Utah Historical Quarterly Volume XXI

The American Tradition of Democracy

THE AMERICAN TRADITION OF DEMOCRACY1 BY JOHN D. HICKS* I T IS INDEED an honor for me to be invited to address this first annual meeting of the Utah State Historical Society. I know a little of your state, for as a resident of California I have several times driven through it, and many more times I have looked down upon its impressive mountains, plains, and waters from an airplane. As a student of the West in American History, I also know some­thing of its origins, and of its almost miraculous development. Most important of all, I suspect, I know it from the consistently capable young men and women who have come to the University of California from Utah to continue their graduate studies in history. I am not sure that I have taught them anything, but they have certainly taught me a great deal. Today, with Professor Creer as my guide, I have seen the sights of your capital city, and have been impressed anew with the fact that yours is not a static, but a dynamic, society, full of vitality, and growing in a thousand fruitful ways. One sees on every hand the evidence that your progress is not confined to materialistic things alone, but reaches over eagerly into the realms of the mind and of the soul. I want to talk to you a little while tonight about the American tradition of democracy. This is a trite phrase and a trite subject, but quite possibly I could cite no better reason for giving it care­ful scrutiny. We have a habit of using words the meanings of which we do not take the pains to clarify. We also use combina­tions of words, particularly such resonant polysyllables as these, to cloak some emotional sentiment that we may feel deeply, but fail utterly to define, even to ourselves. For most of us, I suspect, my subject, "The American Tradition of Democracy," is a mere *John D. Hicks is professor of'history, University of California, Berkeley, and formerly dean of die graduate school of that institution. JAn address delivered at the first annual meeting of the Utah State His­torical Society, Salt Lake City, October 17, 1952. A few paragraphs in this address are taken from an article by Professor Hicks, "Faith of our Fathers," California Monthly, September, 1950, and are reprinted by permission. 26 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY shibboleth-an expression more or less devoid of meaning for which we are willing to fight and argue very hard. For a shibboleth can be very potent, and even the way in which we pronounce the sacred words-a wrong tone of voice or a revealing curl of the lip-may become almost a matter of life and death, as indeed it was in the days when Jephthah, the Gileadite, was judge over Israel. Now Jephthah, as every citizen of Utah must know, had gathered all the men of Gilead to fight against their insolent kinsmen, the men of Ephraim. And the Gileadites, as was proper, prevailed mightily against the Ephrai-mites, so much so that when the battle was done the Gileadites beat the retreating Ephraimites to the River Jordan, across which the latter sought to flee. When some of the Ephraimites, pretend­ing that they were Gileadites, tried to cross the stream in peace, the Gileadites were too shrewd for them. To each suspect they said, "Say now Shiboleth." But the "sh" sound was too much for the poor Ephraimite, who said instead, "Siboleth," for, as the Bible tells us, Judges 12:6, "he could not frame to pronounce it right." And so the Gileadites "took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan; and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand." So even today when a shibboleth is involved we must watch our accents, or perchance we may join the "forty and two thousand." Let me hasten to assure you, I am not here to scoff or sneer at the fighting words I have taken for my text. I bdieve in the American tradition of democracy. It represents the finest in thought and deed that our American ancestors have handed down to us, and that we in turn should hand down with much accrued interest to our posterity. All I am asking is that we give real meaning to these words, that when we say them we have in mind a clear picture out of our experience as a nation, rather than a mere thrill of emotion such as we feel when we see the flag raised, or hear the Star Spangled Banner played. The phrase should not be a mere shibboleth; if properly interpreted it says a great deal. To begin with, let us see what our dictionary will do for us. The word "American" has, unfortunately, a double meaning, according to my dictionary, "pertaining to. or situated in, America, THE AMERICAN TRADITION OF DEMOCRACY 27 or, specifically, the United States." Well, of course we mean "pertaining to the United States." We apologize to other Americans, and we mean to pretend no superiority. Our fore­fathers, in their wisdom, called our country the United States of America. When we seek for an adjective we can no more say "United-States-an," or "United-States-ite," than the Ephraim­ites could say shibboleth; so we say American. That's all there is to it, and no offense intended. North American is no better, for it confuses us with Canadians, Mexicans, and possibly Central Americans. Unless we are to involve ourselves in awkward