Germans As Freemen
If it is so, then the great triumph of America is that in America even the Germans have become good citizens, lovers of liberty, quick to resent dictation. They have fought for good government from the time of Carl Schurz; for freedom of the press since the days of Zenger; they have hated tyranny and corruption since the time of Thomas Nast; they have fought for the oppressed since the time of Altgeld. Of the six million Germans who emigrated, the vast majority were capable of living peaceably and serviceably with their fellowmen. Of these six, one million fled from reactionary governments after the democratic revolution of 1848 had failed, millions of others came to escape the harsh imperialism of victorious Germany after 1870. To them, the Germany of the Kaiser was undesirable, the Germany of Hitler unthinkable. Yet their countrymen, left behind, tolerated one and embraced the other with sickening adulation. It is as if America had drawn off the six million Germans capable of understanding and taking part in a democratic civilization, leaving the materials for Hitlerism behind.
In any case, the Germans in America have proved that Hitler lies to the Germans; they are neither a superior race nor a people incapable of self-government; they will not rule the world, nor be a nation of slaves.
The Brotherhood of the Oppressed
We can say this to the Germans, destroying their illusions and their fears at one stroke. How much more we can say to the great patient peoples whom Germany now enslaves! They have seen the German conquest of Continental Europe; the ascendancy of the Teutonic-Aryan is complete. What can the Norwegian or the Bulgar or the Rumanian believe, except that there is a superior race—and it is not his own?
Fortunately for us, the European has never ceased to believe in America, in us. Not as a military race, not as a race at all; but as people of incredible good fortune in the world. And we can say to every man who has bowed his head, but kept his heart bitter against Hitler, that we have the proof of the equal dignity of every man's soul, a proof which Hitlerism can never destroy. We can say to the Greeks who see the swastika over the Parthenon and the Norwegian whose bed is stripped of its comforters, and to the Serb still fighting in the mountain passes, the one thing Hitler dares not let them believe—that they are as good as other men. We have the proof that under liberty Croats and Finns and Catalans and Norwegians are as good as Germans—because they are men, because under liberty there is no end to what they and their children may accomplish.
If we ever again think that this is oratory, we shall lose our greatest hope of a free world. The orators were too often promising too much because they were betraying America on the side; still they could not falsify the truth which the practical men and the poets both had discovered: America means opportunity. Now we can see the vast implications of the simple assertion. Because America meant opportunity, we can incite riot against Hitler in the streets of Oslo and Prague and even in Vienna; we have proved that given opportunity, freed of artificial impediments, men walk erect, do their work, collaborate to rule over and be ruled by their fellowmen; and that there is no master race, no master class.
This is our address to the people of Europe—that we believe in them, because we know them. We know they can free themselves because they have shown the instincts of free men here; we know they are destined to create a free Europe.
The people of Europe have to know that we are their friends. It will be hard for us to make some of them believe it—as the French did not believe it when we failed to break the British blockade in their favor. But we must persuade them—we have their brothers and mothers and sons here to speak for us.
It was not easy for Woodrow Wilson to speak to the Germans and the Austrians. He had no radio; his facilities for pamphleteering were limited. But he succeeded. Our task is formidable enough; because the radio is so guarded, it may be harder for us to reach the captured populations. But it can be done and will be, as soon as we see how necessary the job is.