When the whole story is told of American achievement and the picture is
painted of our material resources, we come back to the plain but
all-significant fact that far beyond all our possessions in land and
coal and waters and oil and industries is the American man. To him, to
his spirit and to his character, to his skill and to his intelligence is
due all the credit for the land in which we live. And that resource we
are neglecting. He may be the best nurtured and the best clothed and the
best housed of all men on this great globe. He may have more chances to
become independent and even rich. He may have opportunities for
schooling nowhere else afforded. He may have a freedom to speak and to
worship and to exercise his judgment over the affairs of the Nation. And
yet he is the most neglected of our resources because he does not know
how rich he is, how rich beyond all other men he is. Not rich in
money--I do not speak of that--but rich in the endowment of powers and
possibilities no other man ever was given.
Twenty-five per cent of the 1,600,000 men between 21 and 31 years of age
who were first drafted into our Army could not read nor write our
language, and tens of thousands could not speak it nor understand it. To
them the daily paper telling what Von Hindenberg was doing was a blur.
To them the appeals of Hoover came by word of mouth, if at all. To them
the messages of their commander in chief were as so much blank paper. To
them the word of mother or sweetheart came filtering in through other
eyes that had to read their letters.
Now this is wrong. There is something lacking in the sense of a society
that would permit it in a land of public schools that assumes leadership
in the world.
Here is raw material truly, of the most important kind and the greatest
possibility for good as well as for ill.
Save! Save! Save! This has been the mandate for the past two years. It
is a word with which this report is replete. But we have been talking of
food and land and oil while the boys and young men that are about us who
carry the fortune of the democracy in their hands are without a primary
knowledge of our institutions, our history, our wars and what we have
fought for, our men and what they have stood for, our country and what
its place in the world is.
The marvelous force of public opinion and the rare absorbing quality of
the American mind never was shown more clearly than by the fact that out
of these men came a loyalty and a stern devotion to America when the day
of test came. Had Germany known what we know now, it would have been
beyond her to believe that America could draft an army to adventure into
war in Europe. There should not be a man who was in our Army or our Navy
who has the ambition for an education who should not be given that
opportunity--indeed, induced to take it--not merely out of appreciation
but out of the greater value to the Nation that he would be if the tools
of life were put into his hand. There is no word to say upon this theme
of Americanization that has not been said, and Congress, it is now
hoped, will believe those figures which, when presented nearly two years
ago, were flouted as untrue. The Nation is humiliated at its own
indifference, and action must be the result.
To save and to develop, I have said, were equally the expression of a
true conservation. What is true as to material things is true as to
human beings. And once given a foundation of health there is no other
course by which this policy may be effected than to place at the command
of every one the means of acquiring knowledge. The whole people must
turn in that direction. We should enable all, without distinction, to
have that training for which they are fitted by their own natural
endowment. Then we can draw out of hiding the talents that have been
hidden. The school will yet come to be the first institution of our
land, in acknowledged preeminence in the making of Americans who
understand why they are Americans and why to be one is worth while.[5]