circumlocutions, we simply have to say American. Normally the context can be trusted to set the record right. As for "Tradition," we can do a little better there, for my dictionary defines the word as the "handing down of information, opinions, doctrines, practices, etc., through successive generations." That is clear enough, although some who use the term seem not to realize that a tradition is a living, moving, growing thing, not some­thing absolute, unalterable, and forever fixed. The very essence of the idea of tradition is change. Originally, tradition was trans­mitted orally, and grew mightily as the exploits of the primitive peoples to whom it belonged grew also, and were recited from father to son. We smile at our entering freshmen, and sometimes also at our graduating seniors, for their oft-repeated statement, "We are going to start a new tradition." But they are more than half right. The world, as Thomas Jefferson took pains to emphasize, belongs to the living generation, not to the dead, and each new generation leaves its mark on the American tradition. Let me repeat. Tradition is not something that ended with Benjamin Franklin, or George Washington, or James Monroe, or Abraham Lincoln, or even, let us say, with Herbert Hoover. Tradi­tion keeps right on picking itself up. We are grinding it out right now. It is when I come to the word "Democracy" that my troubles really begin. My desk dictionary, excellent as an aid in spelling, and once in a while capable of a meaty definition, lets me down with "government by the people; as, the United States is a democracy." I shop around among dictionaries, and dig up Lincoln's phrase, "government of the people, by the people, for 28 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY the people." I glance on down the column to see what is a Demo­crat, and find that I may choose between "A member of the Democratic party in the United States," and "A high, light wagon with several seats and without a top." If we forsake our diction­aries, and listen to the Communists, the only real democracy, they tell us, exists in Russia, where a handful of party members tell all other Russians what they must do, or else. This does not seem to help us much, nor do we find any light in the brain child of a recent cartoonist who draws a stern-faced Uncle Sam pointing to a map of the United States, and saying, "This is a Republic, not a Democracy." Back to the dictionary we go again for the word "Republic," only to come up with this gem, that a republic is "a state or country in which the supreme power is held by the people." Now, as a matter of fact, we are not interested, any more than the compiler of the dictionary seems to have been, in finespun distinctions. We have little need to debate the differences between pure democracies, and others not so pure, or maybe only repre­sentative. We may as well go back to the beginning. What do we mean by democracy if not government by the people, as in the United States? The only trouble with that definition is that it requires a pretty fair knowledge of the history of our country, something that altogether too few Americans seem to possess. But there is no help for it; to find a definition of American democracy that will really define, we must search the national record. This, to me, has never seemed such a bad idea, anyway. We could learn a lot that way. It was E. L. Godkin, I think, who said once: "He who cannot see very far backward cannot be trusted to see very far forward." The first thing we learn from the record is that American democracy did not start from scratch. The English colonists who crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth century may have come almost empty-handed, but they did not come empty-headed. They brought with them the political ideas then current among English­men. The little band of Pilgrims who founded Plymouth drew up the Mayflower Compact, a very creditable instrument of self-government, before they had so much as landed. They already knew something of democracy when they come to America; so THE AMERICAN TRADITION OF DEMOCRACY 29 also did the founders of Jamestown, mere money-grabbers though they were. These pioneers knew their rights as Englishmen, and they insisted on having them. So with other newcomers to the New World. They began in America where they left off in Europe. And most of them, as Englishmen, were already far advanced along the pathway of democracy. Here in America special conditions bent and moulded the course that our particular brand of democracy was to take. Early New Englanders, accustomed as town dwellers to managing their own affairs, contributed a strong emphasis on local self-government. They accepted readily the principle of majority rule, and drove troublesome minorities into exile to the West. Most of them were Calvinists who believed firmly in contracts. They had them with God and they had them with the government -written contracts, when it came to politics or constitutions, that defined exactly what each party to the agreement was expected to do. And the government, once constituted, was expected to do things. No worry here about a strong government. It was sup­posed to be strong. Nor was theirs a classless society. They had no objection to aristocrats, and