Draft Estes Kefauver Acceptance Speech, 1952

Mr. Chairman, Friends, Fellow- Americans, and Good Neighbors:

From the bottom of my heart I thank you all for your vote of confidence. And when I say ‘you all” I mean not only the men and women from South and North, East and West who are assembled in this great hall. I mean you who are listening and watching in your own homes for the decision of this convention on your Washington hired man for the next four years.

It is with great humility that I accept the honor and responsibility of leading the Democratic Party to victory this fall. Victory in the White House, victory in the Senate and in the House. We must and shall increase our working majorities in both Houses of Congress in order to put into effect the splendid platform to which we all
subscribe. We must also elect more Democratic Governors, more Democratic Mayors, and more Democratic state and local officials. And we will win. Let us all unite in the task ahead.

The question before the American people is the question whether we shall now repudiate the heritage and the progress of the past twenty years and return to the Hoover era of isolationism, bread lines and soup-kitchens, failing banks and bankrupt businesses, poorhouses, Hoovervilles, yellow dog contracts, and dollar diplomacy.

Today, we of the Democratic Party, have made our decision. We will not go back. We will carry on. We will fight the good fight that has been waged by President Truman- and before him by President Roosevelt. We will keep faith with those who have worked, struggled, and died so that our great civilian democracy might rise triumphant above all the military empires that have challenged our American way of life in our lifetimes. And it is because of that faith in civilian rule that this convention has chosen a civilian as its presidential candidate.

I was shocked to hear the Republican candidate for President two weeks ago say that because he had led American boys in a crusade against Hitler he was now fit to lead a second crusade against millions of his fellow countrymen who have dared to differ with a General’s newly discovered politics.

We in this convention do not talk about battles and crusades against fellow Americans. That sort of thing we have left to the Republican Party for a long time, from the days of President-General Grant on. Our differences in this hall have been part of the democratic effort to achieve an ever wider mutual tolerance and understanding between groups which must in time learn to stand together in our great democracy and to rise above all divisions of
region, race, or creed.

These things you have heard and you have seen- the lights and the shadows, the little discords, and the larger harmonies. In all my public career to this day I have never sought to hide my thoughts or my actions from the men and women whom I serve. I am no general. I have not acquired the habit of concealing my thoughts and actions. And so I am glad that American inventiveness and know-how have made it possible for so many millions of my fellow
Americans to participate in this convention. Your participation in the process of selecting a President should not be limited to Election Day. Your votes, your voices, your letters, your prayers, have blazed this path which a Democratic convention has democratically followed.

I hope that some day American inventiveness and American know how will give us television in reverse. With such reverse television we in this hall, might better learn to know the free men and women and children who are bringing this convention into their own homes and who will eventually ratify or reject the actions of this convention. If we could look into all those homes tonight we might better see the achievements of the past twenty years. We would
see the progress of our land, which is now under challenge. We would see healthier, happier children than you could find in any other land or any other generation. We would see freer and more prosperous wage earners. We would see parents who look forward to something better than the poorhouse at the end of their working years. And if American inventiveness could give us a play-back attachment to this reverse television, what would we see here? We
would see the twenty years of the social progress that our Republican friends call “slavery” or “socialism.”

We would see the American people on the march. The direction of that march would be plain. It would be

1. From a 3,000-mile long breadline of 13,000,000 idle workers to a record-breaking full employment.
2. From ten-cents-an-hour sweatshops and sixty-hour weeks to fair wage and hour laws and the highest real wages in world history.
3. From the poorhouse over the hill to a broad and sound system of social security.
4. From closed and failing banks to the world’s safest banking system.
5. From slums and Hoovervilles to great publicly financed housing projects.
6. From Gypsy caravans of homeless Americans evicted by wholesale mortgage foreclosures to a new security for farmers and other homeowners, backed by sound Federal credits.
7. From yellow dog contracts to labors freedom to organize and to bargain collectively through representatives of its own choosing.
8. From kerosene lamps to electric lights and electric power in millions of our farm homes.
9. From rampaging rivers like my own Tennessee to great publicly financed dams and power plants across the face of our land.
10. From the Republican isolationism that bred Hitler and Stalin to the first realistic step in world history towards universal peace, the United Nations.
11. From dollar diplomacy and imperialism to a Good Neighbor Policy, carried now to new heights by President Truman s Point 4 Program- the export of American know-how to our friends and allies south of the Rio Grande and across the seas.

Remember how the Republican leaders attacked each of these forward steps as “socialism” or worse? You can label these steps of American progress, if you will, as the “New Deal” of Franklin D. Roosevelt, or the “Fair Deal” of Harry S. Truman, or even as the “Square Deal” of an earlier Roosevelt. And now we have the prospect of wiping out all these advances. We have the “No Deal” Party, which would repudiate all the gains of the Fair Deal, the New Deal, and the Square Deal.

