I cannot accept the leadership and responsibility which the National
Democratic Convention has again, in such generous fashion, asked me to
accept without first expressing my profound gratitude to the party for
the trust it reposes in me after four years of fiery trial in the midst
of affairs of unprecedented difficulty, and the keen sense of added
responsibility with which this honor fills (I had almost said burdens)
me as I think of the great issues of national life and policy involved
in the present and immediate future conduct of our Government. I shall
seek, as I have always sought, to justify the extraordinary confidence
thus reposed in me by striving to purge my heart and purpose of every
personal and of every misleading party motive and devoting every energy
I have to the service of the nation as a whole, praying that I may
continue to have the counsel and support of all forward-looking men at
every turn of the difficult business.
For I do not doubt that the people of the United States will wish the
Democratic Party to continue in control of the Government. They are not
in the habit of rejecting those who have actually served them for those
who are making doubtful and conjectural promises of service. Least of
all are they likely to substitute those who promised to render them
particular services and proved false to that promise for those who have
actually rendered those very services.
Boasting is always an empty business, which pleases nobody but the
boaster, and I have no disposition to boast of what the Democratic Party
has accomplished. It has merely done its duty. It has merely fulfilled
its explicit promises. But there can be no violation of good taste in
calling attention to the manner in which those promises have been
carried out or in adverting to the interesting fact that many of the
things accomplished were what the opposition party had again and again
promised to do but had left undone. Indeed that is manifestly part of
the business of this year of reckoning and assessment. There is no means
of judging the future except by assessing the past. Constructive action
must be weighed against destructive comment and reaction. The Democrats
either have or have not understood the varied interests of the country.
The test is contained in the record.
What is that record? What were the Democrats called into power to do?
What things had long waited to be done, and how did the Democrats do
them? It is a record of extraordinary length and variety, rich in
elements of many kinds, but consistent in principle throughout and
susceptible of brief recital.
The Republican Party was put out of power because of failure, practical
failure and moral failure; because it had served special interests and
not the country at large; because, under the leadership of its preferred
and established guides, of those who still make its choices, it had lost
touch with the thoughts and the needs of the nation and was living in a
past age and under a fixed illusion, the illusion of greatness. It had
framed tariff laws based upon a fear of foreign trade, a fundamental
doubt as to American skill, enterprise, and capacity, and a very tender
regard for the profitable privileges of those who had gained control of
domestic markets and domestic credits; and yet had enacted anti-trust
laws which hampered the very things they meant to foster, which were
stiff and inelastic, and in part unintelligible. It had permitted the
country throughout the long period of its control to stagger from one
financial crisis to another under the operation of a national banking
law of its own framing which made stringency and panic certain and the
control of the larger business operations of the country by the bankers
of a few reserve centers inevitable; had made as if it meant to reform
the law but had faint-heartedly failed in the attempt, because it could
not bring itself to do the one thing necessary to make the reform
genuine and effectual, namely, break up the control of small groups of
bankers. It had been oblivious, or indifferent, to the fact that the
farmers, upon whom the country depends for its food and in the last
analysis for its prosperity, were without standing in the matter of
commercial credit, without the protection of standards in their market
transactions, and without systematic knowledge of the markets
themselves; that the laborers of the country, the great army of men who
man the industries it was professing to father and promote, carried
their labor as a mere commodity to market, were subject to restraint by
novel and drastic process in the courts, were without assurance of
compensation for industrial accidents, without federal assistance in
accommodating labor disputes, and without national aid or advice in
finding the places and the industries in which their labor was most
needed. The country had no national system of road construction and
development. Little intelligent attention was paid to the army, and not
enough to the navy. The other republics of America distrusted us,
because they found that we thought first of the profits of American
investors and only as an afterthought of impartial justice and helpful
friendship. Its policy was provincial in all things; its purposes were
out of harmony with the temper and purpose of the people and the timely
development of the nation's interests.
So things stood when the Democratic Party came into power. How do they
stand now? Alike in the domestic field and in the wide field of the
commerce of the world, American business and life and industry have been
set free to move as they never moved before.
