THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION IN OUR TIME

...These have been tranquil, comfortable years, but the great decisions have been postponed...

...Early this year Richard Nixon admitted that a crisis provokes demands that the President "lead the people up to the mountain top...

...He has learned to control the elemental forces of nature—before he has learned to control himself...

...But to achieve a greater tempo in the development of national power, our President has told us that we will have to "take our country and make it an armed camp and regiment it...

...The inquiry which has been excited by our revolution, and its consequences," he said, "will ameliorate the condition of men over a great portion of the globe...

...Is he saying that with a $500 billion economy the nation will be imperiled if it devotes a somewhat larger share of its resources to public purposes...

...We can no longer pretend that the challenge of the Twentieth Century can be met with better detergents and more toothpaste—with private opulence and public squalor...

...Too often—and I wish I could call Jefferson as a witness—our leadership has been hesitant and half-hearted, and has concealed from us the nature and dimensions of the crisis...

...And America, as a nation, will be the weaker for it...

...It is the wise way...

...Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them...

...Jefferson, too, discerned a natural division of men into opposing parties in every free and deliberative society—with each taking his side according to his fear of, or confidence in, the good sense of the people...

...and get people steamed up like you did in wars...

...Not long ago, I visited Dr...

...For we are no longer far removed from the tidal waves of history, and the Western world is no longer the center of gravity on our planet...

...Not long ago, the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers said, "As I understand our economy, its ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods...

...As the avenues to truth are opened up, he would expect the people to understand the gravity of the issues and the decisions that lie before them...

...In 1800 he brought a drifting nation back to a sense of its proper mission, not for the sake of any narrow, selfish nationalism but for those maxims of a free society that Lincoln reaffirmed in 1860...

...In the final analysis, as Jefferson said, our national strength lies "in the spirit and the manners of the people...

...They are quietly confident that it will sweep the world, that collective man in a collective state is the ultimate unfolding of human destiny...

...Albert Schweitzer in his jungle hospital in equatorial Africa...

...Nixon is wrong...

...This is the Jef-fersonian mission—the sacred obligation that confronts all Americans who honor his name today—the overwhelming challenge, the exicting opportunity to show the world that the American revolution still belongs to all mankind...

...And this recent history of truth trifling and misrepresentation goes way back to the talk about "liberating" Eastern Europe, "unleashing" Chiang Kai-shek, "Communists in government," and a long procession of impostures born of political expediency and cynical salesmanship...

...What would he say about leadership...

...Cherish therefore," Jefferson wrote, "the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention...

...And our leaders tell us in effect that if we can just balance the budget and produce more consumer goods, the Soviet challenge will somehow disappear...

...The experiment, he knew, could never be concluded...

...We are emerging—we must emerge —from one of these valleys today— with leaders who will have the courage to tell us the truth, the heart to inspire us, and the energy and wisdom to show us the way...

...But it is not the easy way...

...The people have a right to know why we have lost our once unquestioned military superiority...

...What of our public morals today...

...To Jefferson, this tendency to stifle debate struck at the very heart of our idea of government by consent, the moral foundation on which government rested...

...Would he not remind us again that any dominant group, however ostensibly enlightened, would, if given a chance, exploit the people...

...Jefferson's use of the power of the Presidency communicated a respect for the intelligence as well as the virtue of the people...

...Would he not decry our anti-intellectualism and the cult of the lowest common denominator at a time when terrible and dangerous decisions have to be made...

...When Thomas Jefferson was ambassador to France in 1787, he met a young Brazilian patriot who was seeking aid for Brazil's struggle for independence...

...In the months ahead, I hope his party, the Democratic Party, will open up the avenues to many truths, avenues that have been obscured too long...

...Publicity photographs are no substitute for making decisions...

...And in 1960 it will probably be something about "seven wonderful years"—or more accurately, "seven comfortable years...

...He told me he thought this the most dangerous period in all human history...

...Political action alternates endlessly between the great poles of attitude that determine policy...

...To do so would be the ultimate treason, the last refuge of the faithless citizen...

...That is why I think he would be dismayed at today's public relations techniques which are designed to smother political debate with images, slogans, and catchwords...

...that we failed to insist, through our press and other agencies of opinion, that all the avenues to truth be kept open...

...Nixon again lets himself go, of something just short of treason...

...Jefferson toiled night and day to serve his country...

...He would see that our national leadership has not prepared us for the tasks of this searching century...

...When some of our most distinguished citizens and generals express concern about the obvious fact that our defenses are not as strong as they were, the President becomes angry, Mr...

...why we have faltered in the fight for disarmament...

...We are never permitted to despair of the commonwealth," said Jefferson...

...why—nearly a century after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—all of our citizens have still not been guaranteed the right to vote...

...Then, too, the nation had recently experienced an effort to suspend political debate, a drift away from government through discussion and towards a curbing of criticism...

