The University of Utah Seventy-sixth Annual Commencement, 1945, Address by Hon. Elbert D. Thomas

The University of Utah Seventy-sixth Annual Commencement, 1945. "…But Never Unite For Peace?" Commencement Address by Hon. Elbert D. Thomas, United States Senator from Utah at the University of Utah. June 5, 1945.

". . . But NetJe/1, 'llHite 11/-M Peace?" • COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS BY HON. ELBERT D. THOMAS United States Senator from Utah at the University of Utah June 5, 1945 " • • .But N~ 'Uldte d),04 pe,ac,e?" • HrsTORY is being repeated in more ways than one this morning. Commencements have gone on for a number of years. The repetition of history that is on my mind this minute is the fact that in 1906 when I received my degree a Senator gave the commencement address. I do not want to talk to you as a Senator. I do not even want to give advice, not because I am a cynic and believe that graduates will not take advice, but because I merely want to talk about attitudes and trends: attitudes and trends in relation to you and the world. Both are important entities. I must, though, get in a little advice or this will not be a commencement address. I have no advice for the people of Utah. I like the people of Utah. They have been. good to me. I have no advice for the University. I love this institution as I love no other. It is my University in every sense of the word. And one of the things which I take greatest pride in is that I organized the Associated Students of the University of Utah. Some people did not like what I had done in that instance and those in authority did not accept all that was recommended. They did not approve of the separation of the preparatory students from the college students, nor did they like the idea of a required student body fee. But they came around to see the light in time, so that you now have a splendid student body organization. Now for the advice-Every student who ever took an American Government class under me was told to choose some American statesman and read everything he could find about that -3- statesman; learn his life as he learns nothing else .. It does not necessarily matter who the man 1s, but get deeply interested in him. If you will do that yoq_. will never want for something to do in any of your leisure hours and you will find that the twentieth or thirtieth book you read about your hero is more interesting than the first one you read. In this way you will find that you are building up your own soul. You do not have to confine your hero to America or to a statesman, but find someone who has lived a worthwhile life and learn all of the mistakes he has made. That will help you to avoid mistakes. Learn all of the good he has done, the discouragements he has overcome, and you will learn how to overcome discouragement and do some good. I chose Thomas Jefferson for my own hero and the study of Jefferson has been fruitful to me beyond words. I am now Chairman of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Commission and a Director of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association. The Commission has erected a three million dollar memorial to Jefferson and the Association has purchas~d Monticello and given it to the American people as a National Monument. I have at times become so enthusiastic over the Jefferson Memorial that in my enthusiasm I think of it as something I have done. Of course I know I have contributed but little, but that contribution has become so much a . part of my life that I glory in the whole. I remember when the commission for the memorial in Washington was first established that at the very first meeting · of the Commission I told those present that as far as I "'."as concerned I was going to work with such enthusiasm that I was going to take credit for everything the Commission did. I was glad I said that because within a week the · President of the United States called me with the then Chairman of the Commission to give us his ideas. I needn't say more. But just between you and me the President did not have his way and the reason he did not have his way was -4- that he had not said the Memorial was going to be his and I had. Under those circumstances," you would not have budged for the President of the United States, would you? The point I am trying to make is this. ,, It took time to bring about the organization of the Associated Students and it took time to. bring about the Jefferson Memorial, and the fine people who objected to each in the beginning all gave way in the end. If you make something your own, and keep at it long enough, you do win. That brings me to another point. You only go forward with institutions. You cannot go forward alone. Identify yourselves, therefore, with causes that result in institutions, then when you are dead and gone you still live. You cannot take George Washington and Thomas Jefferson out of the Government of the United States. Their spirits are there. Both of them are dead, but the Government of the United States is not dead and in that they live. Let us take a simpler case. When I used to sit on the Deans Council, some bright instructor in the Freshmen English Class, and there were bright instructors in those days, even in English classes, asked the students to write a paragraph on why they came to the University. One girl, and I wish I had known her, merely wrote that she came to the University to get a decent husband (Period) and handed in her paper (Exclamation Point). That was so out of the ordinary that one important dean thought it was disgusting and that such a person should be invited to leave the campus. I said it was great, that there was a girl who had a plan for life and she was just working her plan. She understood a plan about life. Probably without knowing it, she had accepted the Aristqtelian theory that man is a social animal. That girl gave evidence of having a philosophy of life. I wish someone had impressed upon me earlier in life, than when I got the idea, that life can only be lived properly when one has a philosophy of life. It was Mencius who brought me to _,..5~ my senses in regard to this fundamental idea. Mencius' dissertation about the earth worm could be summed up in these words. Both man and an earthworm are parts of life, but man should not live like an earthworm. He should have purpose, purpose in what he does and should act in accordance with that purpose. Man should have reverence for the proper relationships between himself and other men. Man should live in accordance with that understanding of those relationships. I should like to go even further than Mencius and say that man should have