The tariff has been revised, not on the principle of repelling foreign
trade, but upon the principle of encouraging it, upon something like a
footing of equality with our own in respect of the terms of competition,
and a Tariff Board has been created whose function it will be to keep
the relations of American with foreign business and industry under
constant observation, for the guidance alike of our business men and of
our Congress. American energies are now directed towards the markets of
the world.
The laws against trusts have been clarified by definition, with a view
to making it plain that they were not directed against big business but
only against unfair business and the pretense of competition where there
was none; and a Trade Commission has been created with powers of
guidance and accommodation which have relieved business men of unfounded
fears and set them upon the road of hopeful and confident enterprise.
By the Federal Reserve Act the supply of currency at the disposal of
active business has been rendered elastic, taking its volume, not from a
fixed body of investment securities, but from the liquid assets of daily
trade; and these assets are assessed and accepted, not by distant groups
of bankers in control of unavailable reserves, but by bankers at the
many centers of local exchange who are in touch with local conditions
everywhere.
Effective measures have been taken for the re-creation of an American
merchant marine and the revival of the American carrying trade
indispensable to our emancipation from the control which foreigners have
so long exercised over the opportunities, the routes, and the methods of
our commerce with other countries.
The Interstate Commerce Commission is about to be reorganized to enable
it to perform its great and important functions more promptly and more
efficiently. We have created, extended and improved the service of the
parcels post.
So much we have done for business. What other party has understood the
task so well or executed it so intelligently and energetically? What
other party has attempted it at all? The Republican leaders, apparently,
know of no means of assisting business but "protection." How to
stimulate it and put it upon a new footing of energy and enterprise they
have not suggested.
For the farmers of the country we have virtually created commercial
credit, by means of the Federal Reserve Act and the Rural Credits Act.
They now have the standing of other business men in the money market. We
have successfully regulated speculation in "futures" and established
standards in the marketing of grains. By an intelligent Warehouse Act we
have assisted to make the standard crops available as never before both
for systematic marketing and as a security for loans from the banks. We
have greatly added to the work of neighborhood demonstration on the farm
itself of improved methods of cultivation, and, through the intelligent
extension of the functions of the Department of Agriculture, have made
it possible for the farmer to learn systematically where his best
markets are and how to get at them.
The workingmen of America have been given a veritable emancipation, by
the legal recognition of a man's labor as part of his life, and not a
mere marketable commodity; by exempting labor organizations from
processes of the courts which treated their members like fractional
parts of mobs and not like accessible and responsible individuals; by
releasing our seamen from involuntary servitude; by making adequate
provision for compensation for industrial accidents; by providing
suitable machinery for mediation and conciliation in industrial
disputes; and by putting the Federal Department of Labor at the disposal
of the workingman when in search of work.
We have effected the emancipation of the children of the country by
releasing them from hurtful labor. We have instituted a system of
national aid in the building of highroads such as the country has been
feeling after for a century. We have sought to equalize taxation by
means of an equitable income tax. We have taken the steps that ought to
have been taken at the outset to open up the resources of Alaska. We
have provided for national defense upon a scale never before seriously
proposed upon the responsibility of an entire political party. We have
driven the tariff lobby from cover and obliged it to substitute solid
argument for private influence.
This extraordinary recital must sound like a platform, a list of
sanguine promises; but it is not. It is a record of promises made four
years ago and now actually redeemed in constructive legislation.
These things must profoundly disturb the thoughts and confound the plans
of those who have made themselves believe that the Democratic Party
neither understood nor was ready to assist the business of the country
in the great enterprises which it is its evident and inevitable destiny
to undertake and carry through. The breaking up of the lobby must
especially disconcert them: for it was through the lobby that they
sought and were sure they had found the heart of things. The game of
privilege can be played successfully by no other means.
This record must equally astonish those who feared that the Democratic
Party had not opened its heart to comprehend the demands of social
justice. We have in four years come very near to carrying out the
platform of the Progressive Party as well as our own; for we also are
progressives.