expected a good deal of them. They denounced warmly such misconduct as speaking evil of ministers or magistrates. But always one thing was clear; ultimate authority rested with the people. Down in Virginia and thereabouts democracy was built along somewhat different lines. Here the main emphasis, always excepting the institution of slavery, was upon the freedom of the individual. "The less government the better," words incorrectly attributed to Jefferson but certainly well attuned to his views, gave classic expression to this idea. The common people of the South, as long as they weren't bothered too much by the govern­ment, were more content than the New Englanders could possibly have been to leave governmental functions to their more inter­ested and more aristocratic betters. Among the governing planters, however, there was a very lively spirit of democracy. One man was as good as another, for as the saying had it, "everybody who was anybody was somebody in Virginia." The Middle Colonies also made important contributions to the growing pattern of American democracy. They had people 30 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY of many bloods-Hudson Valley Dutch, Pennsylvania Germans, and Scotch-Irish as wdl as English; also of many religions- Quakers, Dutch Reformed, Lutherans, Mennonites, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians; migrants, too, from other American sections, espedally New Englanders in search of better soils and climate. Out of these differences in blood and tradition came tolerance and the necessity of compromise^-'no one group could have everything its own way; also an indpient nationalism, for on one thing only could all agree, they were all Americans. Compounded of all these varied ingredients, and many others besides, the pattern of early American democracy began to emerge. It was something to conjure with at the time of the American Revolution, and no more 'winged words were ever spoken on the subject than those embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Actually the American Revolution was fought primarily to conserve these rights, rights long asserted and long respected on both sides of the Atlantic. The mistake of the British government was to assume that a people which had long governed itself could be governed in any other way. Mellin Chamberlain, a wdl-known nineteenth century Ameri­can historian, once shed fight on this subject in an historical address. Nearly seventy years after the Battle of Lexington, he claimed to have interviewed one of its partidpants, Levi Pres­ton, a minute man of Danvers, trying to find out what were the real reasons why the Americans fought. "Oppressions," said the veteran, in answer to a question on that subject. "What were they? I didn't feel any." "Stamp Act? I never saw one of the stamps." "Tea tax? I never drank a drop of the stuff. The boys threw it all overboard." THE AMERICAN TRADITION OF DEMOCRACY 31 "Then what did you mean by going into that fight?" "Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn't mean we should." But the American definition of democracy was not frozen with the Revolution. It continued to grow. Modifications had already come because of the existence of a colonial frontier, and still further modifications came from the same type of "cutting edge" on the fringe of settlement, wherever it might be. Through­out the first two and a half centuries of American history, society perpetually went primitive again somewhere to the West, and the American tradition of democracy, transplanted to new soil, grew rank and strong. Out in the West, whether the frontier was of the Appalachians, or of the Rockies, or in the great Mississippi Valley that lay between the mountain ranges, or beyond them both, conditions that approached genuine equality always existed for a time. Here democracy of a down-to-earth, man-to-man quality dare raise its head. From such a frontier brand of equalitarian, individualistic, conquering pioneers came the early settlers of Utah, men and women of heroic determination who, with infinite patience and resourcefulness, sought and found a promised land. It is the fashion now to scoff at Frederick Jackson Turner and his emphasis upon the significance of the frontier in American his­tory. That should not surprise us. Turner in his day was a young scoffer, too; youth must almost of necessity be against what age is for. What worried Turner was that the older scholars of his time, mostly easterners, would not concede that anything important had ever happened, or could ever happen, west of the Hudson. So Turner wrote a strong brief for the West. Now, other bright young men, of an age to be Turner's grandchildren, are fanatically eager to prove that Turner was wrong. The East and the cities, they argue, had far more to do with the making of American democracy than the rural and primitive West. Well, these bright young men are merely repeating the Turner performance, although, possibly, without showing quite the striking originality that Turner showed. For it is a fact that many of us, including quite possibly Turner himself before his day was done, have been 32 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY willing for a long time to concede that American democracy