When I look back on the processes of history, when I survey the genesis of
America, I see this written over every page: that the nations are renewed
from the bottom, not from the top; that the genius which springs up from
the ranks of unknown men is the genius which renews the youth and energy
of the people. Everything I know about history, every bit of experience
and observation that has contributed to my thought, has confirmed me in
the conviction that the real wisdom of human life is compounded out of the
experiences of ordinary men. The utility, the vitality, the fruitage of
life does not come from the top to the bottom; it comes, like the natural
growth of a great tree, from the soil, up through the trunk into the
branches to the foliage and the fruit. The great struggling unknown masses
of the men who are at the base of everything are the dynamic force that
is lifting the levels of society. A nation is as great, and only as great,
as her rank and file.
So the first and chief need of this nation of ours to-day is to include in
the partnership of government all those great bodies of unnamed men who
are going to produce our future leaders and renew the future energies of
America. And as I confess that, as I confess my belief in the common man,
I know what I am saying. The man who is swimming against the stream knows
the strength of it. The man who is in the mêlée knows what blows are being
struck and what blood is being drawn. The man who is on the make is the
judge of what is happening in America, not the man who has made good; not
the man who has emerged from the flood; not the man who is standing on the
bank looking on, but the man who is struggling for his life and for the
lives of those who are dearer to him than himself. That is the man whose
judgment will tell you what is going on in America; that is the man by
whose judgment I, for one, wish to be guided.
We have had the wrong jury; we have had the wrong group,--no, I will not
say the wrong group, but too small a group,--in control of the policies of
the United States. The average man has not been consulted, and his heart
had begun to sink for fear he never would be consulted again. Therefore,
we have got to organize a government whose sympathies will be open to the
whole body of the people of the United States, a government which will
consult as large a proportion of the people of the United States as
possible before it acts. Because the great problem of government is to
know what the average man is experiencing and is thinking about. Most of
us are average men; very few of us rise, except by fortunate accident,
above the general level of the community about us; and therefore the man
who thinks common thoughts, the man who has had common experiences, is
almost always the man who interprets America aright. Isn't that the reason
that we are proud of such stories as the story of Abraham Lincoln,--a man
who rose out of the ranks and interpreted America better than any man had
interpreted it who had risen out of the privileged classes or the educated
classes of America?
The hope of the United States in the present and in the future is the same
that it has always been: it is the hope and confidence that out of unknown
homes will come men who will constitute themselves the masters of industry
and of politics. The average hopefulness, the average welfare, the average
enterprise, the average initiative, of the United States are the only
things that make it rich. We are not rich because a few gentlemen direct
our industry; we are rich because of our own intelligence and our own
industry. America does not consist of men who get their names into the
newspapers; America does not consist politically of the men who set
themselves up to be political leaders; she does not consist of the men who
do most of her talking,--they are important only so far as they speak for
that great voiceless multitude of men who constitute the great body and
the saving force of the nation. Nobody who cannot speak the common
thought, who does not move by the common impulse, is the man to speak for
America, or for any of her future purposes. Only he is fit to speak who
knows the thoughts of the great body of citizens, the men who go about
their business every day, the men who toil from morning till night, the
men who go home tired in the evenings, the men who are carrying on the
things we are so proud of.
You know how it thrills our blood sometimes to think how all the nations
of the earth wait to see what America is going to do with her power, her
physical power, her enormous resources, her enormous wealth. The nations
hold their breath to see what this young country will do with her young
unspoiled strength; we cannot help but be proud that we are strong. But
what has made us strong? The toil of millions of men, the toil of men who
do not boast, who are inconspicuous, but who live their lives humbly from
day to day; it is the great body of toilers that constitutes the might of
America. It is one of the glories of our land that nobody is able to
predict from what family, from what region, from what race, even, the
leaders of the country are going to come. The great leaders of this
country have not come very often from the established, "successful"
families.