There is one circumstance connected with this program which ought to be
very plainly stated. It was resisted at every step by the interests
which the Republican Party had catered to and fostered at the expense of
the country, and these same interests are now earnestly praying for a
reaction which will save their privileges,--for the restoration of their
sworn friends to power before it is too late to recover what they have
lost. They fought with particular desperation and infinite
resourcefulness the reform of the banking and currency system, knowing
that to be the citadel of their control; and most anxiously are they
hoping and planning for the amendment of the Federal Reserve Act by the
concentration of control in a single bank which the old familiar group
of bankers can keep under their eye and direction. But while the "big
men" who used to write the tariffs and command the assistance of the
Treasury have been hostile,--all but a few with vision,--the average
business man knows that he has been delivered, and that the fear that
was once every day in his heart, that the men who controlled credit and
directed enterprise from the committee rooms of Congress would crush
him, is there no more, and will not return,--unless the party that
consulted only the "big men" should return to power,--the party of
masterly inactivity and cunning resourcefulness in standing pat to
resist change.
The Republican Party is just the party that _cannot_ meet the new
conditions of a new age. It does not know the way and it does not wish
new conditions. It tried to break away from the old leaders and could
not. They still select its candidates and dictate its policy, still
resist change, still hanker after the old conditions, still know no
methods of encouraging business but the old methods. When it changes its
leaders and its purposes and brings its ideas up to date it will have
the right to ask the American people to give it power again; but not
until then. A new age, an age of revolutionary change, needs new
purposes and new ideas.
In foreign affairs we have been guided by principles clearly conceived
and consistently lived up to. Perhaps they have not been fully
comprehended because they have hitherto governed international affairs
only in theory, not in practice. They are simple, obvious, easily
stated, and fundamental to American ideals.
We have been neutral not only because it was the fixed and traditional
policy of the United States to stand aloof from the politics of Europe
and because we had had no part either of action or of policy in the
influences which brought on the present war, but also because it was
manifestly our duty to prevent, if it were possible, the indefinite
extension of the fires of hate and desolation kindled by that terrible
conflict and seek to serve mankind by reserving cur strength and our
resources for the anxious and difficult days of restoration and healing
which must follow, when peace will have to build its house anew.
The rights of our own citizens of course became involved: that was
inevitable. Where they did this was our guiding principle: that property
rights can be vindicated by claims for damages and no modern nation can
decline to arbitrate such claims; but the fundamental rights of humanity
cannot be. The loss of life is irreparable. Neither can direct
violations of a nation's sovereignty await vindication in suits for
damages. The nation that violates these essential rights must expect to
be checked and called to account by direct challenge and resistance. It
at once makes the quarrel in part our own. These are plain principles
and we have never lost sight of them or departed from them, whatever the
stress or the perplexity of circumstance or the provocation to hasty
resentment. The record is clear and consistent throughout and stands
distinct and definite for anyone to judge who wishes to know the truth
about it.
The seas were not broad enough to keep the infection of the conflict out
of our own politics. The passions and intrigues of certain active groups
and combinations of men amongst us who were born under foreign flags
injected the poison of disloyalty into our own most critical affairs,
laid violent hands upon many of our industries, and subjected us to the
shame of divisions of sentiment and purpose in which America was
contemned and forgotten. It is part of the business of this year of
reckoning and settlement to speak plainly and act with unmistakable
purpose in rebuke of these things, in order that they may be forever
hereafter impossible. I am the candidate of a party, but I am above all
things else an American citizen. I neither seek the favor nor fear the
displeasure of that small alien element amongst us which puts loyalty to
any foreign power before loyalty to the United States.
While Europe was at war our own continent, one of our own neighbors, was
shaken by revolution. In that matter, too, principle was plain and it
was imperative that we should live up to it if we were to deserve the
trust of any real partisan of the right as free men see it. We have
professed to believe, and we do believe, that the people of small and
weak states have the right to expect to be dealt with exactly as the
people of big and powerful states would be. We have acted upon that
principle in dealing with the people of Mexico.
