State of the Union AddressesRoosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano)
History
State of the Union Addresses
Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano)
Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
For out of all the military and diplomatic turmoil, out of all the
propaganda, and counter-propaganda of the present conflicts, there are two
facts which stand out, and which the whole world acknowledges.
The first is that never before has the Government of the United States of
America done so much as in our recent past to establish and maintain the
policy of the Good Neighbor with its sister nations.
The second is that in almost every nation in the world today there is a
true public belief that the United States has been, and will continue to
be, a potent and active factor in seeking the reestablishment of world
peace.
In these recent years we have had a clean record of peace and good-will. It
is an open book that cannot be twisted or defamed. It is a record that must
be continued and enlarged.
So I hope that Americans everywhere will work out for themselves the
several alternatives which lie before world civilization, which necessarily
includes our own.
We must look ahead and see the possibilities for our children if the rest
of the world comes to be dominated by concentrated force alone--even though
today we are a very great and a very powerful nation.
We must look ahead and see the effect on our own future if all the small
nations of the world have their independence snatched from them or become
mere appendages to relatively vast and powerful military systems.
We must look ahead and see the kind of lives our children would have to
lead if a large part of the rest of the world were compelled to worship a
god imposed by a military ruler, or were forbidden to worship God at all;
if the rest of the world were forbidden to read and hear the facts--the
daily news of their own and other nations--if they were deprived of the
truth that makes men free.
We must look ahead and see the effect on our future generations if world
trade is controlled by any nation or group of nations which sets up that
control through military force.
It is, of course, true that the record of past centuries includes
destruction of many small nations, the enslavement of peoples, and the
building of empires on the foundation of force. But wholly apart from the
greater international morality which we seek today, we recognize the
practical fact that with modern weapons and modern conditions, modern man
can no longer lead a civilized life if we are to go back to the practice of
wars and conquests of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Summing up this need of looking ahead, and in words of common sense and
good American citizenship. I hope that we shall have fewer American
ostriches in our midst. It is not good for the ultimate health of ostriches
to bury their heads in the sand.
Only an ostrich would look upon these wars through the eyes of cynicism or
ridicule.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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