I have not written a book since the campaign. I did not write this book at
all. It is the result of the editorial literary skill of Mr. William
Bayard Hale, who has put together here in their right sequences the more
suggestive portions of my campaign speeches.
And yet it is not a book of campaign speeches. It is a discussion of a
number of very vital subjects in the free form of extemporaneously spoken
words. I have left the sentences in the form in which they were
stenographically reported. I have not tried to alter the easy-going and
often colloquial phraseology in which they were uttered from the platform,
in the hope that they would seem the more fresh and spontaneous because of
their very lack of pruning and recasting. They have been suffered to run
their unpremeditated course even at the cost of such repetition and
redundancy as the extemporaneous speaker apparently inevitably falls
into.
The book is not a discussion of measures or of programs. It is an attempt
to express the new spirit of our politics and to set forth, in large terms
which may stick in the imagination, what it is that must be done if we are
to restore our politics to their full spiritual vigor again, and our
national life, whether in trade, in industry, or in what concerns us only
as families and individuals, to its purity, its self-respect, and its
pristine strength and freedom. The New Freedom is only the old revived and
clothed in the unconquerable strength of modern America.