has come to me, the honors that have been given to me demand of me, that I contribute whatever I can to preserve freedom in America and the world.
Over long periods the deep-rooted forces in the world move slowly. Then from accumulated pressures have come explosive periods with wars, convulsions, violent change and a train of stupendous problems. And always a part of the complex forces in these gigantic explosions has been the quest of man to be free.
The first of these gigantic explosions which was to shake the modern world began 170 years ago with the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. After those world wars there followed a hundred years of comparative peace in which the will to freedom spread widely over the earth.
Then came the gigantic explosion of the last World War. Again among the forces in that convulsion was the death clash of free men and dictatorship.
Men inspired by freedom were victorious twenty-five years ago and freedom spread to additional millions of mankind. But victorious men failed to lay the foundations of lasting peace. And from the destruction of that world war came unemployment and poverty over the whole world. And in its wake also came instability of governments, lowering of morals, frustration of ideals and defeatism. Out of this desperate aftermath despotism rose again in the grim shapes of Fascism and Communism. By them the freedom of men was defeated over a large part of the earth.
Now we are in the midst of the greatest explosion in all the history of civilization. Again free men are fighting for the survival of human liberty.
By whatever failures of statesmanship the world were brought to this ghastly Second World War, the realistic fact is that we are in it. There is only one way out of war – that is, to win it. And victory will come again to our armies and fleets for the sons of America do not quit. By winning the war I mean absolute victory over the enemy armies. Any compromise with Hitler or Tōjō will destroy all hope of either freedom or a lasting peace. That is our pledge to these thousands of our men who are dying in the islands of the Pacific and upon the fields of Italy and France.
We are fighting not alone for preservation of freedom, but also for the moral and spiritual foundations of civilization. And it is not alone these foundations under other parts of the world which concerns us today. We must look to our American house.
Recently a canvass was made among youth, both in the armed forces and on the home front, to learn what sort of a world they wanted after this war. I may tell you:
They want a home with a family, a dog and an automobile. They want the security and self-respect of a job. They want to be free to choose their own jobs and not to be ordered to them by a bureaucrat. They want to prove their own worth and have the rewards of their own efforts. They want to be free to plan their own lives. They want to be free to undertake their own adventures.
They want the pleasure of creative work. They want the joy of championing justice for the weak. They want to tell every evil person where he can go. They want a government that will keep down oppression whether from business or labor. They want a fair chance. They want peace in the world that their children never need go through the agonies and sacrifices they have themselves endured.
They want to be free Americans again. Unexpressed in all this there is deep in their souls a force that reaches back into a thousand generations. That is, the ceaseless yearning of humankind to be free. Its advance is as sure as the movement of the stars in the universe. It is as real as the law of gravitation. It is as everlasting as the existence of God.
At each of the great rallies of our party in 1936, in 1940 and today in 1944 I have been called to speak upon the encroachments and the dangers to freedom in our country. Each time I knew even before I spoke that our people would not believe that the impairment of freedom could happen here. Yet each subsequent four years has shown those warnings to have been too reserved, too cautious.
The reason why these warnings have been accurate is simple. From the beginning the New Deal in a milder form has followed the tactics of European revolutions which have gone before. The direction being set, the destination is not difficult to foresee.
The violent forms of these European revolutions all have certain methods in common. They seek to destroy every safeguard of personal liberty and justice. Their method was to create centralized government and a single political party. Purge was their political weapon. Their economic system is regimentation through coercion by bureaucracy. Their faith is the negation of Christianity – that the end justifies the means. Their strategy is to make public opinion by falsehood and to destroy opposition by assassination of character through smearing.
Now I ask you a question. Do you recognize any similarity between these practices and the ten years of the New Deal?
Has not every distress, every sorrow, and every fear of the people been used to further fasten some part of these totalitarian practices upon us?
With the blessing of the Attorney General, the Communists and the fellow travelers are spending vast sums to reelect this regime. Would they spend their money to support the freedom of men?
We all recognize that to win this war many liberties must temporarily be suspended at home. We have had to accept much dictatorship of bureaucracy. We must adopt some of the very practices against which we are fighting. In former wars we had no fear of such temporary suspension of liberty. Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson believed in freedom of men.
Long before the war, in an address on January 3, 1936, Mr. Roosevelt recounted how he had “built up new instruments of public power” which could “provide shackles for the liberties of the people” in any other hands. Freedom is not promoted by shackles in anybody’s hands. We now know the peacetime shackles they provided for the liberties of the people. They put shackles on our farmers. They put them on honest labor unions, on the freedom of workmen, on honest business enterprise. They have done more. These bureaucrats with these “instruments of power” fanned bitter hatreds between labor unions which divided the ranks of labor. And they fanned hate between employers and workmen. They built class conflict instead of national unity.
