Robert Coover - Public Burning

that stirs the hearts of all sane men:

How far have we come in man’s long pilgrimage

from darkness toward the light?

Are we nearing the light—

a day of freedom and peace for all mankind?

Or are the shadows of another night

closing in upon us?

Since the century’s beginning,

a time of tempest has seemed to come upon

the continents of the earth — great nations of Europe

have fought their bloodiest wars; thrones

have toppled and vast empires have disappeared.

The shadow of fear has darkly lengthened across the world.

We sense with all our faculties

that forces of Good and Evil are massed and armed and opposed

as rarely before in history.

No principle or treasure that we hold,

from the spiritual knowledge of our free schools and churches

to the creative magic of free labor and capital,

nothing lies safely

beyond the reach of this struggle.

You are even puzzled

as to whether it is wise to say anything,

because anything that one in my position might say

could be used as an excuse to make

these conditions worse.

But do you cure cancer

by pretending it does not exist?

We must see, clearly and steadily,

just exactly what is the danger before us;

it is more than merely a military threat.

The forces threatening this continent strike directly

at the faith of our fathers and the lives of our sons,

at the very ideals by which our peoples live!

Freedom is pitted against slavery;

lightness against the dark!

Here, then, is joined no argument

between slightly differing philosophies—

for this whole struggle, in the deepest sense,

is waged neither for land

nor for food nor for power

— but for the Soul of Man himself!

We are Christian nations,

deeply conscious that the foundation

of all liberty is religious faith:

we trust in the merciful providence of God,

whose image, within every man,

is the source and substance

of each man’s dignity and freedom.

This faith rules our whole way of life—

we live by it and we intend to practice it.

I think that is not hard to prove

in the case of America: when we came

to that turning point in history, when we intended

to establish a government for free men

and a Declaration and a Constitution to make it last,

in order to explain such a system we had to say:

“We hold that all men are endowed by their Creator”

— thus establishing once and for all

that our civilization and our form of government

is deeply imbedded in a religious faith.

Indeed, those men felt that

unless we recognized that relationship

between our form of government and religious faith,

that form of government made no sense!

Now, that is the doctrine of the administration.

It is most certainly the doctrine of the Republican Party

and those Republican leaders in Congress.

The faith we hold

belongs not to us alone

but the free of all the world.

This common bond

joins the grower of rice in Burma

and the planter of wheat in Iowa,

the shepherd in southern Italy

and the mountaineer in the Andes,

the French soldier who dies in Indochina,

the British soldier killed in Malaya,

the American life given in Korea.

We believe.

The enemies of this faith

know no god but force, no devotion but its use;

they tutor men in treason;

they seek not to eradicate poverty and its causes

but to exploit it and those who suffer it—

they feed upon the hunger of others.

These forces

seek to bind nations not by trust but by fear—

whatever defies them, they torture,

especially the truth. Against these forces

the widest oceans offer no sure defense.

We live in a time of peril.

This is one of those times in the affairs of nations

when the gravest choices must be made — a moment

when man’s power to achieve good or to inflict evil

surpasses the brightest hopes and the sharpest fears

of all ages.

The worst to be feared

and the best to be expected can be simply stated:

the worst is atomic war…the best:

a life of perpetual fear and tension.

We must act from a lesson learned at terrible cost:

to serve our reasoned hope for the best,

we must be ready steadfastly to meet the worst.

These plain and cruel truths

define the peril and point the hope

that come with this spring of 1953.

The world, at least, need be divided no longer

in its clear knowledge of who has condemned

humankind to this fate — we all know something

of the long record of deliberately planned Communist aggression!

It has been coldly calculated by the Soviet leaders,

for by their military threat they have hoped

to force upon America and the free world

an unbearable security burden leading to

economic disaster!

They have plainly said

that free people cannot preserve their way of life

and at the same time provide enormous military establishments

— Communist guns, in this sense,

have been aiming at an economic target

no less than a military target: prolonged inflation

could be as destructive of a truly free economy

as could a chemical attack against an army in the field!

They seek to promote,

among those of us who remain free and unafraid,

the deadliest divisions: class against class,

people against people, nation against nation—

we cannot escape the implication of these attacks,

their complete indifference to human life and to the individual;

it is clearly part of the same calculated assault

that the aggressor is simultaneously pressing

in Indochina and in Malaya,

and of the strategic situation

that manifestly embraces the island of Formosa—

the destruction of freedom everywhere!

It is, friends, a spiritual struggle.

And at such a time in history, we who are free

must proclaim anew our faith; we are called as a people

to give testimony in the sight of the world

to our faith that the future shall belong to the free!

History does not long entrust

the care of freedom to the weak or the timid—

we must be ready to dare all for our country!

Human liberty and national liberty

must survive against Communist aggression

which tramples on human dignity;

upon all our peoples and nations

there rests a responsibility to serve worthily

the faith we hold and the freedom we cherish

— which means essentially a free economy.

Let none doubt this:

we are free men.

I don’t like the word “compulsory”;

I am against the word “socialized”;

everything about such words seems to me

to be a step toward the thing

that we are spending so many billions to prevent—

the overwhelming of this country by any force,

power, or idea that leads us to forsake

our traditional system of free enterprise.

Private investment has been the major stimulus

for economic development throughout this hemisphere;

this is the true way of the Americas — the free way—

by which people are bound together for the common good.

Make no mistake:

the reason we have representatives around the world

is to protect American interests

wherever they may be endangered or in difficulties;

we do everything we can to protect the interests

of the United States everywhere on the globe—