| Selected Quotations from An American Program |
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An American Program is truly a remarkable book, showing the breadth and depth of Willkie's knowledge of and insight into the issues facing America as it stood poised to emerge as a post-war superpower. After reading this book, one cannot help but speculate on how the post-war era, in particular the Cold War and the civil rights movement, might have been different had Willkie lived to continue in his role as a preeminent American statesman.
The issue today is not the issue of states' rights versus federal power. The issue is government administered under law. For if economic and social regulations in our modern industrial age must be national in scope to be effective, so their administration must be by law and rule if the citizen is to remain free.
If we prevail we will have a government representing us abroad with dignity and power, an instrument of the united will of our people which can lead the world to tangible economic and political cooperation.
The Republican Party in its platform and in the declarations of its candidates should commit itself unequivocally and specifically to federal anti-poll tax and anti-lynching statutes.
The Constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens.
Need knows no rules of eligibility or coverage. Protection against old age, illness and economic misfortune must be a right for everyone.
No wage or income based upon the value of the economic contribution of the individual can ever be made to take into proper consideration the needs of his dependents.
In order that industry may function venturesomely, new and effective methods must be found for counteracting and controlling the tendency toward monopoly and monopolistic prices. They are the Trojan horse of the free enterprise system ...
The Republican Party cannot meet the need of the post-war period by merely passing resolutions in favor of ‘free enterprise.’ It must realize the inevitability and the justness of the people’s demand for both protection and opportunity, and it must find the answers, answers which exist uniquely within a responsible enterprise system.
Our post-war economy must be built on a high wage level if we hope to furnish a market for the goods of an expanding peace-time production. Our wheels can keep turning only if our workers can keep spending.
Labor-management cooperation has proved fruitful during the war. The more it is continued and developed after the peace the less necessity there will be for government intervention in industrial relations.
The adjustments of our economy to a peace-time basis will bring a multitude of stresses and strains and labor is fearful that it alone will be asked to bear the sacrifices. That must not be.
Asolution of international economic problems is as indispensable for future peace and security as political and military solutions.
The startling contrast between the level of comfort in our modern industrial countries and the hard struggle for bare sustenance in technically undeveloped countries is one of the most painful -- and most dangerous -- aspects of international relations.
Whatever we do at home constitutes foreign policy. And whatever we do abroad constitutes domestic policy. This is the great, new political fact.
We are fighting a war for freedom; we are fighting a war for men’s minds. This means that we must encourage men’s aspirations for freedom not only at home but everywhere in the world.
Three years ago, two years ago, the United States had the material, the political, the moral leadership of the world. Today we have only the material leadership. We have lost political leadership through ineptness and delay. We have lost moral leadership through attempted expediency.
We emphatically condemn as un-American all words and actions designed to foment antagonism between various economic groups or to stimulate racial or religious intolerance.
We should demand the immediate creation of a Council of the United Nations as a first step towards the formation of a general international organization in order that all the peoples of the United Nations should have a voice in the decisions which will shape the world in which they live.
Benjamin Disraeli, that distinguished statesman of Victorian England who was also a wit and a man of letters, once defined a practical man as a man who practiced the errors of his forefathers. One might, with justice, borrow the definition for those practical politicians who drafted the platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties.
Both platforms ... contain an irreconcilable paradox which in its plain implication can only confuse, deceive and disillusion the American people. This paradox is the promise that permanent or lasting peace can be attained without what is popularly called ‘loss of sovereignty’.
The political and economic status of our citizens of Negro blood assumes an importance in the election of 1944 which has not been equaled since the period immediately following the Civil War.
We cannot expect small nations and men of other races and colors to credit the good faith of our professed purposes and to join us in international collaboration for future peace if we continue to practice ugly discrimination at home against our own minorities, the largest of which is our thirteen million Negro citizens.
Original content Copyright © 1999-2002 Timothy D. Walker Your comments are appreciated
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