not only a philosophy of life, but he should have a religion. By religion, I mean it in its simplest form. The word religion, as you know, comes from the La tin word, religic, which means a tie, or a bond. Religion is merely that bond which connects you with that which has gone before and that which is to come. Thus, man may become part of the eternal scheme in his thinking as well as the social scheme that Mencius stressed. Would you live like an earthworm? One very great philosopher said on this campus when President Thomas was inaugurated that the difference between a man and an earthworm was that when an earthworm digs in the ground he keeps on doing it, but when a man digs in the ground he finds an earthworm and that gives him an idea and he goes fishing. Do you see what I mean? Man does something about the ideas he gets. Let me suggest that you be very selfish. Not that you break the Tenth Commandment, but that you realize within the bounds of the Aristotelian concept that man is a social animal and that selfishness must of necessity also be social. We would not have electric lights today if Edison had said to us-This is the way to make an electric light. Now you go ahead and make it. -He was selfish. He did it himself. You and I have both had more good from electric lights than Edison got out of them. I am sure that I got more pleasure out of reading Jefferson's letters than he got out of writing them. I have -6- had inspiration, understanding, history, appreciation of my country, and I have learned the values of democracy. I know from a study of Jefferson, not only how democracy works but how it should work.Jefferson did not know that he was giving me any of those ideas when he wrote his letters. The good man does never stops. Jefferson never dreamed that Nazism, Fascism, and world conquest through horror would overrun the earth and that his defense of liberty, law and justice would overcome them. But the leaders of the earth today know the strength of his great fundamentals and their power to withstand wickedness. There is not one of you graduates who had anything to do with the moving of the University up here on the hill, or the planting of the first tree on the campus, or the building of the first athletic field, or in planning the first prom. You do not know the headaches other people had in going through those experiences, but you got more out of them than the very people who started them going. Is it right to be selfish and use benefits that someone else has provided? You cannot dodge those benefits. vVho owns this University anyway? It is mine. It is yours. Both of us failed to attain the utmost potentiality the University offered. But that was not the University's fault. Both of us failed in getting in the fullness all that we might have. But the University did its part. We failed to do ours. When you sloughed your last class did you go to the trouble to figure out in dollars and cents who had been cheated. I never did. The class did not seem to cost anything until one day I figured -out that the State of Utah paid me quite a sum of money for delivering the lecture I did. Perhaps no one is cheated when he sloughs a class. But if a professor has sense enough to say-I am delivering this lecture for the good it does me and works so hard in preparation for that lecture with the idea that only he himself will get the profit from it, somebody is benefited, and, as far as the State is concerned, it is not cheated. That is my reason for -7- selfishness. Whatever you do, do for your own upbuilding and others will be benefited. No class in the history of commencements has looked upon a world so wrought in its own destruction as the world you face today. No class has started to tread the path of life with a choice between good and evil so easy to discern. In all of the world's history, civilization has never before presented so many excellent possibilities nor have the destroyers of civilization ever perpetrated so many ills. If, as some of the philosophers held, good and evil exist eternally, never have they dwelt side by side in such close proximity as they dwell today. Man can transport himself quicker, can make for himself greater happiness, can live life more abundantly than it has ever been lived before. He can commit more evil, bring about more destruction, destroy more happiness than he has been able to do before. In many ways, the world I have described here is like the world implied in Cicero's great orations against Cataline. My teacher of Cicero, the sainted Dean Cummings, always left us at the end of each class with the feeling that here was Cataline, a boy like ourselves, a choice one among the youths of Rome, with all of the opportunities that anyone had had opened to him, and he deliberately chose evil. Perhaps the world is not so different after all. At any rate, the good and the evil are side by side. You must make the choice. I once talked to an enthusiastic Nazi who admitted that probably Hitler could not succeed ultimately in his objectives by destroying and killing, but that he could have three or four years of real pleasure out of the success of his endeavor, and that if, after three or four years of destructive processes, he should ultimately come out the conqueror, then happiness for him and his associates would be assured; but if he failed and was crushed, as he admitted he probably would be, he still would have had the satisfaction of having ruled a while. -8- l 1 The Japanese, when they threw the best their nation had to offer into destruction by their attack on Pearl Harbor, knew that it was a gamble for rule or ruin. They accepted the odds; the gambler's fling, with civilization as the stake. What cared they for civilization if they could but rule. There is hardly a boy or girl who has been exposed to the American public school system who cannot appreciate the gambler's chance these destroying leaders took. It was Caesar who said, "I would rather be first in a little Iberian village than second in Rome." He achieved neither. The conflict in the world today is the eternal conflict. Shall I be free in a world of free men, or shall I be a passive follower of a single will? The weaknesses of democracy that Mussolini and Hitler used to point out are democracy's greatest strength. They failed to see the possibilities of any unity among free men. Their great mistake was merely that of assuming that unity can come only by"the de~truction of the individual in his service to a single will. "You will unite because you must," said Hitler. "We will unite because it is right to do so," say the American people. Under the American system, every American