Time does not lend itself to inventory. No cursory glance, not even a thoughtful and comprehensive survey, can begin to encompass the brilliant color, the diversity of action, the variety of mood, and the magnitude of change lying under the soaring arch of time that covers the five decades just past.
It has been my privilege to witness this kaleidoscopic period from a unique vantage point. Since 1919, as special assistant to the attorney general under instructions to make a study of subversive activities in the United States, through the years as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, my work has been in the investigative field. It has been national in scope, and it has afforded a kind of observation post, a behind-the-scenes view of the forces and instrumentalities that induce change and influence manners and morals.
Whether we like it or not, the morals to which we subscribe as a people are vital to our survival as a free nation. The French philosopher Montesquieu spelled out what is essential to the different kinds of government. Fear, he said, is the required ingredient of a despotism. Honor is the key to the monarchy. And what of a republic? “Virtue is necessary in a republic.”
Seven years from now we will celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the beginnings of our great republic. The five decades to which I have reference make up more than a quarter of the life of this magnificent experiment in self-rule. These same decades encompass changes more accelerated and more extensive, perhaps, than those that occurred in the course of a great many preceding centuries. The physical changes take us from the horse-drawn carriage to manned flight to the moon. And the changes in moral and ethical matters are almost as great. As we prepare to commemorate the bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, questions are being raised on all sides about the current revolution in manners, ethics, and morals. Concerned citizens are beginning to wonder if we may not be in grave danger of rejecting those things that are the source of our national strength.
Are we entering an age that must end in anarchy? Are we rearing a generation almost wholly lacking in self-discipline? Have we almost used up the reservoir of that moral quality that Montesquieu deemed essential to the preservation of a republic? In short, do we deserve our magnificent inheritance? Are we good enough to preserve the great republic to which we have pledged our allegiance? Will we retain the capacity to do our duty as Americans?
What is this duty? Views on this vary. I choose to draw mine from the tenets and principles that shine with glowing intensity from the pages of documents, books, and letters bequeathed us by the Founding Fathers. Their strict sense of duty—arising from a stern moral code—permeated the hearts and minds of the majority of early Americans. Duty was a part of their very being. It was the idea that sparked their actions.
Although the following words of a French Dominican friar were not written until many years after the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed to the world, almost every American who helped bring the republic into being would have subscribed to the thought: “Duty is the grandest of ideas, because it implies the idea of God, of the soul, of liberty, of responsibility, of immortality.” God, the soul, liberty, responsibility, immortality—these intangibles formed the focus of American existence. And they coalesced and meshed in one short word—duty. Americans accepted without question the immense spiritual responsibility inherent in such a concept of duty, for they were a God-fearing people. That in itself turned them toward action marked by selflessness and courage, for, as Burke indicated, “he who fears God fears nothing else.” And, like Burke, they held the fear of God to be the “only sort of fear which generates true courage.”
Fear of God and faith in God as the keys to American freedom were freely acknowledged by Americans and observed by visitors. The first American president voiced this in the simple words: “It is impossible to govern the world without God,” and a visitor to these shores from South America noted: “Go to New England, and visit the domestic firesides, if you would see the secret of American independence.… Religion has made them what they are.”
How did Europe view us? The German poet Heine expressed the meaning America held for his continent: “If all Europe were to become a prison, America would still present a loop-hole of escape; and, God be praised! that loop-hole is larger than the dungeon itself.”
For centuries the world saw America as a haven, a refuge, a hope for the poor and downtrodden. And the world saw Americans themselves as unique—a people who had broken from a tyrannical government and projected a declaration that held danger for the world’s rulers in its startling new credo that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights.
The Founding Fathers—those men of extraordinary wisdom and magnificent faith—drew up a spiritual contract with posterity. They built a new nation on a pledge and a daring belief that succeeding generations of Americans would uphold that pledge. And they gave us a blueprint for preserving the republic they had launched—if Americans of the future had the pride, self-discipline, will, understanding, and courage to accept the challenges inherent in the word “American.”
Always that word has had spiritual meaning for the rest of the world, whether or not it is acknowledged, because from the outset our form of government has been a living challenge as no other, before or since. A former ambassador from the Far East, leaving these shores after many years, expressed his farewell in This Week magazine in simple and moving words. He cautioned: “Never forget, Americans, that yours is a spiritual country.” He spoke of its wealth and affluence. Then he concluded with these words.
But underlying everything else is the fact that America began as a God-loving, God-fearing, God-worshipping people, knowing that there is a spark of the Divine in each one of us. It is this respect for the dignity of the human spirit which makes America invincible. May it always endure.… May God keep you always—and may you always keep God.
Nations have souls. The spirit of grace and beauty that Greece bequeathed to the world still lingers. The lamp of law and justice that lighted the Rome of Trajan and Hadrian may sometimes flicker low, but it has not been extinguished. And what of the spiritual light that is the heart and soul of America? Will this generation permit it to wane to the point at which we, in effect, dispense with this quality upon which our nation’s strength is founded?
The answer is to be found within ourselves. The words of an English clergyman born nearly two centuries ago point to the vital issue: “There is a time to be born, and a time to die, says Solomon, and it is the memento of a truly wise man; but there is an interval between these two times of infinite importance.” It is what we do that counts. We need to face the realities of the present with forthrightness, ascertain what needs to be done, and develop the fortitude to do it.
What are the realities?
