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Presidents 1,524 words
March 4 was a Sunday, but the President took the oath
of office at the Capitol in the President's Room that morning. The
oath was taken again the next day, administered by Chief Justice
Edward White on the East Portico of the Capitol. The specter of war
with Germany hung over the events surrounding the inauguration. A
Senate filibuster on arming American merchant vessels against
submarine attacks had closed the last hours of the Sixty-fourth
Congress without passage. Despite the campaign slogan "He kept us out
of war," the President asked Congress on April 2 to declare war. It
was declared on April 6.
The four years which have elapsed since last I stood in
this place have been crowded with counsel and action of the
most vital interest and consequence. Perhaps no equal period
in our history has been so fruitful of important reforms in
our economic and industrial life or so full of significant
changes in the spirit and purpose of our political action.
We have sought very thoughtfully to set our house in order,
correct the grosser errors and abuses of our industrial
life, liberate and quicken the processes of our national
genius and energy, and lift our politics to a broader view
of the people's essential interests. It is a record of singular variety and singular
distinction. But I shall not attempt to review it. It speaks
for itself and will be of increasing influence as the years
go by. This is not the time for retrospect. It is time
rather to speak our thoughts and purposes concerning the
present and the immediate future. Although we have centered counsel and action with such
unusual concentration and success upon the great problems of
domestic legislation to which we addressed ourselves four
years ago, other matters have more and more forced
themselves upon our attention--matters lying outside our own
life as a nation and over which we had no control, but
which, despite our wish to keep free of them, have drawn us
more and more irresistibly into their own current and
influence. It has been impossible to avoid them. They have affected
the life of the whole world. They have shaken men everywhere
with a passion and an apprehension they never knew before.
It has been hard to preserve calm counsel while the thought
of our own people swayed this way and that under their
influence. We are a composite and cosmopolitan people. We
are of the blood of all the nations that are at war. The
currents of our thoughts as well as the currents of our
trade run quick at all seasons back and forth between us and
them. The war inevitably set its mark from the first alike
upon our minds, our industries, our commerce, our politics
and our social action. To be indifferent to it, or
independent of it, was out of the question. And yet all the while we have been conscious that we were
not part of it. In that consciousness, despite many
divisions, we have drawn closer together. We have been
deeply wronged upon the seas, but we have not wished to
wrong or injure in return; have retained throughout the
consciousness of standing in some sort apart, intent upon an
interest that transcended the immediate issues of the war
itself. As some of the injuries done us have become intolerable
we have still been clear that we wished nothing for
ourselves that we were not ready to demand for all
mankind--fair dealing, justice, the freedom to live and to
be at ease against organized wrong. It is in this spirit and with this thought that we have
grown more and more aware, more and more certain that the
part we wished to play was the part of those who mean to
vindicate and fortify peace. We have been obliged to arm
ourselves to make good our claim to a certain minimum of
right and of freedom of action. We stand firm in armed
neutrality since it seems that in no other way we can
demonstrate what it is we insist upon and cannot forget. We
may even be drawn on, by circumstances, not by our own
purpose or desire, to a more active assertion of our rights
as we see them and a more immediate association with the
great struggle itself. But nothing will alter our thought or
our purpose. They are too clear to be obscured. They are too
deeply rooted in the principles of our national life to be
altered. We desire neither conquest nor advantage. We wish
nothing that can be had only at the cost of another people.
We always professed unselfish purpose and we covet the
opportunity to prove our professions are sincere. There are many things still to be done at home, to
clarify our own politics and add new vitality to the
industrial processes of our own life, and we shall do them
as time and opportunity serve, but we realize that the
greatest things that remain to be done must be done with the
whole world for stage and in cooperation with the wide and
universal forces of mankind, and we are making our spirits
ready for those things. We are provincials no longer. The tragic events of the
thirty months of vital turmoil through which we have just
passed have made us citizens of the world. There can be no
turning back. Our own fortunes as a nation are involved
whether we would have it so or not. And yet we are not the less Americans on that account. We
shall be the more American if we but remain true to the
principles in which we have been bred. They are not the
principles of a province or of a single continent. We have
known and boasted all along that they were the principles of
a liberated mankind. These, therefore, are the things we
shall stand for, whether in war or in peace: That all nations are equally interested in the peace of
the world and in the political stability of free peoples,
and equally responsible for their maintenance; that the
essential principle of peace is the actual equality of
nations in all matters of right or privilege; that peace
cannot securely or justly rest upon an armed balance of
power; that governments derive all their just powers from
the consent of the governed and that no other powers should
be supported by the common thought, purpose or power of the
family of nations; that the seas should be equally free and
safe for the use of all peoples, under rules set up by
common agreement and consent, and that, so far as
practicable, they should be accessible to all upon equal
terms; that national armaments shall be limited to the
necessities of national order and domestic safety; that the
community of interest and of power upon which peace must
henceforth depend imposes upon each nation the duty of
seeing to it that all influences proceeding from its own
citizens meant to encourage or assist revolution in other
states should be sternly and effectually suppressed and
prevented. I need not argue these principles to you, my fellow
countrymen; they are your own part and parcel of your own
thinking and your own motives in affairs. They spring up
native amongst us. Upon this as a platform of purpose and of
action we can stand together. And it is imperative that we
should stand together. We are being forged into a new unity
amidst the fires that now blaze throughout the world. In
their ardent heat we shall, in God's Providence, let us
hope, be purged of faction and division, purified of the
errant humors of party and of private interest, and shall
stand forth in the days to come with a new dignity of
national pride and spirit. Let each man see to it that the
dedication is in his own heart, the high purpose of the
nation in his own mind, ruler of his own will and
desire. I stand here and have taken the high and solemn oath to
which you have been audience because the people of the
United States have chosen me for this august delegation of
power and have by their gracious judgment named me their
leader in affairs. I know now what the task means. I realize to the full the
responsibility which it involves. I pray God I may be given
the wisdom and the prudence to do my duty in the true spirit
of this great people. I am their servant and can succeed
only as they sustain and guide me by their confidence and
their counsel. The thing I shall count upon, the thing
without which neither counsel nor action will avail, is the
unity of America--an America united in feeling, in purpose
and in its vision of duty, of opportunity and of
service. We are to beware of all men who would turn the tasks and
the necessities of the nation to their own private profit or
use them for the building up of private power. United alike in the conception of our duty and in the
high resolve to perform it in the face of all men, let us
dedicate ourselves to the great task to which we must now
set our hand. For myself I beg your tolerance, your
countenance and your united aid. The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be
dispelled, and we shall walk with the light all about us if
we be but true to ourselves--to ourselves as we have wished
to be known in the counsels of the world and in the thought
of all those who love liberty and justice and the right
exalted.
March 5, 1917