Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (44 page)

[
BAKER
:] A few words as to the senator’s predictions. The senator from Kentucky stands up here in a manly way, in opposition to what he sees as the overwhelming sentiment of the Senate, and utters reproof, malediction, and prediction combined. Well, sir, it is not every prediction that is prophecy.

What would have been thought, if in another capitol, in another republic, in a yet more martial age, a senator as grave, not more eloquent or dignified than the senator from Kentucky, yet with the Roman purple flowing over his shoulders, had risen in his place, surrounded by all the illustrations of Roman glory, and declared that advancing Hannibal was just and that Carthage ought to be dealt with in terms of peace?

What would have been thought if, after the battle of Cannae, a senator there had risen in his place and denounced every levy of the Roman people, every expenditure of its treasures, and every appeal to the old glories?

[
VOICE
:] He would have been hurled from the Tarpeian Rock!

[
BAKER
:] Yes, a colleague more learned than I says that the speaker of such words would have been hurled from the Tarpeian Rock. It is a grand commentary on the American Constitution that we permit such words as spoken by the senator from Kentucky to be uttered here and now.

But I ask the senator, what, save to send aid and comfort to the enemy, do these predictions of his amount to? Every word thus uttered falls as a note of inspiration upon every Confederate ear. Every sound thus spoken is a word—and from his lips a mighty word—of kindling and triumph to a foe that determines to advance….

For me, amid temporary defeat, disaster, disgrace, it seems that my duty calls me to utter another word, and that word is “war.” Bold, sudden, forward, determined war, according to the laws of war, by armies and by military commanders clothed with full power, advancing with all the past glories of the Republic urging them on to conquest.

I do not stop to consider whether it is “subjugation” or not. The senator animadverts to my use of “subjugation.” Why play on words? We propose to subjugate rebellion into loyalty; we propose to subjugate insurrection into peace; we propose to subjugate Confederate anarchy into constitutional Union liberty….

And when we subjugate South Carolina, what will we do? We shall compel its obedience to the Constitution of the United States; that is all. The senator knows that we propose no more. I yield for his reply.

[
BRECKINRIDGE
:] By whose indulgence am I speaking? Not by any man’s indulgence, I am speaking by the guarantees of that Constitution which seems to be here now so little respected….

When the senator asked what would have been done with a Roman senator who had uttered such words as mine, a certain senator on this floor,—whose courage has much risen of late, replied in audible tones, “He would have been hurled from the Tarpeian Rock.” Sir, if ever we find an American Tarpeian Rock, and a suitable victim is to be selected, the people will turn, not to me, but to that senator who has been the chief author of the public misfortunes.

Let him remember, too, that while in ancient Rome the defenders of the public liberty were sometimes torn to pieces by the people, yet their memories were cherished in grateful remembrance; while to be hurled from the Tarpeian Rock was ever the fate of usurpers and tyrants…. I reply with just indignation at such an insult offered on the floor of the Senate Chamber to a senator who is speaking in his place….

War is separation. War is disunion, eternal and final disunion. We have separation now; it is only made worse by war, and war will extinguish all
those sentiments of common interest and feeling which might lead to a political reunion founded upon consent and upon a conviction of its advantages.

Let this war go on, however, you will see further separation. Let this war go on, and the people of the West see the beautiful features of the old Confederacy beaten out of shape by the brutalizing hand of war, and they will turn aside in disgust from the sickening spectacle and become a separate nation.

[
BAKER
:] The Pacific states will be true to the Union to the last of her blood and her treasure….

I confess, Mr. President, that I would not have predicted three weeks ago the disasters which have overtaken our arms. But I ask the senator from Kentucky, will he tell me it is our duty to stay here, within fifteen miles of the enemy seeking to advance upon us every hour, and talk about nice questions of constitutional construction? Are we to stop and talk about rising sentiment against the war in the North? Are we to predict evil and flinch from what we predict? Is it not the manly part to go on as we have begun, to raise money, to levy armies, to prepare to advance?

To talk to us about stopping is idle; we will never stop. Will the senator yield to rebellion? Will he shrink from armed insurrection? Will his state justify it? Shall we send a flag of truce? What would he have us do? Or would he conduct the war so feebly, that the whole world would smile at us in derision? What would he have us do? Those speeches of his, sown broadcast over the land, what clear distinct meaning have they? Are they not meant for disorganization in our very midst? Are they not intended to dull our weapons? Are they not intended to destroy our zeal? Are they not intended to animate our enemies? Sir—are they not words of brilliant, polished
treason
?

[
BRECKINRIDGE
:] The senator asks me, “What would you have us do?” I have already indicated what I would have us do. I would have us stop the war.

We can do it. There is none of that inexorable necessity to continue this war which the senator seems to suppose. I do not hold that constitutional liberty on this continent is bound up in this fratricidal, devastating, horrible contest. Upon the contrary, I fear it will find its grave in it….

The senator is mistaken in supposing that we can reunite these states by war. He is mistaken in supposing that if twenty million on one side subjugate twelve million on the other side, that you can restore constitutional government as our fathers made it…. Sir, I would prefer to see these states all reunited upon true constitutional principles to any other
object that could be offered me in life. But I infinitely prefer to see a peaceful separation of these states, than to see endless, aimless, devastating war, at the end of which I see the grave of public liberty and personal freedom.

[
BAKER
:] The senator is right about the devastation ahead. There will be privation; there will be loss of luxury; there will be graves reeking with blood, watered with tears. When that is said, all is said. If we have the country, the whole country, the Union, the Constitution, free government—with these there will return all the blessings of a well-ordered civilization. The path of the whole country will be one of greatness and peace such as would have been ours today, if it had not been for the treason for which the senator from Kentucky too often seeks to apologize.

