united-states-presidential-candidates-1940

"Roosevelt's New Deal was not the best alternative, but it certainly was a better alternative than had been offered to the problems of our times, and it was offered with an elan, a spirit that made things go and which tended to lift up people's hearts. In retrospect, I wouldn't change many of the criticisms I then made. Yet the net result was certainly the salvation of America, and it produced peacefully, after some fashion not calculated by Roosevelt, the Welfare State and almost a revolution."

"For I can assure you that in any war, even if it does not become a world war, I do not think there will be a victor who can do much. There may be one less badly off than the other. One side or the other may have sued first for peace. The destruction will be so great, the moral erosion of the experience will be so great, that it is idle to think you’ll find liberty, walking serenely among the corpses of the dead and the agonies of the dying. There are other things to do than that if we want democracy and freedom to live; there have to be other things to do than that."

"Political activism is about what you do; a counterculture is about how you live and look at the world, and the two do not necessarily overlap at all. Thus, Jack Kerouac, the great countercultural of the '50s, was somewhat to the right of Joseph McCarthy; while Norman Thomas, the best-known socialist of the same decade, was as straight as Thomas E. Dewey."

"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of "liberalism" they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."

"I now see Norman Thomas as indeed a liberal, but as a real, old-fashioned, unreconstructed liberal who believes in freedom and justice for everybody."

"All our rulers have said that war is unthinkable, and then we think about it almost all the time. We’ve got to make it unthinkable."

"You will keep America out of the hands of communists by what you do here, you will keep it by making it seem unnecessary to the disadvantaged. It has been the New Deal, it has been democratic socialism which has been a major force from keeping the world from communism."

"Truly, the life of Norman Thomas has been one of deep commitment to the betterment of all humanity."

"The struggle against demagoguery scarcely fits the St George-against-the-dragon myth. Our democratic St George goes out rather reluctantly with armor awry. The struggle is confused; our knight wins by no clean thrust of lance or sword, but the dragon somehow poops out, and decent democracy is victor."

"Thomas has often been a civil liberties agency all by himself, and a most effective one."

"You're worse than Gene Debs...If I had my way, I'd not only kill your magazine but send you to prison for life."

"[Norman Thomas] great fear at this juncture in history was not that Roosevelt himself would lead America to fascism, but that his ‘ideal’ of ‘capitalistic collectivism’ could set the stage for it. The President, he argued, ‘in the best sense of the word, is an aristocrat’ whose ‘accent’ alone would disqualify him as a potential Fascist leader."

"I shall not stir multitudes, but may persuade my readers when I say that democratic socialism, not sure of all answers, not promising sudden utopias, is the world's best hope."

"In no way was Hitler the tool of big business. He was its lenient master. So was Mussolini except that he was weaker."

"It is a rather fascist performance, to exclude a man [Thomas] who has been a loyal supporter of Russian recognition from the days when it was dangerous to support that cause in America down to today."

"[B]oth the communist and fascists revolutions definitely abolished laissez-faire capitalism in favor of one or another kind and degree of state capitalism. In neither form, fascist or communist, did the masses, through any sort of democratic process, either as workers or citizens, control the basic means of production and distribution ."

"Stalin's infamous pact with his fellow dictator has at last made the issue plain: His Communism is the ally not the foe of Fascism; the enemy, not the friend of democracy and the worker's cause."

"The similarities of the economics of the New Deal to the economics of Mussolini's corporative state or Hitler's totalitarian state are both close and obvious."

"Fascism glorifies both militarism and war. It is as surely a menace to the peace as to the liberty of mankind."

"After I asked him [a student] what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement. No decent society can tolerate that definition."

"The ultimate values in the world are those of personality and no theory of the state, whether socialistic or capitalistic, is valid, which makes it master, not servant, of man."

"The problem that confronts some of you younger ones – you’ve got to find an alternative to war. War is something men have hated but yet cherished. Out of wars have come profit of various sorts, power, glory. Sometimes out of them has become a defense of freedom. But you will not get that out of the kind of war we fight now with the weapons that our great scientists have given us. We have got to find a substitute for war, and the substitute isn’t surrender."

