President Roosevelt: ‘I Have Seen War. I Hate War.’

United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addresses a capacity audience in the Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater beginning at 6 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 14, 1936. Photo courtesy of Chautauqua Archives.

Full text of the famous Aug. 14, 1936, Amphitheater address

As many of you who are here tonight know, I formed the excellent habit of coming to Chautauqua more than 20 years ago. After my inauguration in 1933, I promised Mr. Bestor that during the next four years, I would come to Chautauqua again. It is in fulfillment of this that I am with you tonight. A few days ago, I was asked what the subject of this talk would be, and I replied that for two good reasons I wanted to discuss the subject of peace: First, because it is eminently appropriate in Chautauqua, and second, because in the hurly-burly of domestic politics, it is important that our people should not overlook problems and issues which, though they lie beyond our borders, may, and probably will, have a vital influence on the United States of the future.

Many who have visited me in Washington in the past few months may have been surprised when I have told them that personally, and because of my own daily contacts with all manner of difficult situations, I am more concerned and less cheerful about international world conditions than about our immediate domestic prospects. I say this to you not as a confirmed pessimist but as one who still hopes that envy, hatred and malice among nations have reached their peak and will be succeeded by a new tide of peace and good-will. I say this as one who has participated in many of the decisions of peace and war before, during and after the World War; one who has traveled much; and one who has spent a goodly portion of every 24 hours in the study of foreign relations.

Long before I returned to Washington as President of the United States, I had made up my mind that pending what might be called a more opportune moment on other continents, the United States could best serve the cause of a peaceful humanity by setting an example. That was why on the 4th of March, 1933, I made the following declaration: “In the field of world policy, I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor — the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others — the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.”

This declaration represents my purpose; but it represents more than a purpose, for it stands for a practice. To a measurable degree, it has succeeded; the whole world now knows that the United States cherishes no predatory ambitions. We are strong, but less powerful nations know that they need not fear our strength. We seek no conquests; we stand for peace. In the whole of the Western Hemisphere, our good-neighbor policy has produced results that are especially heartening.

The noblest monument to peace and to neighborly economic and social friendship in all the world is not a monument in bronze or stone, but the boundary which unites the United States and Canada — 3,000 miles of friendship with no barbed wire, no gun or soldier and no passport on the whole frontier. Mutual trust made that frontier. To extend the same sort of mutual trust throughout the Americas was our aim. The American Republics to the south of us have been ready always to cooperate with the United States on a basis of equality and mutual respect, but before we inaugurated the good-neighbor policy, there were among them resentment and fear because certain Administrations in Washington had slighted their national pride and their sovereign rights. In pursuance of the good-neighbor policy, and because in my younger days, I had learned many lessons in the hard school of experience, I stated that the United States was opposed definitely to armed intervention.

We have negotiated a Pan-American Convention embodying the principle of nonintervention. We have abandoned the Platt Amendment, which gave us the right to intervene in the internal affairs of the Republic of Cuba. We have withdrawn American marines from Haiti. We have signed a new treaty, which places our relations with Panama on a mutually satisfactory basis. We have undertaken a series of trade agreements with other American countries to our mutual commercial profit.

At the request of two neighboring Republics, I hope to give assistance in the final settlement of the last serious boundary dispute between any of the American nations. Throughout the Americas, the spirit of the good neighbor is a practical and living fact. The 21 American Republics are not only living together in friendship and in peace; they are united in the determination so to remain. To give substance to this determination, a conference will meet on Dec. 1, 1936, at the capital of our great Southern neighbor, Argentina, and it is, I know, the hope of all Chiefs of State of the Americas that this will result in measures which will banish wars forever from this vast portion of the earth.

Peace, like charity, begins at home; that is why we have begun at home. But peace in the Western world is not all that we seek. It is our hope that knowledge of the practical application of the good-neighbor policy in this hemisphere will be borne home to our neighbors across the seas. For ourselves, we are on good terms with them — terms in most cases of straightforward friendship, of peaceful understanding. But, of necessity, we are deeply concerned about tendencies of recent years among many of the nations of other continents.

It is a bitter experience to us when the spirit of agreements to which we are a party is not lived up to. It is an even more bitter experience for the whole company of nations to witness not only the spirit but the letter of international agreements violated with impunity and without regard to the simple principles of honor. Permanent friendships between nations, as between men, can be sustained only by scrupulous respect for the pledged word. In spite of all this, we have sought steadfastly to assist international movements to prevent war. We cooperated to the bitter end — and it was a bitter end — in the work of the General Disarmament Conference. When it failed, we sought a separate treaty to deal with the manufacture of arms and the international traffic in arms. That proposal also came to nothing.

We participated — again to the bitter end — in a conference to continue naval limitations, and when it became evident that no general treaty could be signed because of the objections of other nations, we concluded with Great Britain and France a conditional treaty of qualitative limitation which, much to my regret, already shows signs of ineffectiveness. We shun political commitments, which might entangle us in foreign wars; we avoid connection with the political activities of the League of Nations, but I am glad to say that we have cooperated wholeheartedly in the social and humanitarian work at Geneva. Thus we are a part of the world effort to control traffic in narcotics, to improve international health, to help child welfare, to eliminate double taxation and to better working conditions and laboring hours throughout the world.

