The Strategy of Peace

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From the Introduction by Allan Nevins
"What is the use," Grover Cleveland once growled, "of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?" Whether an officeholder is a mayor, governor, or President he should be held to the spirit of that question; he can be a mayor like Tom L. Johnson of Cleveland, a governor like Altgeld of Illinois, or a President like Franklin D. Roosevelt, who stood not only for something, but something well in advance of accepted goals. In American political life the stand is all-important. One of our national faults is our tendency to pay too much attention to personalities and too little to policy and argument; we are lazy, we like to drift, and we are willing to accept gestures for courage, and catchwords for ideas. . . .
Happily, the tradition has changed. Speaking for good old Buncombe County in Congress, and standing by the flag and the country on the stump, are not enough. Joseph Chamberlain once remarked to his followers: "The trouble... Tovább

Fülszöveg

From the Introduction by Allan Nevins
"What is the use," Grover Cleveland once growled, "of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?" Whether an officeholder is a mayor, governor, or President he should be held to the spirit of that question; he can be a mayor like Tom L. Johnson of Cleveland, a governor like Altgeld of Illinois, or a President like Franklin D. Roosevelt, who stood not only for something, but something well in advance of accepted goals. In American political life the stand is all-important. One of our national faults is our tendency to pay too much attention to personalities and too little to policy and argument; we are lazy, we like to drift, and we are willing to accept gestures for courage, and catchwords for ideas. . . .
Happily, the tradition has changed. Speaking for good old Buncombe County in Congress, and standing by the flag and the country on the stump, are not enough. Joseph Chamberlain once remarked to his followers: "The trouble with you young men is that you don't take enough pains with your speeches"—by which he meant pains to assume a strong stand and defend it by logic and fact; and as if in answer to that challenge, young Winston Churchill said that he wrote a speech six times over with his own hand. In the heyday of stump speech demagogy, Lincoln grappled squarely with questions that most politicians were trying frantically to evade, and put honest reason behind the solutions he ofl^ered. The people responded to his determined effort to think his way through the difficulties facing the country. They will always respond to decision, candor, and earnestness backed by ability, and since our difficulties thickened, they have increasingly made this clear. The speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, torches in the murk of their times, are worth reading still; they set standards which cannot be forgotten. We demand new torch-bearers, and we are getting them. One of the ablest, with the enthusiasm of comparative youth and the idealism of dedicated purpose, lifts his lamp in the pages of this volume. Vissza