Address to the Gridiron Club.

Gentlemen of the Gridiron Club and your guests:

I know I express your gratitude to the Gridiron Club for its hospitality and for a full and comprehensive exposition of national problems and policies by those who have large information and no responsibility.

In the middle ages it was the fashion to wear hair shirts to remind one's self of trouble and sin. Many years ago I concluded that a few hair shirts were part of the mental wardrobe of every man. The President differs only from other men in that he has a more extensive wardrobe. We have had tonight an indication of the great variety of persons and organizations who cheerfully and voluntarily insist on acting as hair shirts for the President. I am not complaining; I am only explaining one of the things that train his soul and his public conduct in urbanity. Incidentally, you could discover from these proceedings why Presidents seldom worry about anything. They have so many troubles in the closet or stowed away in the icebox that when one of them gets tiresome they can always send for another, and by great variety maintain interest and a high cheerfulness of spirit.

You have from time to time during this meeting heard mention of the Senate, and you listened to observations upon the relations of the Executive with this great coordinate arm of the Government. I have for some time also been an interested observer of these relations. I have even searched through the intimate history of my predecessors since George Washington, endeavoring earnestly to discover remedies, antidotes, sedatives, irritants, stimulants, and experience. The important thing I have observed from an inspection of 30 administrations is that there is nothing new on this subject. Presidents have long since learned that one of the undisclosed articles in the Bill of Rights is that criticism and digging of political graves are reserved exclusively to members of the legislative arm. But Presidents have also learned that they have one privilege not extended to members of the legislative arm--they have the option on when to talk and when not to talk.

There is always a minority of the Members of Congress who hope that the President will fail in his task, and who make the same unkind remarks in every administration in exactly the same phrases. Those who say the sensational things necessarily command the attention of the press. They do not represent the great majority of that body. The oppositions in Congress developed the same strategies even in Washington's day as those they now employ. Never has there been a session of Congress when somebody did not waste vast energy building a Scylla and a Charybdis for the President to navigate, or did not elaborately spread those old traps known as the devil and the deep blue sea. At various points in every important debate the opposition never fails to call vigorously upon the Executive to exert leadership, to give direction, to use the big stick. If he yields to these temptations, he is immediately discovered to be meddling in the responsibilities of the independent arm of the Government. This is the oldest form of the devil-and-the-deep-blue-sea trap. The Republican Party has no right to complain; it has been the preoccupation of the opposition with this sort of deep and subtle political strategy over many decades that wins us national elections in our party.

Some people become impatient with the length of debate. But let us not forget that any legislation that involves the safety and the welfare of the United States must be probed to the bottom. It is the safety and the [p.472] vitalizing force of all legislation. In some ways legislatures are much like the old-fashioned rail fences. Some rails are perfect, others are rough. Many of them point in the wrong direction. There are some with sharp splinters. It covers a lot of ground. Yet the fence itself marches straight and performs its function in an effective and lasting manner. Those of us who have had opportunity to observe legislative bodies in other countries, and at the same time to understand some of the varied human motives of men, make no apologies for the Senate of the United States. Together with the House of Representatives it has for over 150 years not only served the American People, but they have time and again proved themselves the greatest of all legislatures of the world.

One of your anxieties this evening has been my appointment of commissions and committees. You have been misled into the impression that I shall soon appoint one every day. That is wrong--I shall probably need to appoint two a day. My conception of government leads me to the firm conviction that we have arrived at a time in our history, because of the increasing complexity of our civilization and the delicacy of its adjustments, when we must make doubly certain that we discover the truth. It is necessary that we make the fullest use of the best brains and the best judgment and the best leadership in our country before we determine upon policies which affect the welfare of 120 million people. And I propose to do it.

The President of the United States is obliged to determine a multitude of questions and policies. By the Constitution he must recommend to Congress such measures as he shall deem necessary and expedient, and he is required to finally pass upon every act of Congress. He is the Chief Executive of the greatest business in the world, which at some point touches upon every single activity of our people.

By his position he must, within his capacities, give leadership to the development of moral, social, and economic forces outside of government which make for betterment of our country.

If we are to curtail the extension of the arm of government into the affairs of our people, we must do it by inspiration of individuals, by cooperation with voluntary organizations, that they through their own initiative, through their own action should remedy abuse and initiate [p.473] progress. Self-government comprises more than political institutions. It is more than municipal governments and State governments, legislatures, and executive officers.

The safeguard against oppressive invasions of government into the lives and liberties of our people is that we shall cure abuse and forward progress without the government action. That is self-government in the highest form of which democracy has yet given conception--that is self-government outside of government.

The committees of Congress are themselves commissions for the investigation and determination of legislative policies. But Congress cannot longer encompass the entire human field. Congress cannot determine administrative policies; it cannot inspire or lead voluntary forces.

The most dangerous animal in the United States is the man with an emotion and a desire to pass a new law. He is prolific with drama and the headlines. His is not the road to the fundamental advance of the liberty and the progress of the American people at this time in our history. The greatest antidote for him is to set him upon a committee with a dozen people whose appetite is for facts. The greatest catastrophe that could come to our country is that administration policies or legislation or voluntary movements shall be encouraged or enacted upon the basis of emotion, not upon facts and reason.

The President has open to him many governmental agencies in search for fact and for the determination of conclusion from them. He receives the largest measure of assistance from the executive departments and congressional committees. But over and beyond all these agencies there are a thousand problems; where the truth must be searched from a multitude of facts; where individual and regional experience must be had; where new ideas must be recruited from the kaleidoscope of a great shifting mass of humanity; where judgment must be distilled from many minds; where common agreement must be secured from conflicting forces; where assurance must be given to the people of the correctness of conclusions; and where their exposition must be secured.