...Yet, ironically, our actions have been timid and irresolute...

...why we spend billions of dollars storing surplus food when one-third of humanity goes to bed hungry...

...Even Washington, a military and world hero, cautioned in his Farewell Address against those self-centered societies that had fomented so much political dissent...

...This is dangerous deception...

...why we spent more money last year on tranquilizers than on space exploration, and more on leisure than on learning...

...What mattered to him, as to all liberals, was the extension of freedom and the rights of the individual...

...This is why the year 1960, like the year 1860 and the year 1800, is one in which the issues transcend all the usual political passions of a quadrennial election...

...He was—to use a contemporary term— an egghead, and proud of it...

...This is the objective of everything we are working at: to produce things for consumers...

...why we have not formulated an economic development program geared to the world-wide passion for economic growth...

...But would he not caution us to beware of easy options and of men on horseback...

...As he fought for the Bill of Rights in his own lifetime, so would he be fighting today for its application to all Americans...

...And he must have revealed that his great hope, as expressed in some magnificent letters, was not to extend our national power but to spread the dominion of our national ideals: "May it be to the world what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men...

...We do not act as frightened as we did during the shameful McCarthy era...

...This concept of leadership is in sharp contrast to Jefferson's conviction that the people must be kept attentive by enlightening them, and that democracy needs the fertilization of dissent if it is not to wither like a plant without water...

...Of all the charges brought against me by my political adversaries," he said on leaving the Presidency, "that of possessing some science has probably done them the least credit...

...I like to think about that talk long ago in a little French provincial inn and of what Jefferson may have said to the eager young Brazilian...

...In 1952, you remember, it was "Communism and Corruption" and "I shall go to Korea...

...We do net have such leadership now...

...Indeed, they represent one of the two enduring polarities of thought around which our political life has centered...

...And one of the first of these decisions will be to select new leadership—leadership that will treat Americans as grown up people, that will help us understand our choices and our dangers, and how to cope with them...

...But haven't we, as a people, also deceived ourselves...

...Is the President saying that we cannot meet the Communist challenge without changing our system and giving up our freedom...

...And beyond Russia, in a nation that our leaders pretend does not exist, there is an even greater thrust of power and purpose by 650 million Chinese under a system even more disciplined and under leaders even more dedicated to the triumph of their fanatical dream...

...Our countrymen are too enlightened themselves to believe that ignorance is the best qualification for their service...

...And although historical parallels are never exact, we can see similarities between the central issue of today—the right of the people to know—and the one that the nation faced in what Jefferson called "the momentous crisis" of 1800...

...Historians have long since released Jefferson from the narrow partisan and states' rights prison that could never confine his universal dimensions...

...And he would be shocked to hear his name invoked in defense of doctrines no longer designed to extend civil rights, but to curtail them...

...how, as he put it, "they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep...

...In 1800, we as a nation were a defenseless confederation standing at the mercy of two great world powers...

...The challenge of free men to stay free in a swiftly changing world would absorb all his energies...

...And he added that this was the easy way, but not often the wise way...

...These are instruments of power, and we must wield them to accelerate our growth...

...Our chief executive will have to be a man who agrees with Franklin Roosevelt's definition of the Presidency as "preeminently a position of moral leadership," and who deeply believes, as Jefferson did, that "the spirit of liberty, when conducted by public virtue, is invincible...

...why we have failed to win the confidence and respect of the billions of impatient people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America...

...So long as this kind of thinking prevails in our leadership, America will continue to entice talented young people into entertainment rather than teaching...

...He would, 1 think, be quick to remind the Americans of today that they cannot take their freedom and security for granted, that they can no longer indulge in the comfortable illusion, as one historian put it, that "history does not happen to us...

...But whatever the slogans that are being tooled for us this year, we who trust the good sense of the people must report the facts and raise the questions the people must answer...

...But in our time, millions of Americans are seemingly so indifferent to public affairs that they do not even feel an obligation to vote...

...The harsh verdict of history will be that our nation was quiescent and complacent, content with illusions...

...It does not even lie in the productive capacity of our farms and factories...

...Our foreign policy has been dominated by sterile anti-Communism and stupid wishful thinking, our domestic policy by fear of inflation and mistrust of government...

...To be sure, the agrarian society that delighted Jefferson is a lost world, and he would have been dismayed by the urban, industrialized, automated society in which we live today...

...Nor can we longer let our fears and mistaken priorities deter federal action where federal action is needed on defense, on education, on civil rights, on housing and slums, on industrial strife, on farm income and surpluses, on water resources, on the cost of medical care—on all the problems that affect the strength and well-being of the whole nation...

...Rich and endowed as we are, the dominant concerns of our leadership have been almost wholly defensive...

...And I wonder if he didn't warn his young friend about the evils of the European social order as well as the colonial system of that time...

