Page History: A City Upon a Hill
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Transcript (Work in Progress, 03/05/2021)
Thank you
Thank you very much. you please.
Thank you. thank you very much please.
thank you well thank you all very much for a very heartwarming welcome and buzz, i thank you for your very generous words reverend clergy governor thompson congressman trine our toastmaster bill rusher the other distinguished guest here at the table any speaker in these first few seconds on his feet is always questioning what should be the first thing of the opening remark the audience catcher so to speak but bill rusher and buzz lukens have set the pace for me i might as well get back in the act and introduce someone myself as a matter of fact there are two men here tonight i'm very proud to introduce it was a year ago this coming february when this country had its spirits lifted as they have never been lifted in many many years when planes began landing in american soil and in the philippines bringing back men who had lived with honor for miserable years in the prison camps of vietnam and two of those men are here tonight john mccain and bill lawrence
wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute i can add another one ed martin right here to join that wonderful crew
thank you
well i might as well sit down i can't do any better than that in the remainder of the evening well you know to be here this is a spot to know that i am midway in the seminars that you've been holding the idea of what subject knowing the audience i would be addressing and not knowing which of those subjects you have explored thoroughly already in your seminars or which are on the schedule for your the rest of your meetings leaves me hard put to find a subject and it isn't helped any but the fact that every once in a while i have when i needed material crib from m stanton evans and he's sitting here tonight so i can't even do that
i think the only story that would describe my situation is one that i've told as some of you i know before but then you have to remember that if life begins at 40 so does lumbago arthritis and the tendency to tell stories three or four times it was a fellow in the picture business who aspired to an operatic career saved his money so he could go to italy and study for opera and after a few years of study there he was invited to sing at la scala a very spiritual fountain head of opera they were doing paliyachi and he sang the beautiful aria vestila juba and the applause was so thunderous and so sustained that they couldn't continue the opera until he repeated vestila juba as an encore and again the same sustained thunderous applause and again he stepped center stage and sang the arya this went on till finally he motioned for quiet and he tried to tell them how full his heart was and what this welcome in his first appearance in opera in that almost sacred place meant to him but he said i have sung vestila juba now nine times my voice is gone i cannot do it again and a voice from the balcony says you'll do it till you get it right
you know reverend i think i ought to tell you that when we were coming east here we ran into some weather we were circling up there on the fog and being vectored into a landing pattern and things were getting a little hairy and a little bumpy and there was a clergyman on board and nancy turned to him across the aisle and said can't you do something about this and he said i'm with sales not management
just a couple of nights ago nancy and i had the great pleasure of being up in new hampshire in governor mel thompson state and i heard a wonderful story there about full of political philosophy and all a quite elderly little lady left her doctor's office one day and hurried directly down the street to the registrar of voters went in and said i want to re-register democrat this man in that little town had known her all his life said how can you do that you've been a republican all your life your parents were republicans your grandparents were republicans she said i know i've just left the doctor's office and he told me my days were numbered and if i've got to go i'd rather it was one of them than one of us
well it is an honor to be here tonight i'm proud that you asked me and i feel more than a little humble in the presence of this distinguished company not too long ago nancy and i also on the way to the governor's conference found ourselves as honored guests at the football game between ole miss and tennessee ole miss hadn't had that good a season tennessee was supposed to clobber them midway in the third quarter was pretty apparent that ole miss was pulling the upset of the season and was going to win and we heard a voice in the stands behind to say man if they'll play that way for him what would they have done if john wayne was here
but seriously there are men here tonight who through their wisdom their foresight and their courage have earned the right to be regarded as prophets of our philosophy indeed they are prophets of our time years past when others were silent or too blind to the facts they spoke up forcefully and fearlessly for what they believed to be right a decade has passed since barry goldwater walked a lonely path across this land reminding us that even a land as rich as ours can't go on forever borrowing against the future leaving a legacy of debt for another generation and causing a runaway inflation to erode the savings and reduce the standard of living for this generation voices have been raised trying to rekindle in our country all the great ideals and principles which set this nation apart from all the others that preceded us but louder and more strident voices utter easily sold cliches and oh congressman dave trine what words of wisdom you gave us here in what our attitude must be it is so easy to fall into the trap of standing on the edge of the cliff ready to jump off with the flag flying and go down arguing how much better it is if we turn persuasive and leave the strident voices to the others on the other side we are the ones who can do the persuasive job that has to be done cartoonists with acid tip pen portray some of the reminders of our heritage i know and our destiny is old-fashioned they say that we're trying to retreat into a past that actually never existed looking to the past in an effort to keep our country from repeating the errors of history is termed by them as taking the country back to mckinley which i've never found that was so bad under mckinley