Can a regime which forged “shackles on the liberties of the people” in peace time be trusted to return freedom to the people from the shackles of war?
Our present rulers have now issued an abridged edition of the Bill of Rights and the other Constitutional guarantees of the citizens from oppression by government. They call the new version the Four Freedoms. The original edition, issued and perfected by the fathers, contains thirty freedoms, not four only. True freedom abides in the whole thirty. They have enriched the soil and the soul of this land for 170 years. Not one or four, but all of them together have brought the greatest advance in civilization in the history of mankind. In this time of crisis to freedom should we amend or abandon any of them?
The Constitution of the United States is a philosophy of government. It is not suspended even by war. But apparently some of these guarantees in our Constitution have not yet been approved by the OPA, the WLB, and the NLRB, the FEC, the FCC and some other parts of the alphabet.
If you happen to get into the clutches of these agencies, you will find a lot of the spirit of even the Magna Charta has been forgotten to say nothing of the Constitution. As an exercise in history, you might read again some of those rights, such as, trial by jury, the right of appeal to the courts; just compensation for property taken for public use; the provisions against search and seizure, taking of property without due process of law and others.
These thirty freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution will survive only so long as their safeguards also survive. I need not remind you of the steady invasion of states’ rights; the packing of the courts; the dictation to Congress; the constant proof that executive officials arrogate unlawful authority.
Only by a change in administration will our returning soldiers find freedom preserved at home.
The price of freedom is not only vigilance as to rights and their safeguards. It also requires vision and action to keep freedom in step with social and economic change that would restrict it.
There is little real freedom for citizens, who, because of forces beyond their control, must go hungry, cold, sick or ignorant. From the very beginning the faith of America has been that we were our brother’s keeper. In earlier time that responsibility was attended to by neighbors, by counties, by municipalities. Many years ago the state governments began to assume a larger part in these responsibilities. In recent years the federal government has assumed a part of the burden in education, public health and by various experiments in old-age pensions and unemployment insurance. But if all these services are to bear the full fruit in freedom, they must be cleared of politics and discrimination. They must be placed upon expanded and firmer foundations.
For the past seventy years the American people have had to engage in battle for freedom on our own economic front. The fertile soil of freedom has grown gigantic business and labor organizations which have immensely increased our comfort and our standards of living.
The vast majority of both business and labor leaders are honest and patriotic. We cannot, however, permit even a small minority of arrogant and irresponsible business leaders to dominate the freedom of men through monopolies, unfair treatment of labor and manipulation of elections. Neither can we have even a small minority of arrogant and irresponsible labor leaders dominating the freedom of men, dictating who can have jobs and manipulating elections. The truly American concept is that we shall maintain freedom from such abuses by a government of law instead of by the whimsicalities of men or the regimentation of men. We do not need to burn down the house of freedom with the fires of totalitarianism to destroy a few rats.
An imperative problem in freedom is rising before us in the transition from war economy to peace economy. We must convert huge plants and find peacetime jobs in industry for thirty million men and women.
We must begin now to make the blueprints of this transition. But before the blueprints can even be commenced, the major question for America must be determined. That is, in what economic and social climate, under what sort of conditions is this transition to be made? Already the New Dealers have planned a large number of Trojan Horses labeled “Liberalism” and “Freedom” stuffed with a mixture of totalitarian economics and with doubtful statistics. The easiest task of government is to suppress individuals, subject them to bureaucracy and subsidizes them to lean on governments – or a political party. If a government has enough power, it can always do that. The hard task of government, and the really liberal task, is to build self-reliance, stimulate initiative, and thereby create men and women of energy, of dignity and of independence. That is the motive power of America.
We will need every atom of this power in the nation, if we are quickly to convert from guns to plowshares in such fashion as to provide jobs and opportunity for all our people. That can never be had by bureaucratic curbing of initiative, class war, or any other mixture of this totalitarianism with freedom. The decision between these philosophies of government must be made now. For the plans must be established now. We cannot be without a peace program as we were without a preparedness program. We owe it to our fighting men that they find no delays in productive jobs.
Only by a change in administration will these gigantic problems be solved in a climate of freedom.
We are faced already with the gigantic problems of making a peace where freedom can live. The world cannot go on like this. Science daily creates more dreadful weapons. Chivalry and compassion has gone out of modern war. Women and children are slaughtered and starved with the same ruthlessness as armed men. We cannot fail again in making peace that sticks if civilization is to survive.
Already during this war we are making the mold in which the new world will be cast. Some of these shapes are already beginning to emerge.
