Grover Cleveland served as our twenty-second and twenty-fourth president of the United States. He remains today the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms as the elected chief executive of our nation. Cleveland was known as a reformer and a staunch opponent of political corruption. He believed that America’s citizens were the safeguards to our mutual liberty and prosperity, and that without active and responsible citizens , our very system of government is at peril.
In 1903, he gave the following address on good citizenship before the Commercial Club of Chicago. I find it amazingly relevant to the current challenges and responsibilities facing our body politic.
The withdrawal of wholesome sentiment and patriotic activity from political action on the part of those who are indifferent to their duty, or foolhardy in their optimism, opens the way for a ruthless and unrelenting enemy of our free institutions. The abandonment of our country’s watchtowers by those who should be on guard, and the slumber of the sentinels who should never sleep, directly invite the stealthy approach and the pillage and loot of the forces of selfishness and greed. These baleful enemies of patriotic effort will lurk everywhere as long as human nature remains unregenerate; but nowhere in the world can they create such desolations as in free America, and nowhere can they so cruelly destroy our highest and best aspirations for self-government.
It is useless for us to blink at the fact that our scheme of government is based upon a close interdependence of interest and purpose among those who make up the body of our people. Let us be honest with ourselves. If our nation was built too much upon sentiment, and if the rules of patriotism and benignity that were followed in the construction have proved too impractical, let us frankly admit it. But if love of country, equal opportunity and genuine brotherhood in citizenship are worth the pains and trial that gave them birth, and if we still believe them to be worth preservation and that they have the inherent vigor and beneficence to make our republic lasting and our people happy, let us strongly hold them in love and devotion. Then it shall be given us to plainly see that nothing is more unfriendly to the motives which underlie our national edifice than the selfishness and cupidity that look upon freedom and law and order only as so many agencies in aid of their designs. Our government was made by patriotic, unselfish and sober-minded founders for the control or protection of a patriotic, unselfish and sober-minded people. It is suited to such a people; but for those who are selfish, corrupt and unpatriotic it is the worst government on earth. It is so constructed that it needs for its successful operation the constant care and guiding hand of the people’s abiding faith and love, and not only is this unremitting guidance necessary to keep our national mechanism true to its work, but the faith and love which prompt it are the best safeguards against selfish citizenship.
Give to our people something that will concentrate their common affection and solicitous care, and let them be their country’s good; give them a purpose that stimulates them to unite in lofty endeavor, and let that purpose be a demonstration of the sufficiency and beneficence of our popular rule, and we shall find that in their political thought there will be no place for the suggestion of sordidness and pelf.
I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care f them. –Thomas Jefferson
Have an AWE-full Weekend!
William “Bill” Bacque