There was a temptation of course to beg your
favor by citing the mistakes of my generation, dwelling on
the awful site of the world and suggesting
that you would bring order out of chaos and set things right. I'm
not that pessimistic, however, and would be
less than honest and sincere if I chose such a course. With
your permission I would rather speak of something
very close to my heart. You members of the
graduating class of 1957 are today coming
into your inheritance. You are taking your adult places in a
society unique in the history of man's tribal
relations. I would like to play the role of a "legal light" in the
reading of the will, and to discuss with you
the terms and conditions of your legacy.
Looming large in your inheritance is this country,
this land America, placed as it is between two great
oceans. Those who discovered and pioneered
it had to have rare qualities of courage and imagination nor
did these qualities stop there. Even the modern-day
immigrants have been possessed of courage beyond
that of their neighbors. The courage to tear
up centuries-old roots and leave their homelands, to come to
this land where even the language was strange.
Such courage is part of our inheritance, all of us spring
from these special people and these qualities
have contributed to the make-up of the American
personality.
There are conditions to this "will" of which
I speak. There are terms the heirs must meet in order to qualify
for the legacy. But, I have never been able
to believe that America is just a reward for those of extra
courage and resourcefulness. This is a land
of destiny and our forefathers found their way here by some
Divine system of selective service gathered
here to fulfill a mission to advance man a further step in his
climb from the swamps.
Almost two centuries ago a group of disturbed
men met in the small Pennsylvania State House they
gathered to decide on a course of action.
Behind the locked and guarded doors they debated for hours
whether or not to sign the Declaration which
had been presented for their consideration. For hours the talk
was treason and its price the headsman's axe,
the gallows and noose. The talk went on and decision was
not forthcoming. Then, Jefferson writes, a
voice was heard coming from the balcony:
They may stretch our necks on all the gibbets
in the land. They may turn every tree into a gallows, every
home into a grave, and yet the words of that
parchment can never die. They may pour our blood on a
thousand scaffolds and yet from every drop
that dyes the axe a new champion of freedom will spring into
birth. The words of this declaration will
live long after our bones are dust.
To the mechanic in his workshop they will speak
hope; to the slave in the mines, freedom; but to the
coward rulers, these words will speak in tones
of warning they cannot help but hear. Sign that parchment.
Sign if the next moment the noose is around
your neck. Sign if the next minute this hall rings with the
clash of falling axes! Sign by all your hopes
in life or death, not only for yourselves but for all ages, for that
parchment will be the textbook of freedom
the bible of the rights of man forever.
Were my soul trembling on the verge of eternity,
my hand freezing in death, I would still implore you to
remember this truth God has given America
to be free.
As he finished, the speaker sank back in his
seat exhausted. Inspired by his eloquence the delegates
rushed forward to sign the Declaration of
Independence. When they turned to thank the speaker for his
timely words he couldn't be found and to this
day no one knows who he was or how he entered or left the
guarded room.
Here was the first challenge to the people
of this new land, the charging of this nation with a responsibility
to all mankind. And down through the years
with but few lapses the people of America have fulfilled their
destiny.
Almost a century and a half after that day
in Philadelphia, this nation entered a great world conflict in
Europe. Volumes of cynical words have been
written about that war and our part in it. Our motives have
been questioned and there has been talk of
ulterior motives in high places, of world markets and balance
of power. But all the words of all the cynics
cannot erase the fact that millions of Americans sacrificed,
fought and many died in the sincere and selfless
belief that they were making the world safe for
democracy and advancing the cause of freedom
for all men.
A quarter of a century later America went into
World War II, and never in the history of man had the issues
of right and wrong been so clearly defined,
so much so that it makes one question how anyone could have
remained neutral. And again in the greatest
mass undertaking the world has ever seen, America fulfilled
her destiny.