was not wholly a product of the forest. Perhaps in another generation the pendulum will stop swinging on this issue, and we can at least agree, without heat, that millions of Americans did go west, that the conditions of fife they endured in their new homes did alter their behavior, that the frontier, after all, did make a differ­ence. But in citing the frontier influence we have by no means fin­ished with our search for the various ingredients of American democracy. We must not neglect the immigrant contribution. It is •worthwhile, occasionally, for us to remind oursdves that we are all, save only a few of Indian blood, the descendants of immigrants, of men and women 'who for the most part deliberately chose to transplant themsdves to a new environment in search of a richer and better fife. But when we speak of immigrants we mean usually the non-English stocks: in colonial times the Scotch-Irish and the Pennsylvania Germans; in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the Celtic Irish and still more Germans; later on, Scandinavians, Italians, Russians, Poles and other Slavs, Magyars, Jews, and Greeks. Nor should we forget the unwilling immigrants from Africa, the Negro slaves. All these people brought Old World cultures with them that wrought many subde changes in our democracy-an added note of contentiousness, perhaps, from the Scandinavians, a sense of orderliness and good-housekeeping from the Germans, an assurance that England must always be wrong from the Irish, a dash of cheerful skeptitism from the southern Europeans, a brooding fear from the Slavs, a melancholy memory of bondage from the Negroes. The Old Country ideas and ideals did not so much five on in America; Louis Adamic in his Nation of Nations tends to overemphasize this point. Rather, the earlier American heritage was modified; it was the old American ideals, the old American institutions that lived on, but they were never quite the same again. The coming of the immigrants suggests another factor that helped to shape our democracy-the Industrial Revolution. Many of these newcomers came to work in our factories, to build our cities and our railroads, to help transform our nation from a rural to an urban republic. The presence of a large dty population, THE AMERICAN TRADITION OF DEMOCRACY 33 composed mainly of people dependent always on the wages they earned for their daily bread and never very far removed from want, made a notable change in our concept of democracy. As early as the age of Jackson the city workers were undoubtedly playing a tremendous role in the fashioning of our democratic tradition. Later on city politicians devised political machines that made politics pay. City bosses learned to exchange a crude sort of social security for votes. Neither Franklin D. Roosevelt nor his brash young braintrusters should be credited with instructing social security into the United States. Hard-boiled city political organizations had something of the kind all worked out years before anyone had ever heard of the New Deal. If you were out of a job, disabled by sickness or old age, or in any kind of trouble, you could see your local party leader, and he would help you out. In return, all you had to do was to vote the way your block leader told you to vote. As a famous Middle Western columnist used to say, "What more could be fairer?" But there was a fairer way; the American tradition of democracy came to recognize that government itself, not the exploiters of government, owed this kind of service to society. Call it paternalism, if you like, but it is with us to stay. One other development we cannot ignore. The United States was once somewhat isolated from the rest of the world-never so much as some people tried to make out, but at least relatively it stood apart and alone. Over a hundred years ago Ralph Waldo Emerson called attention to this fact. "Our day of de­pendence," he said, "our long apprentice-ship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. Let us have done with Europe and dead cultures, let us explore the possibilities of our own new world." During the century and more since Emerson's address we have rounded a circle. Today we must recognize the interdepend­ence of all nations. Two world wars in which the United States has been obliged to intervene have taught us at last that American democracy cannot "have done with Europe," and, for that matter, that European cultures are far from dead. With means of com­munication what they are today, we must live in close proximity with all the nations of the world. Their ideas infiltrate America, and our ideas are everywhere insistently proclaimed. We have an interest in preserving democracy wherever it exists; if it dies 34 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY in other lands, it may also die in ours. So American democracy, whether we like it or not, now carries the brand of internationalism. After even this hasty glance at the record, it takes a good deal of courage to try to produce a simple definition of American democracy. The dements that have gone into its making are too many and varied. It is complicated by historical contradictions, by sectional differences, and by many Old World nuances, the contributions of our immigrants. It was not made