The Issue Is Peace
Stevenson, Adlai E.
The Issue Is Peace by ADLAI E. STEVENSON This article, reflecting a point of view almost untouched by other campaigners, is adapted, with his permission, from several of Mr. Stevenson's recent...
...We have drifted and stumbled long enough...
...Nixon called it "catastrophic nonsense...
...You cannot separate foreign and domestic policy...
...And then he added, "We wonder, when you seem sometimes to turn your backs to us, whether you have forgotten something of your own history...
...The world today has no place for an America that tries to stand in its own shadow—tired, timid, unwilling to take the initiative history thrusts upon us...
...Hungry people don't ask whether the rice which is offered them comes from freedom's larder...
...We do not charge that it is responsible for all of the crises and difficulties in the world...
...The people of Asia and Africa think of freedom first, as we did, in terms of freedom from outside rule...
...Jefferson answered, across the centuries, those who see only defeat in the face of change in the world today, those who fear that the new nations of Africa and Asia may be emerging from colonial rule only to pass into a world-wide system of dictatorship...
...When the Asian-African Conference was convened at Bandung, Indonesia, five years ago, the keynote talk made it clear that no event in human history said more to the peoples of Asia and Africa, or provided more nourishment for the moral imagination, than what happened in America from 1776 to 1789...
...Are they to be informed and asked, and their judgment sought...
...We do believe that it should be held responsible for failing to anticipate any of these crises, for never moving with enough speed, enough imagination, and enough generosity of spirit to conquer manageable problems before they become unmanageable crises...
...A young man said to me once in Africa, where he had returned from one of our universities, "What we want is only the kind of freedom you wanted, and the kind of freedom you won...
...One test which the world rightly imposes on the sincerity of our professions is our own readiness to live up to them...
...We have drifted with events and watched helplessly as events drifted into castas-trophe...
...And Jefferson replied, in the authentic voice of democracy and of the Democratic Party: "I will not believe our labors are lost . . . Light and liberty are on steady advance . . . The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism...
...To the peoples of Asia and Africa, individual liberties can become a reality only when national liberty is achieved...
...Only a liberal government can bring about the reorientation I have indicated...
...America was a country which had gained freedom itself through successful revolution against European colonialism...
...The real question is not who can stand up or talk back to the Russians...
...Looking at it, worrying about it, Adams asked Jefferson: "Must we . . . surrender all our pleasing hopes of the progress of society, of the improvement of . . . the world, and of the reformation of mankind...
...But our neglect of it—our obsession with the cobra of Communism to the point of thinking of the world revolution only in terms of pro- or anti-Communism—can be a danger and a very great one...
...Many of the Asian and African leaders look today to the American Revolution and the founding of the United States for their inspiration...
...Our great documents, from the Declaration of Independence to the Atlantic Charter, had spoken the aspirations of the common people for independence and growth...
...A timid, unimaginative, and conservative government is bound to produce a timid, unimaginative, and conservative foreign policy...
...These people see more clearly than we sometimes do that they stand today where we once stood—at the threshold of history...
...Yet there are wide and legitimate differences about the way to peace...
...j There is no matter of higher urgency or deserving of more sustained attention than the search for the abolition of war through the destruction of the means of war...
...Shouting Is Better than Shooting" But there wasn't any other proposal at all...
...And Communism no longer provides the revolutionary dynamic of the age we live in...
...Again, it was not the United States but the Russians that proposed complete disarmament at the United Nations last year, although fifteen years ago the Truman Administration declared that the only safety was in general disarmament under effective international control...
...The world cries out today for an America, born in revolution, to wake once more to demands no less than those we answered two centuries ago—to throw off the encircling chains of a new tyranny, to accept once more the flag of freedom, to take once again the leadership for liberty—because, again, the other choice is death...
...while the Russian economy is far from the efficient agent we sometimes think...
...But when the story of America is a story of apathy and neglect and indifference, no amount of propaganda can hide the truth from people in other countries...