under mckinley we freed cuba
but on the span of history we're still thought of as a young upstart country celebrating soon only our second century as a nation and yet we're the oldest continuing republic in the world and so i thought that perhaps tonight rather than talking on the subjects we're trying to find something new to say about the very things that you're discussing it might be appropriate to reflect a bit on our heritage now you can call it mysticism if you want to but i've always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage now this was true of those who pioneered the great wilderness in the beginning of this country but it was also true and is true of those later immigrants who were willing to leave the land of their birth and come to a land where even the language was unknown to them call it chauvinistic but our heritage does set us apart some years ago a writer he happened to be an avid student of history told me a story and it happened to be a story about that little day and or that day in the little hall in philadelphia where honorable men hard-pressed by a king who was flouting the very law they were willing to obey debated whether they should take the fateful step of declaring their independence from that king i was told by this man that the story could be found in the writings of jefferson i confess i've never researched or made an effort to verify it perhaps it's only legend but story or legend he described the atmosphere the strain the debate and that that grew heated as men for the first time faced the consequences of such an irretrievable act the walls resounded with the dread word of treason and its price the gallows and the headsman's axe and as the day wore on the issue hung in the balance and then according to the story a man rose in the small gallery he was not a young man he was obviously calling on all the energy he could muster citing the grievances that had brought them to this moment he said sign that parchment they may turn every tree into a gallows every home into a grave and yet the words of that parchment can never die the mechanic in his workshop they will be words of hope to the slave in the of freedom and he added if my hand were freezing in death i would sign that parchment with my last ounce of strength sign sign if the next moment the noose is around your next sign even if this hall is ringing with the sound of the hezman's ex for that parchment will be the textbook of freedom the bible of the rights of man forever and then it is said he fell back exhausted but 56 delegates swept by his elegance signed the declaration of independence a document destined to be the as immortal as any work of man can be and according to the story when they turned to thank him for his timely oratory he couldn't be found nor were there any who knew who he was or how he had come in or gone out through the locked and guarded doors well as i say whether story or legend the signing of the document that day in independence hall was in itself miracle enough 56 men a little band so unique we've never seen their likes since pledged their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor 16 gave their lives most gave their fortunes all of them preserved their sacred honor and what manner of men were they certainly they were not an unwashed revolutionary rebel nor were they adventurers of in the heroic mold 24 were lawyers and jurists 11 were merchants and tradesmen nine were farmers they were men who had achieved security but who valued freedom more and what price did they pay john hart was driven from the side of his desperately ill wife after more than a year of living almost as an animal in the forest and in caves he returned to find his wife had died his children were vanished he never saw them again his property destroyed and he died of a broken heart but with no regret only pride in the party had played that day in independence hall carter braxton of virginia lost all his ships they were sold to pay his debts he died in rags so it was with ellery climber paul walton gwinnett rutledge morris livingston and middleton nelson learning that cornwallis was using his home for a headquarters personally begged washington to fire on and destroy his home he died bankrupt it has never been reported that any of these men ever expressed bitterness or renounced their action is not worth the price 56 rank and file ordinary citizens had founded a nation that grew from sea to shining sea five million farms quiet villages cities that never sleep all done without an area redevelopment plan or urban renewal or a rural legal assistance program now we're a nation of 211 million people with a pedigree that includes the bloodlines from every corner of the world and we have shed that american melting pot blood in every corner of the world usually in the defense of someone's freedom but those who remained of that remarkable band we call our founding fathers tied up some of the loose ends about a dozen years after the revolution it had been the first revolution in all man's history that didn't just exchange one set of rulers for another this had been a philosophical revolution the culmination of men's dreams for six thousand years and they formalized those dreams with the constitution and that too was something of a miracle probably the most unique document ever drawn in the long history of man's relation to man i know there have been other constitutions new ones are being drawn today by newly emerging nations most of them even the one of the soviet union contains many of the same guarantees as our own constitution and still there is a difference the difference is so subtle that we often overlook it but it is so great that it tells the whole story those other constitutions say government grants you these rights and our says you are born with these rights they are yours by grace of god and no government on earth can take them from you
