Memorial Day Address at Arlington National Cemetery

Veterans of Our Armies:

This is the special day of the nation's gratitude, most genuinely felt and most gladly expressed. I do not believe republics are ungrateful. They may sometimes have the seeming of ingratitude, but since republics must be like the citizens who constitute them, we are bound to believe our Republic full of the gratitude which animates our citizenship.

Sometimes we reasonably may ask what are the most becoming expressions of genuine gratitude. I have seen it in individuals so deep and so engulfing that it could not be expressed in words. Grateful souls are sometimes silent, though inwardly vibrant with grateful appreciation. On reflection I believe the gratitude of action vastly surpasses that of words. It is good to have the spoken expression. The world needs more of it. I wish we might have less condemnation of error and more commendation of right. We ought to have much less of bitter criticism of errors and more of approval and appreciation for things well done. I am not thinking of government so much as of the individual. When we do a helpful thing for the individual, we help the whole community. And I like to think of the individual citizen as a veteran of our contending forces in peace as well as a defender in war, who deserves likewise the gratitude of his countrymen. It little matters what war one served in. The supreme offering of life on the altar of American patriotism was the same in every one. No man could offer more. It calls for gratitude unlimited and unfailing.

The span of life of the republic is yet so limited that veterans of the Mexican War are still surviving, and widows of veterans of the War of 1812 are now on the Government's pension rolls. We rejoice that so many of the Grand Army of the Republic survive to give us the very soul of the day they originated, and we honor the participants in the Spanish-American War, and with all the honored older veterans we gratefully include the fallen of the great World War in the offering of memory. Yes, we are met in memory of the fallen, but I can not escape the thought that the real compensation comes to the living. The fallen do not, can not know of our remembrance of them, but the living may take to their breasts the consolation that the republic does love and revere, and comfort ourselves in so doing. Just as sure as present-day civilization endures, just so sure will the Americans of next year and the next century and the century after that be meeting gratefully on Memorial Day to pay memory's tribute to the soldier dead who had served the Republic. Veterans marching near the shadows, but with heads erect and hearts all brave; veterans of middle age, who look back on marvelous achievement and to the future for still greater; veterans of youth, with the seriousness of life mostly before them, starting with the supreme experience—all may go on, assured of a becoming and grateful remembrance, which is chief among the compensations of life.

I spoke a moment ago of the deeper gratitude expressed in action. My thought was not of compensations or of pensions or of the Government's care for the disabled. These are obligations, and their discharge is a national duty. There can be a gratitude of action which is a still finer and nobler thing. It was a nation grateful in action which followed the Civil War with reunion and reconstruction, and strode forward to a concord of union which did not exist prior to the war, revealed the mutuality of interest essential to the nation expanding in influence and power. It was gratitude of action to develop a union which has been proven to be worth preserving, in spite of all the cost involved. It was gratitude of action which led the republic to keep faith with the ideals of liberty which led the veterans of 1898 to strike at oppression. With the expanded area of the flag has attended the expanded area of liberty which we grant to others, precisely as we demand for ourselves. It is the gratitude of action which has so zealously committed us to the preservation of the civilization for which the World War veterans fought, and the task is only a little less difficult than theirs. Civilization can never be entrenched, it must battle in the open, ever ready to march on. Entrench it and it dies. Its defense must be progressively offensive. In the inspiration of the example of you who have thrice saved the republic, and firm in the belief of the righteousness of American intent, and strong in the faith, we mean to carry on.

There is another gratitude of action which surpasses all expressed in the others, which I hope to see recorded to glorify the last days of the Civil War veterans and to add fullness to the lives of the World War veterans, and tranquilize the lives of all America and the world. I devoutly wish the United States to do its full part toward making war unlikely if not impossible. While I would abhor a pacifist America, I would rejoice to have the United States proven to be unafraid, and yet the most peace-loving and the foremost peace-promoting nation in all the world. We have already proven that we can have less of armament. Let us strive for the assurance that we shall have none of war.

