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FREEDOM HOUSE DIRECTORS In The Service of Freedom WILLIAM AGAR, Acting Pres. GEORGE FIELD, Vice-Pres. HARRY D. GIDEONSE, Chairman of Board HERBERT BAYARD SWOPE, Treasurer MRS. ANDREW JACKSON, Secretary Louis Adamic Mrs. Ward Cheney Rev. George B. Ford Arthur J. Goldsmith John Green Mrs. Harold K. Guinzburg Helen Hayes Samuel Shore George N. Shuster Mrs. Kenneth F. Simpson Spyros Skouras Rex Stout Dorothy Thompson Henry P. Van Dusen Robert J. Watt Walter White Wendell 1. Willkie Mrs. Elsie B. Wimpfheimer HERBERT AGAR, President on leave By W ALTER LIPPMANN Jail 2t 1 '.1 ~ ~ Published By FREEDOM HOUSE 5 WEST 54TH STREET ~393 NEW YORK 19. N. Y.
In The Service of Freedom IN MEMORY OF LIEUTENANT BLUM Freedom House presents the following speech, delivered by Walter Lippmann at its second,anniversary dinner. Its distribution to a wider audience is made possible by a gift in memory of Lieutenant Robert B. Blum, navigator in the United States Army Air Corps, who died of wounds received in North Africa. We do this with no thought that this tribute measures up to the fullness of the sacrifice he and so many others have made. Yet we believe Walter Lippmann's speech, by recalling how infinitely precious our freedom is, will help renew in all of us our devotion to the cause for which this soldier gave his life. We thank his parents for choosing us as a worthy vehicle for this memorial to their son. We know we may, all too easily, fall short of the goals for which we strive. But we cannot read the following words about Lieutenant Blum without realizing that we are dedicated now forever to the fight for justice and for freedom. "The causes for which Freedom House is working are those for which he gave his life and in which he would have taken an active part in the postwar world, had he been spared." By WALTER LIPPMANN M ANY years ago while I was still a student at college, I read a book about which I have forgotten almost everything, including the name of the author, except one incident. The book contained the recollections of an Englishman who visited France a few years after the fall of Napoleon. One day, as I recall it, he found himself talking to an old man, a peasant, who had been working on his farm, which was a day's journey from Paris, for more than fifty years. He had lived there under the Bourbon Kings, during the Revolution, during the Terror, and during the Napoleonic Empire and its downfall. The English traveller seems to have been a forerunner of Dr. Gallup, or perhaps I should say of those who now consult taxicab drivers about Anglo-American relations and the prospects of Mr. Willkie. So the Englishman tried to draw out the peasant, feeling, I suppose, that when he returned he would then be able to tell the people of England what the people of France were thinking. But what was his surprise when he found that his excellent friend had somehow contrived to live near Paris for the past thirty years and yet never to have heard anything about Napoleon Bonaparte. I remember asking one of myoid teachers about the story and whether such a strange thing could really have happened, and I remember his saying: "Yes, it could have happened... it happens in every age, and what is more it happens to most of the people in any age, and it will happen to you too in one degree or another, to live in an age when history is made and not to know what that history it: And then, he added, "and so my young friend, remember that peasant whenever you feel superior, and informed, and enlightened. You will know the names of the Napoleons of your time, but will you know any more than that? Will you know what they mean?"
This story made a lasting impression upon me. And so this evening, because your kindness has made me feel that I can impose upon you, I should like to tell you the final thing I have learned from the gigantic struggle of the wars and revolutions of the past thirty years. I should like at least to try to become aware not of its events, and not of the practical measures that we are taking and have still to take, but of its lesson, of the lesson that we must, if we can, transmit to those who will gather at Freedom House in the days to come. I should like them to know that we knew, even while the battle raged and the issue was as yet undecided, that the struggle for freedom in our age differed radically from the historic struggles of the past. We were born in an age when for more than a century the essential rights of man, the principle of the supremacy of law over arbitrary force, had been acknowledged and established in a very large portion of the world. We were not born under the yoke of tyrants. We came naturally and as a matter of course into the inheritance of freedom within which, as free men, we had the power and the right to shape our destiny. The great fact of our age has been that the freedom which had already been won has been so very nearly lost. That is the fact, I believe, upon which we must meditate, and about it we must search our consciences. It is from this fact that we must, I believe, begin when we attempt to conceive the course of freedom in the future. It is a poignant fact, and much the most significant fact with which we have to square ourselves, that we have seen great nations renounce freedom after they have won it. We have seen peoples in the profoundest doubt whether their historic freedom was in fact worth preserving, we have seen great nations apathetic, indifferent, unconcerned, as long as their own freedom was not directly and immediately assaulted. Yet we have always said that freedom was indispensable to life itself: give us liberty, we repeat, or give us death. But here we are, members of a generation which had that freedom which our ancestors won for us, and we find that millions of men thought they preferred other things to freedom and many more I millions were unable, unwilling, or unprepared to defend and preserve it. We must take this to heart, I submit, or we shall not have learned the hard lessons of our bitter experience. For it is a bitter experience. It is bitter not only because of the cruelty and agony and violence of the struggle but bitterest of all, I believe, because this