Date: October 7, 1916
Location: Boston, MA
(Original document available here)
This is more than a Republican Convention, – it is a patriotic reunion and festival. It reaches beyond former party lines. As Americans have done in every crisis, men have come here to put above party welfare the welfare of our country. For proof of this assertion you have but to read the names of those who are high in the counsels of these proceedings, and high on the state and national ticket, we are here this day to pledge ourselves to elect. For these fortunate circumstances much praise is due the Republican Chairman, Edward A. Thurston.
In the Executive Offices of yonder State House hangs a photograph of Governor Andrew and his Council taken in the dark and troublous days of 1863. Among those Honorable Councillors, supporting their great War Governor, supporting the cause of the Union under the leadership of President Lincoln, were two whose names have ever since been renowned for disinterested service to their fellowmen. Through their beginning last year with a most loyal support of a man worthy to succeed Andrew, and this year extending that support to a man worthy to succeed Lincoln, this convention sees today under its standard the yet more distinguished sons of those two patriotic sires, Charles Sumner Bird and Winthrop Murray Crane.
This convention may well take pride, not only in the soundness of the principles set out in its platform, but in the personal worth of my associate candidates for State and National offices. Representatives in Congress, you know them all, I shall not name them, each one is a “Chief in his own countrie” and entitled to be a leader in Washington, our splendid Chief Executive, pre-eminent among all the Governors of the Nation, my other associates on the State ticket, men of ability and understanding, and veterans all in the service of the Commonwealth, our senior senator for the first time giving the people a chance to elect him at the polls, a great scholar and more, a great Massachusetts senator, and more, a great patriotic statesman. When he speaks he is quoted all over the nation and listened to in all the chancellories of the earth, but who ever recognizes that the way for him to serve humanity is for him to serve first his native land. And above all stands that man of iron strength, of ability, of achievement, of dauntless courage, of purity and unflinching loyalty to his own convictions, Charles Evans Hughes.
I shall not dwell now upon the present state administration. It has been one of notable achievement. The abnormal increase in expenditures has been overmastered. Commissions reduced. Taxation reformed. Abuses remedied. There is now no long line of appointments waiting until after election to be made. It is no longer impossible to find competent men. The standard of public service has been raised.
But the contest begun so successfully in this Commonwealth last year, and which we are now carrying on, reaches beyond our own borders. There is a revolt against the National Democratic Administration both outside and inside their own party. Back in 1914 their own Massachusetts platform failed to endorse the government at Washington. In 1915 endorsement was handled very gingerly on the stump of this State. It was not pleasant to remember that Colonel House, a man of no official title, from Texas, had to be consulted as to patronage in Massachusetts. And in 1916 the favor of that administration has been fatal to candidates for nomination within the party in New York, in New Jersey, in Massachusetts, in Texas, where ex-Governor Colquitt declared that “the Wilson administration has been the greatest failure in the history of the Presidency,” and on that platform, defeated Senator Culberson by 31,000, in the Democratic primaries for the nomination for senator. The recent result in Maine is familiar to everybody
The chief reason for this revolt has been an utter lack of stability, manifested by entire disregard of platform pledges and party traditions, manifested by sounding proclamations and contrary actions.
Four years ago the slogan was tariff for revenue only, and reduction of the high cost of living, this year it is prosperity and peace.
The Republican Party has not forgotten the prosperity that flowed from its protective tariffs, nor the adversity that resulted from the free trade tariff of the present Democratic administration, and it proposes to hold them to the record. Their tariff law was passed in October 1913. A great journalist told me in the winter of 1914 that in November 1913 over 400,000 men had been discharged from employment. From patriotic motives he had not published it. The Secretary of the Treasury was having to promise relief from a financial stringency by issuing additional currency under the Aldrich Vreeland Act. Secretary Redfield was threatening the most searching investigation of any concern that dared reduce wages, the President himself talked of a gallows as high as Haman’s for those who dared to bring about a panic. It was going to be a crime not to prosper under a Democratic administration. Then the war came on and the alibi was shifted from conspiracy at home to catastrophe abroad. The party in power is entitled to whatever credit there is for any present prosperity if it wants to accept the responsibility for the present war. So long as their policies were in effect there was unemployment, suffering and want and business stagnation and a failure of the normal increase of wealth, as shown by the assessed valuation of our own Commonwealth. They cannot blame the war in 1914 and praise their law in 1916.
We stand for prosperity, but a prosperity that is our own, not one that comes only from the agony of nations abroad. We demand that prosperity that comes not from chance or favor but from the mastery of our own destiny. That prosperity the Democratic party is taking no step to secure. The capital of the investor, the bread of the wage earner, are in deadly peril and the party in power is leaving them to chance.
We stand for peace, for the reality as well as the name, for the only secure foundation for peace, the respect and confidence of other nations. An administration which is notorious for the violation of its pledges at home cannot maintain confidence abroad. But we want the results of peace. In the latter part of 1914 new taxes were imposed which we were solemnly informed were war taxes. We have twice resorted to force in the West Indies. Our marines met death at Veracruz, our soldiers at Carrizal. Our citizens have met violent deaths on our own soil, in Mexico and on the High Seas, where they had the same right to be and the same claim for protection from their government as though they were seated by their own fireside. Our property has been destroyed. Our citizen soldiers are now in the field. We have had peace only in name. That security for life and property, which alone makes peace worth while from a material point of view, has not existed. And more than that, the honor and respect of the world, which American citizens can secure only through our Foreign Office, and to which we are entitled, is gone.
We want peace, but we want more. We want prosperity. but we want more. These are the means, not the end, the accidental, not the essential. “Man cannot live by bread alone.” Whether peace come and prosperity, or war come and adversity, we demand an administration that shall provide for every American citizen, the full measure of his highest manhood, honor and righteousness of action at home and abroad. The Republican call is not a call to expediency, it is a call to duty.
Citation: Vermont Historical Society
The Coolidge Foundation gratefully acknowledges the volunteer efforts of Isaac Oberman, who prepared this document for digital publication.