There comes into the lives of each and every one of us, sometimes, a picture never to be effaced from memory. Veterans in the service have seen the suffering and sacrifices and the thrilling heroisms which are never visible except to those engaged in conflict. I have tried to visualize the carnage and conflict and the horrors and suffering of war, softened by the comradery of camp and the less perilous adventures of march and field, but I came to understand how imagination had failed me, when I stood at a Hoboken pier, among 5,000 dead, in their flag-draped coffins, two years ago. Here was death in war's unheeding allotment, corridors of sorrow and sacrifice so far as the eye could see, and grief that no human soul could appraise. Under the spell of the great sorrow which gripped my heart, I said then and repeat now, "It must not be again! It must not be again!"

But the saying is not enough. We must do the things which rational thinking leads us to believe will tend to render war less likely. If we ever have the insanity to make conflict among ourselves we will deserve to sacrifice. But that must never be. Searching our own souls, believing in our own good intent, we can see no cloud on the horizon. We are thinking of no war for us, anywhere. But there was no cloud for us in, 1914, and yet we were drawn into the very cataclysm of all wars.

It is not enough to seek assurance for ourselves. I believe it a God-given duty to give of our influence to establish the ways of peace throughout the world. We cannot guarantee, but we can promote the peaceful adjustment of disputes, we can aid in the establishment of the agencies of peace, we can be influential in committing the world to the triumphs of peace and make hateful to humankind the spoils of war. Americans have gloried in our part as the exemplar of representative democracy to aspiring peoples of the world. If we have been successful as the exemplar of democracy there is a duty to perform in pointing the way and influencing the adoption of democracy's peace. This is a world relationship we cannot avoid and will not avoid in the spirit of the America of which we rejoice to boast. But there is one thing which we may do among ourselves alone to make our own participation less likely and banish much of war's hatefulness if national honor must call us to arms.

Standing amid a group of veterans of North and South in glad reunion at Gettysburg in 1913, I heard these sturdy warriors argue how they had been drawn into conflict by the wealth of North and South. That was well enough to argue that kindred Americans had no reason to fight one another. But they were far away from the great cause. Amid the conflicting ideas and interests in the chaos of the great beginning an ambiguity was written into the Constitution and it had to be wiped out. The fathers had not settled the dispute in the making, and their descendants had to fight it out in the development of the nation. It has brought us the needful concord of union and the greater possibilities of the nation. The arguing veterans, fifty years after Gettysburg, on the scene of the world-famed combat, were thinking of industrial greed in the North and slave-owning greed in the South. But in reality their prejudices had been inspired by the hateful profiteering incident to war.

In all the wars of all time the conscienceless profiteer has put the black blot of greed upon righteous sacrifice and highly purposed conflict. In our fuller understanding of today, in that exalted consciousness that every citizen has his duty to perform and that his means, his honor and his life are his country's in a time of national peril, in the next war, if conflict ever comes again, we will not alone call to service the youth of the land, which has, in the main, fought all our wars, but we will draft every resource, every activity, all of wealth, and make common cause of the nation's preservation.

God grant that no conflict will come again, but if it does it shall be without profit to the noncombatant participants except as they share in the triumphs of the nation. It will be a more grateful nation which consecrates all to a common cause, and there will be more to share the gratitude bestowed. More, there will be a finer conscience in our war commitments and that sublimity of spirit which makes a people invincible.

Oh, it is a glad privilege today to utter a special love and reverence for the Civil War veterans who still witness the progress of the nation they saved, and find new reason, from year to year, to glory in their achievement. Out of their example is undying inspiration, for their accomplishment is measureless gratitude. I like to tell these aged veterans before me that long after they are gone we will be gratefully remembering them and all succeeding generations will sing their glory. And every time we meet to memorialize and honor them, every time our successors meet to pay annual tribute, there will be a patriotic resolution in every grateful heart to be worthy of the heritage which these have left behind, each to do his part in the making of a greater and a better republic, mindful of every obligation at home and unafraid to play our part in the world in which he lives.