Readers; Speeches, addresses, etc., American; United States
I would not feel any exhilaration in belonging to America if I did not
feel that she was something more than a rich and powerful nation. I
should not feel proud to be in some respects and for a little while her
spokesman if I did not believe that there was something else than
physical force behind her. I believe that the glory of America is that
she is a great spiritual conception and that in the spirit of her
institutions dwells not only her distinction but her power. The one
thing that the world can not permanently resist is the moral force of
great and triumphant convictions.
THE MEANING OF THE FLAG
The following address on the Flag was delivered by President
Woodrow Wilson from the south portico of the Treasury Building,
Washington, D.C., June 14, 1915.
MR. SECRETARY, FRIENDS, AND FELLOW CITIZENS:--I know of nothing more
difficult than to render an adequate tribute to the emblem of our
nation. For those of us who have shared that nation's life and felt the
beat of its pulse it must be considered a matter of impossibility to
express the great things which that emblem embodies. I venture to say
that a great many things are said about the flag which very few people
stop to analyze. For me the flag does not express a mere body of vague
sentiment. The flag of the United States has not been created by
rhetorical sentences in declarations of independence and in bills of
rights. It has been created by the experience of a great people, and
nothing is written upon it that has not been written by their life. It
is the embodiment, not of a sentiment, but of a history, and no man can
rightly serve under that flag who has not caught some of the meaning of
that history.
Experience, ladies and gentlemen, is made by men and women. National
experience is the product of those who do the living under that flag. It
is their living that has created its significance. You do not create the
meaning of a national life by any literary exposition of it, but by the
actual daily endeavors of a great people to do the tasks of the day and
live up to the ideals of honesty and righteousness and just conduct. And
as we think of these things, our tribute is to those men who have
created this experience. Many of them are known by name to all the
world--statesmen, soldiers, merchants, masters of industry, men of
letters and of thought who have coined our hearts into action or into
words. Of these men we feel that they have shown us the way. They have
not been afraid to go before. They have known that they were speaking
the thoughts of a great people when they led that great people along the
paths of achievement. There was not a single swashbuckler among them.
They were men of sober, quiet thought, the more effective because there
was no bluster in it. They were men who thought along the lines of duty,
not along the lines of self-aggrandizement. They were men, in short, who
thought of the people whom they served and not of themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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