Warren G. Harding

“ I would like the Congress and the people of the Nation to believe that in a firm and considerate way we are insistent on American rights wherever they may be questioned, and deny no rights of others in the assertion of our own. Moreover we are cognizant of the world's struggles for full readjustment and rehabilitation, and we have shirked no duty which comes of sympathy, or fraternity, or highest fellowship among nations. Every obligation consonant with American ideals and sanctioned under our form of government is willingly met. When we can not support we do not demand. ”

“ Nationality is the call of the hearts of liberated people, and a dream of those to whom freedom becomes an undying cause. It's the guiding light, the calm, the prayer, the confirmation for our own people, although we were never assured indivisible union until the Civil War was fought. Can any red-blooded American content now, when we have come to understand its priceless value -- to merge our nationality into internationality, merely because brotherhood and fraternity and fellowship and peace are soothing and appealing terms? ”

“ Everything relating to trade, among ourselves and among nations, has been expanded, excessive, inflated, abnormal, and there is a madness in finance which no American policy alone will cure. We are a creditor Nation, not by normal processes, but made so by war. It is not an unworthy selfishness to seek to save ourselves, when the processes of that salvation are not only not denied to others, but commended to them. We seek to undermine for others no industry by which they subsist; we are obligated to permit the undermining of none of our own which make for employment and maintained activities. ”

“ We are resolved to liberate the soul of American life and prove ourselves an American people in fact, spirit, and purpose, and consecrate ourselves anew and everlastingly to human freedom and humanity's justice. Realizing our new relationship with the world, we want to make it fit to live in, and with might and fright and wrathfulness and barbarity crushed by the conscience of a real civilization. ”

“ I can vision the ideal republic, where every man and woman is called under the flag for assignment to duty for whatever service, military or civic, the individual is best fitted; where we may call to universal service every plant, agency, or facility, all in the sublime sacrifice for country, and not one penny of war profit shall inure to the benefit of private individual, corporation, or combination, but all above the normal shall flow into the defense chest of the Nation. ”

“ Let's get out of the fevered delirium of war with the hallucination that all the money in the world is to be made in the madness of war and the wildness of its aftermath. Let us stop to consider that tranquility at home is more precious than peace abroad and that both our good fortune and our eminence are dependent on the normal forward stride of all the American people. We want to go on, secure and unafraid, holding fast to the American inheritance, and confident of the supreme American fulfillment. ”

“ Doubtless our own people have emerged from the World War tumult less impaired than most belligerent powers; probably we have made larger progress toward reconstruction. Surely we have been fortunate in diminishing unemployment, and our industrial and business activities, which are the lifeblood of our material existence, have been restored as in no other reconstruction period of like length in the history of the world. Had we escaped the coal and railway strikes, which had no excuse for their beginning and less justification for their delayed settlement, we should have done infinitely better. ”

“ We're a hundred million or more today, and if the miracle of the first century of national life may be repeated in the second, the millions of today will be the myriads of the future. I like to think, sirs, that out of the discovered soul of the republic, and through our preservative actions in this supreme moment of human progress, we shall hold the word American the proudest boast of citizenship in all the world. ”

“ The right of labor to organize is just as fundamental and necessary as is the right of capital to organize. The right of labor to negotiate, to deal with and solve its particular problems in an organized way, through its chosen agents, is just as essential as is the right of capital to organize, to maintain corporations, to limit the liabilities of stockholders. Indeed, we have come to recognize that the limited liability of the citizen as a member of a labor organization closely parallels the limitation of liability of the citizen as a stockholder in a corporation for profit. ”

“ We welcome the referendum to the American people on the preservation of America, and the Republican party pledges its defense of the preserved inheritance of national freedom.
In the call of the conscience of America is peace. The peace that closes the gaping wound of world war and silences the impassioned voices of international envy and distrust. ”

“ America headed the forward procession of civil, human, and religious liberty which ultimately will affect the liberation of all mankind. The Federal Constitution is the very base of all Americanism, the ark of the covenant of American liberty, the very temple of equal rights. The Constitution does abide and ever will, so long as the Republic survives.
Let us hesitate before we surrender the nationality which is the very soul of highest Americanism. This republic has never failed humanity, nor endangered civilization. ”