lord acton of england that same lord acton who said power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely would say of that document its authors they had solved with astonishing ease and unexample success two problems which had heretofore baffled the capacity of the most enlightened nations they had contrived a system of federal government which prodigiously increased national power and yet respected local liberties and authorities and they had founded it on a principle of equality without surrendering the securities of property or freedom never as any society had the preeminence of the individual been so firmly established and given such a priority in less than twenty years we would go to war because of the god-given rights of american sailors as defined in the constitution that were being violated by a foreign power we serve notice then in the world that all of us together would act collectively to safeguard the rights of even the least among us but still in an older cynical world they were not convinced the great powers of europe still had the idea that one day this great continent would be open again to colonizing and they would come over and divide us up but in the meantime men who yearned to breathe free were making their way to our shores among them was a young refugee from the austro-hungarian empire he'd been a leader in an attempt to free hungary from austrian rule the attempt had failed and he had fled to escape execution in america this young hungarian costume by name became an importer by trade and took out his first citizenship papers one day business took him to a mediterranean port there was a large austrian warship under the command of an admiral in the harbor he had a manservant with him he had described to this manservant what the flag of his new country looked like word was passed to the austrian warship that this revolutionary was there and in the night he was kidnapped and taken aboard that large ship his man servant desperate walking up and down the harbor suddenly spied a flag that resembled the description he'd heard it was on a small american war sloop he went aboard he told captain ingraham of that american wars loop his story ingraham went to the american council when the american council learned that koster had only taken out his first papers he washed his hands of the incident captain ingraham said i am the senior officer in this port i believe under my oath of office i owe this man the protection of our flag he went aboard the austrian warship he demanded to see our pride their prisoner our citizen the admiral was amused but they brought the man on deck he was in chains he'd been badly beaten captain ingraham said i can hear him better without those chains and the chains were struck he walked over and he said to kostya i will ask you one question consider your answer carefully do you ask the protection of the american flag and costa not a dumbly yes and he said you shall have it he went back and told the frightened council what he had done later in the day three more austrian ships sailed into the harbor it looked as if the four were getting ready to leave captain ingraham sent a junior officer over to the austrian flagship to tell the admiral that any attempt to leave that harbor with our citizen aboard would be resisted with appropriate force and he said i will expect a satisfactory answer by four o'clock this afternoon as the hour neared they were looking at each other through the glasses as it struck four he had them roll the cannons into the ports he had them light the tapers with which they would set off the cannons one little sloop and suddenly the lookout called down and said they're lowering a boat and they rode costa over to the little american ship and captain ingraham went below and wrote his letter of resignation to the united states navy he said i did what i thought my oath of office required but if i have embarrassed my country i resign his resignation was refused in the united states senate with these words this battle that was never fought may turn out to be the most important battle in our nation's history now i haven't told that story incidentally there is to this day and i hope there always will be a uss ingraham in the united states navy
i didn't tell that story out of any desire to be narrowly chauvinistic or to glorify aggressive militarism but it is an example of government meeting its highest responsibility in recent years we've been treated to a rash of noble sounding phrases some of them sound good but they don't hold up under close analysis take for instance the slogan so frequently uttered by the young senator from massachusetts the greatest good for the greatest number henry taylor described that as having three things in common with an oil well it keeps it keeps on producing something it stinks unbelievably and nobody knows that sorcerer's potential