Our recent pursuit of bandits into Mexican territory was no violation of
that principle. We ventured to enter Mexican territory only because
there were no military forces in Mexico that could protect our border
from hostile attack and our own people from violence, and we have
committed there no single act of hostility or interference even with the
sovereign authority of the Republic of Mexico herself. It was a plain
case of the violation of our own sovereignty which could not wait to be
vindicated by damages and for which there was no other remedy. The
authorities of Mexico were powerless to prevent it.
Many serious wrongs against the property, many irreparable wrongs
against the persons of Americans have been committed within the
territory of Mexico herself during this confused revolution, wrongs
which could not be effectually checked so long as there was no
constituted power in Mexico which was in a position to check them. We
could not act directly in that matter ourselves without denying Mexicans
the right to any revolution at all which disturbed us and making the
emancipation of her own people await our own interest and convenience.
For it is their emancipation that they are seeking,--blindly, it may be,
and as yet ineffectually, but with profound and passionate purpose and
within their unquestionable right, apply what true American principle
you will,--any principle that an American would publicly avow. The
people of Mexico have not been suffered to own their own country or
direct their own institutions. Outsiders, men out of other nations and
with interests too often alien to their own, have dictated what their
privileges and opportunities should be and who should control their
land, their lives, and their resources,--some of them Americans,
pressing for things they could never have got in their own country. The
Mexican people are entitled to attempt their liberty from such
influences; and so long as I have anything to do with the action of our
great Government I shall do everything in my power to prevent anyone
standing in their way. I know that this is hard for some persons to
understand; but it is not hard for the plain people of the United States
to understand. It is hard doctrine only for those who wish to get
something for themselves out of Mexico. There are men, and noble women,
too, not a few, of our own people, thank God! whose fortunes are
invested in great properties in Mexico who yet see the case with true
vision and assess its issues with true American feeling. The rest can be
left for the present out of the reckoning until this enslaved people has
had its day of struggle towards the light. I have heard no one who was
free from such influences propose interference by the United States with
the internal affairs of Mexico. Certainly no friend of the Mexican
people has proposed it.
The people of the United States are capable of great sympathies and a
noble pity in dealing with problems of this kind. As their spokesman and
representative, I have tried to act in the spirit they would wish me
show. The people of Mexico are striving for the rights that are
fundamental to life and happiness,--15,000,000 oppressed men,
overburdened women, and pitiful children in virtual bondage in their own
home of fertile lands and inexhaustible treasure! Some of the leaders of
the revolution may often have been mistaken and violent and selfish, but
the revolution itself was inevitable and is right. The unspeakable
Huerta betrayed the very comrades he served, traitorously overthrew the
government of which he was a trusted part, impudently spoke for the very
forces that had driven his people to the rebellion with which he had
pretended to sympathize. The men who overcame him and drove him out
represent at least the fierce passion of reconstruction which lies at
the very heart of liberty; and so long as they represent, however
imperfectly, such a struggle for deliverance, I am ready to serve their
ends when I can. So long as the power of recognition rests with me the
Government of the United States will refuse to extend the hand of
welcome to any one who obtains power in a sister republic by treachery
and violence. No permanency can be given the affairs of any republic by
a title based upon intrigue and assassination. I declared that to be the
policy of this Administration within three weeks after I assumed the
presidency. I here again vow it. I am more interested in the fortunes of
oppressed men and pitiful women and children than in any property rights
whatever. Mistakes I have no doubt made in this perplexing business, but
not in purpose or object.
More is involved than the immediate destinies of Mexico and the
relations of the United States with a distressed and distracted people.
All America looks on. Test is now being made of us whether we be sincere
lovers of popular liberty or not and are indeed to be trusted to respect
national sovereignty among our weaker neighbors. We have undertaken
these many years to play big brother to the republics of this
hemisphere. This is the day of our test whether we mean, or have ever
meant, to play that part for our own benefit wholly or also for theirs.