...Jefferson thought of democracy as a moral principle...

...But to millions of people just emerging from feudalism or colonialism we still look like a nation that has forgotten its revolutionary heritage and moral purpose, and that prefers the political status quo, business profits, and personal comforts to the traditions on which our republic was founded...

...Jefferson today would, I suspect, scent some wolves and prescribe a large dose of enlightenment to keep alive "the people's attention...

...For, as Jefferson once said, "No experiment can be more interesting than that which we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact that man may be governed by reason and truth...

...He spoke warmly of respect for law and order, little upon the subject of liberties, and not at all upon the right to criticize...

...But the freedom many people want today is freedom from responsibility...

...Periods of high purpose and endeavor yield to periods of complacency and relaxation, eras of energy and innovations are supplanted by eras of static timidity, stages of high public virtue are succeeded by stages of moral confusion, long years of struggle over mountainous terrain are followed by years of slumber in green valleys...

...We are entering a decade of great decisions affecting our nation, our civilization, and our very survival as human beings—a decade as fateful for the republic as the one that began with Jefferson in 1800, and the one that began with Lincoln just a hundred years ago, in 1860...

...into high-priced psychiatry rather than low-cost public health...

...Whatever their condition, Jefferson believed in the capacity of the people to rise to greatness once they know, once they are told, once they are summoned...

...This is the language of those who fought Jefferson in 1800...

...He called it a division "between two opinions which are as old as the world . . . the one tending to limit, the other to extend indefinitely the power of the people...

...Our system of government was founded, as Jefferson declared, "not in the fears and follies of man, but on his reason, on his sense of right, on the predominance of the social over his dissocial passions...

...I also believe that Jefferson would be deeply disturbed by the slowness with which this reality is sinking in...

...why millions of Americans lead blighted lives in our spreading urban slums...

...For Jefferson knew full well that the world does not stand still...

...Jefferson believed that the American revolution belonged to all mankind...

...So now he would call upon this still young, still vigorous nation to rouse itself and resume the everlasting work of preserving "the blessings and security" of self-government...

...Nor does it lie in the balance of a budget...

...The earth," he said, "belongs always to the living generation," and, "Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and inalienable right of man...

...personal appearances in foreign capitals, for the hard work of imaginative diplomacy...

...South America must have been much in his mind when he wrote that...

...For the people can neither grant nor withhold consent on rational or just ground unless they are informed—enlightened, to use Jefferson's word...

...why we have fewer doctors per capita than we did fifty years ago and pay more for our medical care than ever before...

...We offer aid less to help others than to shield ourselves...

...And on the other hand we have been warned that in spite of a gross national product of $500 billion, bankruptcy stares us in the face if we divert any more of our wealth from private self-indulgence to the urgent task of meeting the challenge of a totalitarian society, already growing faster than ours, whose leaders are determined to remake the whole world in their own image...

...But knowing that we would never be a perfected society and should never think of ourselves as one, he added, "and is still reserved for us...

...There was no lethargy in 1800, no confusion about our values or objectives...

...So Jefferson today would be plunged into a battle that was familiar to him, even though the terrain is different...

...To one who spent a dauntless, restless lifetime in the service of his fellow-men, some other symptoms of our times would also be profoundly disturbing...

...We have been reassured on the one hand that America has never been stronger or more prosperous or more respected in the world...

...But if what I have been saying seems too contemporary for a memorial lecture, my excuse is that these attitudes about leadership are not new...

...But he would have understood that, as the population swelled from five million to 180 million, it brought profound changes...

...that with the machine age would come tremendous pressures toward impersonalized conformity...

...We shall have to decide whether to go on putting private consumption first or shift the first priority to our public needs...

...Stevenson's Founder's Day address at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville recently—The Editors...

...Our first object should therefore be to leave open all the avenues to truth...

...In 1956, it was "I like Ike" and "Peace, Progress and Prosperity...

...But these impostures also derive from misunderstanding or disrespect for our system—from a vague feeling that the best kind of government is one in which the people turn their hopes and fears over to a kind of caretaker for the national welfare and conscience, to a benign chief magistrate, who countenances little criticism and comforts the people with good news or none...

...Is he saying that our system of liberty is so fragile that it cannot keep up the pace in this great contest of national power...

...that it has not, in his words, "kept alive our attention...

...Because, he said, man is no longer controlled by nature...

...It can only be met with better education and more attention to our public needs...

...Today we are no longer poor and defenseless...

...There is no doubt in my mind where Jefferson would stand...

...Not only has our society become infinitely more complex, but life itself has become infinitely more perilous...

...Excitement was in the air, for we stood as a nation at the head of a crusade for freedom that was just beginning to unshackle humanity from the servitude of centuries...