according to pattern or formula, but is the result, rather, of a long evolutionary process, a process which still goes on. American democracy is an ever-changing organism, a living tree •whose roots, leaves, and branches are all growing at the same time. And yet we ought to be able to concentrate on a few enduring principles that, in the light of our historical experience, we can agree upon as fundamental to our concept of democracy. I have singled out four for spedal attention; no doubt there are others. But first of all, it seems to me that Americans have come to believe, with great intensity, in majority rule. It cost us a Civil War to establish this principle along national lines, but nowadays there are not many who would be so bold as to question it. Secondly, we adhere firmly to the concept of individual freedom, the inalien­able rights of the Dedaration of Independence and the first amendments of the Federal Constitution. There are certain things that government may not do to men because men are men and deserve to be respected as such. Third, we give a good deal more than lip service to the idea of equality of opportunity. We have always been quick to admit that the equality which is our birthright might not long persist-some get on in the world, and others do not. But we are devoted to the principle of the even chance. The cards must not be stacked. And finally, we bdieve in the right of democracy to survive and to grow. This does not mean that we should spend our fives and our fortunes in an effort to take new territory for democracy; but it does mean that we must be on guard to prevent the contraction of democracy, and to keep the evolutionary process alive and in full vigor. Eventually, the fittest should survive. We have something, we believe, that the world will want. I, for one, believe that these four fundamental principles of THE AMERICAN TRADITION OF DEMOCRACY 35 democracy are in no danger of extinction, however much they may be discounted in certain sophisticated circles. Sometimes I think we pride ourselves too much on our critical faculties, and con­centrate too intently on what is wrong with the world, with our nation, with the society in which we live. We appear to have a perfect passion for self-abasement. If our children misbehave, we the parents must be at fault. If there is crime and evil any­where, then somehow the good people of the world are really responsible. Above all, if the Russian leaders, in blind mis­anthropy, deliberately set out to destroy the world's hope for peace, then for a certainty the American State Department must be to blame. Personally I deplore this nonsense. Some years ago Norman Thomas, of all persons, published an article in the Reader's Digest, of all places, on "What's right with America." It was a good article, and deserves to be republished and reread. We are rightfully troubled about the application of the four principles I have stated to our extremely complicated society, but we are worried far more than the facts justify by the charges that those who hate our way of life continually level against it. To lose our faith is not the way to deal with such defects as exist; rather, we should stand fast in our faith, and work without ceasing to reconcile our performances with our ideals. That principle of majority rule, for example, is not the easiest thing in the world to apply, at least for a nation so large and diversified in its interests as our own. Critics of the American system of government are apt to speak scornfully of the fact that our two major political parties rarely point up their differences clearly, and often seem to be trying to crowd each other off the same platform. Replace the words "We point with pride" with the words "We view with alarm," and in almost any presidential campaign the platforms of the two major political parties could be exchanged without serious embarrassment to either party. What chance, one might ask, is there for majority rule when the issues are so consistently blurred? But the point is that to make majority rule effective in our country the process of compromise must be endlessly maintained. What may be meat for one section is pretty sure to be poison for another. What may satisfy one class of society may antagonize another. Somewhere the process of working out an accommodation that can command a majority 36 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY must go on. We do it in political platforms at our national nomi­nating conventions. We do it in Congress where the representa­tives of every class and section fight it out in committees and in behind-the-scenes deals to line up their majorities. We do it in the Presidency, where, if the office is to be fully effective, we must have a man perculiarly sensitive to public opinion, and able to shift his position convincingly to fit the changing needs of the times. Indeed, the interests of the nation would probably be served best if each of our two major parties could be trusted at all times to represent every important segment of our population, and every important point of view. We do not need to apologize for our party system. It serves our needs wdl. As a recent writer, Herbert Agar, effectively main­tains, it is the price of union. If each of our parties