We are witnessing irrational violence stemming from a widespread promotion of the doctrine of civil disobedience. We are experiencing lawlessness unexampled in our nation’s history, and a growing percentage of vicious crimes being committed by the very young. We are recording instance after instance in which, by reason of technicalities, unrepentant felons are being loosed to prey once more upon the public. We are watching society’s safeguards sink lower and lower each time an unjust and irresponsible shout of “Police brutality!” is raised. And we seem to be developing a peculiar attitude toward criminal activities. The current myopic stance condones constant expansion of the rights of the criminal, including shorter and shorter periods of imprisonment, together with an overweening reluctance to condemn criminal behavior. In Alice in Wonderland fashion, we are focusing tender concern on the criminal while ignoring the cries of his victims. We seem to have forgotten the Justinian definition of justice—that it is “the constant desire and effort to render to every man his due.”
We are witnessing an era of permissiveness in which vacillating pedagogues and parents too often abdicate their decision-making roles, thus forcing their responsibilities to fall upon immature students and children. These young people are growing to adulthood in a culture that has changed drastically in recent decades. Undiluted filth stains great segments of our literary output while the seals of vulgarity, unrestrained sex, violence, and brutality are stamped upon much of the material purveyed by our entertainment media. We are witnessing a denial of formerly accepted values. Too many parents preach one thing and practice another while their children, revolted by hypocrisy, reject all values.
Thousands of young people, unable to face life as it is and lacking the courage to strive to improve it, seek to destroy everything. Some commit suicide. Some simply withdraw into a shadowland of drugs, suffering the subsequent degradation of soul and mind and body. Many adopt the cynical, nihilistic, and anarchistic philosophy constantly being promoted by the totalitarians in their efforts to destroy individual freedom. Indeed, we are witnessing an age in which cunning representatives of an international totalitarian conspiracy are given the broadest opportunities to subvert the minds of our young people before knowledge and experience enable them to form sound standards of judgment.
These are some of the difficult realities with which we must contend as we approach the bicentennial of the birth of the republic. We have to decide what kind of world we want—one of liberty or one of license. Our forefathers sacrificed without thought of self to give us, in Jefferson’s words, “what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government.” We are among the fortunate of the world to have been given that right—as well as the opportunity to show by our deeds the value we place upon it. But that precious right cannot long be maintained in the absence of the individual citizen’s acceptance of his obligations.
I speak of the “individual citizen,” not the “ordinary citizen.” In view of the proud challenge issued by the Founding Fathers almost two hundred years ago, no citizen of the United States is ordinary. What each man is and does is important in a democratic republic. Alexis de Tocqueville, after viewing the raw, young republic, noted this and wrote with great perception: “Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”
The “solitude of his own heart” must be fearful indeed for the man who is without faith. For the believing man, that dependence upon self offers a constant challenge that demands the best he has to give—and de Tocqueville noted that, too. In a statement before the French Senate on his return to France after his visit to the United States in 1831, the great French observer reportedly said:
During my journey throughout America I sought for the secret of the genius and the greatness of America; I sought for her genius and greatness and growth and glory in her rich soils, in her rich mines, her great forests, her fallow fields, her ample rivers and noble harbors, but I did not discover it there. I further sought for the reason for her growth and her glory and her genius and her greatness, and I found it in her matchless Constitution; I found it in her schools, churches and homes, ablaze with righteousness. It was there in her Constitution, in her homes, in her schools, in her churches, that I found the true secret of the source of America’s genius and greatness.
I have given this statement as it was quoted by Senator Henry F. Ashurst in his farewell speech to the Senate of the United States in 1940. He concluded with these words of his own: “So it is, fellow Senators. America is great because she is good. When America is no longer good, she will no longer be great.”
My days are filled with evidence of crime, corruption, betrayal, and subversion. Often during the past quarter of our nation’s history it would have been easy to become doubtful and pessimistic—and never more so than in the present decade. Yet, when the strains and tensions become almost unbearable, I am blessed with a recurring memory from the past. Crossing the continent by rail many years ago, I had the privilege of riding on the open platform at the end of a long passenger train. There, as we passed through sleeping prairies, high mountains, and lonely reaches of desert lighted by low-hanging stars, the glory and grandeur of God’s handiwork became as manifest to me as I’m sure it was to those superlative sailors of space whose midnight message from the distant moon reminded us once again that we are not alone.
I believe in the great challenge of America. I believe that if the children of America were taught to understand the meaning of that challenge as fully in its spiritual sense as in its material, we would regain that ordered discipline stemming from a sense of personal responsibility that once marked our national behavior.
How far we have strayed from the once universally accepted image of Americans became very visible recently in a foreign columnist’s reference to the impression made in Britain by the Apollo 11 moon flight. The behavior of the astronauts, said the columnist, “showed that they were not men of stature only in space, but were of equal and superlative quality in the ordinary business of life. To a people fed with endless stories of American vulgarities and violence, these men recalled another America of sober dignity, responsibility and dedication to duty.”
Whether we like it or not, we are born to a challenge. By virtue simply of being American we are “keepers of the flame.” It is our continuing and inescapable obligation to prove that man is, indeed, capable of self-rule. In the brief interval between birth and death that God grants all of us, let us do our duty as Americans.
J. Edgar Hoover has been director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation since 1924. He received teh LL.B. and LL.M. degrees from The George Washington University
TWO CHRISTMASES
Again this year
Two Christmases are served.
One is gobbled up by nerve endings
And other things sensual and selfish;
While the other in a fog
(Or incense, depending upon disposition)
Sifts in to round off the sharp edges,
Tries to convert excitement into feeling.
One Christmas is flushed out of TV sets,
And overflows into crowded irritated ways;
The other seeps in slowly.
But guilt is a catalyst,
And so is compassion,
Even wobbling faith is a help.
Two Christmases.
One is chartreuse and flashing pinks,
The other is dark blue, speckled with starlight.
BERNARD VIA, JR.