monstrous calamity came upon us in an age when, as a result of the other war, the free peoples of the western world had in their hands the power to shape the future. Think where we stood on Armistice Day in 1918. The technology and the resources which are the basis of all civil and military power were in an overwhelming preponderance in the hands of men who were free--free to vote, free to speak, free to worship, free to think, free to form governments to defend, protect, and enhance the rights of free men. The Italians may not have been altogether happy, and their trains did not run on time, but they had all the rights of free men when they accepted and permitted themselves to be seduced by Mussolini and his blackshirts. The Germans were defeated. They were in distress. But they were the citizens of a republic which stood for all the essential rights of man when they threw themselves into the clutches of Hitler and his Nazis. The nations which appeased them, which tolerated and feared them, were not servile peoples who had not yet become free; they were the very peoples who had fought and won across the centuries the long struggle for human freedom. The tyrants of our age were abie to seize their power from the peoples themselves. Their tyrannies have been built upon the ruins of liberal democratic states, and they took their power from, and they were given their power by, nations which had already won the right to govern themselves. This is the fact for which the disciples of freedom have to make themselves responsible and accountable to the judgment of posterity. Let us never for a moment forget it. Let us remember it now when we have come to the climax of this great struggle, when with infinite pain and trouble throughout the world men have at last learned again the infinite value of liberty and have risen in their might to recover it and to restore it.
As we remember it, let us realize that the destruction of tyrants can of and in itself alone liberate men from oppression and from evil, but it does not make men truly free. We can and we shall by force of arms break open the prison gates and strike the shackles from men's hands. But men who have been freed, and that will include us all, are not yet free men. They are only men who have been freed, men with the chance to be free, but only the chance. The day will come, the light of that day is already visible in the morning sky, when the foul tyrannies with which we are at war will go down to death and destruction. The day will come when the armies of liberation march in victory, and the darkened cities are lighted up again, and the bells ring out the good news. Let us not forget the days that will follow that day when the tyrants are dead and the emancipated peoples have the right but also the awful responsibility of governing themselves. Those are the days for which we must prepare ourselves now. We must not delude ourselves into thinking that we shall have prepared ourselves for them if all we do is to formulate plans of peace, plans of demobilization, plans of reconstruction. We must, of course, make these plans and work to perfect them, and never become weary and discouraged at the practical difficulties we shall encounter. But all our plans, our mechanisms, our new institutions, our agreements, and our measures will be dust and ashes in the end if we fail to recognize the inner problem of freedom. That problem is how adult men and women can acquire within their own minds and characters, the capacity to reason and the will to restrain and govern themselves. For what in the last analysis is the cause why peoples, nominally free to govern themselves, have allowed themselves to be governed by creatures like Mussolini and Hitler? In the last analysis the cause is that they had not learned to govern themselves, did not know how to govern themselves, and had not the will to govern themselves. It is upon the weakness of the free peoples that the modern tyrants have built their power. The tyrants have exploited, capitalized, and preyed upon the confusion, the irresolution, the fecklessness, the self-centered selfishness of men who on the law books possessed all the rights of free and self-governing peoples. The downfall of the tyrants will not, therefore, make men capable of freedom. That remains to be achieved in the days to come. It will be achieved only if the terror and suffering of this tremendous ordeal have taught enough men that the future of fredom will not be assured on the battlefields nor in the council chambers. Only the opportunity of freedom can be won there. What men make of that opportunity will be determined in the quiet places where men think and set the modes by which men think, in the schools, in the places of meditation and of worship, in the homes where children receive the forms of their conduct and their impulses, in the gatherings where men meet and discuss their affairs. That is where it will be determined whether the liberties we are defending, and that we shall recover and restore, are to become the habit of men's lives, or are to be merely an absence of restraint, an invitation to appetitie, a license to be vain and greedy and foolish until new tyrants rise to rule peoples who have not learned how to rule themselves. I do not know whether you agree with me. I do not know how many of you will think that the issue I have been defining is too remote, too unreal, too abstract, for the terrible urgency of the times in which we live. But I have felt that I could respond sincerely to your kindness only by speaking the ultimate truth as I see it, only by testifying to that which the tremendous experience of the wars and revolutions of our time have taught me. The experience has taught me that as freedom is infinitely precious it is infinitely difficult. It has taught me never to despair at the difficulty and never to deny how immense is the difficulty. The cause of freedom, which is the short name for the whole struggle of man out of barbarism, is not cheap and it is not easy. That struggle began long ago. It will go on long after we here are dead and have been forgotten. We can only serve it humbly, in the knowledge that our lives have meaning only in so far as we have served it at all.