"By every test of civil liberty Russian life is at least as much regimented as in the Fascist countries. The press, schools, and radio are if anything more absolutely controlled. ... To strike is as dangerous in Russia as in Germany. . . ."

"We are socialists because we believe we live now in a world that requires a great deal of thoughtful planning ahead of time. We are socialists because we live in a world that is peculiarly interdependent, and to a degree quite unknown in earlier times. [...] We are socialists because we believe in this kind of world - in this anarchy of nations - we need to have a concept that the great purpose of life is to manage our extraordinary scientific and technological achievements and our resources for the common good. It’s not easy and it cannot be the byproduct of a game where everybody seeks the maximum profit for himself, either men or nations in that role."

"The heretic may be very irritating, he may be decidedly wrong, but the attempt to choke heresy or dissent from the dominant opinion by coercing the conscience is an incalculable danger to society. If war makes it necessary, it is the last count in the indictment against war."

"Such is the logic of totalitarianism... [that] communism, whatever it was originally, is today Red fascism."

"To what extent may we expect to have the economics of fascism without its politics?"

"There is the sharp and bitter division between Socialists and Communists, principally on the important question of method and tactics. In general, however, Socialists propose to bring about as rapidly as possible the social ownership of land, natural resources and the principle means of production, thereby abolishing the possibility of the existence of any class on an income derived not from work but from ownership. This does not necessarily mean that no man will have a home he can call his own. His right will rest on use and not on a title deed."

"When the state seeks to compel a man who believes that war is wrong, not merely to abstain from actual sedition, as is its right, but to participate in battle, it inevitably compels him, however deep his love of country, to raise once more the cry, "We ought to obey God rather than man". He acknowledges with Romain Rolland that he is the citizen of two fatherlands and his supreme loyalty is to the City of God of which he is a builder. Some conscientious objectors may substitute mankind or humanity for God, but their conviction remains the same; only the free spirit can finally determine for a man the highest service he can render."

"We are socialists because we believe this income which we all cooperate in making isn’t divided as it ought to be. [...] We do reward men according to deed. We do reward or give to people according to need. No religion would be possible in which that wasn’t done. There are the young, there are the old, there are many whom we have to reward according to their need. But in spite of improvements that have been made, and especially perhaps by my liberal friends who aren't just sure how far to go...we still have a society where there's a great deal of reward not according to deed, not according to need, but according to breed - the choice of your grandfather is very important. And according to the successful greed, which operates not in terms of great contributions to men, but in terms of manipulations of one sort of another."

"You have to do a little bragging on yourself even to your relatives—man just doesn’t get anywhere without advertising."

"Worst damnfool mistake I ever made was letting myself be elected Vice President of the United States. Should have stuck with my old chores as Speaker of the House. I gave up the second most important job in the Government for one that didn't amount to a hill of beans. I spent eight long years as Mr. Roosevelt's spare tire. I might still be Speaker if I didn't let them elect me Vice-President."

"Not worth a bucket of warm piss."

"This is a quality that has appeared often enough in American history — and outside America as well. Senators like Ted Kennedy have been prominent before, bearing names like Henry Clay or Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater and Hubert Humphrey. Governors like New York Republican Nelson Rockefeller or Alabama Democrat George Wallace. A Congressman like Jack Kemp. Non-office holders like Martin Luther King in the United States or Mohandas Gandhi in India or Nelson Mandela in South Africa (who later became president of his country) can, through sheer force of personality, come to dominate the political scene of the day without ever bearing a single official title."

"About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record which we shall long regret"

"As a matter of general principle, I believe there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government … too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think that it will give some comfort to the enemy to know that there is such criticism. If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it as far as I am concerned, because the maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur."

"I think it would have been humanly impossible for two people, over a period of eight years, to agree more consistently and thoroughly than Mr. Hull and I have done. There has never been the slightest important difference of opinion between us, and so far as I am personally concerned I think it would be impossible for any man in my position, who has been so closely associated with the Secretary- who has had the opportunity of being associated wuth a man of his extraordinary moral courage and consistency, and I think an almost unique intellectual integrity- to have anything except very deep devotion for him."

