Free Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History by Unknown Page A

Massachusetts. In some unimportant detail some other states may surpass her, but in the general results, there is no place on earth where the people secure, in a larger measure, the blessings of organized government, and nowhere can those functions more properly be termed self-government.
    Do the day’s work. If it be to protect the rights of the weak, whoever objects, do it. If it be to help a powerful corporation better to serve the people, whatever the opposition, do that. Expect to be called a standpatter,but don’t be a standpatter. Expect to be called a demagogue, but don’t be a demagogue. Don’t hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don’t hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table. Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. Don’t hurry to legislate. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation.
    We need a broader, firmer, deeper faith in the people—a faith that men desire to do right, that the commonwealth is founded upon a righteousness which will endure, a reconstructed faith that the final approval of the people is given not to demagogues, slavishly pandering to their selfishness, merchandising with the clamor of the hour, but to statesmen, ministering to their welfare, representing their deep, silent, abiding convictions.
    Statutes must appeal to more than material welfare. Wages won’t satisfy, be they never so large. Nor houses; nor lands; nor coupons, though they fall thick as the leaves of autumn. Man has a spiritual nature. Touch it, and it must respond as the magnet responds to the pole. To that, not to selfishness, let the laws of the commonwealth appeal. Recognize the immortal worth and dignity of man. Let the laws of Massachusetts proclaim to her humblest citizen, performing the most menial task, the recognition of his manhood, the recognition that all men are peers, the humblest with the most exalted, the recognition that all work is glorified. Such is the path to equality before the law. Such is the foundation of liberty under the law. Such is the sublime revelation of man’s relation to man—democracy.

Interior Secretary Harold Ickes Lashes Isolationists and Defeatists
    “Destroy a whole generation of those who have known how to walk with heads erect in God’s free air, and the next generation will rise against the oppressors and restore freedom.”
    Harold Ickes was a Chicago lawyer and newspaper reporter with a flair for plain speaking and an instinct for the killing phrase. He styled himself a “curmudgeon”; when he resigned from Harry Truman’s cabinet over the selection of a Truman friend to be undersecretary of the navy, he entered political phrasemaking immortality with “I am against government by crony.”
    As Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, the outspoken Ickes was point man attacking the New Deal’s detractors. As World War II began, he took on Senator Burton K. Wheeler and members of the America First Committee, getting out in front of FDR in castigating the isolationists. In 1940, poet Anne Morrow Lindbergh, like her husband, Charles, impressed by Germany’s power, wrote a long essay titled “The Wave of the Future,” which many readers took as an apologia for fascism. In his May 18, 1941, “I Am an American Day” speech on the Central Park Mall in New York City, Ickes made the case for intervention and chose as his villain “the wavers of the future.” The sentences are short, declarative, punchy, answering simple self-directed questions: “Do you know why? Because we cannot live in the world alone….” The accusations admit no pussyfooting: “I tell you that this is a cold-blooded lie.” It is a classic of rock-’em, sock-’em political oratory with an undercurrent of idealism.
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    I WANT TO ask a few simple questions. And then I shall answer them. What has happened to our vaunted idealism? Why have some of us been behaving like scared chickens? Where is the million-throated,