...It cannot succeed of itself, it must be a part of a general attack on the conditions which make for war—on the poverty of much of the world, on the instability of the countries which are aspiring to independence, on the fears and antagonisms between the Communists and the West, and on the uncertain mind of the undecided peoples everywhere ^Fealie7Tn~shof t, is an all-pervading business/And I know that peace will be the central objective of the foreign policy of a Democratic administration, with vigorous leadership for disarmament under effective international control...
...Are the American people really all of one mind about the human situation—the mind expressed by the present Republican foreign policy...
...We simply cannot, in our abundance, ask this vast section of the world to take our principles on faith without offering them also the necessary help to implement those principles in their own countries...
...Or are they to be told when it is not true that all is well and just not to worry...
...We mock our own ideals as long as there is poverty or remediable illness among us...
...These new nations are no strangers to the ideas of the American Revolution...
...jf The plain facts are that we have lost the peace initiative...
...and the result is the wasting of our moral assets and the loss of our convictions which underlie the present public confusion...
...The first is the assumption that the Russians wish us ill—which they clearly do...
...Only a few years back, we seemed to enslaved peoples the hope of the earth...
...There is no peace party and no war party...
...Nixon and Mr...
...Communists are not impressed or changed by either smiles or insults...
...This second industrial revolution does not menace us in and of itself: on the contrary it can be of the very greatest advantage to us...
...The second is the assumption that the Russians are dangerously able to inflict harm upon us, first because they have a system, a religion, which is potent in its appeal to the minds of discontented men, and second because the Russian economy is vast and powerful, and getting more so...
...Largely, I think, they are differences of understanding, of political fortitude, and of priorities...
...It is not a case of being convinced by the fake gospel of Communism...
...as long as the gangs of young rebels we call "juvenile delinquents" are an open and national scandal...
...Until we can attack war itself, peace can remain only an armed truce, an uneasy and explosive interlude between two agonies of destruction...
...as long as we are crippled by an educational system that is understaffed and poorly housed...
...We cannot agree what should be done about the great positive ends of common human life, the first of which is peace...
...if we continue to assume that Communism is our only problem and that it is only military...
...On the contrary, we have let Russian propaganda take the word peace away from us, leaving us little which can safely be discussed in public but the hatred...
...Then our government grudgingly followed the Russians and also suspended tests...
...It is by economic and political means that recent Communist successes have been won and recent American reverses suffered, and it will be by economic and political means that the new Communist offensive will be stopped when it is stopped...
...As long as there are second-class— yes, and third-class—citizens in our nation, as long as we refuse to honor our solemn promise that all Americans shall have equal rights, we cannot pretend to have offered mankind the working model of a free society...
...I have said that the second difference in this area is one of political fortitude...
...Whether we look at Cuba or the Congo or other trouble spots around the globe, the recent record of American initiative and foresight and planning is bare and empty...
...It was to us that new nations instinctively looked for sympathy, for support, for guidance.^ When Franklin Roosevelt and George Norris built the TVA in the 1930's, the story of this remarkable success reached the people of the world and visitors from every corner of the globe came, as they still do come, to marvel at these mighty dams, at the re-forestation of eroded hills, and at the flowering of a richer, fuller life for millions of people...
...The danger of Communism is obviously no longer—if it ever was— only military and conspiratorial...
...Peace is not a partisan issue...
...But we will not fulfill our role by preaching or teaching, by aid or by charity...
...So we let the Russians make the same proposal—and receive the thanks and plaudits of the world...
...For so long as we talk big and act little, for so long as power and material success are our national purpose and our individual goals—for so long as these present facts of American life continue to be facts, we cannot face the future with any confidence that the world will take us seriously for what we say we are, and what democracy means...
...The plain truth is that we have been muddling along, living from year to year, doing what had to be done after the fact...
...and it is the function of the political process to explore—but never to exploit—these differences...
...Until Asians and Africans live decently, they are not going to think much about the place of the individual in the scheme of things...
...How long are we to go on holding our fingers in the dike hoping for something to happen to end the necessity...
...The hydrogen bomb has broken the pattern of history...
...In Asia, our policy has been mainly military alliances, containment, massive retaliation, and such foolish talk as "unleashing Chiang Kai-shek...
...The flames of freedom—or at least the sparks from these flames—have spread over the world...