certainly under that slogan no modern day captain ingraham would risk even the smallest craft and crew for a single citizen every dictator who ever lived has justified the enslavement of his people on the theory of what was good for the majority justice oliver wendell holmes reminded us that catchwords can obscure truth for countless years we're not a warlike people nor is our history filled with tales of aggressive adventures and imperialism which might come as a shock to some of the placard painters in our modern demonstrations we fought wars with citizen soldiers and volunteer dollar a year men we haven't casually declared that men are expendable to improve some fancied political position but in the last decade or two the greatest good philosophy has prevailed far more than it should the uss ingraham has been riding rather low in the water these same strident voices would have us believe that the uniform itself is the cause not the result of war the lesson of vietnam i think should be that never again will young americans be asked to fight and possibly die for a cause unless that cause is so meaningful that we as a nation pledge our full resources to achieve victory as quickly as possible
i realized that such a pronouncement of course would possibly be lay one open to the charge of war mongering but that would be ridiculous my generation has paid a higher price for freedom and fought harder for freedom than any generation that ever lived we have known four wars in a single lifetime all were horrible and all could have been avoided if at a particular moment in time
we had made it plain that we subscribed to the words of john stuart mill when he said that war is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth a war is worse the man who has nothing which he cares about more than his personal safety is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself
but widespread disaffection with things military is only a part of the philosophical division in our land today i must say to you who have only recently or are presently still receiving an education i am awed by your powers of resistance i have some knowledge of the attempts that have been made in many classrooms and lecture halls to persuade you that there is little to admire in america for the second time in this century capitalism and the free enterprise system on under assault privately owned business is blamed for despoiling the environment exploiting the worker and seducing if not outright raping the customer those who make the charge have the solution of course government regulation and control they never get around to explaining how citizens who are so gullible that they can be suckered into buying breakfast cereal or soap that they don't need and it wouldn't be good for them can at the very same time be astute enough to choose representatives in government in which they would entrust the running of their lives
not too long ago a poll was taken on some 2500 college campuses in this country thousands and thousands of responses were obtained overwhelmingly the students in percentages of 65 and 70 and 75 percent found business responsible as i said before for the things that are wrong in this country and that same number said that government was the solution to take over the management and the control of private business and then 80 percent of the respondents said they wanted government to keep his paws out of their private lives
we're told every day that the assembly line worker is becoming a dull-witted robot and that mass production results in standardization well there isn't a socialist country in the world that wouldn't give its copy of karl marx for our standardization standardization means production for the masses and the assembly line means more leisure for the worker and freedom from back-breaking and mind-dulling drudgery that man had known for centuries past karl marx didn't abolish child labor or free the women from working in the mines the coal mines in england the steam engine and modern machinery did that unfortunately the disciples of the new order have had a hand in determining too much policy in recent decades and government has grown in size and power and cost through the new deal the fair deal a new frontier in the great society it costs more for government today than the family pays for food shelter and clothing combined as an old rabbi said if all the seas were ink and all the reeds were pins and all the skies were parchment and all men could write this would not suffice to write down all the red tape of this government not even
not even the office of management and budget knows how many boards commissions bureaus and agencies there are in the federal government but the federal registry listing their regulations is just a few pages short of being as big as the encyclopedia britannica one of those regulations caught up with a businessman in california he was told that he had to have separate employees men washrooms men's and women's washrooms he only has one employee and she's his wife and at home they sleep in the same bed and use the same bathroom during the great society we saw the greatest growth of this government there were eight cabinet departments and twelve independent agencies to administer the federal health programs there were thirty five housing programs and twenty transportation projects public utilities had to cope with twenty seven different agencies on just routine business there were 192 installations in nine departments with a thousand projects having to do in the field of pollution one congressman found the federal government was spending four billion dollars on research in its own laboratories but didn't know where they were how many people were working in them or what they were doing one of the research projects was the demography of happiness and for two hundred and forty nine thousand dollars we learned that people who make more money are happier than people who make less