were a party of intense devotion to principle, instead of having only two of them we should have to have ten or a dozen different parties, as the French do, with results totally unpredictable. The virtue of our system is that, whichever party wins, it will probably represent the interest of the whole people rather than only a mere fraction of the people. What better assurance of majority rule could we have? On the second great aspect of American democracy-in­dividual freedom-there is such universal consent that I need do little more than state the case. In the last hundred years we have maintained with fair consistency the guarantees of the first few amendments of the Federal Constitution, and the similar guarantees that have found their way into the Bills of Rights of our various state constitutions. We bdieve in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to petition the government for the redress of grievances, freedom of assembly, freedom of religious worship, freedom from unreasonable search and sdzure, and a long list of other freedoms, including the broad guarantee that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. We know, of course, that these are limited free­doms. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to make irre­sponsible and unprovable statements damaging to the character of another citizen-that is, unless one chances to be, let us say, a member of the United States Senate, and protected by senatorial THE AMERICAN TRADITION OF DEMOCRACY 37 immunity. Freedom of the press does not mean freedom to print libelous and untrue statements. Freedom of assembly does not mean the the right to start a riot. And so on. But these freedoms do mean that the government of the United States and the govern­ments of the various states may not resort to the police state methods that exist everywhere behind the iron curtain. Liberty flourishes in the United States to a degree that would be regarded as intolerable in any totalitarian nation. Freedom, too, means pro­tection for the minority. There is no principle more vital to the maintenance of our democratic way of life than the one which guarantees to a defeated minority the right to hold steadfastly, and without penalty, to its opinions. The third great principle of American democracy, equality of opportunity, has found the going rather tough during the past hundred years, but it has survived far better than many critics of our society are willing to concede. The economic revolution that accompanied the Civil War and continued after its close brought about great and unanticipated changes. New machines for production and new means of transportation and communica­tion created in a short time a new world, one in which the modern business corporation because of its size and wealth wielded great power. How could the ordinary individual compete with these huge agglomerations of capital? What was to happen to equality of opportunity in America while a smaller and smaller number of larger and larger corporations were taking over the direction of American economic life? Perhaps a people less accustomed to free­dom and equality might have bowed humbly before the storm, but not so the American people. They stood up and fought. In the nineteenth century the Grangers and the Greenbackers and the Populists carried the ball. In the twentieth century the drive for greater equality of opportunity was the principal objective of Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In many aspects, certainly, the victory is not yet won, and the battle goes on. But in one fashion or another, through governmental regula­tion, through limited public ownership, through the deliberate encouragement of labor organization, through corporation taxes and graduated income taxes, through a vast network of social security legislation, the trend toward the elimination of equality 38 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY of opportunity that for a time seemed so threatening has been arrested. Low incomes have been brought up, high incomes have been brought down. Frederick Lewis Allen, in a book just off the press. The Big Change, brings out with startling darity how far this process has progressed. The United States, without resort to socialism and with the utmost disdain for communism, seems well on the way toward the creation of a classless society. I come now to the fourth item that I have induded in my historical definition of American democracy, the right to survive. We used to have no doubts on this score; now, after two devastat­ing world wars, doubts do exist. We had dreamed of one world, a world of united nations that would keep the peace and give democracy real hope for the future. But instead of one world we now have two, one in which the prindples we believe in have a chance to survive, and one in which most of these prindples, at least, are denounced and ruthlessly suppressed. Behind the iron curtain there is no such thing as majority rule. There a small but disdplined minority, frantically devoted to an intensely reac­tionary creed, gives the law, like an oriental despot, to all the rest Behind the iron curtain there is no such thing as individual free­dom. There, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of thought, and every