...whether we argue with them in the kitchen or exchange toasts in the dining room...
...The inconceivable fact is, indeed, that through large parts of the world, the United States is today regarded as a greater threat to world peace than the Soviet Union...
...Our great leaders—Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt—had affirmed the ideals of freedom with an eloquence that had won the allegiance of men and women everywhere...
...Capitalism has had an extraordinary rebirth which has made it in fact, if not in repute, the seductive economic religion of the generation...
...The talk is merely an affirmation of virtue, not a declaration of purpose...
...Only a new liberal administration next January can restore the image of our country once so well-known and well-loved—not as a country glutted with wealth and self-esteem, but as the nation which gave birth to the Declaration of Independence and the Four Freedoms—a nation marked, not by smugness, but by generosity...
...But let us do it this time in the ways not of war but of peace...
...This is not a matter of whether we shake our fists at the Communists or smile at them...
...We charge this Administration not with a lack of loyalty but with a lack of judgment...
...He chose at that significant moment in history, which had to be grasped before it sped by, to do nothing, to say things were all right, not to worry, that anyone who disagreed was an irresponsible prophet of doom—and a little soft on Communism besides...
...Our indictment is a much more realistic and honest one...
...When a Negro child is denied admission to a school, or an unemployed miner faces grim poverty, the image of America is defaced...
...I stated "my complete willingness to accept any better proposal for accomplishing the same purpose...
...The real question is who can sit down with them at the bargaining table and negotiate with them from a position of strength and confidence...
...It is compounded of nationalism, social unrest, and scientific progress...
...As we consider that the next war may well blow up the world, we may begin to wonder whether the soft-headed dreamers are not those who think that disarmament is of no importance, and whether the hardhearted realists are not those who demand that we make disarmament a top priority in our conduct of foreign affairs...
...What these people are deciding is in part whether they can afford the democratic way of life...
...Neither are we offering any simple solution...
...It is only the most important, the most indispensable, most neglected element...
...The basis for this policy is a series of assumptions...
...And yet every sign indicates that although we have been blocked off from the word peace we are increasingly starved for the thing itself...
...Every responsible man, Democrat or Republican, must say to himself in the words of a famous clergyman: "I stand for what unites...
...How long are we to wait to receive the future at the hands of Russian failure or collapse or whatever...
...These surface events which win so much publicity are only the meaningless fluff of world politics...
...as long as the growing number of "unemployable" or helpless aged remain a problem...
...The one issue in this election year which dwarfs all others is—Peace...
...I mention this with no personal pride...
...Peace, to put it crudely, is something we hope the Russians will collapse into giving us, not something we are determined to bring about ourselves...
...Are people to be told the truth about their position in the world...
...The revolutionary dynamic of the contemporary world is something very different...
...Our urgent need is to identify ourselves, by our policies and our deeds, with the historic revolution of our time...
...not by stale conservatism and a weary reliance on dollars and guns, but by broad vision and moral and social passion...
...by angry debates or by champagne hospitality...
...not with an absence of good intentions but with a failure of foresight...
...Communism, at least in Europe and North America, is on the decline...
...Our policies have always run out of breath behind yesterday's headlines, like a lagging commuter missing the last train to the city...
...And when Secretary of State Herter hands the Secretary General of the United Nations a check for five million dollars, as he did last week, or when the President pledges hundreds of millions of dollars, as he did before the General Assembly, that money will have been cast upon the waters unless we renew the new nations' confidence and their respect for the virility, in human terms, of the American experience in democracy...
...We are not going to suggest that a personal trip to Havana or Leopoldville by the next President will bring our difficulties to an end...
...But disarmament is not all there is to a policy for peace...
...The United States has failed to persuade the world that it is a nation intent on peace...
...So far as purpose goes, our apparent intention is to go on spending our tens of billions a year for armaments until something happens—that is, until something happens on the Russian side...
...Or, more precisely, we are bored by the talk of war and tension—and we want peace...
...We have no choice but to use our economic abundance boldly and to the full to attack the breeding-grounds of desperate solutions...
...not by meanness, but by magnanimity...
