The Shining City Upon A
Hill
On January 25,
1974
There are three men here
tonight I am very proud to introduce. It was a year ago this coming February
when this country had its spirits lifted as they have never been lifted in many
years. This happened when planes began landing on American soil and in the
Philippines, bringing back men who had lived with honor for many miserable years
in North Vietnam prisons. Three of those men are here tonight, John McCain, Bill
Lawrence and Ed Martin. It is an honor to be here tonight. I am proud that you
asked me and I feel more than a little humble in the presence of this
distinguished company.
There are men here tonight who, through their
wisdom, their foresight and their courage, have earned the right to be regarded
as prophets of our philosophy. Indeed they are prophets of our times. In years
past when others were silent or too blind to the facts, they spoke up forcefully
and fearlessly for what they believed to be right. A decade has passed since
Barry Goldwater walked a lonely path across this land reminding us that even a
land as rich as ours can't go on forever borrowing against the future, leaving a
legacy of debt for another generation and causing a runaway inflation to erode
the savings and reduce the standard of living. Voices have been raised trying to
rekindle in our country all of the great ideas and principles which set this
nation apart from all the others that preceded it, but louder and more strident
voices utter easily sold cliches.
Cartoonists with acid-tipped pens
portray some of the reminders of our heritage and our destiny as old-fashioned.
They say that we are trying to retreat into a past that actually never existed.
Looking to the past in an effort to keep our country from repeating the errors
of history is termed by them as “taking the country back to McKinley.” Of course
I never found that was so bad -- under McKinley we freed Cuba. On the span of
history, we are still thought of as a young upstart country celebrating soon
only our second century as a nation, and yet we are the oldest continuing
republic in the world.
I thought that tonight, rather than talking on
the subjects you are discussing, or trying to find something new to say, it
might be appropriate to reflect a bit on our heritage.
You can call it
mysticism if you want to, but I have always believed that there was some divine
plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by
those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of
courage.
This was true of those who pioneered the great wilderness in
the beginning of this country, as it is also true of those later immigrants who
were willing to leave the land of their birth and come to a land where even the
language was unknown to them. Call it chauvinistic, but our heritage does not
set us apart. Some years ago a writer, who happened to be an avid student of
history, told me a story about that day in the little hall in Philadelphia where
honorable men, hard-pressed by a King who was flouting the very law they were
willing to obey, debated whether they should take the fateful step of declaring
their independence from that king. I was told by this man that the story could
be found in the writings of Jefferson. I confess, I never researched or made an
effort to verify it. Perhaps it is only legend. But story, or legend, he
described the atmosphere, the strain, the debate, and that as men for the first
time faced the consequences of such an irretrievable act, the walls resounded
with the dread word of treason and its price -- the gallows and the headman's
axe. As the day wore on the issue hung in the balance, and then, according to
the story, a man rose in the small gallery. He was not a young man and was
obviously calling on all the energy he could muster. Citing the grievances that
had brought them to this moment he said, “Sign that parchment. They may turn
every tree into a gallows, every home into a grave and yet the words of that
parchment can never die. For the mechanic in his workshop, they will be words of
hope, to the slave in the mines -- freedom.” And he added, “If my hands were
freezing in death, I would sign that parchment with my last ounce of strength.
Sign, sign if the next moment the noose is around your neck, sign even if the
hall is ringing with the sound of headman’s axe, for that parchment will be the
textbook of freedom, the bible of the rights of man forever.” And then it is
said he fell back exhausted. But 56 delegates, swept by his eloquence, signed
the Declaration of Independence, a document destined to be as immortal as any
work of man can be. And according to the story, when they turned to thank him
for his timely oratory, he could not be found nor were there any who knew who he
was or how he had come in or gone out through the locked and guarded doors.
Well, as I say, whether story or legend, the signing of the document
that day in Independence Hall was miracle enough. Fifty-six men, a little band
so unique -- we have never seen their like since -- pledged their lives, their
fortunes and their sacred honor. Sixteen gave their lives, most gave their
fortunes and all of them preserved their sacred honor. What manner of men were
they? Certainly they were not an unwashed, revolutionary rebel, nor were then
adventurers in a heroic mood. Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists, 11 were
merchants and tradesmen, nine were farmers. They were men who would achieve
security but valued freedom more.