Upon the outcome of that test (its outcome in their minds, not in ours)
depends every relationship of the United States with Latin America,
whether in politics or in commerce and enterprise. These are great
issues and lie at the heart of the gravest tasks of the future, tasks
both economic and political and very intimately inwrought with many of
the most vital of the new issues of the politics of the world. The
republics of America have in the last three years been drawing together
in a new spirit of accommodation, mutual understanding, and cordial
cooeperation. Much of the politics of the world in the years to come will
depend upon their relationships with one another. It is a barren and
provincial statesmanship that loses sight of such things!
The future, the immediate future, will bring us squarely face to face
with many great and exacting problems which will search us through and
through whether we be able and ready to play the part in the world that
we mean to play. It will not bring us into their presence slowly,
gently, with ceremonious introduction, but suddenly and at once, the
moment the war in Europe is over. They will be new problems, most of
them; many will be old problems in a new setting and with new elements
which we have never dealt with or reckoned the force and meaning of
before. They will require for their solution new thinking, fresh courage
and resourcefulness, and in some matters radical reconsiderations of
policy. We must be ready to mobilize our resources alike of brains and
of materials.
It is not a future to be afraid of. It is, rather, a future to stimulate
and excite us to the display of the best powers that are in us. We may
enter it with confidence when we are sure that we understand it,--and we
have provided ourselves already with the means of understanding it.
Look first at what it will be necessary that the nations of the world
should do to make the days to come tolerable and fit to live and work
in; and then look at our part in what is to follow and our own duty of
preparation. For we must be prepared both in resources and in policy.
There must be a just and settled peace, and we here in America must
contribute the full force of our enthusiasm and of our authority as a
nation to the organization of that peace upon world-wide foundations
that cannot easily be shaken. No nation should be forced to take sides
in any quarrel in which its own honor and integrity and the fortunes of
its own people are not involved; but no nation can any longer remain
neutral as against any wilful disturbance of the peace of the world. The
effects of war can no longer be confined to the areas of battle. No
nation stands wholly apart in interest when the life and interests of
all nations are thrown into confusion and peril. If hopeful and generous
enterprise is to be renewed, if the healing and helpful arts of life are
indeed to be revived when peace comes again, a new atmosphere of justice
and friendship must be generated by means the world has never tried
before. The nations of the world must unite in joint guarantees that
whatever is done to disturb the whole world's life must first be tested
in the court of the whole world's opinion before it is attempted.
These are the new foundations the world must build for itself, and we
must play our part in the reconstruction, generously and without too
much thought of our separate interests. We must make ourselves ready to
play it intelligently, vigorously, and well.
One of the contributions we must make to the world's peace is this: We
must see to it that the people in our insular possessions are treated in
their own lands as we would treat them here, and make the rule of the
United States mean the same thing everywhere,--the same justice, the
same consideration for the essential rights of men.
Besides contributing our ungrudging moral and practical support to the
establishment of peace throughout the world we must actively and
intelligently prepare ourselves to do our full service in the trade and
industry which are to sustain and develop the life of the nations in the
days to come.
We have already been provident in this great matter and supplied
ourselves with the instrumentalities of prompt adjustment. We have
created, in the Federal Trade Commission, a means of inquiry and of
accommodation in the field of commerce which ought both to cooerdinate
the enterprises of our traders and manufacturers and to remove the
barriers of misunderstanding and of a too technical interpretation of
the law. In the new Tariff Commission we have added another
instrumentality of observation and adjustment which promises to be
immediately serviceable. The Trade Commission substitutes counsel and
accommodation for the harsher processes of legal restraint, and the
Tariff Commission ought to substitute facts for prejudices and theories.
Our exporters have for some time had the advantage of working in the new
light thrown upon foreign markets and opportunities of trade by the
intelligent inquiries and activities of the Bureau of Foreign and
Domestic Commerce which the Democratic Congress so wisely created in
1912. The Tariff Commission completes the machinery by which we shall be
enabled to open up our legislative policy to the facts as they develop.
