Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (100 page)

Peace is never long preserved by weight of metal or by an armament race. Peace can be made tranquil and secure only by understanding and agreement fortified by sanctions. We must embrace international cooperation or international disintegration.

Science has taught us how to put the atom to work. But to make it work for good instead of for evil lies in the domain dealing with the principles of human duty. We are now facing a problem more of ethics than of physics.

The solution will require apparent sacrifice in pride and in position, but better pain as the price of peace than death as the price of war.

Robert A. Taft, son of President William Howard Taft (“Mere size is no sin”), dominated the U.S. Senate in the decade after World War II. He led the fight to break down wartime restrictions such as price controls, lest they become permanent in peacetime, and urged the rollback of other reaches for more central power that marked the New Deal crisis era. Brilliant and abrasive, personally stiff and remote, he became known as Mr. Republican; “To err is Truman” was the famous crack of his wife,
Martha; he is remembered for his bill restraining the power of organized labor. Though the exponent of a principled policy to limit the concentration of executive power, his most lasting contribution to the nation’s economy was housing legislation revered by liberals.

One reason he lost the Republican nomination to Eisenhower in 1952 was his willingness to support unpopular causes in the name of political principle. As World War II ended, and the enormity of Nazi atrocities came to light, the Allied nations moved toward trying Hitler’s aides for the new crime of genocide. Taft reminded Americans that trying anyone for acts later designated as crimes was against all Anglo-American legal principles; pundit David Lawrence, his conservative supporter, called this “a technical quibble,” and Ohio’s
Toledo Blade
summed up the opinion of the majority in saying Taft’s speech to Kenyon College on October 5, 1946, demonstrated that he “had a wonderful mind which knows practically everything and understands practically nothing.”

On later review, however, at least another passage of his “equal justice under law” speech—about our failure to protest Stalin’s takeover of the Baltic states—seems prescient in its evocation of human rights as a greater determinant of foreign policy than is the use of force.

The tone of this Taft speech is formal and dispassionate, the reasoning logical, the style legalistic and bloodless, but in all carrying the weight of principle.

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…I DESIRE TODAY
to speak particularly of equal justice, because it is an essential of individual liberty. Unless there is law, and unless there is an impartial tribunal to administer that law, no man can be really free. Without them only force can determine controversy, as in the international field today, and those who have not sufficient force cannot remain free. Without law and an appeal to a just and independent court to interpret that law, every man must be subject to the arbitrary discretion of his ruler or of some subordinate government official.

Over the portal of the great Supreme Court building in Washington are written the words “Equal Justice under Law.” The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and every pronouncement of the founders of the government stated the same principle in one form or another. Thomas Jefferson in his first inaugural emphasized above everything the necessity for “equal and exact justice to all men of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political.”

In England the progress towards a definite law, administered by efficient
and impartial courts or tribunals, was slow and uncertain. The common law developed slowly and only became clear and definite after many centuries. For a long time the courts were anything but impartial, and the actual application of the law was often unfair and unjust. But reverence for the principle must have existed, or it would not have been transported so early to the shores of America to become the dominant theory of government in the colonies….

Unfortunately, the philosophy of equal justice under law, and acceptance of decisions made in accordance with respected institutions, has steadily lost strength during recent years. It is utterly denied in totalitarian states. There the law and the courts are instruments of state policy. It is inconceivable to the people of such a state that a court would concern itself to be fair to those individuals who appear before it when the state has an adverse interest. Nor do they feel any need of being fair between one man and another. Therefore they see no reason for presenting logical argument to justify a position. Nothing is more typical of the Communist or the Fascist than to assert and reassert an argument which has been completely answered and disproved, in order to create public opinion by propaganda to the ignorant.

The totalitarian idea has spread throughout many nations where in the nineteenth century, the ideals of liberty and justice were accepted. Even in this country, the theory that the state is finally responsible for every condition, and that every problem must be cured by giving the government arbitrary power to act, has been increasingly the philosophy of the twentieth century. It infects men who still profess complete adherence to individual liberty and individual justice, so that we find them willing to sacrifice both to accomplish some economic or social purpose. There is none of the burning devotion to liberty which characterized Patrick Henry and even the conservative leaders of the American Revolution.

We see the ignoring of justice internationally when a powerful nation takes the position that its demands must be complied with, “or else,” and refuses to argue or discuss the question. We see it within this country in some labor groups and in some business groups who present ultimatums backed by economic force, and refuse to submit even to partial arbitration. It is present in the world so long as any nation refuses to submit its disputes to argument or adjudication….

Even more discouraging is the attitude of the people and the press. Government action which twenty-five years ago would have excited a sense of outrage in thousands is reported in a few lines and, if disapproved at all, is disapproved with a shrug of the shoulders and a hopeless feeling that nothing can be done about it.

To a large extent this feeling has been promoted by the attack on the
Supreme Court, and the effort to make the courts instruments of executive policy. The old Court may have been too conservative, but the judges believed they were interpreting the laws and Constitution as they were written, and most of the country believed that they were honestly impartial. Today the Court regards itself as the maker of policy—no maker of policy can command respect for impartial dispensation of justice.