And what price did they pay? John Hart
was driven from the side of his desperately ill wife. After more than a year of
living almost as an animal in the forest and in caves, he returned to find his
wife had died and his children had vanished. He never saw them again, his
property was destroyed and he died of a broken heart -- but with no regret, only
pride in the part he had played that day in Independence Hall. Carter Braxton of
Virginia lost all his ships -- they were sold to pay his debts. He died in rags.
So it was with Ellery, Clymer, Hall, Walton, Gwinnett, Rutledge, Morris,
Livingston, and Middleton. Nelson, learning that Cornwallis was using his home
for a headquarters, personally begged Washington to fire on him and destroy his
home--he died bankrupt. It has never been reported that any of these men ever
expressed bitterness or renounced their action as not worth the price. Fifty-six
rank-and-file, ordinary citizens had founded a nation that grew from sea to
shining sea, five million farms, quiet villages, cities that never sleep -- all
done without an area re-development plan, urban renewal or a rural legal
assistance program.
Now we are a nation of 211 million people with a
pedigree that includes blood lines from every corner of the world. We have shed
that American-melting-pot blood in every corner of the world, usually in defense
of someone's freedom. Those who remained of that remarkable band we call our
Founding Fathers tied up some of the loose ends about a dozen years after the
Revolution. It had been the first revolution in all man’s history that did not
just exchange one set of rulers for another. This had been a philosophical
revolution. The culmination of men's dreams for 6,000 years were formalized with
the Constitution, probably the most unique document ever drawn in the long
history of man's relation to man. I know there have been other constitutions,
new ones are being drawn today by newly emerging nations. Most of them, even the
one of the Soviet Union, contains many of the same guarantees as our own
Constitution, and still there is a difference. The difference is so subtle that
we often overlook it, but is is so great that it tells the whole story. Those
other constitutions say, “Government grants you these rights” and ours says,
“You are born with these rights, they are yours by the grace of God, and no
government on earth can take them from you.”
Lord Acton of England, who
once said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” would say
of that document, “They had solved with astonishing ease and unduplicated
success two problems which had heretofore baffled the capacity of the most
enlightened nations. They had contrived a system of federal government which
prodigiously increased national power and yet respected local liberties and
authorities, and they had founded it on a principle of equality without
surrendering the securities of property or freedom.” Never in any society has
the preeminence of the individual been so firmly established and given such a
priority.
In less than twenty years we would go to war because the
God-given rights of the American sailors, as defined in the Constitution, were
being violated by a foreign power. We served notice then on the world that all
of us together would act collectively to safeguard the rights of even the least
among us. But still, in an older, cynical world, they were not convinced. The
great powers of Europe still had the idea that one day this great continent
would be open again to colonizing and they would come over and divide us up.
In the meantime, men who yearned to breathe free were making their way
to our shores. Among them was a young refugee from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
He had been a leader in an attempt to free Hungary from Austrian rule. The
attempt had failed and he fled to escape execution. In America, this young
Hungarian, Koscha by name, became an importer by trade and took out his first
citizenship papers. One day, business took him to a Mediterranean port. There
was a large Austrian warship under the command of an admiral in the harbor. He
had a manservant with him. He had described to this manservant what the flag of
his new country looked like. Word was passed to the Austrian warship that this
revolutionary was there and in the night he was kidnapped and taken aboard that
large ship. This man's servant, desperate, walking up and down the harbor,
suddenly spied a flag that resembled the description he had heard. It was a
small American war sloop. He went aboard and told Captain Ingraham, of that war
sloop, his story. Captain Ingraham went to the American Consul. When the
American Consul learned that Koscha had only taken out his first citizenship
papers, the consul washed his hands of the incident. Captain Ingraham said, “I
am the senior officer in this port and I believe, under my oath of my office,
that I owe this man the protection of our flag.”
He went aboard the
Austrian warship and demanded to see their prisoner, our citizen. The Admiral
was amused, but they brought the man on deck. He was in chains and had been
badly beaten. Captain Ingraham said, “I can hear him better without those
chains,” and the chains were removed. He walked over and said to Kocha, “I will
ask you one question; consider your answer carefully. Do you ask the protection
of the American flag?” Kocha nodded dumbly “Yes,” and the Captain said, “You
shall have it.” He went back and told the frightened consul what he had done.