...An administration devoted to the status quo can never hope to light fires of idealism and faith among the oppressed peoples of the earth...
...There have been few periods in history in which the human situation was less settled and few periods in which the American people were less clear in their minds about what if anything ought to be done...
...When I say that what the world needs is an end to the armaments race I mean that we should stop dragging our feet, resolve the conflicts within our government, give peace the priority and attention it deserves, and take the initiative again...
...From sputnik to the summit, from Suez to the Congo, from Caracas to Tokyo—the experience of the last eight years has been of coping with crisis and failure, and of packaging setbacks to look like triumphs...
...Eisenhower have talked of peace fervently and often, but their policy is little more than preparation for fighting—inadequate preparation...
...Four years ago I proposed stopping the hydrogen bomb tests...
...We are beginning to realize, as the President's speech at the United Nations finally shows, how important our material aid is to these new nations, and, therefore, to ourselves...
...On the contrary, they will consume those engines and all who work them...
...if we continue to determine our relations with other peoples solely on the basis of their willingness or unwillingness to line up in advance on our side of a war with Communism, we may very well wake up to find that history has passed us by, that the second industrial revolution has taken place without us, and that we are no longer a dynamic and creative force in the world, which is to say, a great power...
...The President dismissed what I said as a "theatrical gesture...
...Unless we march with this revolution, unless indeed we share in leading it, the future it will one day shape may have no place for us...
...Because we have had no policy for helping the new African states—until the President was finally persuaded to address the United Nations—we have lost much of our opportunity to build a sound relationship there...
...It is the great new political, social, and industrial revolution which is now sweeping the world, and which will inevitably alter the way of life of every area on every continent...
...The difference here is between an American policy—a peace policy—built only around the menace of Communism, and a policy designed to find and develop the basic elements of peace in a revolutionary world in which Communism is only one agent of disorder...
...Peace, in other words, is something we are led to hope may happen as the result of Soviet collapse or backing down: not something we are told we must bring about ourselves...
...What they want in their stomachs may overcome what they feel in their hearts...
...In times past, it has often served as a means by which good-hearted but soft-headed visionaries could escape from the hard realities of international conflict...
...They are being offered what are made to appear quicker, even if drastic, solutions to their problems...
...I hold at a distance that which divides...
...How long are we to leave the initiative in trust...
...We Democrats in this campaign are not indulging in the demagogic cry—"Who Lost Cuba...
...For centuries mankind knew that, though war was destructive, humanity still would survive, if by the skin of its teeth, and so it never took disarmament seriously...
...If we continue to misread the history of the time...
...A great nation cannot stand still in a time of change, it cannot content itself with things the way they are, it must foresee, must think, must plan, must act, must lead—or its greatness will evaporate even while we watch...
...We do not accuse the Republicans of lack of patriotism or a lack of good intentions...
...But these assumptions, though religiously held by many Americans and though unquestionable under the present system of political taboos, are in fact dubious...
...We can agree among ourselves to hate the Russians but we cannot agree as to what we should do about a world in which hatred provides the only dynamism...
...The third difference is in our priorities and in the degree of our commitment to the purpose, the prospect, the possibility, of peace...
...Disarmament is an ancient dream...
...Almost a century and a half ago, in 1821, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson about the upheaval which was at that time seizing a large part of Europe...
...That's too easy...
...Our own colonial policies had been generous and forbearing...
...It is more like getting in hock to the company store...
...Quite clearly they are not...
...And they ask us repeatedly whether we are prepared to help them work for that freedom...
...Only by setting our own house in order, only by becoming in truth the free and civilized nation we claim to be, can we hope to do our part in shaping the future of the world...
...In this hemisphere, after ignoring for seven years the great social revolution that was plain for all to see, the Administration only recently hurriedly improvised a program for Latin America...
...How long are we going to be frustrated by the national conviction that there is nothing we ourselves can do about peace...
...But nuclear weapons have changed many things...
...Now, as in the past, they respect only power and they negotiate only in terms of hard facts...
...First, of understanding...
...Stevenson's recent campaign addresses in behalf of the candidacy of Senator John F. Kennedy.—The Editors...
Vol. 24 • November 1960 • No. 11
