When the Progressive Party renominated Roosevelt for president in June 1916, he declined to run, endorsing instead the Republican candidate, Charles Evan Hughes. A former governor of New York and an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Hughes stepped down from the bench to run on a platform that called for a “strict and honest neutrality” but denounced the administration for having “humiliated us in our own eyes” by failing to defend American rights abroad. Wilson’s supporters countered with the slogan “he kept us out of war.” Roosevelt could hardly think of a worse reason for reelecting anybody, and said as much at Cooper Union in New York City just days before the election. The results of one of the closest contests in American history hung in the balance for three days. At last the 3,806-vote margin in California made the difference, giving Wilson 277 electoral votes to Hughes’s 254.
I AM GLAD to speak in this historic building, at the request of men of such high standing as those who have asked me to speak; and I thank them for having asked me to speak on the most vital of all present-day questions, the “Nation’s Crisis,” a crisis preeminently moral and spiritual.
There can be no greater misfortune for a free nation than to find itself under incapable leadership when confronted by a great crisis. This is peculiarly the case when the crisis is not merely one in its own history, but is due to some terrible world cataclysm—such a cataclysm as at this moment has overwhelmed civilization. The times have needed a Washington or a Lincoln. Unfortunately we have been granted only another Buchanan.
The appeal is made on behalf of Mr. Wilson that we should not change horses in crossing a stream. The worth of such an appeal is not obvious when the horse, whenever he comes to a stream, first pretends he is going to jump it, then refuses to enter it, and when he has reached the middle alternately moves feebly forward and feebly backward, and occasionally lies down. We had just entered the greatest crisis in our history when we “swapped horses” by exchanging Buchanan for Lincoln; and if we had not made the exchange we would never have crossed the stream at all. The failure now to change Mr. Wilson for Mr. Hughes would be almost as damaging.
Washington and Lincoln confronted crises of different types, and therefore in any given crisis it is now the example of one, now the example of the other, which it is most essential for us to follow. Each stood absolutely for the National ideal, for a full Union of all our people, perpetual and indestructible, and for the full employment of our entire collective strength to any extent that was necessary in order to meet the nation’s needs. Lincoln had to deal with vital questions of internal reform, and with the overturning of internal forces tending toward the destruction of the Union. Washington had to deal primarily, not only with the creation of our Union, but with the maintenance of our liberty against all adverse forces from without. This country must learn the lessons taught by both careers, and must apply the principles established by those careers to the ever-changing conditions of the present, or sooner or later it will go down in utter ruin.
The lesson of nationalism and therefore of efficient action through the national government is taught by both careers. At the present moment we need to apply this principle in our social and industrial life to a degree far greater than was the case in either Washington’s day or Lincoln’s.
The expansion of our people across the continent has gone hand in hand with their immense concentration in great cities, and with gigantic changes in the machinery of communication, transportation, and production; changes which have worked a business revolution almost as vast as that worked by all similar revolutions put together since the days of the Roman Empire. Therefore we are now forced to face problems not only new in degree, but new in kind. We must face these problems in the spirit of Washington and Lincoln; but our methods in industrial life must differ as completely from those that obtained in the times of those two great men of the past as the weapons of warfare now differ from the flintlocks of Washington’s soldiers, or the muzzle-loading smooth-bores of Lincoln’s day. We must quit the effort to meet modern conditions by flintlock legislation. We must recognize, as modern Germany has recognized, that it is folly either to try to cripple business by making it ineffective, or to fail to insist that the wage-worker and consumer must be given their full share of the prosperity that comes from the successful application and use of modern industrial instrumentalities. Both capitalists and wageworkers must understand that the performance of duties and the enjoyment of rights go hand in hand. Any shirking of obligation toward the nation, and towards the people that make up the nation, deprives the offenders of all moral right to the enjoyment of privileges of any kind. This applies alike to corporations and to labor unions, to rich men and poor men, to big men and little men.