Later in the day three more Austrian ships sailed into harbor. It looked as
though the four were getting ready to leave. Captain Ingraham sent a junior
officer over to the Austrian flag ship to tell the Admiral that any attempt to
leave that harbor with our citizen aboard would be resisted with appropriate
force. He said that he would expect a satisfactory answer by four o'clock that
afternoon. As the hour neared they looked at each other through the glasses. As
it struck four he had them roll the cannons into the ports and had then light
the tapers with which they would set off the cannons -- one little sloop.
Suddenly the lookout tower called out and said, “They are lowering a boat,” and
they rowed Koscha over to the little American ship.
Captain Ingraham
then went below and wrote his letter of resignation to the United States Navy.
In it he said, “I did what I thought my oath of office required, but if I have
embarrassed my country in any way, I resign.” His resignation was refused in the
United States Senate with these words: “This battle that was never fought may
turn out to be the most important battle in our Nation's history.” Incidentally,
there is to this day, and I hope there always will be, a USS Ingraham in the
United States Navy.
I did not tell that story out of any desire to be
narrowly chauvinistic or to glorify aggressive militarism, but it is an example
of government meeting its highest responsibility.
In recent years we
have been treated to a rash of noble-sounding phrases. Some of them sound good,
but they don't hold up under close analysis. Take for instance the slogan so
frequently uttered by the young senator from Massachusetts, “The greatest good
for the greatest number." Certainly under that slogan, no modern day Captain
Ingraham would risk even the smallest craft and crew for a single citizen. Every
dictator who ever lived has justified the enslavement of his people on the
theory of what was good for the majority.
We are not a warlike
people. Nor is our history filled with tales of aggressive adventures and
imperialism, which might come as a shock to some of the placard painters in our
modern demonstrations. The lesson of Vietnam, I think, should be that never
again will young Americans be asked to fight and possibly die for a cause unless
that cause is so meaningful that we, as a nation, pledge our full resources to
achieve victory as quickly as possible.
I realize that such a
pronouncement, of course, would possibly be laying one open to the charge of
warmongering -- but that would also be ridiculous. My generation has paid a
higher price and has fought harder for freedom that any generation that had ever
lived. We have known four wars in a single lifetime. All were horrible, all
could have been avoided if at a particular moment in time we had made it plain
that we subscribed to the words of John Stuart Mill when he said that “war is an
ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.”
The decayed and
degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth a
war is worse. The man who has nothing which he cares about more than his
personal safety is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless
made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
The
widespread disaffection with things military is only a part of the philosophical
division in our land today. I must say to you who have recently, or presently
are still receiving an education, I am awed by your powers of resistance. I have
some knowledge of the attempts that have been made in many classrooms and
lecture halls to persuade you that there is little to admire in America. For the
second time in this century, capitalism and the free enterprise are under
assault. Privately owned business is blamed for spoiling the environment,
exploiting the worker and seducing, if not outright raping, the customer. Those
who make the charge have the solution, of course -- government regulation and
control. We may never get around to explaining how citizens who are so gullible
that they can be suckered into buying cereal or soap that they don't need and
would not be good for them, can at the same time be astute enough to choose
representatives in government to which they would entrust the running of their
lives.
Not too long ago, a poll was taken on 2,500 college campuses in
this country. Thousands and thousands of responses were obtained.
Overwhelmingly, 65, 70, and 75 percent of the students found business
responsible, as I have said before, for the things that were wrong in this
country. That same number said that government was the solution and should take
over the management and the control of private business. Eighty percent of the
respondents said they wanted government to keep its paws out of their private
lives.
We are told every day that the assembly-line worker is becoming a
dull-witted robot and that mass production results in standardization. Well,
there isn't a socialist country in the world that would not give its copy of
Karl Marx for our standardization.
Standardization means production for
the masses and the assembly line means more leisure for the worker -- freedom
from backbreaking and mind-dulling drudgery that man had known for centuries
past. Karl Marx did not abolish child labor or free the women from working in
the coal mines in England – the steam engine and modern machinery did that.