young people are happier than old people and people who are healthier happier than people who are sick
now for 15 cents they could have bought an almanac and read the old bromide it's better to be rich young and healthy than poor old and sick now i haven't told you all of this to make you unhappy or discouraged as a matter of fact i feel quite the reverse you know government extravagance is probably the only bright spot we have can you imagine how miserable we'd all be if we were getting all the government we're paying for
those who've lost faith in free enterprise frequently cite the joys of living in countries where government has assumed the ultimate control countries where everything that isn't prohibited is compulsory a look at the efficiency with which one iron curtain satellite solved a holiday problem just a couple of years ago it issued the following edict they said because christmas eve falls on a thursday thursday has been designated a saturday for work purposes factories will close all day with stores open a half a day only friday december 25th has been designated a sunday with both factories and stores closed all day monday will be a wednesday for work purposes wednesday will be a business friday saturday will be a sunday and sunday will be monday
but do not falter in the course that you've for you are far more in tune with the hopes and aspirations of our people and are those who would sacrifice freedom for some fancied security standing on the tiny deck of the arabella in 1630 off the massachusetts coast john winthrop said we will be as a city upon a hill the eyes of all people are upon us so that if we deal falsely with our god in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world but we have not dealt falsely with our god even if there he is temporarily suspended from the classroom when i was born my life expectancy was ten years less than i've already lived that's a cause of regret to some people in california i know
ninety percent of americans at that time lived beneath what is considered the poverty line today three quarters lived in what is considered substandard housing today each of those figures is less than ten percent we have increased our life expectancy by wiping out almost totally diseases that still ravage mankind in other parts of the world for the young people who are here tonight i doubt if they know some of the names of diseases that were commonplace when we were growing up we have more doctors per thousand people than any nation in the world we have more hospitals than any nation in the world when i was your age believe it or not some of us didn't even know in fact none of us knew that we even had a racial problem when i graduated in college and became a radio sports announcer broadcasting major league baseball i didn't have a hank aaron's or a willie mays to talk about the spalding guide said baseball was a game for caucasian gentlemen some of us then began editorializing and campaigning against this gradually we campaigned and against all those other areas where the constitutional rights of a large segment of our citizenry were being denied we haven't finished the job we still have a ways to go but we've made more progress in a few years than we've had in more than a century one-third of all the students in the world who are pursuing higher education are getting that higher education in the united states and our young negro community is going to college in a percentage that is greater than the percentage of whites in any other country in the world one half of all the economic activity in the entire history of man has taken place in this republic and we have distributed our wealth more widely among our people than any society ever known to man americans work less hours for a higher standard of living than any other people 95 percent of all our families have an adequate daily intake of nutrients and a part of the five percent that don't are trying to lose weight 99 have gas or electric refrigeration 92 percent have tv an equal number have telephones there are 120 million cars on our streets and highways and all of them are on the street at once when you try to get home at night ah but isn't this just proof of our materialism the very thing that we're charged with well we also have more churches more libraries we support voluntarily more symphony orchestras and opera companies and non-profit theaters and publish more books than all the other nations of the world put together and somehow america has bred a kindliness into our people unmatched anywhere as has been pointed out in that best-selling record by a canadian
journalist
we are not a sick society a sick society could not produce the men that set foot on the moon or who now circle the earth above us in skylab a sick society bereft of morality and courage did not produce the men who went through that year those years of torture in captivity in vietnam where did we find such men they are typical of this land as the founding fathers were typical we found them on the streets in the offices and the shops and the working places of our country and on the farms we cannot escape our destiny short nor should we try to the leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall in philadelphia in the days following world war ii when economic strength and power of america was all that stood between the world and a return to the dark ages pope pius xii said the american people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish action into the hands of america god has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind we are indeed and we are today the last best hope of man on earth thank you
so
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