There can be no genuine feeling of patriotism of the kind that makes all men willing and eager to die for the land, unless there has been some measure of success in making the land worth living in for all alike, whatever their station, so long as they do their duty; and on the other hand, no man has a right to enjoy any benefits whatever from living in the land in time of peace, unless he is trained physically and spiritually so that if duty calls he can and will do his part to keep the land against all alien aggression. Every citizen of this land, every American of whatever creed or national origin, should keep in mind the injunction of George Washington to his nephews, when in his will dated July 9th, 1799, he bequeathed to each of them a sword, making the bequest in the following words:
“The swords are accompanied with an injunction not to unsheathe them for the purpose of shedding blood, except it be for self-defense, or in defense of their country and its rights; and in the latter case to keep them unsheathed and prefer falling with them in their hands to the relinquishment thereof.”
These are noble words. Remember that they gained their nobility only because the deeds of Washington had been such that he had a right to utter them. His sword had been sheathed until he drew it on behalf of national liberty and of humanity, and then it was kept unsheathed until victory came. His sword was a terror to the powers of evil. It was a flame of white fire in the eyes of those who fought for what was right.
Washington loved peace. Perhaps Lincoln loved peace even more. But when the choice was between peace and righteousness, both alike trod undaunted the dark path that led through terror and suffering and the imminent menace of death to the shining goal beyond. We treasure the lofty words these men spoke. We treasure them because they were not merely words, but the high expression of deeds still higher; the expression of a serene valor that was never betrayed by a cold heart or a subtle and selfish brain. We treasure what Washington enjoined on his blood-kin as their duty when they should inherit his swords; but we do so only because Washington’s own sword never slipped from a hand made irresolute by fear. We treasure the words that Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, and in his second inaugural; words spoken with the inspiration of a prophet of old, standing between the horns of the altar, while the pillars of the temple reeled round about. The words spoken by Lincoln were spoken when he was weighed down by iron grief, and yet was upheld by an iron will, so that he stood erect while the foundations of the country rocked beneath his feet, and with breaking heart and undaunted soul poured out, as if it were a libation, the life blood of the best and bravest of the land. We cherish these words of his only because they were made good by his deeds. We remember that he said that a government dedicated to freedom should not perish from the earth. We remember it only because he did not let the government perish. We remember that he said that the bondman should be free at whatever cost. We remember it only because he paid the cost and set the bondman free.
When Lincoln accepted the nomination of the Republican Party in 1860, he spoke of the platform of that party as follows:
“The declaration of principles and sentiments which accompanies your letter meets my approval, and it shall be my care not to violate or disregard them in any part.”
This was a short statement. It derived its value from the fact that it was a promise that was kept. I ask you to compare this record of Lincoln’s with the cynicism shown by Mr. Wilson at different times in repudiating almost every promise he has ever made on any matter of vital importance. He has repudiated the promises of the platform on which he was elected. He has repudiated the promises he made on the stump to further his own election. He has now repudiated about all the promises which he has made since he became President.
I have been assailed because I have criticised Mr. Wilson. I have not said one thing of him that was not absolutely accurate and truthful. I have not said one thing of him which I did not deem it necessary to say because of the vital interests of this Republic. I have criticised him because I believe he has dragged in the dust what was most sacred in our past, and has jeopardized the most vital hopes of our future. I have never spoken of him as strongly as Abraham Lincoln in his day spoke of Buchanan and Pierce when they were Presidents of the United States. I spoke of him at all, only because I have felt that in this great world crisis he has played a more evil part than Buchanan and Pierce ever played in the years that led up to and saw the opening of the Civil War. I criticise him now because he has adroitly and cleverly and with sinister ability appealed to all that is weakest and most unworthy in the American character; and also because he has adroitly and cleverly and with sinister ability sought to mislead many men and women who are neither weak nor unworthy, but who have been misled by a shadow dance of words. He has made our statesmanship a thing of empty elocution. He has covered his fear of standing for the right behind a veil of rhetorical phrases. He has wrapped the true heart of the nation in a spangled shroud of rhetoric. He has kept the eyes of the people dazzled so that they know not what is real and what is false, so that they turn, bewildered, unable to discern the difference between the glitter that veneers evil and the stark realities of courage and honesty, of truth and strength. In the face of the world he has covered this nation’s face with shame as with a garment.