Unfortunately, the disciples of the new order have had a hand in
determining too much policy in recent decades. Government has grown in size and
power and cost through the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the
Great Society. It costs more for government today than a family pays for food,
shelter and clothing combined. Not even the Office of Management and Budget
knows how many boards, commissions, bureaus and agencies there are in the
federal government, but the federal registry, listing their regulations, is just
a few pages short of being as big as the Encyclopedia Britannica.
During
the Great Society we saw the greatest growth of this government. There were
eight cabinet departments and 12 independent agencies to administer the federal
health program. There were 35 housing programs and 20 transportation projects.
Public utilities had to cope with 27 different agencies on just routine
business. There were 192 installations and nine departments with 1,000 projects
having to do with the field of pollution.
One Congressman found the
federal government was spending 4 billion dollars on research in its own
laboratories but did not know where they were, how many people were working in
them, or what they were doing. One of the research projects was “The Demography
of Happiness,” and for 249,000 dollars we found that “people who make more money
are happier than people who make less, young people are happier than old people,
and people who are healthier are happier than people who are sick.” For 15 cents
they could have bought an Almanac and read the old bromide, “It's better to be
rich, young and healthy, than poor, old and sick.”
The course that you
have chosen is far more in tune with the hopes and aspirations of our people
than are those who would sacrifice freedom for some fancied security.
Standing on the tiny deck of the Arabella in 1630 off the Massachusetts
coast, John Winthrop said, “We will be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all
people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have
undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be
made a story and a byword throughout the world.” Well, we have not dealt falsely
with our God, even if He is temporarily suspended from the classroom.
When I was born my life expectancy was 10 years less than I have already
lived – that’s a cause of regret for some people in California, I know. Ninety
percent of Americans at that time lived beneath what is considered the poverty
line today, three-quarters lived in what is considered substandard housing.
Today each of those figures is less than 10 percent. We have increased our life
expectancy by wiping out, almost totally, diseases that still ravage mankind in
other parts of the world. I doubt if the young people here tonight know the
names of some of the diseases that were commonplace when we were growing up. We
have more doctors per thousand people than any nation in the world. We have more
hospitals that any nation in the world.
When I was your age, believe it
or not, none of us knew that we even had a racial problem. When I graduated from
college and became a radio sport announcer, broadcasting major league baseball,
I didn’t have a Hank Aaron or a Willie Mays to talk about. The Spaulding Guide
said baseball was a game for Caucasian gentlemen. Some of us then began
editorializing and campaigning against this. Gradually we campaigned against all
those other areas where the constitutional rights of a large segment of our
citizenry were being denied. We have not finished the job. We still have a long
way to go, but we have made more progress in a few years than we have made in
more than a century.
One-third of all the students in the world who are
pursuing higher education are doing so in the United States. The percentage of
our young Negro community that is going to college is greater than the
percentage of whites in any other country in the world.
One-half of all
the economic activity in the entire history of man has taken place in this
republic. We have distributed our wealth more widely among our people than any
society known to man. Americans work less hours for a higher standard of living
than any other people. Ninety-five percent of all our families have an adequate
daily intake of nutrients -- and a part of the five percent that don't are
trying to lose weight! Ninety-nine percent have gas or electric refrigeration,
92 percent have televisions, and an equal number have telephones. There are 120
million cars on our streets and highways -- and all of them are on the street at
once when you are trying to get home at night. But isn't this just proof of our
materialism -- the very thing that we are charged with? Well, we also have more
churches, more libraries, we support voluntarily more symphony orchestras, and
opera companies, non-profit theaters, and publish more books than all the other
nations of the world put together.
Somehow America has bred a kindliness
into our people unmatched anywhere, as has been pointed out in that best-selling
record by a Canadian journalist. We are not a sick society. A sick society could
not produce the men that set foot on the moon, or who are now circling the earth
above us in the Skylab. A sick society bereft of morality and courage did not
produce the men who went through those year of torture and captivity in Vietnam.
Where did we find such men? They are typical of this land as the Founding
Fathers were typical. We found them in our streets, in the offices, the shops
and the working places of our country and on the farms.
We cannot escape
our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was
thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of Philadelphia. In the
days following World War II, when the economic strength and power of America was
all that stood between the world and the return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII
said, “The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish
actions. Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted
mankind.”
We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on
earth.