...His power—his leadership—did not come just from the fact that he was a philosopher-statesman, a teacher, and that, in Henry Adams' phrase, he dared to legislate for all humanity...

...While he loved Europe, he was horrified by a system in which, in words he quoted from Voltaire, every man was either the hammer or the anvil...

...It is the language of those who have no confidence in the good sense of the people...

...Yet this was the nation that Jefferson proclaimed to be the strongest on earth, not because of its military might or its productive capacity—for it had little of either—but because its people believed profoundly in a moral purpose from which they could not be swayed, even when men in office sought to curb their energies and suppress their criticisms...

...But our national character has not deteriorated beyond repair in this period of leaderless lassitude...

...Instead, they felt that the business of government should be left in the hands of those who believed they knew best...

...Jefferson explained to Senhor da Maia that he had no authority to discuss such a delicate subject, but that while the very young government of the United States could not get involved, the American people could and should be concerned with Brazil's freedom...

...Such failure of leadership and communication touches the roots of the idea of democratic society...

...Its leaders believe in their revolution as the leaders in the American Revolution believed in theirs...

...Jefferson was this kind of President...

...Jefferson's whole philosophy was based on belief in the ability and decency of the average man...

...And today, Jefferson would not understand why anything should stop us from showing this restless, inquisitive world—only now beginning to sense its common humanity—that our free civilization is just as vigorous as the Soviet civilization, and that we Americans are just as capable of great deeds as we were when our frontier was not the wilderness of space but the wilderness of our own continent...

...This is a moral issue that has always kindled strong feelings, and he concluded that whenever America lost this distinction dividing the two parties, "her morality . . . suffered by their extinction...

...In Jefferson's phrase, we must "cherish the spirit of our people," even though we will no doubt be accused of "gloom and doom," extravagance, hysteria, socialism, and, if Mr...

...This year we will be making a choice between two approaches...

...This preference for private indulgence to public need is a far cry from the ideals expressed by Thomas Jefferson...

...The next President's task is heavier than any autocrat's because in the decade of the 1960's democracy and the slow process of persuasion must match the efficiency of central planning and the swiftness and certainty of dictatorial decision...

...why we have repeatedly allowed the Soviets to seize the diplomatic initiative...

...But hope, in the face of universal and revolutionary change, cannot be sustained by platitudes and pieties...

...He knew how hard it was to win and preserve freedom...

...No effort is too great that may help to realize their goals...

...why the richest nation in the history of the world cannot support the public services and facilities we must have not only for world power but for national growth and opportunity...

...What distinguished the Federalists, the Whigs, and, in our day, the Republicans from the party that Jefferson founded is that their leaders never really trusted what he called "the good sense of the people...

...Our strength does not lie in the iron discipline of the state...

...Once they become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and . . . judges and governors shall all become wolves...

...that it has not summoned us to our duty...

...The people have a right to know— and their leaders have a duty to tell them—the truth about the nature of our crisis and the dimensions of the problems that will have to be faced by the next Administration...

...He made a distinction between the acts of governments and the acts of citizens who played such a significant part in the independence struggle in Latin America...

...why we are not providing our children with education to which they are entitled...

...Rather his power lay in his unshaken confidence in the capacity for good in human beings, a confidence based not on fatuous illusions but on a clear, hard-headed realization that only on such a foundation could "the last best hope of earth" endure...

...Our leaders talk of freedom—and embrace dictators...

...And late in life, Jefferson reflected upon the good fortune that "the full experiment of a government democratical, but representative, was reserved for us...

...Our own leaders have deceived us by underrating the magnitude of the crisis...

...Thomas Jefferson knew them well...

...We are by far the richest nation on earth and, until recently, the most impregnable...

...It is the language of those who fought Roosevelt's great initiative, the New Deal, at another time of decision nearly thirty years ago...

...It is impossible to spend years traveling around the world, as I have, without a disquieting awareness of the thrust and purpose of Soviet society...

...Government by concealment, by soothing assurances rather than candid communication, cannot be long tolerated if our system is to endure...

...to assume the blessings and security of self-government...

...Their agents are everywhere...

...and no corner of humanity is too insignificant to those who believe the whole human race is destined to become one in Communist brotherhood...

...Nixon considers that it undermines our security, and the Republican national chairman contributes a sarcastic remark about their "paper hats and wooden swords...

...Concealment of the true nature of the crisis—even assurances from a Secretary of State, as late as 1956, that Communism is "a gigantic failure"—has been accompanied by an attitude on the part of our leaders that seems almost to equate discussion with disunity and criticism with disloyalty...

...And at the close of the 1790's, this tendency reached its most extreme form in legislation which sought, in the name of national security, to apply a check-rein to criticism of public officials...

...This distinction was perceived by Tocqueville more than a hundred years ago...

...And our common culture and convictions are challenged as they have not been since Islam's challenge to Christianity hundreds of years ago...