85 Radio Address on Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12, 1931
85 Radio Address on Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12, 1931
BY THE MAGIC of the radio I am able to address several hundred public gatherings called this evening throughout our country in celebration of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.
It is appropriate that I should speak from this room in the White House where Lincoln strived and accomplished his great service to our country.
His invisible presence dominates these halls, ever recalling that infinite patience and that indomitable will which fought and won the fight for those firmer foundations and greater strength to government by the people. From these windows he looked out upon that great granite shaft which was then in construction to mark the country’s eternal tribute to the courage and uncompromising strength of the founder of this Union of States.
Here are the very chairs in which he meditated upon his problems. Above the mantelpiece hangs his portrait with his Cabinet, and upon this fireplace is written:
“In this room Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, whereby 4,000,000 slaves were given their freedom and slavery forever prohibited in these United States.”
It was here that he toiled by day and by night that the Union created by the fathers might be preserved and that slavery might be ended.
Most of the business of this room in Lincoln’s time was concerned with the conduct of war against destructive forces. From here he could oft hear the sound of approaching cannon, and yet the thought that he should desert his place, this city and this house, never entered into his considerations. Lincoln was a builder in an epoch of destruction. It was his assignment by Providence to restore the national edifice, so badly shattered in its social and economic structure that it had well-nigh failed. His undying idealism and inflexible resolve builded a new temple of the national soul in which our succeeding generations have since dwelt secure and free and of a richer life.
And if Lincoln could today resurvey the scene of his country he would find a union more solidly knit and more resolute in its common purpose than ever in its history. He would find the States of the South recovered from the wounds of war, inspired by the splendid leadership of a new generation to a brilliant renaissance of industry and culture.
He would indeed find the consummation of that great moving appeal of his inaugural in which he said: “The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” It was indeed a great prophecy.
If Lincoln were living, he would find that this race of liberated slaves, starting a new life without a shred but the clothes in which they stood, without education, without organization, has today by its own endeavors progressed to an amazingly high level of self-reliance an