President Eisenhower Speech: Humanity Hanging from a Cross of Iron: http://youtu.be/eGQ-wgPGTp8 via @youtube
And Read About It; (From Wikipedia) GOTO: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech
Eisenhower took office in January 1953, with the Korean War winding
down. The Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb,
and appeared to reach approximate military parity with the United States.[1] Political
pressures for a more aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union mounted, and
calls for increased military spending did as well. The death of Joseph Stalin on
March 5, 1953, briefly left a power vacuum in the Soviet Union and offered a
chance for rapprochement with the new regime, as well as an opportunity to
decrease military spending.[2]
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The speech was a peace initiative, addressed to
the American Society of Newspaper Editors,
in Washington D.C., on April 16, 1953. Eisenhower
took an opportunity to highlight the cost of continued tensions and rivalry
with the Soviet Union.[3] While
addressed to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the speech was
broadcast nationwide, through use of television and radio, from the Statler Hotel.[4] He
noted that not only were there military dangers (as had been demonstrated by
the Korean War),
but an arms race would
place a huge domestic burden on both nations (see guns and butter):
“Every
gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the
final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold
and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.[1][5]”
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.[1][5]”
Eisenhower's "humanity hanging from a cross
of iron" evoked William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech. As a result, "The
Chance for Peace speech", colloquially, became known as the "Cross of
Iron speech" and was seen by many as contrasting the Soviet Union’s
view of the post-World War II world, with the United States'
cooperation and national reunion view.[6]
Despite Eisenhower's hopes as expressed in the
speech, the Cold War deepened during his time in office.[7] His farewell address was "a
bookend" to his Chance for Peace speech.[1][8] In
that speech, he implored Americans to think to the future and "not to
become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow",[9] but
the large peacetime military budgets that became established during his
administration have continued for half a century.[10]
Historians have debated whether the speech given
by Eisenhower was sincere in aiming to end the Cold War or
whether it was merely a propaganda ploy.[11] The
Cold War did not end once the speech was delivered, but continued for decades.
It Should Be Noted That: ABC's
Jonathan Karl reports: This week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in
Washington has a co-sponsor from the far-right fringe of American
politics: The John Birch Society. According to Ian Walters, a
spokesman for CPAC, it’s the first time the John Birch Society has sponsored
the conference. That’s not surprising, considering that the Birch Society
has long been considered wacky and extreme by conservative leaders. William F.
Buckley famously denounced the John Birch Society and its founder Robert Welch
in the early 1960s as “idiotic” and “paranoid. “ Buckley’s condemnation
effectively banishing the group from the mainstream conservative
movement. Welch had called President Dwight D. Eisenhower a “conscious,
dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy” and that the U.S. government was
“under operational control of the Communist party.” Buckley argued that
such paranoid rantings had no place in the conservative movement or the
Republican party. Two years after Buckley’s death, the John Birch Society
is no longer banished; it is listed as one of about 100 co-sponsors
of the 2010 CPAC. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2010/02/farright-john-birch-society-2010/
Michael Rafa