Address at Symphony Hall in Boston, Massachusetts

Governor, Mr. Chairman:

It is, of course, always a pleasure for me to come to Boston, and I hope you will let me come back when I am out of a job.

This year I am not asking for votes for myself, but I want your votes for the Democratic Party just as much if not more than I did in 1948.

When I leave the White House next January 20th, I want to be able to turn over the duties of my great office to a man who is worthy to lead this Nation during the next 4 years. That man is Adlai Stevenson.

I hope at the same time you'll send Jack Kennedy to the Senate to work with him.

I know you will send my old friend, John McCormack, back to his job as majority leader in the House of Representatives.

And I want you to elect to the House of Representatives that fine group of new Democratic candidates for Congress, Frederick Hailer, Thomas O'Neill, and David J. Crowley. Now it is a very difficult situation for a President, and I am speaking from experience, when he has a contrary Congress, although I won the election on account of the fact that I did have one. But I want to give the new President a chance to do the job and put his program through.

I know you are going to continue your progressive and constructive State government by reelecting my good friend Governor Paul Dever, and the whole Democratic ticket. I'm going to spend a little time tonight talking with you about a self-styled crusade. Of course, it's not unusual to call a campaign a crusade, but in this case the military analogy is being carried just a little too far. The leader of the crusade has announced that the model for his crusaders is to be Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads.

Well Oliver Cromwell may have had his points, but his crusade, as I recall it, was one that started out as a matter of principle, and finished up by destroying parliamentary government and butchering women and children. God save us from a crusade like that.

That suggests that it is easier to start a crusade than it is to control it, particularly when a lot of fanatics are enrolled in the ranks. And tonight I want to take a good look at some of the fanatics that are enrolled in the great Republican crusade of 1952.

We Democrats have good reason to be on our guard against fanaticism in a political campaign.

The last time fanaticism was injected into a presidential campaign, deliberately and on a national scale, was in 1928.

In that campaign, the Democratic party was led by one of the finest men this country ever produced, Alfred E. Smith.

As the liberal and progressive Governor of New York throughout the period of reactionary Republican rule in Washington, he had already pointed out the path that the New Deal and the fair Deal were to follow after 1932.

You people of Boston don't have to be reminded of the tactics that were used to defeat Al Smith in 1928. It was the most disgraceful and un-American campaign in the history of the country.

Now, I am sincerely hoping that the present one doesn't set a new low, but I'm afraid that's just what's happening.

The opposition party has been desperately searching for an issue these past 4 years. But the country is strong and firm and prosperous. We are making progress in security, opportunity, and the enjoyment of our civil rights.

Abroad, the country has moved to meet the greatest danger to world civilization that we have ever seen. We have built the ramparts of the free world, and helped to man them. We have checked and frustrated the Communist plans for world conquest without bringing on world war III.

Now, my friends, these are tremendous achievements--of which this generation may well be proud.

So what have the Republicans dragged up as an issue ? It is so contrary to the facts as to be preposterous. It is the false charge that this administration--this party--your Democratic Party--has been soft toward communism.

Outside the lie-factory of the Kremlin itself, it would be hard to find a more fantastic perversion of the truth.

I am sure you could go around the world, talking to every person you met, from Ireland to Japan, and you wouldn't find a single one who thought that the Democratic Party was soft on communism--until you got back in this country, and talked to a Republican.

I can tell you truthfully--that is not what the people of Europe think. It is not what the people of Africa or Asia think. All around the world the free nations acknowledge us as the leaders in the resistance to communism.

I assure you the Russians do not think we are soft toward communism. They have been defeated, blocked, and thwarted at every turn of the road. My name and the name of this great party of ours are things they curse and grind their teeth at.

And soon they will be cursing the name of Adlai Stevenson the same way.

I don't think the Russians are by any means so sure that the Republican Party means business in this fight against communism. When it comes to speeches, the Republican Party may be way ahead; but when it comes to deeds, their record is far, far behind.

It is not the Democrats, but the Republicans in Congress who have been voting to cut aid to the free nations of Europe in this struggle against communism. It is not the Democrats, but the Republicans in Congress-who voted more than 6 to 1 to deny to the little Republic of Korea, almost on the eve of its invasion by the Communists, the help that they needed. If there was any act on our part that led the Communist leaders to believe they could launch their attack with impunity, it was that vote on the Korean aid bill in 1950.

In the light of the world struggle we are engaged in, the Republican talk about our being soft toward communism is surely one of the most desperate fabrications that a desperate party ever put forth. But they put it forth, and they continue to reiterate it, and I suppose the clamor will get even worse before election day.

