“In the approaching contest, the nation faces a crisis. Fundamental principles are involved. Shall the America of our fathers, with its republican form of government, its principles of civil liberty, and its whole democratic social and industrial order be maintained for a new period of constructive progress, or shall it be abandoned for some untried experiment?
“This is not the first crisis in the history of the republic. This is not the first time that the principles for which the Republican Party stands have been called upon to save the country from its enemies.
“There are elements in our population which teach doctrines that sound strange to the American ear.
“The present crisis is brought about by those who have lost faith in America-–who no longer believe in, or who do not understand the principles of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution of the United States–who would turn their backs upon a republican form of government, in order to set up in its place a system of control by a privileged class.
“Such men frankly proclaim their preference for the political philosophy of Lenin and Trotsky to that of Washington, Hamilton, Webster, and Lincoln.
“Once let the American people understand the issue, and they will rise in their might to overwhelm the enemies of America. The issue is a preservation of the American form of government, with its incomparable blessing of liberty under the law.
“The question to be settled by the people this year is . . .
“Whether the American nation shall remain upon its foundations of ordered liberty and free opportunity, or whether there will arise in its stead a social democracy–autocracy’s best friend—to take over the management of each individual’s life and business, to order his comings and his goings, to limit his occupations and his savings, and to say that the great experiment of Washington and Hamilton, of Jefferson and Madison, of Marshall and Webster, of Adams and Clay, of Lincoln and Roosevelt, has come to an end, and gone to join the list of failures in free government, with the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, and their later followers of Venice and of Genoa.
“Our nation will not divide under the leadership and guidance of the Republican party. It will become all American.”
Would you believe these words originated from an address delivered nearly 100 years ago (June 1920) by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nicholas Murray Butler, “an educator and university president; an adviser to seven presidents and friend of statesmen in foreign nations; recipient of decorations from fifteen foreign governments and of honorary degrees from thirty-seven colleges and universities; a member of more than fifty learned societies and twenty clubs.” A man referred to by his good friend Theodore Roosevelt as “Nicholas Miraculous Butler.”
Three years before Butler received his Nobel Prize (1931), one newspaper commented Butler was “the most lavishly decorated member of the human race.” Upon his death in 1947 at the age of 85, The New York Times described him as “one of the best known Americans of his generation the world over.”
Reflect, for a moment… on Solomon’s words for the wise, as recorded in the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Solomon’s profoundly perceptive declaration would certainly have resonated with Thomas Jefferson who put forth the following before a general assembly of delegates in 1779: “The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.
“Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight.”
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics.
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