It is obvious that the hot fires of nationalism are rising out of the emotions of this war just as they do from every war. The Communist internationalism of Russia has been driven out by the nationalist aspiration to free Mother Russia and expand the Empire. Other United Nations are demanding the independent resumption of their possessions. Mr. Churchill has stated that he did not become His Majesty’s Prime Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. I am sure that if the Republican Party comes to power it will not be to liquidate either the economic welfare or the independence of the United States.
It is obvious from the rise of nationalism that ideas of world super-government, no matter how idealistic, are already dead from these cold blasts of realism. Peace must be based upon cooperation between independent sovereign nations.
It is obvious that three great dominant centers of power will emerge from this war – that is, the United States, Great Britain, Russia and possibly China as a fourth. And France will someday return as a major power.
It is obvious that there must be some sort of world organization to preserve peace. It is proposed that, like the League of Nations, it shall have a general assembly representing all peaceful nations and a council in which the great centers of power have a permanent part. If the general assembly is not to be a mere debating society, it should be split into three divisions – one for Europe, one for Asia and one for the Western Hemisphere. And each region should be given the primary responsibility for peace in its area before the central council is called upon. Especially should that responsibility be imposed on Europe where the dangers of world wars come from.
It is obvious that there must be a long transition period from war to stable peace. Before any organization to preserve peace can succeed, the foundations of political and economic reconstruction of the world must be laid in such a manner as to allay the causes of war. Unless these foundations are securely laid, any temple dedicated to preserving peace will be built upon sand. That was the disaster of the League of Nations. A good league has never cured a bad peace.
It is obvious that the great centers of power in Washington, London, and Moscow will dominate these vital political and economic settlements no matter what peace preserving machinery is set up. Their approach to these settlements must be that of trustees for all nations not their selfish interests. They must not become a disguised military alliance or become the scene for power politics or balance of power. The whole history of the world is punctuated by the collapse of such methods into renewed wars.
It should be obvious that there can be no lasting peace unless the productivity of the world is restored. That can come only by exertion from within nations and from political settlements which give them a chance. The United States must furnish food to thousands of starving towns and cities ravaged by the enemy. We should have long since been feeding the undernourished children, for compassion is not dead in America. The United States can be helpful to all mankind, but it is certain we cannot finance a world WPA.
It is obvious the American people have but one purpose in this war. We want to live in peace. We do not want these horrors again. We want no territory except some Pacific island bases that will protect the United States. We want no domination over any nation. We want no indemnities. We want no special privileges.
But we do want the freedom of nations from the domination of others, call it by whatever name we will – liberation of peoples, self-government or just restored sovereignty. We want it both in the cause of freedom and we want it because we know that there can be no lasting peace if enslaved peoples must ceaselessly strive and fight for freedom.
There are constants in the relations between nations that are more nearly to be found in their history, their surroundings, their ideals, their hearts, than in the declarations of their officials. Foreign relations are not sudden things created by books or speeches or banquets. The history of nations is more important than their oratory.
The ideal of freedom for other people’s lies deep in American history and the American heart. It did not arise from Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points or from the Atlantic Charter. It was embedded in the hearts of the American people by the suffering and sacrifice with which they won their own independence. It was in response to the cry for liberation and freedom of peoples that we established the Monroe Doctrine, which we fought the Mexican War, the Spanish War, and the First World War and now, after twenty years, we again sacrifice the sons of America to the call of freedom.
Without this spiritual impulse of freedom for others we would not have engaged in a single one of these wars. Had we not been concerned with the freedom of China, we would not have been attacked at Pearl Harbor. Only because freedom was in jeopardy in all Europe are we making this gigantic effort.
Therefore, the American people are not likely to welcome any settlements which do not include the independence of Poland as well as every other country which desires to be free from alien domination. Americans do not want this war to end in the restriction of freedom among nations. It is obvious that the United States will emerge from this war the strongest military, and thus political, power in the world. Our power to bring freedom to the world must not be frittered away.
During the past month Forrest Davis has published a circumstantial account of the Tehran Conference. It is said to have been authorized. It has not been denied. It relates to President Roosevelt’s new peace method, called by him, The Great Design. A peace method under this same name, The Great Design, was proposed by Henry IV, a French monarch, some 350 years ago. It has some similarities to Mr. Roosevelt’s idea.
We are told Mr. Roosevelt had this Great Design in mind during his recent conference at Tehran.
So far as these published descriptions go this method is power politics and balance of power diplomacy. That is not the diplomacy of freedom. And worse still apparently the United States is to furnish the balance between Britain and Russia. If that be the case you may be sure that we will sooner or later gain the enmity of both of them. The basis of lasting peace for America must be friendship of nations not brokerage of power politics.
