Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (126 page)

I am in this cause with my whole heart and soul. I believe that the Progressive movement is making life a little easier for all our people; a movement to try to take the burdens off the men and especially the women and children of this country. I am absorbed in the success of that movement….

I say this by way of introduction, because I want to say something very serious to our people and especially to the newspapers. I don’t know anything about who the man was who shot me tonight…. He shot to kill. He shot—the shot, the bullet went in here—I will show you. [Opens jacket, shows bloodstained shirt.]

I am going to ask you to be as quiet as possible for I am not able to give the challenge of the bull moose quite as loudly. Now, I do not know who he was or what he represented. He was a coward. He stood in the darkness in the crowd around the automobile and when they cheered me, and I got up to bow, he stepped forward and shot me in the darkness.

Now, friends, of course, I do not know, as I say, anything about him; but it is a very natural thing that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers in the interest of not only Mr. Debs but of Mr. Wilson and Mr. Taft.

Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party; and now I wish to say seriously to all the daily newspapers, to the Republicans, the Democrat, and Socialist parties, that they cannot, month-in month-out and year-in and year-out, make the kind of untruthful, of bitter assault that they have made and not expect that brutal, violent natures, or brutal and violent characters, especially when the brutality is accompanied by a not very strong mind—they cannot expect that such natures will be unaffected by it.

Now, friends, I am not speaking for myself at all, I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap. I have had a good many experiences in my time and this is one of them. What I care for is my country.

I wish I were able to impress upon my people—our people, the duty to feel strongly but to speak the truth of their opponents. I say now, I have never said one word on the stump against any opponent that I cannot defend. I have said nothing that I could not substantiate and nothing that I ought not to have said—nothing that I—nothing that, looking back at, I would not say again.

[Waves off doctor approaching him onstage.] I am not sick at all. I am all right.

Now, friends, it ought not to be too much to ask that our opponents… make up their minds to speak only the truth, and not use that kind of slander and mendacity which if taken seriously must incite weak and violent natures to crimes of violence. Don’t you make any mistake. Don’t you pity me. I am all right. I am all right and you cannot escape listening to the speech either…

This effort to assassinate me emphasizes to a peculiar degree the need for the Progressive movement. Friends, every good citizen ought to do everything in his or her power to prevent the coming of the day when we shall see in this country two recognized creeds fighting one another, when we shall see the creed of the “Have-nots” arraigned against the creed of the “Haves.” When that day comes then such incidents as this tonight will be commonplace in our history. When… you permit the conditions to grow such that the poor man as such will be swayed by his sense of injury against the men who try to hold what they improperly have won, when that day comes, the most awful passions will be let loose and it will be an ill day for our country.

Now, friends, what we who are in this movement are endeavoring to do is forestall any such movement for justice now—a movement in which we ask all just men of generous hearts to join with the men who feel in their souls that lift upward which bids them refuse to be satisfied themselves while their countrymen and countrywomen suffer from avoidable misery. Now, friends, what we Progressives are trying to do is to enroll rich or poor, whatever their social or industrial position, to stand together for those elementary rights which are the foundation of good citizenship in this great Republic of ours. [A renewed effort was made to persuade Mr. Roosevelt to conclude his speech.] My friends are a little more nervous than I am. Don’t you waste any sympathy on me. I have had an A-1 time in life and I am having it now.

I never in my life was in any movement in which I was able to serve with such wholehearted devotion as in this; in which I was able to feel as I do in this that common weal. I have fought for the good of our common country.

And now, friends, I shall have to cut short much of that speech that I meant to give you, but I want to touch on just two or three points…. I know these doctors, when they get hold of me, will never let me go back, and there are just a few more things that I want to say to you.

I have got to make one comparison between Mr. Wilson and myself, simply because he has invited it and I cannot shrink from it. Mr. Wilson has seen fit to attack me, to say that I did not do much against the trusts
when I was president. I have got two answers to make to that. In the first place what I did, and then I want to compare what I did when I was president with what Mr. Wilson did not do when he was governor.

When I took the office the antitrust law was practically a dead letter and the interstate commerce law in as poor a condition. I had to revive both laws. I did. I enforced both. It will be easy enough to do now what I did then, but the reason that it is easy now is because I did it when it was hard….

Mr. Wilson has said that the states are the proper authorities to deal with the trusts. Well, about 80 percent of the trusts are organized in New Jersey. The Standard Oil, the Tobacco, the Sugar, the Beef, all those trusts are organized in the state of New Jersey and the laws of New Jersey say that their charters can at any time be amended or repealed if they misbehave themselves and give the government ample power to act about those laws, and Mr. Wilson has been governor a year and nine months and he has not opened his lips. The chapter describing what Mr. Wilson has done about trusts in New Jersey would read precisely like a chapter describing snakes in Ireland, which ran: “There are no snakes in Ireland.” Mr. Wilson has done precisely and exactly nothing about the trusts….

When the Republican party—not the Republican party—when the bosses in control of the Republican party, the Barneses and Penroses, last June stole the nomination and wrecked the Republican party for good and all—I want to point out to you that nominally they stole that nomination from me, but it was really from you. They did not like me, and the longer they live the less cause they will have to like me. But while they don’t like me, they dread you. You are the people that they dread. They dread the people themselves, and those bosses and the big special interests behind them made up their mind that they would rather see the Republican party wrecked than see it come under the control of the people themselves. So I am not dealing with the Republican party.

There are only two ways you can vote this year. You can be progressive or reactionary. Whether you vote Republican or Democratic it does not make a difference, you are voting reactionary.