These subjects cover the whole range of human thought, and I do not arrogate to myself the combined knowledge or judgment of the [p.474] technologists, the philosophers, the scientists, the social thinkers, the economists, and the thousand callings of our people.

In these matters commissions and committees of our citizens can be made to add to the security of our steps and the certainty of acceptance of our policies. There is no worse agency of government than commissions and committees for executive action. Action requires undivided mind and undivided responsibility. But for the purpose of these special determinations I shall need more and more commissions, and more and more conferences, and I am grateful for the willingness our citizens have shown to give their time and service upon them.

And it is my belief that this is a vital means of government by the people and for the people, now that the people have ceased to live the simple life.

Those who have responsibility have but little to complain of and much to be grateful for from the press. If they were to complain it would be not against the representatives of the press but against the appetite of the American people as to the form of news. The human animal gets most of his thrills out of Washington from accounts of rivalry, conflict, fight, and combat, both actual and prospective. The press must cater to this and most of the news must be projected in this form, whether it be a stage fight or mere difference of opinion. Obviously, such accounts create and intensify enmities and thus increase combats and generate more news.

But when national interest requires it, the press does not fail to shift from combat to cooperation.

The Nation has passed through a trying period during the past month. Fear, alarm, pessimism, and hesitation swept through the country, which, if unchecked, would have precipitated absolute panic throughout the business world with untold misery in its wake. Its acute dangers were far greater than we are able to disclose at the present time. But the Washington correspondents and the press not only sensed that danger but gave a wholehearted cooperation which contributed in large degree to smothering that conflagration. We shall feel aftereffects. But the outstanding contribution of the press was the entire abandonment of the [p.475] search for conflict. The search was for the points of agreement, the word of men of good will, the spread of cooperation.

I am wishing that the press could join in another demonstration of national solidarity in the face of national danger. We have for years seen the steady growth of friction between great naval powers arising from competitive armament. I don't hold that it meant inevitable war, but certainly the continuing pouring of its poison into public mind does not make for peace. The steady arming of Europe before the Great War by the same competitive processes was not the perfection of peace on that occasion.

We have inaugurated conferences designed to bring this competition to an end. The success of those conferences will depend as much upon the press as upon the abilities and character of the negotiators. If the press goes to London resolved that the differences which will inevitably develop shall be painted as fights, campaigns, and combats, rather than earnest effort to find the area of agreement, if the conference is to be represented to the people of the world as an international war of words and intrigue, it will fail. If it fails, the poison flowing from the failure will be a thousandfold more potent in suspicion and hate than ever before.

Never in our history has the press played so large a part or incurred so great a responsibility in our foreign relations as at present. The seasoned public opinion and the example of the American people have become the most powerful influences for peace and orderly progress of the world. Its mobilization at home and the cooperation in its use with other nations abroad is our contribution to peace, entirely within our time-honored refusal to become entangled in such engagements as might involve us in the use of military force.

America has always occupied that mission in the world. Here was lifted the first banner of the right of men to govern themselves, and that voice resounded through the revolutionary drums of the world for a century. It was Americans who first gave effective voice that controversies between nations should be settled by arbitration and judicial determination. It was the public opinion of America which intervened that the results of the World War should not repeat the aftermath of [p.476] the Thirty Years' War, when one-third of the population of Europe died. It was the voice of America that led to the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. It is the United States that successfully summoned the public opinion of the world against the first violation of the Kellogg Pact. It was the public opinion of the United States that enacted the call for a reduction of naval arms.

Recently I made the suggestion that the time had come when men should renounce starvation of women and children as a weapon of war, not alone for humane considerations but to remove a constant impulse to increasing arms. I have suggested that its enforcement must rest upon the public opinion of the world. There has been an almost universal approbation from our own countrymen of that proposal because it represents the spirit of America. From abroad has come its approval by the leaders of a score of nations. There are discordant notes and discordant nations. The old fallacy has been again produced that making war more terrible will frighten nations to peace. War has become more terrible every year since the invention of gunpowder, and every half century has seen more and more men sacrificed upon the battlefield. Human courage rises far above any terror yet invented. I have been told that one cannot furnish food to civilians without furnishing it to armies, but no body of armed men ever did starve when food existed. There was no army in the World War that did not feed in full up to the last hour of the armistice, no matter when rows of pinched faces and emaciated children stood by roadsides and ransacked their offal for wasted bread.

I am instructed by some that by putting the screws on the civil population we get war over with more quickly and it is thus more humane; the last war proved that attempts at starvation only sharpen hate; it hardens resolution. I have been told that no advance rules made in peace can be made binding in war; that public opinion of the neutral world is futile to restrain belligerents when the war is once launched. That is partly true, unless the subject is one on which public opinion can instantly react as to right and wrong. Public opinion of the neutral world does not react on the legalistic question of whether doormats are contraband or noncontraband. That is the main reason why all the agreements [p.477] providing for the so-called freedom of the seas have never become a reality. But public opinion can and will react against forced starvation of nations. I have seen it stated that public opinion of neutrals had no effect in the last war. On the contrary, when the final verdict of history is given, it will be found that the loser lost, not for lack of efficiency, or valor, or courage, or from starvation, but by failure to heed the public opinion of what were originally neutral nations.

Public opinion against the use of starvation as a weapon once created will never be downed. The voice of America on behalf of humanity requires no agreement among nations to give it force. It needs no alliances, no leagues, no sanctions. That voice when raised in human cause is the most potent force in the world today.