They are using the technique of the big lie--the technique developed by Hitler--of advancing a falsehood so monstrous that it stuns the judgment of the listener, and then repeating it again and again--in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. And they are using this technique to play upon our legitimate fear and concern about Communist infiltration.

Now Communist infiltration is, of course, a threat to this country, as it is a threat to all free countries. It is a threat we must be aware of--one that we are aware of, and one that we have been handling through effective security measures for a long time. But it is not something that should make us lose our commonsense, lose all faith in our institutions, lose confidence in one another.

I think the whole picture has been put very well by Gen. Bedell Smith, who is the head of our Central Intelligence Agency-one of our most important agencies in the struggle against communism. He has said that we must always be on the alert against Communist espionage. No matter what precautions we may take, we can never assume that we are entirely safe from them. But, he said, our security is not a political matter. And he went on, and I am going to quote him:

"Any future President, Republican or Democrat, is going to have to work with the same security agencies now in existence. Both will have the same difficulties that we now encounter today. If either one of them, the Democrat or the Republican, does as well as President Truman in cooperation with the security agencies in ferreting out subversives, the American people can congratulate each other and will have little to worry about."

Now, my friends, those are the words of a Government security expert, a man who is a distinguished Army general--a four-star general.

He is a former Chief of Staff to the man who is now the Republican candidate for President. The Republican candidate knows him well, and I don't think that even he can deny that General Smith is a man to be trusted.

Now this is the important point: Security against Communist infiltration is not a partisan affair. It is just as easy for a Communist spy to deceive a Republican as it is for him to deceive a Democrat. Espionage and treachery are no respecters of the party label.

All through our history there have been instances of espionage and treason. And all through our history Americans have had the good sense to be disgusted and angry at the traitors, and not at the people they betrayed.

George Washington put his full faith and trust in Benedict Arnold, and gave him command of West Point, the key to our defenses in New York. When Benedict Arnold tried to turn that fort over to the British, the American people didn't scream about George Washington, and call for his removal. They did not say Washington was soft on Tories. They vented their wrath, quite properly, on the traitor--Benedict Arnold.

During the Revolutionary War, there was a wide net of British espionage and treachery throughout the colonies. It was a terrible threat to our survival.

If our Founding Fathers had been as jittery and hysterical as the Republicans of today, they would have lost their heads, suspecting and mistrusting each other, and they never would have won the war for independence. But they weeded out the British traitors quietly, as they went along; they stuck together, and they won.

That is what we will have to do.

No man is immune from being betrayed. Even the Holy Gospel teaches that very well.

This attempt to fix partisan blame for the existence of traitors is a new low in our political life.

But because so much effort has been made to misrepresent the whole question of Communist infiltration, I think I ought to tell you some of the things your administration has been doing about it.

Our fight against communism goes back a long way. In the despair of the Great Depression, communism had a chance to sell its false doctrines to the American public. It is easy to make a hungry, homeless, unemployed man hate his government and the economic system which has no place for him. In 1932 there were over 100,000 Communist votes.

But today, after 20 Democratic years, nearly all Americans are proud of their Government and of the economic system under which they live. The membership of the Communist Party today, according to J. Edgar Hoover, Director of FBI, is less than 25,000--25,000 and 157 million good citizens. Do you think they can overturn the Government?

We have been fighting communism by doing away with the conditions in which communism grows.

And the Republicans have been no help to us at all in this part of the struggle. They have fought the measures--like housing and minimum wages--which have cut the ground out from under the Communist propaganda. In fact they have called these measures communistic--and they have hurled scurrilous slanders of communism at those who have worked for these measures-from Franklin D. Roosevelt down to me.

But we have been successful in spite of them.

What is left of the Communist movement is a small, insidious underground conspiracy. It is a group designed to serve the interests of a foreign dictatorship, the Soviet Union, through deceit and treachery.

We have met this part of the threat, too. In 1939 President Roosevelt directed the FBI to take charge of all investigative work in matters relating to espionage, sabotage, and subversive activities. I have continued the work of the FBI in this field, and have expanded it.

Skillfully and systematically, the FBI and the Department of Justice have been breaking up the Communist conspiracy in the United States. They have caught Soviet espionage agents. They have sent the principal leaders of the Communist Party to jail for conspiring to advocate the overthrow of our Government by force and violence.

In addition, the Department of Justice has proceeded against the Communist conspiracy on every other level. It has secured convictions against hundreds of Communists for perjury, contempt of Congress, contempt of court, and other crimes relating to communism. Since 1939 it has been unlawful for a Communist to work for the Federal Government. All Government employees have been required to take an oath that they are not Communists or members of an organization that advocates overthrow of our Government.