I hardly know whether to feel the most burning indignation at those speeches of his wherein he expresses lofty sentiments which his deeds belie, or at those other speeches wherein he displays a frank cynicism of belief in, and of appeal to, what is basest in the human heart. In a recent speech at Long Branch he said to our people, as reported in the daily press, that “You cannot worship God on an empty stomach, and you cannot be a patriot when you are starving.” No more sordid untruth was ever uttered. Is it possible that Mr. Wilson, who professes to be a historian, who has been a college president, and passes for a man of learning, knows nothing either of religion or of patriotism? Does he not know that never yet was there a creed worth having, the professors of which did not fervently worship God whether their stomachs were full or empty? Does he not know that never yet was there a country worth living in which did not develop among her sons something at least of that nobility of soul which makes men not only serve their country when they are starving, but when death has set its doom on their faces?
Such a sentence as this could be uttered only by a President who cares nothing for the nation’s soul, and who believes that the nation itself puts its belly above its soul. No wonder that when such a doctrine is preached by the President, his Secretary of War should compare Washington and Washington’s soldiers with the bandit chiefs of Mexico and their followers who torture men and murder children, and commit nameless outrages on women. This sentence is as bad as anything Secretary Baker himself said. I call the attention of these apostles of the full belly, of these men who jeer at the nation’s soul, I call the attention of President Wilson and his Secretary of War and his Secretary of the Navy, to what Washington said of his own soldiers when he spoke of them in a letter to Congress on April 21st, 1778:
“Without arrogance or the slightest deviation from truth, it may be said that no history now extant can furnish an instance of an army’s suffering such uncommon hardships as ours has done and bearing them with the same patience and fortitude. To see men without clothes to cover their nakedness, without blankets to lie on, without shoes for the want of which their marches might be traced by the blood from their feet, and almost as often without provisions as with them, marching through the frost and snow and at Christmas taking up their winter quarters within a day’s march of the enemy without a house or a hut to cover them till they could be built, and submitting without a murmur, is a proof of patience and obedience which, in my opinion, can scarce be paralleled.”
That is what Washington said. Does Mr. Wilson think that these men of Valley Forge were not patriots, because they were starving? Is his own soul so small that he cannot see the greatness of soul of Washington and of the Continental soldiers whose feet left bloody tracks upon the snow as they marched towards the enemy? They were clad in rags; their eyes were hollow with famine; their bodies were numbed with cold and racked with fever; but they loved their country; they stood for the soul of the nation and not for its belly. Mr. Baker and Mr. Daniels have done evil to this country only because they stood where their master, Mr. Wilson, had placed them. Mr. Baker has preached the doctrine of contempt for the men of the Revolution only because he has followed the lead of the President, who says that religion is merely a matter of a full stomach, and that patriotism vanishes when heroes feel the pinch of famine. I call your attention to these statements not only because they are foul slanders on everything that is good in human nature, not only because they are a foul slander on every American worth calling an American, but because they show the character of Mr. Wilson himself.
So much for Mr. Wilson when he says what he really feels. Now a word about what he says when he speaks what it is quite impossible that he really believes. On last Saturday afternoon, with an effrontery that is literally dumbfounding, he said that when he “started in one direction” he “would never turn around and go back,” and that he “had acted upon this principle all his life,” and that he “intended to act upon it in the future,” and that he “did not see any obstacle that would make him turn back.” Why, his whole record has consisted in turning back at every point when he was bidden to do so by either fear or self-interest. He has reversed himself on almost every important position he has ever taken. There is not a bandit leader in Mexico who does not know that if he can show enough strength he can at any moment make Mr. Wilson not merely turn back, but humbly kiss his hand; kiss the hand that is red with the blood of our men, women and children. Mr. Wilson says that he “never turns back!” Why, he has been conducting his whole campaign on the appeal that he has “kept us out of war”; and yet last Thursday, without a moment’s notice, and only ten days before election, after having been going full speed in one direction, he turned around and went full speed in the reverse direction on this very point; saying, forsooth, that if there was another war we must not keep out of it! He has been claiming credit because in the case of Belgium he has preserved a neutrality that would make Pontius Pilate quiver with envy; and yet in this speech last Thursday he said that never again must we be neutral! He has kept us absolutely unprepared; so that now we are as absolutely unprepared, after he has been in office three and a half years, as we were when he took office; and yet he now says that we must enter the next war whenever one comes! He has looked on without a single throb of his cold heart, without the least quickening of his tepid pulse, while gallant Belgium was trampled into bloody mire, while the Turk inflicted on the Armenian and Syrian Christians wrongs that would have blasted the memory of Attila, and he has claimed credit for his neutral indifference to their suffering; and yet now, ten days before election, he says the United States must hereafter refuse to allow small nations to be mishandled by big, powerful nations. Do it now, Mr. Wilson! If you mean what you say, Mr. Wilson, show that you mean it by your action in the present.
