U.S. presidents on war and sacrifice

Civil War:

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ― that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion ― that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.

~ President Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863

World War I: 

There are, it may be, many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us...  To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.

~ President Woodrow Wilson, war message to Congress, April 2, 1917

World War II:

“It is not a sacrifice for any man, old or young, to be in the Army or Navy of the United States.  Rather it is a privilege.  It is not a sacrifice for the industrialist or the wage-earner, the farmer or the shopkeeper, the trainman or the doctor, to pay more taxes, to buy more bonds, to forego extra profits, to work longer or harder at the task for which he is best fitted.  Rather it is a privilege.  It is not a sacrifice to do without many things to which we are accustomed if the national defense calls for doing without.” 

~ President Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio address after Pearl Harbor, December 9, 1941

 

Korean War:

To do this will require hard work and sacrifice by all of us. I know all of us are prepared to do whatever is necessary in the cause of peace and freedom.

~ President Harry Truman, radio and television report, September 1, 1950

Cold War:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

~ President John F. Kennedy, inaugural address, January 20, 1961

War on Terror:

Two years ago, I told the Congress and the country that the war on terror would be a lengthy war, a different kind of war fought on many fronts in many places. Iraq is now the central front… This will take time and require sacrifice. Yet we will do what is necessary, we will spend what is necessary to achieve this essential victory in the war on terror, to promote freedom and to make our own nation more secure.

~ President George W. Bush, address to the nation, September 7, 2003

Amid all this violence, I know Americans ask the question: Is the sacrifice worth it?  It is worth it, and it is vital to the future security of our country.

~ President George W. Bush, June 28, 2005, speech at Fort Bragg

 

Iran War:

As we celebrate this progress, we think especially of the 13 American warriors who have laid down their lives in this fight to prevent our children from ever having to face a nuclear Iran… And now we must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives.

~ President Donald Trump, address to the nation, April 1, 202

Kevin Duffy on American imperialism and the Israel alliance

At the core of American imperialism is the noble cause.  Woodrow Wilson got the ad campaign started when he coined the phrase “making the world safe for democracy.”  In 2009, the Navy came up with the slogan “a global force for good.”  (This lasted all of five years.)  The mask is now off Israel.  Its carefully cultivated image as an enlightened, progressive, tolerant democracy has been shattered… not good for the U.S. global brand.  America’s longstanding policy of unconditional support for Israel is now in question, i.e. the imperial delusion is bumping into harsh reality.

~ Kevin Duffy, "The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Investment implications," The Coffee Can Portfolio, January 6, 2024

Royal Meeker on minimum wage laws

It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work.  Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind. 

~ Royal Meeker, Princeton scholar and labor commissioner to Woodrow Wilson, as quoted in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 25, 1910

Dwight D. Murphey on progressivism and the civil rights movement from the early 1900s to 1930s

[Modern] liberals in the United States did not provide conspicuous leadership to a movement for racial and ethnic equality until the issue came to life during and after World War II.  Most Americans will be amazed to hear that it was the Progressives who were most instrumental in establishing the Jim Crow system in the South; they did so after the Populist movement created a fear of the potentially corrupting effects of a movement that would combine blacks and poor whites.  Theodore Roosevelt is reputed to have made an embarrassingly bigoted comment about Negroes at the time of the Brownsville Affair.  Woodrow Wilson originally wanted to include blacks in his administration, but backed off when this led to criticism from his Southern supporters.  Franklin Roosevelt did not make civil rights legislation for blacks a significant part of the New Deal. 

During all those years the many liberals connected with the liberal journals as editors and writers, while favorable to Negroes and horrified by lynchings, made no move to make "civil rights" a priority issue.  As we look back from the ethos of the 1980s and '90s, we tend to think, racial, ethnic and sexual equality have held a place in the pantheon of liberal philosophy from the beginning.  But that is just not so.

~ Dwight D. Murphey, Liberalism in Contemporary America, p. 19

Woodrow Wilson on socialism and democracy

It proposes that all idea of a limitation of public authority by individual rights be put out of view, and that the State consider itself bound to stop only at what is unwise or futile in its universal superintendence alike of individual and of public interests. The thesis of the state socialist is that there is, that no line can be drawn between private and public affairs which the State may not cross at will.

[...]

[I]t is very clear that in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals. Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.

~ Woodrow Wilson, "Socialism and Democracy," 1887

Woodrow Wilson
1922-1925

Ron Pestritto on the German roots of progressivism

It helps us to see how the progressive movement became the means by which a lot of principles that had grown up in Europe took root in the United States, and in particular principles that were part of the German understanding of politics, and the German state, and the German understanding of history. And the influence of German thought, in German education, is evident not only from looking at the ideas of the progressives, but also just looking at the historical connections, at the pedigree of a lot of the most important progressive thinkers. Almost all of them were either educated in Germany or had as teachers those who had been educated in Germany, and this requires us to realize the real sea change that had taken place in higher education in the United States between say 1860 and 1900. This is at a time where most Americans who wanted a higher education, a graduate level education, went to Europe to get it and often went to Germany to get it. And thus by 1900, the faculties of American colleges and universities were populated with people who had been educated in Europe by and large in the German tradition. 

One example would be, take a place like Johns Hopkins University. This was actually founded in 1876 with the explicit purpose of bringing the German educational model to the United States. And Hopkins was a place, not coincidentally, where some of the most important American progressives educated: people like Woodrow Wilson, people like John Dewey, and Frederick Jackson Turner, just to name a few.

~ Ronald J. Pestritto, "The Progressive Rejection of the Founding," 25:55 mark, Hillsdale College

Woodrow Wilson on the importance of history

A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about.

~ Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson on neutrality

Neutrality is a negative word. It does not express what America ought to feel. We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations on which peace may be rebuilt.

~ Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921)
1938

Woodrow Wilson on the creation of the Federal Reserve on his watch

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit.

We are no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the voice of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.

~ Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson
1954-1968

Walter Lippmann on war propaganda

We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy’s side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace. Is it necessary for us the height of our power to stoop to such self-deceiving nonsense?

~ Walter Lippmann, former advisor to Woodrow Wilson

World War I Victory
1919