"Hull has passed most of his threescore years and ten in useful service to his country and to the world. His rank in history will depend on the fate of democracy, for he has been one of its most ardent champions. If democracy should fail and disappear at this critical point in its history, he will be forgotten as a minor prophet of an unimportant illusion in the development of the human race. If democracy emerges triumphant from the tempering furnace, he will be hailed as a major prophet whose words have lighted his fellow men to hope and progress."

"A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on."

"There will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the separate alliances through which in the unhappy past the nations strove to safeguard their security or promote their interest."

"Perhaps the real fantasists were the Americans, who adopted a remarkably confrontational stance in the final pre-war months, given the vulnerability of their own military installations in the Pacific, particularly the Philippines. The British were markedly more conciliatory, even temporarily closing the Burma Road - 700 mostly mountainous miles along which supplies were travelling to China - in response to Japanese pressure. For reasons that are not easy to fathom, Roosevelt consistently exaggerated the actual economic and future strategic importance of China and underestimated the perils of war with Japan. He declined an invitation from Konoe to attend a summit conference in the summer of 1941. Secretary of State Cordell Hull wanted complete withdrawal of Japanese troops from China and Indo-China; he would not hear of any suspension of US aid to Chiang, which the Japanese demanded. In his fateful note of November 26, Hull even proposed a mutual surrender of extraterritorial rights in China - an end, in effect, to the old Open Door system - and recognition of the Guomindang government. With some justification, the policy of the United States towards Japan in this period has been likened to her policy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War."

"War is a contagion, whether it be declared or undeclared. It can engulf states and peoples remote from the original scene of hostilities. We are determined to keep out of war, yet we cannot insure ourselves against the disastrous effects of war and the dangers of involvement. We are adopting such measures as will minimize our risk of involvement, but we cannot have complete protection in a world of disorder in which confidence and security have broken down."

"No nation which refuses to exercise forbearance and to respect the freedom and rights of others can long remain strong and retain the confidence and respect of other nations. No nation ever loses its dignity or good standing by conciliating its differences and by exercising great patience with, and consideration for, the rights of other nations."

"If civilization is to survive, the principles of the Prince of Peace must be restored. Shattered trust between nations must be revived. Most important of all, the will for peace on the part of peace-loving nations must express itself to the end that nations that may be tempted to violate their agreements and the rights of others will desist from such a cause. There must be positive endeavors to preserve peace. America hates war. America hopes for peace. Therefore, America actively engages in the search for peace."

"It is true that the moral consciousness of the world must recognize the importance of removing injustices and well-founded grievances; but at the same time it must be aroused to the cardinal necessity of honoring sanctity of treaties, of respecting the rights and liberties of others, and of putting an end to acts of international aggression."

"There is a solidarity and interdependence about the modern world, both technically and morally, which makes it impossible for any nation completely to isolate itself from economic and political upheavals in the rest of the world, especially when such upheavals appear to be spreading and not declining. There can be no stability or peace either within nations or between nations except under laws and moral standards adhered to by all. International anarchy destroys every foundation for peace. It jeopardizes either the immediate or the future security of every nation, large or small. It is, therefore, a matter of vital interest and concern to the people of the United States that the sanctity of international treaties and the maintenance of international morality be restored."

"It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease."

"Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations — disappeared not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion, government weakness — weakness through lack of leadership in government. Finally, in desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat. We in America know that our own democratic institutions can be preserved and made to work. But in order to preserve them we need to act together, to meet the problems of the Nation boldly, and to prove that the practical operation of democratic government is equal to the task of protecting the security of the people."

"Enlightened business is learning that competition ought not to cause bad social consequences which inevitably react upon the profits of business itself. All but the hopelessly reactionary will agree that to conserve our primary resources of man power, government must have some control over maximum hours, minimum wages, the evil of child labor and the exploitation of unorganized labor."

"A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers' wages or stretching workers' hours."