A short time after that war was concluded a
plane was winging its way across the Pacific Ocean. It
contained dignitaries of the Philippines and
of our own government. Landing at a naval installation a short
distance from Manila, the plane was held there
while those people listened by radio to the first detonation
of an experimental atomic weapon at the Bikini
Atoll. Then the plane took to the air again and soon landed
in Manila. There these people, together with
our vice president, senators, generals and admirals, met with
250,000 Philippines in the Grand Concourse,
where they watched the American flag come down and the
flag of the Philippine independence take its
place.
I was privileged to sit in an auditorium one
night and hear one of the passengers on that plane, a great
man of the Philippines, describe this scene,
General Carlos Romulo, whose father was killed by American
soldiers in the Philippine insurrection. As
a boy, the General was taught to be a guerrilla and to fight
Americans and hate them. But I saw him, with
tears in his eyes, tell us how he turned to his wife that day
in Manila and said, a hundred years from now
will our children's children learn in their schoolrooms that on
this day an atomic weapon was detonated for
the first time on a Pacific Island, or will they learn that on
another Pacific Island a great and powerful
nation, which had bled the flower of its youth into the sands of
the island's beaches reconquering them from
a savage enemy, had on this day turned to the people of
that island and for the first time in the
history of man's relationship to man had said, 'Here, we've taken
your country back for you. It's yours. As
we heard him, I think most of us realized once again the
magnitude of the challenge of our destiny,
that here indeed is "the last best hope of man on earth."
And now today we find ourselves involved in
another struggle this time called a cold war. This cold war
between great sovereign nations isn't really
a new struggle at all. It is the oldest struggle of human kind, as
old as man himself. This is a simple struggle
between those of us who believe that rnan has the dignity
and sacred right and the ability to choose
and shape his own destiny and those who do not so believe.
This irreconcilable conflict is between those
who believe in the sanctity of individual freedom and those
who believe in the supremacy of the state.
In a phase of this struggle not widely known,
some of us came toe to toe with this enemy this evil force in
our own community in Hollywood, and make no
mistake about it, this is an evil force. Don't be deceived
because you are not hearing the sound of gunfire,
because even so you are fighting for your lives. And
you're fighting against the best organized
and the most capable enemy of freedom and of right and
decency that has ever been abroad in the world.
Some years ago, back in the thirties, a man who was
apparently just a technician came to Hollywood
to take a job in our industry, an industry whose commerce
is in tinsel and colored lights and make-believe.
He went to work in the studios, and there were few to
know he came to our town on direct orders
from the Kremlin. When he quietly left our town a few years
later the cells had been formed and planted
in virtually all of our organizations, our guilds and unions. The
framework for the Communist front organizations
had been established.
It was some time later, under the guise of
a jurisdictional strike involving a dispute between two unions,
that we saw war come to Hollywood. Suddenly
there were 5,000 tin-hatted, club- carrying pickets outside
the studio gates. We saw some of our people
caught by these hired henchmen; we saw them open car
doors and put their arms across them and break
them until they hung straight down the side of the car,
and then these tin-hatted men would send our
people on into the studio. We saw our so- called glamour
girls, who certainly had to be conscious of
what a scar on the face or a broken nose could mean
careerwise going through those picket lines
day after day without complaint. Nor did they falter when they
found the bus which they used for transportation
to and from work in flames from a bomb that had been
thrown into it just before their arrival.
Two blocks from the studio everyone would get down on hands and
knees on the floor to avoid the bricks and
stones coming through the windows. And the 5,000 pickets out
there in their tin hats weren't even motion
picture workers. They were maritime workers from the
water-front-members of Mr. Harry Bridges'
union.
We won our fight in Hollywood cleared them
out after seven long months in which even homes were
broken, months in which many of us carried
arms that were granted us by the police, and in which
policemen lived in our homes, guarding our
children at night. And what of the quiet film technician who had
left our town before the fighting started?
Well, in 1951 he turned up on the Monterey Peninsula where he
was involved in a union price-fixing conspiracy.
Two years ago he appeared on the New York waterfront
where he was Harry Bridges' right hand man
in an attempt to establish a liaison between the New York
and West Coast waterfront workers. And a few
months ago he was mentioned in the speech of a U.S.