In addition, employees of the executive branch are checked by the FBI. In those cases where the check shows there is any question about the loyalty of an employee, the FBI gives him a thorough investigation, clear back to the time he was born. The FBI investigates every charge or suggestion or indication--from whatever source--that a Government employee is a Communist or is not loyal to the Government.

In this way, persons who are found to be Communists, or of doubtful loyalty, are kept out of the Government.

If there are any Communists or subversives in the Federal Government today, they will be thrown out just as fast as they can be identified by the FBI or the other security agencies of the Government.

But, my friends, the Government employees will not be fired without evidence. They will not be convicted on the mere basis of accusation. I am still a believer in the Bill of Rights, my friends.

Quietly, relentlessly, this work of maintaining our security goes on. It is a hard and thankless task. It doesn't get headlines in the papers. The headlines go to the headline hunters, when they deny that the job is being well done.

A little group of reckless politicians have discovered that they can get great publicity for themselves if they bring to light any bits and pieces of this incessant process of security screening.

The uproar started when a Republican Senator, through devious means, managed to get his hands on the results of a number of these security investigations. These were old cases, but he dumped them all into the public record and claimed that he had uncovered a whole host of Communists in the State Department. My friends, he hadn't uncovered a single Communist, and he hasn't uncovered a single Communist to this day. And he can't do it.

But as a result of the publicity he got, the Republicans decided to make a big thing out of the false charges of Communists in the Government. They began to attack their political opponents, and Government employees who resisted their demands, even their critics in the press--as Communists. And every time they did it, the one-party press gave them a headline--increasing their appetite for more headlines.

The low point in this hysteria was reached when they tried to besmirch the reputation-the honor and the integrity--of one of the finest, most honorable, and most patriotic soldiers and public servants we have ever had--Gen. George C. Marshall.

Now, my friends, the moral pigmies who assailed this truly great man were Senator Jenner of Indiana and Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin.

The Republican candidate for President probably owes more to General Marshall than he does to any other living man. General Marshall trusted him, gave him his great opportunities, and backed him up when the going was rough.

Yet the Republican candidate, far from condemning these two slanderers of his great friend, has welcomed them to his campaign-has shaken their hands in public-has appealed to the voters to send them to the Senate to help him, if he is elected.

For me, these acts tell volumes about the character of the Republican candidate for President. I am sorry. I am saddened by that action.

Most of us, I think, believe a man ought to be loyal to his friends when they are unjustly attacked; that he ought to stand up for them, even if it costs him some votes. At any rate, that is a rule of my life. I stand by my friends.

I don't know what the strategy board of the Republican Party thinks about it--nor do I care--but I say that a man who won't stand up for the honor and good name of his friends can't be relied on to stand up for anything else. I don't trust a man like that, and I don't think you do, either.

What the Republican candidate for President has done is more than endorse an unworthy individual. He has endorsed a technique--a reign of terror by slander. He has endorsed the indiscriminate slaughter of the good name of one's opponents as a method of political warfare. Henceforth, unless this thing is stopped, we are all in danger--every Democrat, every liberal, every minority group, every decent citizen who dares to oppose these men of poisoned tongues.

The Republican candidate has given himself to the whirlwind--the tempest of slander, which has grown strong on our fear of communism. He hopes that he can ride into office on it. But he may find it stronger than he is. And at any rate, it is a strange ending for his "great crusade." What started out as a matter of principle, like Cromwell's crusade, is ending up in the butchery of the reputations of innocent men and women. And that is tragic--that is tragic.

This is what I mean by the fanaticism that has now taken over the "great crusade."

At this point, it would be a good thing for us all to remember the words of the Catholic bishops of the United States-uttered a year ago as a warning against this very danger.

They said, and I quote: "Dishonesty, slander, detraction, and defamation of character are as truly transgressions of God's commandments when resorted to by men in political life as they are for all other men."

Nothing was ever more truly said. These are good words for us to heed, and to follow.

I do not have to point out to you that they constitute a principle which has been followed throughout his public career by a man who is now the Democratic candidate for President--Adlai Stevenson.

In his words, as in his acts, Adlai Stevenson has demonstrated that he is fair, honest, and courageous. He has not stooped to lies, or half-truths. He has fought a hard campaign cleanly. No shady equivocation, no slimy innuendo has passed his lips, whatever the provocation.

His, my friends, is a character you can trust.

His is the party you can trust.

His is the great party of the American people, firm in their belief in right conduct, unshakable in their faith in God, united against the monstrous evils of communism and godlessness in all their forms, confident of winning the way, under Divine Guidance, to a just and lasting peace.