soldier who takes part in a battle understands the general objectives. He is trusted to do his part. The old German system required that the individual soldier do what he was told without understanding the purpose of his doing. What football coach would try a play that every man on the team did not understand. Football is democracy in action. A player can run the wrong way with the ball and he sometimes does, but, generally, intelligent recognition of the facts of the game brings our team through. Thus, free men can work in unison. It is inspiring to hear our great generals talk about our team. It is fine to see them recognize each soldier as a member of that team. Never has an army in the history of the world been such an understanding one as has our army become this time. Democracy is strength if it is intelligently directed. Make each individual in that democ-~9- ~ and thousands more, who have di in concentration camps rather than surr der an ideal. Yes, giving their lives that ri t, decent living, honesty, and morality ma ave a meaning in this world. The acts o re so great and the facts of history so stupendous that we who stand here uttering words must seem insignificant indeed. "I saw the powers of darkness put to flight! I saw the morning break!" The world's great task is the same as it was when the Constitution of the United States was written and ratified. How to bring otie out of many- E Pluribus Unum - is the task that faces us today as it faced our fathers. It must be done as they did it. It is because of my firm belief in the great American experiment that I always advocate that world unity can only come through American leadership and under the auspices of the American theory. It is in America that the federal technique of government has been worked out. It is in America that the theory of dual and plural citizenship has been made practical. It is in America that we can unite for some purposes and be divided for others. It is in America that liberty is maintained by promoting voluntary cooperation instead of forced unity. It is in America that national and state sovereignty are permitted to exist side by side, not without conflict, to be sure but with those conflicts adjusted by peaceful means. It is in America that the individual has the right to have and to hold, to go and to come, to live life in a greater sense than it ha$ ever been lived before, with man "under his own vine and fig tree" as some prophet of old foretold man should live. After one hundred and fifty years of experience, if the world would but catch America's spirit, no one rteed feel that the efforts being made by our leaders today are in va_in. Slowly but surely man is being made consc10us of the fact that, no matter what nation he belongs to, that nation in turn is but one of a community of nations. That fact realized that fact maintained, surely then the standa/d for -12- nations can be as readily set ½Pas the standai:ds for individuals are set up within the community or the nation. Man lives in law and is not free from the restraints of his neighbors. A nation too lives in law and should not be free from restraints of its neighbors. If we fail to bring about a better world through the organization of the nations we will fail because we did not realize the fact that the earth is a unit and the nations of the earth are but individual entities within that unit and must adhere to-the prevailing will of the community of na~ions. I~ we but do this, we shall have a sanct10n for international law as binding and as great as the fundamental sanction which we have in our own Constitution. · When we say-we the pe?ple in order ~o do certain things do those . thi?gs - there. is no questioning in our Constitution of the nght of the people to say-we the people. What state questions that right today among our fortyeight? Can we not expand the idea as America has expanded from thirteen small states to forty-eight mighty ones and say-:"We the peop!e of the world in order to form, m order to do, m order to act establish the following-" Practicaiiy every pitfall that is pointed out by those without faith in the earth today was pointed out by those without faith in our American Constitution one hundred and fifty . years ago. If those theories which were dreamed of by the fathers, if that Constitution which we so glibly call inspired contain the elements of truth, why should anyone critic~ze ~e ":hen I say that the American Rev~lut10~ is still _on, that it has not accomplished its ultimate obJective and that its full meaning in the earth will not be understood until the world unity is made manifest, that same type of unity which we have made manifest in our one hundred and fifty years of history. A unity which ~as destroyed war among us can by expans10n destroy war in the earth. Thus I have talked of you and the world. I might have talked of you and many worlds, but -13- I have full faith that the great sacrifices of so many has brought home to all the need for thoughtful approach to bring about that condition among men that destruction by war shall cease. It was a heroine in one of the early Greek dramas, I believe it was one of Sophocles', that wailed-"Oh, Why! Oh, Why! do men unite so readily for war, but never unite for peace?" Is the task hopeless? Are nations so foolish that they will not give a little of that which they claim for themselves in order to gain much for all? There were those among our fathers who talked against our Constitution with that spirit, but they did not prevail. There are those in the world today who still have little faith. But for you, may I suggest this simple approach. Had you lived in Washington's time would you have been happy to have been one of those without faith in Washington's cause? Had you lived in Lincoln's time would you now be proud that you were one of those who were against -what Lincoln was trying to do? You will have to make decisions. Make them so that your grandchildren will point with pride and be happy to be identified as sons and daughters of some great cause which is yours. Do not think it was easier for our fathers to decide than it is for you. It was not. And never forget that "Mankind needs men, men that can stand alone Their faith unsullied in a sordid world. The age is growing, right comes to its own. Prometheus loosed no more from gods is hurled. Mankind needs men, such as in days of old Deemed that bright treasure Honor more than gold. Should courtesy and courage be upheld Less nobly now than in the days of old?" -14- If this pamphlet has interested you, won't you please pass it on to a friend ? 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