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One of the big local American Youth Congress Councils, I am told, took a decisive stand against the granting of American loans to Finland not on the ground that we ought to spend the money here among our own needy unemployed, but on the ground that such action was "an attempt to force America into the imperialistic war." My friends, that reasoning was unadulterated twaddle based perhaps on sincerity, but, at the same time, on ninety per cent ignorance of what they were talking about.
I can say this to you with a smile because many of you will recognize the inherent wisdom and truth of what I am saying. Here is a small Republic in northern Europe, which, without any question whatsoever, wishes solely to maintain its own territorial and governmental integrity. Nobody with any pretense at common sense believes that Finland had any ulterior designs on the integrity or the safety of the Soviet Union.
That American sympathy is ninety-eight per cent with the Finns in their effort to stave off invasion of their own soil is by now axiomatic. That America wants to help them by lending or giving money to them to save their own lives is also axiomatic today. That the Soviet Union would, because of this, declare war on the United States is about the silliest thought that I have ever heard advanced in the fifty-eight years of my life. That we are going to war ourselves with the Soviet Union is an equally silly thought. Therefore, while I have not the slightest objection in the world to the passing of futile resolutions by conventions, I do think there is room for improvement in common-sense thinking, and definite room for improvement in the art of not passing resolutions concerning things one does not know everything about.
So I suggest that all of you can smile with me on this subject, but please do not pass resolutions of that kind again.
More than twenty years ago, while most of you were very young children, I had the utmost sympathy for the Russian people. In the early days of Communism, I recognized that many leaders in Russia were bringing education and better health and, above all, better opportunity to millions who had been kept in ignorance and serfdom under the imperial regime. I disliked the regimentation under Communism. I abhorred the indiscriminate killings of thousands of innocent victims. I heartily deprecated the banishment of religion—though I knew that some day Russia would return to religion for the simple reason that four or five thousand years of recorded history have proven that mankind has always believed in God in spite of many abortive attempts to exile God.
I, with many of you, hoped that Russia would work out its own problems, and that its government would eventually become a peace-loving, popular government with a free ballot, which would not interfere with the integrity of its neighbors.
That hope is today either shattered or put away in storage against some better day. The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world. It has allied itself with another dictatorship, and it has invaded a neighbor so infinitesimally small that it could do no conceivable possible harm to the Soviet Union, a neighbor which seeks only to live at peace as a democracy, and a liberal, forward-looking democracy at that.
FDR. Address to the Delegates of the American Youth Congress. Washington, D.C. February 10, 1940.
I can say this to you with a smile because many of you will recognize the inherent wisdom and truth of what I am saying. Here is a small Republic in northern Europe, which, without any question whatsoever, wishes solely to maintain its own territorial and governmental integrity. Nobody with any pretense at common sense believes that Finland had any ulterior designs on the integrity or the safety of the Soviet Union.
That American sympathy is ninety-eight per cent with the Finns in their effort to stave off invasion of their own soil is by now axiomatic. That America wants to help them by lending or giving money to them to save their own lives is also axiomatic today. That the Soviet Union would, because of this, declare war on the United States is about the silliest thought that I have ever heard advanced in the fifty-eight years of my life. That we are going to war ourselves with the Soviet Union is an equally silly thought. Therefore, while I have not the slightest objection in the world to the passing of futile resolutions by conventions, I do think there is room for improvement in common-sense thinking, and definite room for improvement in the art of not passing resolutions concerning things one does not know everything about.
So I suggest that all of you can smile with me on this subject, but please do not pass resolutions of that kind again.
More than twenty years ago, while most of you were very young children, I had the utmost sympathy for the Russian people. In the early days of Communism, I recognized that many leaders in Russia were bringing education and better health and, above all, better opportunity to millions who had been kept in ignorance and serfdom under the imperial regime. I disliked the regimentation under Communism. I abhorred the indiscriminate killings of thousands of innocent victims. I heartily deprecated the banishment of religion—though I knew that some day Russia would return to religion for the simple reason that four or five thousand years of recorded history have proven that mankind has always believed in God in spite of many abortive attempts to exile God.
I, with many of you, hoped that Russia would work out its own problems, and that its government would eventually become a peace-loving, popular government with a free ballot, which would not interfere with the integrity of its neighbors.
That hope is today either shattered or put away in storage against some better day. The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world. It has allied itself with another dictatorship, and it has invaded a neighbor so infinitesimally small that it could do no conceivable possible harm to the Soviet Union, a neighbor which seeks only to live at peace as a democracy, and a liberal, forward-looking democracy at that.
FDR. Address to the Delegates of the American Youth Congress. Washington, D.C. February 10, 1940.
