Our Common Country/Chapter 16
November the eleventh has an abiding significance to America and the world. For America it sealed our capacity to defend our national rights and stamped our effectiveness in aiding to preserve the established order of world civilization; for the world it marked a new order for humanity, and for all time it warns ambition and madness for power that one man's or one people's domination of the world never was designed by God and never will be tolerated by mankind.
The day is especially interesting to our own country, because without American participation it might have been a later and a different date, if indeed there had been an armistice day at all. We do not claim to have won the war, but we helped mightily and recorded undying glory to American arms and gave the world a new understanding of the American spirit and a new measure of American resources.
Whatever the world may have thought of us before, however incorrectly we may have been appraised, the world has come to know that selfishness is not a trait of our national character, that commercialism does not engross us, that neutrality was conceived in fairness—not in fear—and that when our national rights are threatened and our nationals are sacrificed, America is resolved to defend, and ever will. More, we gave to humanity an example of unselfishness which it only half appraised before misunderstandings led to confusion.
We helped to win the war, unaided and unmortgaged. We fought with the Allied Powers, and were never committed, if fully aware of them, to the compacts of the alliance.
History will record it correctly, no matter how much beautiful sentiment has beclouded our purposes in the World War. We did not fight to make the world safe for democracy, though we were its best exemplars. Nor did we fight for humanity's sake, no matter how such a cause impelled. Democracy was threatened and humanity was dying long before American indignation called for the Republic's defense. But we fought for the one supreme cause which inspires men to offer all for country and the flag, and we fought as becomes a free America, and dropped hatred and stifled greed when the victory for defense was won.
We proved anew that there is a free and ample America, which does not ask, but freely gives. We were American in name before the World War made us American in fact, not a collection of peoples, but one people with one purpose, one confidence, one pride, one aspiration and one flag.
We learned a lesson, too, of transcending importance. Righteousness and unfailing justice are not in themselves a guaranty of national security. We must be ever strong in peace, foremost in industry, eminent in agriculture, ample in transportation. Better transportation on land and an adequate merchant marine would have speeded our participation and shortened the conflict. I believe an America eminent on the high seas, respected in every avenue of trade, will be safer at home and greater in influence throughout the world.
I like to think of an America whose citizens are ever seeking the greater development and enlarged resources and widened influence of the Republic, and I like to think of a government which protects its citizens wherever they go on a lawful mission, anywhere under the shining sun.
All the way from my home in Ohio to the furthermost port on the Gulf I have seen among the people who came to give us kindly greetings scores of stalwart, virile young Americans who served their country so gallantly and effectively at home and overseas. One must have cause for renewed pride in the character of these men, in their readiness and capacity to serve, in the certitude of their manhood, in their new baptism of Americanism. These soldiers of the Republic, like their fathers, believe in an America of civil and human and religious liberty, they believe in an America of American ideals. They believe in America first, for it is in America that their hopes and inspirations center.
We choose no aloofness, we shirk no obligation, we forsake no friends, but we build in nationality, and we do not mean to surrender it.
Our young veterans believe it is only morning to the life of the Republic and they want to look forward to the surpassing noonday of national life, where this Republic shall be the foremost nationality among the nations of the earth. I believe with them and with you that our sure path is the American path. I do not believe the wisdom of Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton is to be ignored, nor are the chivalry of Lee and the magnanimity of Grant to be forgotten, nor can the supreme belief of Lincoln in union and nationality be forgotten nor the outstanding Americanism of Theodore Roosevelt fail to stir our hearts.