Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

Remarks at the Annual Breakfast of Masonic Leaders.

February 24, 1955

Mr. Chairman, My Friends:

I use that form of address, I hope, with no intimation of egotism in claiming all of you in such capacity.

In the first place, I am unaccustomed to the usages of fraternal orders, and I wouldn't know how to address you properly should I try to follow protocol. And in the second place, although I notice among this audience certain individuals who to my astonishment--sometimes to my utter amazement--have differed with me on a specific political question, I note also among the audience many that I have classed as my warm personal friends for years. I sincerely trust that all of you feel that we can have differences without breaking a friendship.

But I do feel a very great sense of friendship for individuals of the Americas, because I conceive it to be the first duty of anybody in public office in a free country to sustain freedom wherever it may be alive, or struggling to come alive. In such a body as this, I feel not only at home, I feel a warm sense of fellowship that I am certain can scarcely be closer were I a member myself of this great organization.

It is for a number of reasons that I feel a distinct sense of pride in coming over here this morning. First, as you know, I spent a great deal of my life in uniformed service, and I look forward to seeing some uniforms. To each individual who out in front of the hotel this morning formed part of that colorful guard of honor: my thanks. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Then when I came in and the choir greeted us with the Battle Hymn of the Republic, I almost went out to look for a recruiting office. A little later, when this great band favored us with the "Caissons Go Rolling Along," I started to get up and march around the room.

These things are things that touch the sentiment, the spirit of a man. And it is that, if I may, that I would like to talk to you about for just a little bit this morning: the spirit of the individual-his feeling toward his country, toward the society in which he lives.

And when I mention country, may I say to our South American, our Canadian, and our friends of other nationalities here, I would hope that my words can be felt by you to apply to your country as well.

We hear a lot in our Fourth of July speeches about the great privileges of American citizenship. We are wont to parade them--our rights, our priceless heritage, and our privileges-throughout the world and to ourselves. And they are indeed priceless.

I should like to talk for just a few moments about the responsibilities devolving upon the individual that make possible the maintenance of those rights.

There are great new problems to perform in any society. The care of the sick and the unfortunate, the security of a group in terms of national security and local security, and all the rest. Free government is based on the theory that there will be a certain element of spontaneous cooperation among free people in order to get these jobs done; that they will not all have to be done from a centrally directed authority. The more we allow a centrally directed authority to take these responsibilities and to exercise the necessary authority that goes with responsibility, the more we are deserting the great responsibilities on which rest these great rights and individual liberties.

So one of the prides I feel was the knowledge that I was coming to a group who through its association takes on its own shoulders one of the great civic responsibilities: to help care for the unfortunate, to make certain that they are doing something to discharge that old feeling that we do have a selfish interest, indeed, in the welfare of our brothers. In such a society as ours, unless the whole prospers, the individual cannot prosper; unless the individuals in themselves are prospering, then the whole cannot prosper. We will be serving our own ends of the preservation of our rights and discharging our responsibilities when we do these things.

Government has a function in all of these civic responsibilities, in all these problems. But the genius of our Government has been, of course, its federated principle: a central government of limited powers and authorities, giving to each State, to each community, and above all to each individual, certain things he must do, if this great experiment in government, this great revolutionary movement that is still going on, is to succeed.

The Communists claim it cannot. Those of you who have studied carefully any Communist book will find in it a great dwelling upon inherent contradictions within a free society. They prove to their apparent satisfaction that it cannot succeed.

I believe that you gentlemen, each of you who is participating in the great fraternal work of your organization to help the unfortunate, are setting an example to all of us that we must do our duty, if we are to prove the Communists to be in error.

I could not more express my pride than to say I feel that I am in a group which by its actions recognizes its brotherhood at the feet of the Almighty, and discharges the obligations of brotherhood by doing for others those things that other people deserve merely because they are humans and, like yourselves, children of a common God.

And so in these halting words I hope you can find the real reason for my pride in being invited here this morning before such a body, to express to you a few of the words that lie in my heart. Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at the Statler Hotel, Washington, D.C. His opening words "Mr. Chairman" referred to Frank S. Land, founder of the Order of DeMolay and Imperial Potentate of A.A.O.N.M.S.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Remarks at the Annual Breakfast of Masonic Leaders. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/233975

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