I remember speaking at a school not long ago where I understood that
almost all the young men were the sons of very rich people, and I told
them I looked upon them with a great deal of pity, because, I said: "Most
of you fellows are doomed to obscurity. You will not do anything. You will
never try to do anything, and with all the great tasks of the country
waiting to be done, probably you are the very men who will decline to do
them. Some man who has been 'up against it,' some man who has come out of
the crowd, somebody who has had the whip of necessity laid on his back,
will emerge out of the crowd, will show that he understands the crowd,
understands the interests of the nation, united and not separated, and
will stand up and lead us."
If I may speak of my own experience, I have found audiences made up of the
"common people" quicker to take a point, quicker to understand an
argument, quicker to discern a tendency and to comprehend a principle,
than many a college class that I have lectured to,--not because the
college class lacked the intelligence, but because college boys are not in
contact with the realities of life, while "common" citizens are in contact
with the actual life of day by day; you do not have to explain to them
what touches them to the quick.
There is one illustration of the value of the constant renewal of society
from the bottom that has always interested me profoundly. The only reason
why government did not suffer dry rot in the Middle Ages under the
aristocratic system which then prevailed was that so many of the men who
were efficient instruments of government were drawn from the church,--from
that great religious body which was then the only church, that body which
we now distinguish from other religious bodies as the Roman Catholic
Church. The Roman Catholic Church was then, as it is now, a great
democracy. There was no peasant so humble that he might not become a
priest, and no priest so obscure that he might not become Pope of
Christendom; and every chancellery in Europe, every court in Europe, was
ruled by these learned, trained and accomplished men,--the priesthood of
that great and dominant body. What kept government alive in the Middle
Ages was this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and
file of the great body of the people through the open channels of the
priesthood. That, it seems to me, is one of the most interesting and
convincing illustrations that could possibly be adduced of the thing that
I am talking about.
The only way that government is kept pure is by keeping these channels
open, so that nobody may deem himself so humble as not to constitute a
part of the body politic, so that there will constantly be coming new
blood into the veins of the body politic; so that no man is so obscure
that he may not break the crust of any class he may belong to, may not
spring up to higher levels and be counted among the leaders of the state.
Anything that depresses, anything that makes the organization greater than
the man, anything that blocks, discourages, dismays the humble man, is
against all the principles of progress. When I see alliances formed, as
they are now being formed, by successful men of business with successful
organizers of politics, I know that something has been done that checks
the vitality and progress of society. Such an alliance, made at the top,
is an alliance made to depress the levels, to hold them where they are, if
not to sink them; and, therefore, it is the constant business of good
politics to break up such partnerships, to re-establish and reopen the
connections between the great body of the people and the offices of
government.
To-day, when our government has so far passed into the hands of special
interests; to-day, when the doctrine is implicitly avowed that only select
classes have the equipment necessary for carrying on government; to-day,
when so many conscientious citizens, smitten with the scene of social
wrong and suffering, have fallen victims to the fallacy that benevolent
government can be meted out to the people by kind-hearted trustees of
prosperity and guardians of the welfare of dutiful employees,--to-day,
supremely, does it behoove this nation to remember that a people shall be
saved by the power that sleeps in its own deep bosom, or by none; shall be
renewed in hope, in conscience, in strength, by waters welling up from its
own sweet, perennial springs. Not from above; not by patronage of its
aristocrats. The flower does not bear the root, but the root the flower.
Everything that blooms in beauty in the air of heaven draws its fairness,
its vigor, from its roots. Nothing living can blossom into fruitage unless
through nourishing stalks deep-planted in the common soil. The rose is
merely the evidence of the vitality of the root; and the real source of
its beauty, the very blush that it wears upon its tender cheek, comes from
those silent sources of life that lie hidden in the chemistry of the soil.
Up from that soil, up from the silent bosom of the earth, rise the
currents of life and energy. Up from the common soil, up from the quiet
heart of the people, rise joyously to-day streams of hope and
determination bound to renew the face of the earth in glory.
I tell you, the so-called radicalism of our times is simply the effort of
nature to release the generous energies of our people. This great American
people is at bottom just, virtuous, and hopeful; the roots of its being
are in the soil of what is lovely, pure, and of good report, and the need
of the hour is just that radicalism that will clear a way for the
realization of the aspirations of a sturdy race.
V