We can no longer indulge our traditional provincialism. We are to play a
leading part in the world drama whether we wish it or not. We shall
lend, not borrow; act for ourselves, not imitate or follow; organize and
initiate, not peep about merely to see where we may get in.
We have already formulated and agreed upon a policy of law which will
explicitly remove the ban now supposed to rest upon cooeperation amongst
our exporters in seeking and securing their proper place in the markets
of the world. The field will be free, the instrumentalities at hand. It
will only remain for the masters of enterprise amongst us to act in
energetic concert, and for the Government of the United States to insist
upon the maintenance throughout the world of those conditions of
fairness and of even-handed justice in the commercial dealings of the
nations with one another upon which, after all, in the last analysis,
the peace and ordered life of the world must ultimately depend.
At home also we must see to it that the men who plan and develop and
direct our business enterprises shall enjoy definite and settled
conditions of law, a policy accommodated to the freest progress. We have
set the just and necessary limits. We have put all kinds of unfair
competition under the ban and penalty of the law. We have barred
monopoly. These fatal and ugly things being excluded, we must now
quicken action and facilitate enterprise by every just means within our
choice. There will be peace in the business world, and, with peace,
revived confidence and life.
We ought both to husband and to develop our natural resources, our
mines, our forests, our water power. I wish we could have made more
progress than we have made in this vital matter; and I call once more,
with the deepest earnestness and solicitude, upon the advocates of a
careful and provident conservation, on the one hand, and the advocates
of a free and inviting field for private capital, on the other, to get
together in a spirit of genuine accommodation and agreement and set this
great policy forward at once.
We must hearten and quicken the spirit and efficiency of labor
throughout our whole industrial system by everywhere and in all
occupations doing justice to the laborer, not only by paying a living
wage but also by making all the conditions that surround labor what they
ought to be. And we must do more than justice. We must safeguard life
and promote health and safety in every occupation in which they are
threatened or imperilled. That is more than justice, and better, because
it is humanity and economy.
We must cooerdinate the railway systems of the country for national use,
and must facilitate and promote their development with a view to that
cooerdination and to their better adaptation as a whole to the life and
trade and defense of the nation. The life and industry of the country
can be free and unhampered only if these arteries are open, efficient,
and complete.
Thus shall we stand ready to meet the future as circumstance and
international policy effect their unfolding, whether the changes come
slowly or come fast and without preface.
I have not spoken explicitly, Gentlemen, of the platform adopted at St.
Louis; but it has been implicit in all that I have said. I have sought
to interpret its spirit and meaning. The people of the United States do
not need to be assured now that that platform is a definite pledge, a
practical program. We have proved to them that our promises are made to
be kept.
We hold very definite ideals. We believe that the energy and initiative
of our people have been too narrowly coached and superintended; that
they should be set free, as we have set them free, to disperse
themselves throughout the nation; that they should not be concentrated
in the hands of a few powerful guides and guardians, as our opponents
have again and again, in effect if not in purpose, sought to concentrate
them. We believe, moreover,--who that looks about him now with
comprehending eye can fail to believe?--that the day of Little
Americanism, with its narrow horizons, when methods of "protection" and
industrial nursing were the chief study of our provincial statesmen, are
past and gone and that a day of enterprise has at last dawned for the
United States whose field is the wide world.
We hope to see the stimulus of that new day draw all America, the
republics of both continents, on to a new life and energy and initiative
in the great affairs of peace. We are Americans for Big America, and
rejoice to look forward to the days in which America shall strive to
stir the world without irritating it or drawing it on to new
antagonisms, when the nations with which we deal shall at last come to
see upon what deep foundations of humanity and justice our passion for
peace rests, and when all mankind shall look upon our great people with
a new sentiment of admiration, friendly rivalry and real affection, as
upon a people who, though keen to succeed, seeks always to be at once
generous and just and to whom humanity is dearer than profit or selfish
power.
Upon this record and in the faith of this purpose we go to the country.