Now, the Democratic party in its platform and through the utterances of Mr. Wilson has distinctly committed itself to the old flintlock, muzzle-loaded doctrine of states’ rights, and I have said distinctly we are for people’s rights…. I ask you to look at our declaration and hear and read our platform about social and industrial justice and then, friends, vote for the Progressive ticket without regard to me, without regard to my personality—for only by voting for that platform can you be true to the cause of progress throughout this Union. [Helped off platform.]

A good keynote address is at once a leisurely evocation of the glory of a partisan past and a brief promise of a glorious future. In the television age, it is also a showcase for a promising young politician, and a party’s presentation of what it considers the best image of the party to the public. A keynoter is usually not assigned to deal with the central issue of the time, its key note; rather, it is the orator’s job at the start of a gathering of partisans to uplift, exhort, and galvanize the troops.

An example of this kind of keynote address is that of Claude Bowers at the 1928 Democratic National Convention in Houston. That convention nominated Al Smith to face Herbert Hoover, just nominated by the Republicans in Kansas City to succeed Calvin Coolidge. Bowers (1878–1958) was a political columnist for the
New York Journal
and a popular historian, whose best-known works were
The Party Battles of the Jackson Era
and
Jefferson and Hamilton
(he revered Jefferson and despised Hamilton). He later served as FDR’s ambassador to Spain during its civil war and to Chile in the 1940s.

The orator associates the Republicans with Hamilton and dissociates them from their Lincoln; he foresees a “plunderbund,” or association of predators, if the opposition stays in power; and he makes the coming political contest an Armageddon between the forces of good and evil: “They are led by money-mad cynics and scoffers—and we go forth to battle for the cause of man.” It made everybody in the hall feel good.

***

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
of the Convention:

The American Democracy has mobilized today to wage a war of extermination against privilege and pillage. We prime our guns against autocracy and bureaucracy. We march against that centralization which threatens the liberties of the people. We fight for the republic of the fathers, and for the recovery of the covenant from the keeping of a caste and class. We battle for the honor of the nation, besmirched and bedraggled by the most brazen and shameless carnival of corruption that ever blackened the reputation of a decent and self-respecting people.

We stand for the spirit of the preamble of the Declaration that is made a mockery; for the Bill of Rights that is ignored; for the social and economic justice which is refused; for the sovereign right of states that are denied; and for a return to the old-fashioned civic integrity of a Jackson, a Tilden, a Cleveland, and a Wilson. We stand for the restoration of the government to the people who built it by their bravery and cemented it with their blood….

The issues are as fundamental as they were when Jefferson and Hamilton crossed swords more than a century ago. To understand the conflicting views of these two men on the functions of government is to grasp the deep significance of this campaign.

Now, Hamilton believed in the rule of an aristocracy of money, and Jefferson in a democracy of men.

Hamilton believed that governments are created for the domination of the masses, and Jefferson that they are created for the service of the people.

Hamilton wrote to Morris that governments are strong in proportion as they are made profitable to the powerful; and Jefferson knew that no government is fit to live that does not conserve the interest of the average man.

Hamilton proposed a scheme for binding the wealthy to the government by making government a source of revenue to the wealthy; and Jefferson unfurled his banner of equal rights.

Hamilton would have concentrated authority remote from the people, and Jefferson would have diffused it among them.

Hamilton would have injected governmental activities into all the affairs of men; and Jefferson laid it down as an axiom of freedom that “that government is best which governs least.”

Just put a pin in this: there is not a major evil of which the American people are complaining now that is not due to the triumph of the Hamiltonian conception of the state. And the tribute to Hamilton at Kansas City was an expression of fealty to him who thought that governments are strong in proportion as they are made profitable to the powerful; who proposed the plan for binding the wealthy; who devised the
scheme to tax the farm to pay the factory; and whose purpose was to make democracy in America a mockery and a sham.

Thus we are challenged once more to a conflict on the fundamentals; and a clear call comes to us today to fight anew under the Jeffersonian banner, with the Jacksonian sword, and in the Wilsonian spirit, and, crashing the gates of privilege, make Jeffersonian democracy a living force again in the lives and homes of men….

You cannot believe with Lincoln in a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and with Hamilton in a government of the wealthy, by the influential, and for the powerful.

There are Lincoln Republicans and Hamilton Republicans, but never the twain shall meet….

What a majestic figure was he who led us in those fruitful years! The cold, even light of his superb intellect played upon the most intricate problems of the times, and they seemed to solve themselves. He lifted the people to such heights of moral grandeur as they had never known before; and his name and purpose made hearts beat faster in lowly places where his praise was sung in every language in the world. And when at length, his body broken, but his spirit soaring still, he fell stricken, while still battling for his faith, there passed to time and to eternity and to all mankind the everlasting keeping of the immortal memory of Woodrow Wilson.

We submit that a party that stands for that democracy which is inseparable from the liberties of men, and has given a Jefferson, a Jackson, and a Wilson to the service of mankind, has earned the right, in times like these, to the cooperation of independents and progressives in the struggle for the preservation of popular government, and the purging of the nation of that corruption which has made America a byword and a hissing in the very alleys of the world….

Never in a century has there been such a call to us to battle for the faith of our fathers as there is today; and never has the control of government been so completely concentrated in the hands of a willing caste as now. The dreams of the Hamiltonians have literally come true while the people slept. They wanted organized wealth in possession of the government—and we have it. They wanted the sovereign rights of states denied—and we have it. They wanted bureaucratic agents swarming over the land like the locusts of Egypt—and we have it. They wanted government made profitable to the powerful—and we have it. They wanted, through administration, to make a mockery of democracy—and we have it. The Hamiltonian state is necessarily a temple of gold resting on the bowed back of peasants in other people’s fields—and we almost have that now. They would deify dollars and minimize men, limit self-government
and centralize power, cripple democracy, empower bureaucracy, welcome plutocracy—and we will soon have that, too.