I believe more strongly than I can say that if we would maintain progress and liberty in America, it is our responsibility to see not only that laws be rewritten to substitute law for arbitrary discretion but that the whole attitude of the people be educated to a deep devotion to law, impartiality, and equal justice. It is even more important to the entire world that these principles be established as the guide for international action. In my opinion they afford the only hope of future peace. Not only must there be a more definite law to govern the relations between nations, not only must there be tribunals to decide controversies under that law, but the peoples of the world must be so imbued with respect for law and the tribunals established that they will accept their decisions without an appeal to force.

Whether we have a league of sovereign nations like the United Nations, or a world state, there cannot be an end of war if any important people refuse to accept freely the principle of abiding by law, or if truly impartial tribunals are not established.

Unfortunately, I believe we Americans have also in recent foreign policy been affected by principles of expediency and supposed necessity, and abandoned largely the principle of justice. We have drifted into the acceptance of the idea that the world is to be ruled by the power and policy of the great nations and a police force established by them rather than by international law….

During the war, and since, I have felt that there has been little justice in our treatment of the neutral countries. We took the position, in effect, that no nation had the right to remain neutral, and bullied these countries to an extreme restrained only by consideration of policy, but not of justice.

The treatment of enemy countries has seldom been just after any war, but only now are we beginning to get some justice into our treatment of Germany. Our treatment has been harsh in the American Zone as a deliberate matter of government policy, and has offended Americans who saw it, and felt that it was completely at variance with American instincts. We gave countenance to the revengeful and impracticable Morgenthau plan, which would have reduced the Germans to economic poverty. We have fooled ourselves in the belief that we could teach another nation democratic principles by force. Why, we can’t even teach our own
people sound principles of government. We cannot teach liberty and justice in Germany by suppressing liberty and justice.

I believe that most Americans view with discomfort the war trials which have just been concluded in Germany and are proceeding in Japan. They violate that fundamental principle of American law that a man cannot be tried under an ex post facto statute.

The trial of the vanquished by the victors cannot be impartial, no matter how it is hedged about with the forms of justice. I question whether the hanging of those who, however despicable, were the leaders of the German people will ever discourage the making of aggressive war, for no one makes aggressive war unless he expects to win. About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record which we shall long regret.

In these trials we have accepted the Russian idea of the purpose of trials—government policy and not justice—with little relation to Anglo-Saxon heritage. By clothing policy in the forms of legal procedure, we may discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come. In the last analysis, even at the end of a frightful war, we should view the future with more hope if even our enemies believed that we had treated them justly in our English-speaking concept of law, in the provision of relief and in the final disposal of territory. I pray that we do not repeat this procedure in Japan, where the justification on grounds of vengeance is much less than in Germany.

Our whole attitude in the world, for a year after V-E Day, including the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seems to me a departure from the principles of fair and equal treatment, which has made America respected throughout the world before this Second World War. Today we are cordially hated in many countries. I am delighted that Secretary [of State James F.] Byrnes and Senator [Arthur H.] Vandenburg have reversed our policy in many of the respects I have referred to. But abroad as at home we have a long way to go to restore again to the American people our full heritage of an ingrained belief in fairness, impartiality, and justice.

Peace in the world can only come if a law is agreed to relating to international relations, if there is a tribunal which can interpret that law and decide disputes between nations, and if the nations are willing to submit their disputes to impartial decision regardless of the outcome. There can be no peace until the public opinion of the world accepts, as a matter of course, the decisions of an international tribunal.

War has always set back temporarily the ideals of the world. This time,
because of the tremendous scope of the war, the increased barbarism of its methods and the general prevalence of the doctrine of force and expediency even before the war, the effect today is even worse and the duration of the postwar period of disillusionment may be longer.

As I see it, the English-speaking peoples have one great responsibility. That is to restore to the minds of men a devotion to equal justice under law.

In 1949, southern politicians cared little about civil rights; on the contrary, the votes were to be had by exploiting what later came to be known as racism. James Folsom, at the end of the third year of his first term as Alabama’s governor, was known as Big Jim for his size and as Kissin’ Jim for his habit of enthusiastically bussing women (the sobriquet buttressed by a much-publicized paternity suit against him); he was a populist in the Huey Long tradition, with no intellectual pretensions. Thus, his seriously Christian Christmas message, broadcast on December
25, 1949, came as something of a surprise to constituents, and years later southern scholars saw in it political-social thinking that was considerably ahead of its time.

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I AM HAPPY
to have this opportunity to talk to the people of Alabama on Christmas Day. This is the greatest day, the most revered day, of our entire calendar. It is the birthday of Christ, who was the greatest humanitarian the world has ever known.

This is a day to talk about loving our neighbors, lending help to the less fortunate, and bringing joy to others by good work.

We set aside Thanksgiving Day to honor the Almighty’s bountifulness to us; we celebrate the Fourth of July, which marks the freedom of our country; but on Christmas Day we pay tribute for the freedom of our souls.

It is great to live in America, with all of its plenty and bounty—yet it behooves us not to forget that we are the most blessed people on earth. And to remember that with that greatness goes a like share of responsibility.