other freedom hits the discard, save only free­dom to obey the dictates of the state. For the common people only one rule is certain: "Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die." Behind the iron curtain irresponsible rulers give lip service to economic equality, but they insist that to promote an even chance for all, such priceless treasures of democracy as majority rule and individual freedom must go. The surrender of liberty, people are told, is the price of economic security. Sadly enough, what actually happens is that the great masses of the people are exploited for the benefit of the ruling clique to a degree quite impossible in such a country as ours. In reality, behind the iron curtain the great masses of the people have neither liberty nor security. Furthermore, those who occupy the driver's seat in the Soviet Union and its satellite states have set out to rule the world. They want one world, to be sure, but it must be one communist world. They overcame western Europe's great barrier to the THE AMERICAN TRADITION OF DEMOCRACY 39 east right after the second World War and turned its free peoples into slave. They have achieved a similar conquest of China, and their dreams of expansion know no bounds. In every country they have their fifth columns, their spy networks, their agents of red imperialism. In the face of this challenge what can the people of the American nation do? Shall we sit by supinely while the warlords of Russia prepare our ruin, or shall we do something about it? Fortunately the makers of American foreign policy (and, what­ever impassioned campaign orators may now assert, they were for a long time bipartisan) were and are determined to turn back the red menace. When it was about to engulf Greece and Turkey in 1947, the President of the United States announced without reservation that it was our policy "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure"-the Truman Doctrine. Following close on the heels of this notable departure from traditional American foreign policy came the Marshall Plan, by which the United States agreed to grant financial aid to the efforts of European nations to speed up recovery. For communism, it was well understood, could feed best on chaos and misery; with economic recovery in sight, the danger of its triumph would be slight. After that came the organ­ization of European defense through the North Atlantic Treaty. Then came Korea, and the long-drawn-out fight in that unhappy land to turn back the tide of communist aggression. One thing we have learned out of that experience. Americans still believe in democracy enough to fight for it. They will not permit democracy's chance to grow, even in an imperfect embryo country like Korea, to be utterly destroyed if they can help it. They know that if democracy is to survive, even here at home, they can never again remain supine, indifferent, and isolated when it is attacked anywhere in the world. We here in this group represent, I suspect, nearly all the various shades of opinion current in the United States today. What we could agree upon, Americans in general could agree upon. When it comes to fundamentals, the differences among us would be slight. Probably we would all agree upon the four basic principles I have featured. But if our brand of democracy 40 UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY is to five these good old principles must be continually readapted to the difficult and pressing needs of our times. We must ask ourselves, in season and out of season, what we can do to make democracy work. How can we preserve the blessings of majority rule under the complications of our present age? How can we maintain our ideals of individual freedom and equality of oppor­tunity when so many people who give lip service to those ideals are really ready to undermine them at every turn? How can de­mocracy survive and grow if, here in the United States at its source and center, we cannot reconcile its behavior in fact with its ideal­istic theories? And how can we falter and turn back in our inter­national obligations, and not at the same time surrender to those forces which wish to destroy our democracy at home? Democracy must advance, not retreat; it must make converts, not suffer apostacy. I suppose that Longfellow is outmoded today, but I recall that during the second World War, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt were not above quoting him back and forth across the Atlantic. In closing, I can think of no better words than these: Thou, too, sail on, O ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate! We know what Master laid thy keel, What Workman wrought thy ribs of sted, Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, What anvils rang, what hammers beat. In what a forge and what a heat, Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! Fear not each sudden sound and shock, 'Tis of the wave and not the rock; 'Tis but the flapping of the sail, THE AMERICAN TRADITION OF DEMOCRACY 41 And not a rent made by the gale. In spite of false lights on the shore. Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea! Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee, Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, Are all with thee-are all with thee!