The anti -war protest.
As American as apple pie, we fought against fighting every war we've ever fought in.
Like Charles Lindbergh did with these thoughts before Pearl Harbor.
The hypocrisy and subterfuge that surrounds us comes out in every statement of the war party.
When we demand that our government listen to the 80 % of the people who oppose war, they shout that we are causing disunity.
We stand for the right of those who do the paying and the dying to also have a voice in the deciding.
When President Roosevelt opened the magnificent Bonneville Dam in 1937, he spoke the words most Americans were speaking in the 30s.
I cannot help the thought that instead of spending, as some nations do, half their national income in piling up armaments and more armaments for purposes of war, we in America are wiser in using our wealth on projects like this, which will give us more wealth, better living, and greater happiness for our children.
The president who had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I was well aware of the horrors of conflict, as were most Americans.
I have seen a war on land and sea.
I have seen blood running from the wounded.
I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs.
I have seen the dead in the mud.
I have seen cities destroyed.
I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line, the survivors of a regiment of 1 ,000 that went forward 48 hours before.
I have seen children starving.
I have seen the agony of mothers and wives.
I hate war.
The college campus in the 30s was a center of anti -war protest.
There was sympathy for Hitler's victims, but there was little desire for active participation in the conflict.
I have never been on a soapbox, and I am not a radical, and I am anything else, but I do believe in peace.
There has been a never -flowing alliance, a vigorous protest against the spilling of innocent human blood, the aggrandizement and satisfaction of a few tyrants and jingoists.
Today, one million American students strike for peace.
Today, we stand out and declare that we will not be fooled again.
Maybe if we stand out boldly now, not when war breaks out, it's too late then.
If we stand out bravely now and tell those in high places how we feel about it, and how determined we are that we're not going to march to the slaughter fields and have our college diplomas rot there under the reign of a poisonous Jew, maybe I say if we stand out here today, we may not have these conditions forever.
And I think it's that possibility that justifies and making our coming out here today very sane, sensible, and another adjective, American.
The climax of anti -World War II protests came five months before Pearl Harbor, when the President moved the nation into the Battle of the Atlantic by landing U .S.
forces in Iceland, a thousand miles closer to Berlin than New York.
Many Americans felt the occupation of Iceland should not have been undertaken without the consent of Congress.
Charles Lindbergh, America's hero of the era, was a leading dissenter in the days before the war.
So was Senator Robert Taft, Senator Burton K.
Wheeler, and Senator William Borah until his death in 1940.
From the repeal of the arms embargo to the occupation of Iceland, we have become more and more involved.
And each step we have made toward war has been with the promise of the administration that it was for the purpose of keeping us out.
In my opinion, the President has no legal or constitutional right to send American troops to Iceland.
If the occupation of Iceland is defense, then any act the President cares to order is defense.
They are afraid to put democracy to a test right here in their own country.
Otherwise...
Otherwise, they would put the issue of war or peace to Congress or to a referendum of the people.
Instead of trying to take us to war through the back door, the President ought to come to Congress and ask for a declaration of war as provided by the Constitution of the United States.
I'm convinced that if the question of war is submitted to the people by referendum or if it is submitted to Congress, a great majority will speak for peace and aid to Britain but against war.
If I am mistaken, I am quite prepared to support without stint or qualification the wishes of the majority of the people declared by Congress.
But I deny the right of the President to take us into war against the wishes of the men, women, and children in the cities, in the towns, and on the farms of America.
I would regard the Monroe Doctrine as a part of our national defense and a cornerstone of our foreign policy.
I would send no money to the war chests of Europe.
I would send no munitions to any nation engaged in war.
And above all, no American boy to be sacrificed in the machinations of European imperialism.
If we are going into a war to defeat Germany, it means that we must create military forces large enough and strong enough to cross the Atlantic and force a landing on the European coast against the greatest military power the world has ever known.
If we intend to do that, if it is possible at all, it will necessitate turning this country into a military state on standards similar to those of Germany herself.
It means that probably for a decade and possibly for several generations, America must be a uniformed and regimented nation.
It means that we will have to raise an army not of one million men or of two million men, but probably of at least ten million men.
It means that every family in America will have its wounded and its dead.