Congresswoman who was thanking him for his
help in framing labor legislation. He is a registered lobbyist
in Washington for Harry Bridges.
Now that the first flush of victory is over
we in Hollywood find ourselves blessed with a newly developed
social awareness. We have allowed ourselves
to become a sort of a village idiot on the fringe of the
industrial scene fair game for any demagogue
or bigot who wants to stand up in the pulpit or platform and
attack us. We are also fair game for those
people, well-meaning though they may be, who believe that the
answer to the world's ills is more government
and more restraint and more regimentation. Suddenly we
find that we are a group of second class citizens
subject to discriminatory taxation, government
interference and harassment.
This harassment reaches its peak, of course,
in censorship. Here in this great land of the free exchange
of ideas our section of the communications
industry is subjected to political censorship in more than 200
cities and 11 states and it's spreading every
day. But are we the only victims of these restraints and
restrictions on our personal freedom? Is censorship
really a restriction on us who already have a voluntary
censorship code of good taste, or is this
an invasion of your freedom? Isn't this the case of a few of your
neighbors taking it upon themselves the right
to tell you what you are capable of seeing and hearing on a
motion picture screen?
So we worry a little about the class of '57,
we who are older and have known another day. We worry that
perhaps someday you might not resist as strongly
as we would if someone decides to tell you what you
can read in a newspaper, or hear on the radio,
or hear from a speaker's platform, or what you can say or
what you can think. So there are terrns and
conditions to the will, and one of the terms is your own eternal
vigilance guarding against restrictions on
our American freedom.
You today are smarter than we were. You are
better educated and better informed than we were
twenty-five years ago. And that is part of
your heritage. You enjoy these added benefits because, more
than 100 years ago near this very spot, a
man plunged an ax into a tree and said, here we will build a
school for our children." And for over 100
years people have contributed to the endowment and support of
this college. Their contributions were of
the utmost in generosity because they could never know the
handclasp of gratitude in return for their
contributions. Their gifts were to generations yet unborn.
Many of us here share this heritage with you,
and some of us shared it under different circumstances. I
recall my own days on this campus in the depths
of the depression. Even with study and reading I don't
think you can quite understand what it was
like to live in an America where the Illinois National Guard, with
fixed bayonets, paraded down Michigan Avenue
in Chicago as a warning to the more than half million
unemployed men who slept every night in alleys
and doorways under newspapers. On this campus many
of us came who brought not one cent to help
this school and pay for our education. The college, of
course, had suffered and lost much of its
endowment in the stock crash, had seen its revenue not only
from endowment but from gifts curtailed because
of the great financial chaos. But we heard none of that.
We attended a college that made it possible
for us to attend regardless of our lack of means, that created
jobs for us, so that we could eat and sleep,
and that allowed us to defer our tuition and trusted that they
could get paid some day long after we had
gone. And the professors, God bless them, on this campus,
the most dedicated group of men and women
whom I have ever known, went long months without
drawing any pay. Sometimes the college, with
a donation of a little money or produce from a farm, would
buy groceries and dole them out to the teachers
to at least try and provide them with food. We know
something of your heritage, but even if we
had been able to pay as many of you have paid for your
education we, and you, must realize that the
total price paid by any student of this college is far less than it
costs this college to educate you. This is
true not only of Eureka, but of the hundreds of schools and
universities across the land.
Now today as you prepare to leave your Alma
Mater, you go into a world in which, due to our carelessness
and apathy, a great many of our freedoms have
been lost. It isn't that an outside enemy has taken them.
It's just that there is something inherent
in government which makes it, when it isn't controlled, continue to
grow. So today for every seven of us sitting
here in this lovely outdoor theater, there is one public servant,
and 31 cents of every dollar earned in America
goes in taxes. To support the multitudinous and gigantic
functions of government, taxation is levied
which tends to dry up the very sources of contributions and
donations to colleges like Eureka. So in this
time of prosperity we find these church schools, these small
independent colleges and even the larger universities,
hard put to maintain themselves and to continue
doing the job they have done so unselfishly
and well for all these years. Observe the contrast between
these small church colleges and our government,
because, as I have said before, these have always
given far more than was ever given to them
in return.
