July 19, 1971
Page 25952
THE FIFTH FREEDOM
(Remarks by Senator EDMUND MUSKIE at the Four Freedoms Award Dinner, New York City, May 20, 1971)
The program says that you are here to honor me. But you and I both know the truth. We are really meeting to honor a very special man among men – and the ideals he left to all mankind.
In the midst of war, Franklin Roosevelt had the courage to proclaim a new vision of peace. He looked beyond the death and the destruction to affirm the hope for a decent life.
Thirty years later, his hope still lights our way. We are still fighting for the future and that is why we are still fighting for the four freedoms.
We believe in freedom from fear. But we live with the terrible fear of world war and the grim reality of an Asian war. Nations agree again and again to a contest of arms, but seldom to the control of arms.
We believe in freedom of speech and the press. But we hear constant attacks on the networks and the newspapers that are trying to tell us the truth. Their right to report the news is threatened by men who have inherited Franklin Roosevelt's place, but not his principles.
We believe in freedom of religion. But we too often forget our first moral duty to grant each person the full equality God gave all people. Prejudice and hate have no place in any man's faith.
We believe in freedom from want. But we witnessed in 1970 a rise in the number of Americans forced to survive on less than survival requires. This Nation once proudly announced a war on poverty – but there was almost no reaction to last year's defeat.
America is still far from the four freedoms – and we are now learning that even the four freedoms are no longer enough. We are learning that we must also fight for another freedom – the fifth freedom – the freedom to achieve.
In 1971, people will not settle for just enough food and just enough shelter. Even in the midst of want, they are intent on more than freedom from want. Whether they are black or white – whether they have a poverty level income or a blue collar income – millions of Americans are now looking for an opportunity to achieve.
They are looking for hiring lines instead of welfare lines – so they can earn their own livelihood in dignity and with respect.
They are looking beyond dead-end jobs to new skills and new chances – so they can test the range of their talents and reach for their dreams.
They are looking for good schools – so their sons and daughters can learn the way to a more rewarding life.
They are looking for the right of every American to compete fairly against any American.
Three decades ago, barely past the disaster of the great depression, many of our people would have welcomed minimum material security. But not in 1971 – when even deprived Americans see all around them the promise of American life. They know how prosperous things can be – and they will not accept things as they are.
They will not accept a six percent unemployment rate. They will not accept a subsistence farm wage or a depressed factory wage. They will not accept disrupted and declining schools. And they are right. Those things are unacceptable. Those things deny the freedom to achieve. No accident of birth should ever decide who goes to college and who goes to boot camp.
We once thought of relief and unemployment compensation and public housing as landmark social advances. They were and they are. But we must advance beyond them now. We must commit our society to the realization in our time of a new freedom to achieve.
And the commitment must be total. Franklin Roosevelt's four freedoms were supposed to reach every American. Now a new freedom to achieve must include all of us, women as well as men.
The mother and the daughters of any family should have an equal chance to become the best artists – the best professionals – and the best politicians.
Franklin Roosevelt's four freedoms were supposed to reach "everywhere in the world." Now a new freedom to achieve must encompass every part of the third world. In Africa and Asia and in Latin America, poor countries are working desperately against long odds for social progress.
They are determined to create an agricultural system that can feed the millions who are literally starving. They will not rest until they build an industrial plant that can make the reality of their economy equal to the potential of their independence.
And their concern is not so different from ours. In a very real sense, our country and the poor countries are the common casualties of a common tragedy.
I believe that we cannot gain the freedom to achieve anywhere in the world until we guarantee freedom from fear everywhere in the world. As long as we spend $200 billion dollars a year so we can kill people, we will never muster the resources to enhance people's lives. The burden of our defense is breaking the back of our best hopes. Nuclear bombs and non-nuclear weapons alike are stockpiled in every nation. The result is an arms race that breeds insecurity – and an insecurity that breeds an escalating arms race. The vicious cycle has many victims. Sometimes, the victims are the villages bombed into rubble, the children dead before their time, the aged killed when there was some precious time left.
More often, the victims are economic plans that have to be abandoned – cities that must remain in crisis – schools that are allowed to decline – job opportunities that cannot be created – and housing that cannot be built – all because our wealth is diverted to rifles that cannot heal and missiles that cannot teach. What it all adds up to is the pervasive fear that put the freedom to achieve beyond man's grasp and sometimes even beyond his vision.
You can see the result in the condition of the great powers, who have barely started to make their societies as good as they could be.
You can see the result in the new nations, which have been left with societies that are less than they should be.
That is the steep price we have all paid to enter the arms race. The price is people – their aspirations and their rights. The price is an American student who could not afford college last year in Brooklyn – and a Russian machinist who had to turn down a better job because he couldn't find an apartment in Leningrad. The price is too high – and the world must stop payment now.
In January, Governor Harriman and I spent four hours talking with Premier Kosygin in Moscow.
I told him then essentially the same things I have told you tonight.
I voiced my concern about what the competition in arms has given us in return for all our expense: Nothing but more insecurity between nations and more insecurity within nations. I believe we must repeat and reemphasize a vital truth until it becomes a rule of behavior: The security of every nation depends on the mutual arms restraint of all nations.
As I said on my return from Moscow, I sensed that the Soviets may be ready to negotiate specific agreements for a specific reduction of arms.
Today's news from the SALT talks is an encouraging sign.
The United States and the Soviet Union have reached an agreement about what to negotiate. Now we must negotiate an agreement that actually reduces the weight of arms.
That is the most urgent priority.
The talks must also begin to deal with improvements in the quality of weapons, not just increases in their number.
And, ultimately, the world must move beyond strategic weapons restraint to limits on the conventional arms of all countries as well as the nuclear arms of the great powers.
It is time for the nations of the world to give the people of the world the freedom to achieve. The first step and the most crucial step is to win freedom from fear.
It may take a long time. There will be difficulties and frustrations and defeats. But if we persist, peace will ultimately prevail – in our own nation and around the globe.
We must believe that the four freedoms are essential to the establishment of sane and rational relations among all men.
We must believe that the power of these ideals can persuade other peoples and other societies to make the same commitment.
By our example and by our initiatives we must convince others of our own commitment to the specific steps which must be taken if we are to achieve them.
We have the opportunity in arms control and in so many other areas. We must seize it now.
In Southeast Asia, we must negotiate an end to the fighting – we must withdraw our forces by the end of the year.
In Berlin, we must make the agreements that may make it possible to heal the division in Europe.
In the Middle East, we must support efforts by the parties themselves to negotiate a settlement that provides security.
On our trade policies we must work for the day when men will trade goods and never bombs.
In our aid program we must do as much as we should and more than we are doing in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
The most powerful nation in man's history surely has the power to change man's destiny on earth from the potential destruction of his prospects for life to the enlargement of his prospects for hope.
We can do so not just by reliance on arms, but by a demonstration of our capacity for leadership – leadership which has the faith and the strength to build upon man's potential to be human.
That was Franklin Roosevelt's faith when he proclaimed the four freedoms. That is your faith when you present the four freedoms award. I am proud to accept the award tonight because I have always shared that faith.
I believe that together we can make our common faith the common fate of man.