Will you follow example of Kansan’s political courage?
Excerpted from a speech given
in 1957 at the University of Kansas
I feel a great sense of privilege and responsibility in appearing in this state — for this is the home of a great United States senator of the past who has long been an inspiration to me and who consequently played a major role in my book, “Profiles in Courage.”
I refer, of course, to one of this state’s earliest senators some 90 years ago, the man who performed what the late Professor F.H. Hodder of Kansas University called “the most heroic act in American history” and who for a time made his home in this city.
His name — which I shall never forget — is, of course, Edmund G. Ross.
Of all the acts of courage described in my book, Ross’ was the bravest of them all. When he rose on the Senate floor to cast the vote that saved President Andrew Johnson from impeachment conviction, he knew he was destroying a promising political career.
As he later described it: “I almost literally looked down into my own open grave. Friendships, position, fortune, everything that makes life desirable to an ambitious man were about to be swept away by the breath of my mouth, perhaps forever.”
Tragic to say, Edmund Ross was not exaggerating the fury that would fall upon him for his determined position.
And yet, he was equally correct when he wrote to his wife shortly after the trial: “Millions of men cursing me today will bless me tomorrow for having saved the country from the greatest peril through which it has ever passed, though none but God can ever know the struggle it has cost me.”
We need throughout the country today the courage and determination of Edmund Ross. Unfortunately, too many of you, I am afraid, have no interest in becoming senators or working in any other political capacity.
Some will point out the advantages of civil service positions. Others will talk in high terms of public service, or statesmanship, or community leadership. But few, if any, will urge you to become politicians.
Mothers may still want their favorite sons to grow up to be president, but, according to a famous Gallup poll of some years ago, they do not want them to become politicians in the process.
Successful politicians, according to Walter Lippmann, are “insecure and intimidated men” who “advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate” the views and votes of the people who elect them.
It was considered a great joke years ago when humorist Artemus Ward declared: “I am not a politician, and my other habits are good also.”
In more recent times, even the president of the United States [Kansan Dwight Eisenhower], when asked at a news conference early in his first term how he liked “the game of politics,” replied with a frown that his questioner was using a derogatory phrase.
Being president, he said, is a “very fascinating experience … but the word ‘politics’ … I have no great liking for that.”
Politics, in short, has become one of our most neglected, our most abused, and our most ignored professions. It ranks low on the occupational list of a large share of the population, and its chief practitioners are rarely well or favorably known.
No education, except finding your way around a smoke-filled room, is considered necessary for political success.
“Don’t teach my boy poetry,” a mother recently wrote the headmaster of Eton. “He’s going to stand for Parliament.”
Both teachers and students find it difficult to accept the differences between the laboratory and the legislature.
In the former, the goal is truth, pure and simple, without regard to changing currents of public opinion.
In the latter, compromises and majorities and procedural customs and rights affect the ultimate decision as to what is right or just or good.
Even when they realize the difference, most intellectuals consider their chief function to be that of the critic — and most politicians are sensitive to critics, possibly because we have so many of them.
I would ask those of you who look with disdain and disfavor upon the possibilities of a political career to remember that our nation’s first great politicians were traditionally our ablest, most respected, most talented leaders — men who moved from one field to another with amazing versatility and vitality.
A contemporary described Thomas Jefferson as “a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin.”
Daniel Webster could throw thunderbolts on the Senate floor and then stroll a few steps down the corridor and dominate the Supreme Court as the foremost lawyer of his time.
John Quincy Adams, after being summarily dismissed from the Senate for a notable display of independence, became Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard and then a great secretary of state.
A little more than 100 years ago, in the presidential campaign of 1856, the Republicans sent three brilliant orators around the campaign circuit: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In those carefree days, it seems, the egg-heads were all Republicans.
I would urge that each of you, regardless of your chosen occupation, consider entering the field of politics at some stage in your career.
It is not necessary that you be famous, that you effect radical changes in the government, or that you are acclaimed by the public for your efforts.
It is not even necessary that you be successful. I ask only that you offer to the political arena, and to the critical problems of our society, which are decided therein, the benefit of your talents, which society has helped to develop in you.
I ask you to decide, as Goethe put it, whether you will be an anvil or a hammer.
The question now is whether you are to be a hammer — whether you are to give to the world in which you were reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of that education.
It is not enough to lend your talents to merely discussing the issues and deploring their solutions.
I do not say that politics is an easy, comfortable profession, as the career of Edmund Ross illustrates.
Yet ours is an essential role in a democracy. As T.V. Smith, — both a university professor and a congressman, put it: “We catch it from both sides, but were it not for our kind, eventually there would not be two sides.”
When Edmund G. Ross cast his decisive vote, the bitter, crippled Thad Stevens was heard to remark as he was carried by his bearers out of the Senate chamber: “The country is going to the devil!”
But this country is never going to the devil if Kansas can give us more Edmund Rosses, if you who are here today will bear in mind not the sneers of the cynics or the fears of the purists, for whom politics will never be an attraction — but will bear in mind instead these words which are inscribed behind the speaker’s desk high on the Chamber Wall of the United States House of Representatives, inscribed for all to see and all to ponder, these words of the most famous statesman my state ever sent to the Halls of Congress, Daniel Webster:
“Let us develop the resources of our land — call forth its power — build up its institutions — promote all its great interests — and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.”