There may have been no political commitments at Tehran. But certainly since that Conference we have seen a series of independent actions by Russia which seem to be the negative of restored sovereignty to certain peoples. Certainly the Atlantic Charter has been sent to the hospital for major amputations of freedom among nations. The American people deserve a much fuller exposition of this Great Design.
And the Tehran Conference raises another question. Under our form of government the President cannot speak either for the Congress or the conclusions of American public opinion. The only way for America to succeed in foreign relations is by open declaration of policies. They must first have seasoned consideration and public understanding. These do not come by secret diplomacy. America cannot successfully bluff, intrigue or play the sordid game of power politics.
Nothing contributed more to the tragedy of Versailles than the suspicion and misunderstandings which arose when the heads of states sought to persuade and beguile each other in secret. Such unchecked bartering results in implications, deductions and appeasements will rise to plague us.
Direct conferences by heads of state and their military leaders on military questions are useful. But under our institutions and our public opinion negotiation in political matters with our allies should be conducted by Secretaries of State. The President of the United States is far more influential delivering considered judgments from the White House. The voice from that pulpit is far more potent than any beguilement in private conversation in some foreign city, or any personal power diplomacy.
President Wilson also had a “great design” most of which was lost by the blandishments and pressures of personal negotiation. Every thinking American views with great apprehension a repetition of 1919. America needs a change in administration to get out of personal power diplomacy
There is a force for freedom as old as life itself which will emerge with new vividness from the complexities of the times. Not only life but freedom itself must find regeneration from youth.
In every generation youth presses forward toward achievement. Each generation has the right to build its own world out of the materials of the past, cemented by the hopes of the future.
Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.
This convention is handing the leadership of the Republican Party to a new generation. And soon to support these younger men there will be an oncoming generation who will differ from all others. Twelve million young men matured far beyond their years under the supreme tests of war will be coming home. To them will be added the other millions of young men and women serving in the shops, on the farms and in the offices. They also, by the responsibilities they have shared, have had their minds and understanding advanced beyond their age. From the tremendous experience in this war this new generation will have grown in responsibility, in dignity, in initiative and skills.
And these young men who are offering their lives on the beaches and in the mud, those who are fighting in the air, those who battle on the seas, will return to demand justification for their sacrifices and for the sacrifice of their buddies who have died. They will insist upon a reckoning and they will be stern and hard faced. They will reject the easy language of politics, the straddling and compromises, and the senseless phrases of skilled ghostwriters. And they will be watchful of political leaders lest they again be led into the giving of the blood and risking the future of their families from failures in international statesmanship. Today, more than any new generation that we have known, youth will demand a voice in its own destiny.
I rejoice that this is to be. Youth can bring the courage, the ideals and confidence which can erect a new society in America upon the debris of two world wars. We need their courage as never before.
We, the older generation, who have learned something of the great forces in the world, can advise and counsel. The issues are not new, and we can distill principles from the experience of the past. But youth must act and the past can never wholly point the way through the changing future.
And let me say this to the many younger Republicans in this convention. On each election night, I read of able young Republican men and women who are chosen by their countrymen to positions of trust and eminence. I see men whom I have known since they cut their eye teeth in district politics, rise to state and city government, to the Congress, and to the Governorship in their state. From that I know that our party is a living institution recruiting from the oncoming generation its brilliant men and women and setting them to work for the good of our country. And it is through this living institution, the Republican Party that I call upon the younger generations to take up the weapons for American liberty to fight the good fight in the manner and according to the lights of their own time.
And may I say this to youth: You have a great material heritage. You are receiving millions of farms and homes built by your forebears. There have been prepared for you magnificent cities, great shops and industries. But you have even a greater heritage. That is a heritage of religious faith of morals and of liberty. There is no problem which confronts the nation that you cannot solve within this framework.
You in your own manner can lead our people away from the jungle of disorderly, cynical and bitter ideas, the topsy-turvy confusions, the hopelessness and lack of faith and defeatism that have haunted this nation over these dozen years. You can lead our nation back to unity of purpose again.
We of the older generation know that you will carry forward. We wish you to carry the torch bravely and aloft. Carry it with the dauntless assurance of your forebears who faced the chill of the ocean, the dangers of the forest and desert, the loneliness of the pioneer to build upon this continent a nation dedicated to justice and liberty and the dignity of the individual man. Watch over it. Vigilantly guard it. Protect it from foes, within and without. Make for this a sanctuary and dedicate it to God and all mankind.
Youth of the Republican Party! I, representing the generation of your fathers, greet you and send you forth crusaders for freedom which alone can come under a Constitutional Republic – a Constitutional America.
We, who have lived long, turn our eyes upon your generation lovingly with hope, with prayer and with confidence for our country.