There is no more evil lesson that can be taught this people than to cover up failure in the performance of duty in the present by the utterance of glittering generalities as to the performance of duty in the nebulous future. With all my heart I believe in seeing this country prepare its own soul and body so that it can stand up for the weak when they are oppressed by the strong. But before it can do so it must fit itself to defend its own rights, and it must stand for the rights of its citizens. During the last three years and a half, hundreds of American men, women and children have been murdered on the high seas, and in Mexico. Mr. Wilson has not dared to stand up for them. He has let them suffer without relief, and without inflicting punishment upon the wrongdoers. When he announces that in some dim future he intends to stand up for the rights of others, let him make good in the present by now standing up for the rights of our own people. He wrote Germany that he would hold her to “strict accountability” if an American lost his life on an American or neutral ship by her submarine warfare. Forthwith the Arabic and the Gulflight were sunk. But Mr. Wilson dared not take any action to make his threat effective. He held Germany to no accountability, loose or strict. Germany despised him; and the Lusitania was sunk in consequence. Thirteen hundred and ninety-four people were drowned, one hundred and three of them babies under two years of age. Two days later, while the dead mothers with their dead babies in their arms lay by scores in the Queenstown morgue, Mr. Wilson selected the moment as opportune to utter his famous sentence about being “Too proud to fight.” Mr. Wilson now dwells at Shadow Lawn. There should be shadows enough at Shadow Lawn; the shadows of men, women and children who have risen from the ooze of the ocean bottom and from graves in foreign lands; the shadows of the helpless whom Mr. Wilson did not dare protect lest he might have to face danger; the shadows of babies gasping pitifully as they sank under the waves; the shadows of women outraged and slain by bandits; the shadows of Boyd and Adair and their troopers who lay in the Mexican desert, the black blood crusted round their mouths, and their dim eyes looking upward, because President Wilson had sent them to do a task, and had then shamefully abandoned them to the mercy of foes who knew no mercy. Those are the shadows proper for Shadow Lawn; the shadows of deeds that were never done; the shadows of lofty words that were followed by no action; the shadows of the tortured dead.
The titanic war still staggers to and fro across the continent of Europe. The nations engaged in the death wrestle still show no sign of letting up. Some time in the next four years the end will come, and then no human being can tell what this nation will have to face. If we were ready and able to defend ourselves and to do our duty to others, and if our abilities were backed by an iron willingness to show courage and good faith on behalf both of ourselves and of others, not only would our own place in the world be secure, but we might render incalculable service to other nations. If we elect Mr. Wilson it will be serving notice on the world that the traditions, the high moral standards, the courageous purposes of Washington and Lincoln have been obscured, and that in their stead we have deliberately elected to show ourselves for the time being a sordid, soft and spineless nation; content to accept any and every insult; content to pay no heed to the most flagrant wrongs done to the small and weak; allowing our men, women and children to be murdered and outraged; anxious only to gather every dollar that we can, to spend it in luxury, and to replace it by any form of moneymaking which we can follow with safety to our own bodies.
We cannot for our own sakes, we cannot for the sake of the world at large, afford to take such a position. In place of the man who is now in the White House, who has wrought such shame on our people, let us put in the Presidential chair the clean and upright Justice of the Supreme Court, the fearless Governor of New York, whose whole public record has been that of a man straightforward in his thoughts and courageous in his actions, who cannot be controlled to do what is wrong, and who will do what is right no matter what influences may be brought against him.
November 3, 1916