We are not isolationists except insofar as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war. Yet we must remember that so long as war exists on Earth, there will be some danger that even the nation which most ardently desires peace may be drawn into war.

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line — the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

I have passed unnumbered hours, I shall pass unnumbered hours, thinking and planning how war may be kept from this nation. I wish I could keep war from all nations, but that is beyond my power. I can at least make certain that no act of the United States helps to produce or to promote war. I can at least make clear that the conscience of America revolts against war and that any nation which provokes war forfeits the sympathy of the people of the United States.

Many causes produce war. There are ancient hatreds, turbulent frontiers, the “legacy of old forgotten, far-off things and battles long ago.” There are new-born fanaticisms. Convictions on the part of certain peoples that they have become the unique depositories of ultimate truth and right. A dark old world was devastated by wars between conflicting religions. A dark modern world faces wars between conflicting economic and political fanaticisms in which are intertwined race hatreds.

To bring it home, it is as if within the territorial limits of the United States, 48 nations with 48 forms of government, 48 customs barriers, 48 languages, and 48 eternal and different verities, were spending their time and their substance in a frenzy of effort to make themselves strong enough to conquer their neighbors or strong enough to defend themselves against their neighbors.

In one field, that of economic barriers, the American policy may be, I hope, of some assistance in discouraging the economic source of war and therefore a contribution toward the peace of the world. The trade agreements which we are making are not only finding outlets for the products of American fields and American factories but are also pointing the way to the elimination of embargoes, quotas and other devices which place such pressure on nations not possessing great natural resources that to them, the price of peace seems less terrible than the price of war.

We do not maintain that a more liberal international trade will stop war, but we fear that without a more liberal international trade, war is a natural sequence. The Congress of the United States has given me certain authority to provide safeguards of American neutrality in case of war. The President of the United States, who, under our Constitution, is vested with primary authority to conduct our international relations, thus has been given new weapons with which to maintain our neutrality. Nevertheless — and I speak from a long experience — the effective maintenance of American neutrality depends today, as in the past, on the wisdom and determination of whoever at the moment occupy the offices of President and Secretary of State.

It is clear that our present policy and the measures passed by the Congress would, in the event of a war on some other continent, reduce war profits which would otherwise accrue to American citizens. Industrial and agricultural production for a war market may give immense fortunes to a few men; for the nation as a whole it produces disaster. It was the prospect of war profits that made our farmers in the West plow up prairie land that should never have been plowed, but should have been left for grazing cattle. Today we are reaping the harvest of those war profits in the dust storms, which have devastated those war-plowed areas. It was the prospect of war profits that caused the extension of monopoly and unjustified expansion of industry and a price level so high that the normal relationship between debtor and creditor was destroyed.

Nevertheless, if war should break out again in another continent, let us not blink the fact that we would find in this country thousands of Americans who, seeking immediate riches — fools’ gold — would attempt to break down or evade our neutrality. They would tell you — and, unfortunately, their views would get wide publicity — that if they could produce and ship this and that and the other article to belligerent nations, the unemployed of America would all find work. They would tell you that if they could extend credit to warring nations that credit would be used in the United States to build homes and factories and pay our debts. They would tell you that America once more would capture the trade of the world. It would be hard to resist that clamor; it would be hard for many Americans, I fear, to look beyond — to realize the inevitable penalties, the inevitable day of reckoning, that come from a false prosperity.

To resist the clamor of that greed, if war should come, would require the unswerving support of all Americans who love peace. If we face the choice of profits or peace, the nation will answer — must answer — “We choose peace.” It is the duty of all of us to encourage such a body of public opinion in this country that the answer will be clear and for all practical purposes unanimous. With that wise and experienced man who is our Secretary of State, whose statesmanship has met with such wide approval, I have thought and worked long and hard on the problem of keeping the United States at peace.

But all the wisdom of America is not to be found in the White House or in the Department of State; we need the meditation, the prayer, and the positive support of the people of America who go along with us in seeking peace. No matter how well we are supported by neutrality legislation, we must remember that no laws can be provided to cover every contingency, for it is impossible to imagine how every future event may shape itself. In spite of every possible forethought, international relations involve of necessity a vast uncharted area. In that area, safe sailing will depend on the knowledge and the experience and the wisdom of those who direct our foreign policy. Peace will depend on their day-to-day decisions.

At this late date, with the wisdom, which is so easy after the event and so difficult before the event, we find it possible to trace the tragic series of small decisions which led Europe into the Great War in 1914 and eventually engulfed us and many other nations. We can keep out of war if those who watch and decide have a sufficiently detailed understanding of international affairs to make certain that the small decisions of each day do not lead toward war and if, at the same time, they possess the courage to say “no” to those who selfishly or unwisely would let us go to war. Of all the nations of the world today we are in many ways most singularly blessed.

Our closest neighbors are good neighbors. If there are remoter nations that wish us not good but ill, they know that we are strong; they know that we can and will defend ourselves and defend our neighborhood. We seek to dominate no other nation. We ask no territorial expansion. We oppose imperialism. We desire reduction in world armaments. We believe in democracy; we believe in freedom; we believe in peace. We offer to every nation of the world the handclasp of the good neighbor. Let those who wish our friendship look us in the eye and take our hand.

Part I

Part II

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