Anti -war protest is as old as war itself, but never has it been as vocal as during the period of United States involvement in Vietnam.
In 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave the President approval in advance for any action he might take in the Southeast Asia crisis.
To some, it was a blank check with which the President could take the nation into war without a declaration of war by Congress.
The anti -war dissenters spoke out loud and clear in their demands for peace.
Others felt the power given to the President was justified in order to keep the world safe for democracy.
Many times, one group questioned the patriotism of the other.
Everybody said I'll be impressed.
We had the only American flag there.
They tore it down, they beat us up.
The boys were wearing a flower on one side of their shirt and a swastika on the other side.
I'm here because I have eight sons.
I had one son just for Vietnam.
We just served in there and came back and he was killed.
I have another son in Fosil, Oklahoma.
He didn't want to be rejected, but I begged him to go ahead and regard the government here in the United States.
I have another one just turning 18 years old.
He got arrested for this cold -blooded war.
I'm here marching for freedom.
I turned in my draft card for basically two reasons.
One, I think the war in Vietnam is basically incompatible with what I understand to be the principles of the United States and what it stands for historically and what it ought to stand for today.
And secondly, I turned it in because I take my Christian faith very seriously and I find the war totally incompatible with what the Christian faith says to me should be our posture in such a situation.
I think in my case it had to be done because the whole structure of our own society, instead of being improved because we are engaged in such an action, has been destroyed.
I think people are realizing now that what we've done is not helping the people in Vietnam.
We're destroying their entire sociocultural fabric.
And in the same instance, we're destroying our own.
Black leaders like Stokely Carmichael tied anti -war protest into the Civil Rights Movement.
We always want to prove what good Americans we are.
The very first man to die for the War of Independence in this country was a black man named Crispus Attucks.
He was a fool.
Because here he was dying for white folk freedom and millions of his brothers were enslaved in the very country.
Oh, but we wanted to prove what great Americans we were.
We begged the white folk to let us fight in the War of Independence and they said no.
So we organized ourselves in bands of armies, training ourselves with our bare foot to prove to the white folk what great Americans we were.
Please let us fight white folk.
And finally they came and inspected our troops and said, good niggers, you can fight.
And they had us fighting the Indians.
Like fools, we should have teamed up with the Indians and take care of you.
The future of limited wars has been widely explored by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee led by Senator J.
William Fulbright.
Historian Henry Steele Commager has been heard and retired Marine Corps Commandant General David Shoup, Lieutenant General James Gavin.
It is not our duty to keep peace throughout the globe, to put down aggression wherever it starts up, to stop the advance of communism or otherisms which we may not approve of.
It is primarily the responsibility of the United Nations to keep the peace, to settle disputes, to discourage aggression.
And if that organization is not strong enough to do the job, we should perhaps bend our major energies to giving her the necessary authority and the tools.
The nature of conflict being what it is and the danger of a nuclear holocaust being ever present, it is compelling that solutions less than total war be found.
These governments change.
They change in Africa overnight.
They've changed in many other places overnight.
And even if we establish a constitution, we don't know whether it'll last two weeks after we left, if we ever leave.
Where is the proof that the same situation wouldn't break out within months in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Korea, and you could keep on going? We must realize that limited wars must be kept limited.
This change in the nature of war is quite fundamental.
And it should be reflected in our foreign policy and the military operations that mirror such policy.
Otherwise, we shall expend our national wealth and manpower in never -ending conflicts all over the world.
These wars always have a way in the past of getting larger and larger, of spreading.
People's emotions become involved.
Some place up the line, it's too much for us.
And at that spot, whether we like it or not, we're going to have to say we can't help.
It is my feeling that we do not have the resources, material, intellectual, or moral, to be at once an American power, a European power, and an Asian power.
Just as Holmes used to say that the first lesson a judge had to learn was that he was not God.
It is a lesson every man has to learn and a lesson every nation has to learn.
The locations change, but the funerals bring on the same emotions.
The ultimate anti -war protest is the shedding of tears.
What is our responsibility? Who has the right to decide that our involvement in foreign wars is essential to our freedom at home? Should the question be put to a vote of the people? The answers are important, but only to the living.