Why do the bosses of the Republican machine hate the Fair Deal, the New Deal, the Square Deal? Is it because they hate on sight whatever is new or fair and square? Or is it because the great generals and the great corporation executives who are now running the Republican Party would feel more comfortable issuing orders rather than entering into deals for all the people? Today, as Senator Humphrey has remarked, the Republican Party is run
by four generals, General MacArthur, General Eisenhower, General Electric, and General Motors. These four generals, the leaders of the No Deal forces, look forward to the day when they can wipe out the social progress of twenty years. But the American people will have something to say about that. And I cannot help remembering that four years ago, in July, 1949, the experts and they were all predicting the triumph of a Republican candidate named
Dewey. And at regular four-year intervals before that in July, Mr. Willkie, Mr. Landon, and Mr. Hoover were practically elected. But while the newspapers give the Republicans their victories in July, the American people have the good sense to give the Democrats their victories in November. For a little while, every four years, a Republican in the White House looks like a change worth having. But after three or four months of study, the American people have
generally been able to distinguish between the change that Democrats stand for, which is the steady pushing forward of the frontiers of social progress, and the change Republicans stand for, which is the retreat to the past gone with the wind.

If we had this reverse television with the play-back attachment before us tonight, I would want to turn the machine back twenty years, to July 28, 1932. I would focus the machine on a spot in the shadow of the Capitol. Here brave veterans of World War I, goaded by the heartlessness of a Republican administration, had assembled to voice their peaceable protest against their inability to find jobs. This is every American’s God-given right of free speech and petition guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. Then I would focus on Pennsylvania Avenue. Here, at the orders of a Republican President, marched a general and their picked troops, to rout the assembled war veterans with bare bayonets and to burn down the tents and shacks of their pitiful little shanty town- then commonly known as Hooverville. In the end, the assembled veterans won their struggle. The bonus they sought was won. But the shame of that military attack on American citizens will never be forgotten. And I could not help thinking, two weeks or so ago, that twenty years after that shameful day the President who gave those orders was the principal speaker of the 1952 Republican Convention, the General of the white horse who proudly carried out that order in July 1932 was the keynote speaker of the 1952 Republican convention. Certainly General Eisenhower remembers this episode. And when that candidate talks today about leading a crusade against his own fellow-Americans, and says that because he led a crusade against Hitler, he is now fit to lead a second crusade against his fellow-Americans, we might understand what he means if we re member the Hoover-MacArthur crusade against the bonus petitioners who were the real founders of our American social security system.

The American people found a better way to deal with Hoovervilles than the Hoover-MacArthur-Eisenhower method of force and violence. Shall we go back now to the methods beloved by generals from time immemorial, or shall we carry now to ever-widening frontiers the banners of American freedom and progress, the way of the Good Neighbors, at home and abroad?

Far be it from me to criticize a soldier for carrying out orders. But when a soldier has carried out orders for forty years, is it not possible that he has gotten into the habit of carrying out orders? And whose orders now will he take? Will it not be the orders of Mr. Republican – Senator Taft – who is chairman of Republican Policy Committee in the Untied States Senate? The orders of Joe Martin and John Taber? Will he listen to the advice of MacArthur? Will
he consult Joe McCarthy?

Centuries of history should teach us that generals make good servants and bad masters. I can well understand how the Republican bosses, worried by certain defeat, should seize on a popular military hero in 1952 as they did in 1868. I can well understand how the bosses would use the good name of a soldier as they used the good name of Ulysses S. Grant, to cover up their own corrupt machinations. An innocent general can cover a multitude of sins.
I do not blame a soldier for quitting his battle post in a time of international crisis, in order to run for high public office. But I think it is too bad when a good soldier is moved by the pleas of old friends to leave his job of soldiering and to repudiate his own better judgement of 1948 that a soldier should keep out of politics.

I think we need not more militarism in our highest civilian offices but less. I am disturbed at the rolling back into civilian public life of the military mind, with its government by directives and orders and military expropriations. Will we get rid of regimentation by entrusting all our civilian offices to a soldier who has lived all his adult life in regiments under military discipline? If we place all our civilian agencies in the charge of a man who has never in all
his life had to worry about earning a living or about what would happen to him in his old age or about the high cost of living, may we not expect the same militarizing process that we have seen in the Old World and in some parts of Latin America?¹

I have seen and talked face to face with millions of Americans in the past five months. And I have no doubt that in November Americans will vote to retain the system of democracy we know, the system of civilian supremacy, the system of government by consent rather than government by coercion, the civilian system of government by law rather than the military system of government by order.

It is because I believe fervently in these democratic ideals that I pledge every ounce of my effort to the larger realization of those ideals in the years ahead. In this task eight points will have my special concern and I pledge you all my best efforts towards these national objectives:

1. To raise to new heights of strength the union of the freedom- loving peoples of the world forged by the Democratic Administration to preserve the peace.
2. To double American production and thereby double American living standards in the next decade.
3. To wipe out the corruption of our public servants by malefactors of great wealth.
4. To eliminate discrimination and racial hatreds from American life.
5. To vanquish communism by rooting out its lawless instigators in our land and by showing the peoples of the earth that our way of life can conquer the evils of poverty, hatred, and militarism which are the breeding grounds of communist imperialism.
6. To remove McCarthyism and planned hysteria from our public life.²
7. To extend the benefits of social security and the protections against natural disaster and human exploitation established by the social legislation of twenty years to every worker, farmer, home owner, bank-depositer, and veteran, and to every household in our land.
8. To maintain civilian government, -the supremacy of private citizens over generals, which is the heart and soul of our democracy.

1. There is a note on the draft here reading: “Ability to deal with Congress? Knowledge of law-making, leading a program of legislation by consultation, deliberation, and eventually Congressional action?” ↩︎
2. There is a note on the draft here reading: “To assure every individual protection against character assassination and slander.” ↩︎