[
BRECKINRIDGE
:] You say that the opinions I express are but brilliant treason. Mr. President, if I am speaking treason, I am not aware of it. I am speaking what I believe to be for the good of my country. If I am speaking treason, I am speaking it
in my place
in the Senate…. If my opinions do not reflect the judgment of the people I represent, I am not a man to cling to the emoluments of public life. If the commonwealth of Kentucky, instead of attempting to mediate as a neutral in this struggle, shall throw her energies into the strife on the side of what I believe to be a war of subjugation and annihilation, then she shall take her course. I am her son and will share her destiny, but she will be represented by some other man on the floor of this Senate.

This speech, read on August 12, 1919, to the U. S. Senate during the “great debate” on postwar foreign policy, made the case against Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for the United States to join the League of Nations. Internationalists have long remembered this stand of the “irreconcilables” as the supreme example of misguided isolationism.

Lodge was Senate majority leader and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee; he detested Wilson personally, but took a middle position on the League, which the U.S. president had proposed at the Versailles conference. He argued that the Senate should accept it with a key reservation: that the Congress had to remain central in any commitment as important as war.

Lodge’s view, not Wilson’s, prevailed; the United States was not about to surrender that much of its sovereignty to a world body, and a policy of selective intervention with senatorial participation remained bipartisan doctrine throughout the twentieth century. His grandson, Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., an internationalist who later became our ambassador to the UN, in 1953 resolutely defended the much maligned Lodge reservation as one that “simply preserved the power of Congress—a power which is jealously guarded today, which is completely safeguarded both in the United Nations Charter and the Atlantic Pact, and which President Wilson was unwilling categorically to express at that time.”

The essence of the speech is expressed in a single verb: “Let us beware how we
palter
with our independence.” “Palter,” perhaps rooted in a Germanic word for “rag,” means “deal frivolously”; it has a more solemn tone than “fiddle around.” The use of an archaic or unfamiliar word at a critical moment is rhetorically effective; Franklin Roosevelt used the same technique in referring to Pearl Harbor Day as one that would live in “infamy” rather than “history.” A defensive note is struck in Lodge’s speech by a speaker aware of the appeal of Wilsonian idealism and the bitter charges of isolation and selfishness being made against opponents
of the League. Note how he closes with a serious, low-key effort to overcome Wilson’s “monopoly of idealism.”

***

I OBJECT IN
the strongest possible way to having the United States agree, directly or indirectly, to be controlled by a league which may at any time, and perfectly lawfully and in accordance with the terms of the covenant, be drawn in to deal with internal conflicts in other countries, no matter what those conflicts may be. We should never permit the United States to be involved in any internal conflict in another country, except by the will of her people expressed through the Congress which represents them….

Those of us, Mr. President, who are either wholly opposed to the League or who are trying to preserve the independence and the safety of the United States by changing the terms of the League, and who are endeavoring to make the League, if we are to be a member of it, less certain to promote war instead of peace have been reproached with selfishness in our outlook and with a desire to keep our country in a state of isolation. So far as the question of isolation goes, it is impossible to isolate the United States. I well remember the time, twenty years ago, when eminent senators and other distinguished gentlemen who were opposing the Philippines and shrieking about imperialism sneered at the statement made by some of us, that the United States had become a world power. I think no one now would question that the Spanish war marked the entrance of the United States into world affairs to a degree which had never obtained before. It was both an inevitable and an irrevocable step, and our entrance into the war with Germany certainly showed once and for all that the United States was not unmindful of its world responsibilities.

We may set aside all this empty talk about isolation. Nobody expects to isolate the United States or to make it a hermit nation, which is a sheer absurdity. But there is a wide difference between taking a suitable part and bearing a due responsibility in world affairs and plunging the United States into every controversy and conflict on the face of the globe. By meddling in all the differences which may arise among any portion or fragment of humankind, we simply fritter away our influence and injure ourselves to no good purpose. We shall be of far more value to the world and its peace by occupying, so far as possible, the situation which we have occupied for the last twenty years and by adhering to the policy of Washington and Hamilton, of Jefferson and Monroe, under which we have risen to our present greatness and prosperity….

It has been reiterated here on this floor, and reiterated to the point of weariness, that in every treaty there is some sacrifice of sovereignty. That is not a universal truth by any means, but it is true of some treaties and it is a platitude which does not require reiteration. The question and the only question before us here is how much of our sovereignty we are justified in sacrificing. In what I have already said about other nations putting us into war I have covered one point of sovereignty which ought never to be yielded—the power to send American soldiers and sailors everywhere, which ought never to be taken from the American people or impaired in the slightest degree. Let us beware how we palter with our independence….

Contrast the United States with any country on the face of the earth today, and ask yourself whether the situation of the United States is not the best to be found. I will go as far as anyone in world service, but the first step to world service is the maintenance of the United States. You may call me selfish if you will, conservative or reactionary, or use any other harsh adjective you see fit to apply, but an American I was born, an American I have remained all my life. I can never be anything else but an American, and I must think of the United States first, and when I think of the United States first in an arrangement like this I am thinking of what is best for the world, for if the United States fails, the best hopes of mankind fail with it. I have never had but one allegiance—I cannot divide it now. I have loved but one flag, and I cannot share that devotion and give affection to the mongrel banner invented for a league. Internationalism, illustrated by the Bolshevik and by the men to whom all countries are alike provided they can make money out of them, is to me repulsive. National I must remain, and in that way I, like all other Americans, can render the amplest service to the world. The United States is the world’s best hope, but if you fetter her in the interests and quarrels of other nations, if you tangle her in the intrigues of Europe, you will destroy her power for good and endanger her very existence. Leave her to march freely through the centuries to come as in the years that have gone. Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.