Class of 1957, it will be part of the terms
of the will for you to take stock in the days to come, because we
enjoy a form of government in which mistakes
can be rectified. The dictator can never admit he was
wrong, but we are blessed with a form of government
where we can call a halt, and say, "Back up. Let's
take another look. " Remember that every government
service, every offer of government financed
security, is paid for in the loss of personal
freedom. I am not castigating government and business for
those many areas of normal cooperation, for
those services that we know we must have and that we do
willingly support. It is very easy to give
up our personal freedom to drive 90 miles an hour down a city
street in return for the safety that we will
get for ourselves and our loved ones. Of course, that might not
be a good example it seems sometimes that
this is a thing we have paid for in advance and the
merchandise hasn't yet been delivered. But
in the days to come whenever a voice is raised telling you to
let the government do it, analyze very carefully
to see whether the suggested service is worth the personal
freedom which you must forego in return for
such service.
There are many well-meaning people today who
work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so
that no one shall exist below a certain level
or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this.
But look more closely and you may find that
all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling
above which no one shall be permitted to climb
and between the two are pressing us all into conformity,
into a mold of standardized mediocrity. The
tendency toward assembly-line education in some of our
larger institutions, where we are not teaching
but training to fulfill certain specific jobs in the economic life
of our nation, is a part of this same pattern.
We have a vast system of public education in
this country, a network of great state universities and
colleges and none of us would have it otherwise.
But there are those among us who urge expansion of
this system until all education is by way
of tax- supported institutions. Today we enjoy academic freedom
in America as it is enjoyed nowhere else in
the world. But this pattern was established by the independent
secular and church colleges of our land schools
like Eureka. Down through the years these colleges and
universities have maintained intellectual
freedom because they were beholden to no political group, for
when politics control the purse strings, they
also control the policy. No one advocates the elimination of
our tax-supported universities, but we should
never forget that their academic freedom is assured only so
long as we have the leavening influence of
hundreds of privately endowed colleges and universities
throughout the land.
So you should resolve, here and now, that you
will not only accept your heritage but abide by the terms
and conditions of the will. You should firmly
resolve that these schools will not just be a part of America's
past, but that they will continue to be a
part of America's great future. Democracy with the personal
freedoms that are ours we hold literally in
trust for that day when we shall have fulfilled our destiny and
brought mankind a great and long step from
the swamps. Can we deliver it to our children? Democracy
depends upon service voluntarily rendered,
money voluntarily contributed.
These institutions which have contributed so
much to us, from which we have received so much of our
heritage, were here for our benefit only because
our forefathers preferred voluntarily to support institutions
of their choice in addition to sharing taxation
for the support of governmental institutions. The will provides,
class of 1957, not only that you receive this
heritage and cherish it, but that you voluntarily tax your own
time and your own money and contribute to
these free institutions so that generations not yet born in this
country and in the rest of the world, may
benefit from this same heritage of freedom.
It will be very easy for you to say, "Well,
I will do something, some day. When I can afford it, I am going to."
But would you let an old "grad" tell you one
thing now? Giving is a habit. Get into the habit now, because
you will never be able to afford to give and
contribute, thus to repay the obligation you owe to those people
who made this college possible, if you wait
until you think you can afford it. Start now regardless of how
small, and in the days to come when you are
confronted with demands for many worthwhile causes and
charities I think you will find that you will
give dutifully to all the worthy ones. But here and there you will
pick one or two that will be favorites, and
you can do no better than to pick this, your Alma Mater, because
you will not only be repaying your own personal
obligations, you will be making your contribution to the very
process which has made and continues to keep
America great.
This democracy of ours which sometimes we've
treated so lightly, is more than ever a comfortable cloak,
so let us not tear it asunder, for no man
knows once it is destroyed where or when he will find its
protective warmth again.
Return to photos from the 1957 visit
Return to the Ronald Reagan Photo Essay Index