The Handle of Faith

"This is a good time to think about the future," said Dwight Eisenhower, "for this convention is celebrating its 100th anniversary." So saying, he staked his speech on pointing the Grand Old Party away from all the inhibitions of its recent past toward a vista that it had never really allowed itself since the exuberant days of Theodore Roosevelt. From Henrik Ibsen he borrowed his text: "I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future."

"Today I want to demonstrate the truth of a single proposition: the Republican Party is the party of the future. I hold that the Republican Party and platform are right in 1956 because they are most closely in league with the future. And for this reason [they] will be decisively approved in 1956."

To stake down his single proposition, Ike outlined some sharp points:

"It is the party of long-range principle, not short-term expediency."

"Change based on principle is progress. Constant change without principle becomes chaos." He cited specific examples from recent dialogues between principle and expediency (for "expediency" many of his listeners read Democrats).

P: On the farm problem, expediency had multiplied "our price-depressing surpluses at the risk of making the problem twice as bad." The answer: a "program of principle" that will "preserve our continent's basic resource of soil" and a determined effort to get farm prices and income "back on a genuinely healthy basis." P: In labor relations, the Administration has stuck fast to the principle of free collective bargaining despite the argument that in major labor disputes the Government should force the parties to agree by knocking their heads together. The result: "For the first time in our history, a complete steel contract was negotiated and signed without direct Government intervention." P: In the area of federal v. states' rights, expediency had argued for "the centralization short cut every time something [had] to be done." Replied Ike: "Geographical balance of power is essential to our form of free society." Hence, "we stemmed the stampede to Washington. We made a special point to build up state activities," and thereby saved for the present and the future "the unique system of division of authority which has proved so successful in reconciling our oldest ideas of personal freedom with the 20th century need for decisiveness in action."

"It is the party which concentrates on the facts and issues of today and tomorrow, not the facts and issues of yesterday."

The challenges are many: the need for better schools, health, housing, power development, the peaceful use of atomic energy. Many Democrats, nonetheless, are blinded in their approach to these problems by "their obsession with the depression." Says the party of the future: Let us quit fighting the battles of the past and face up to the issues on which long-term well-being depends.

"It is the party that draws people together, not drives them apart."

By rejecting the "technique of pitting group against group for cheap political advantage," it has "again [become] the rallying point"--as it was in Lincoln's time--"for Americans of all callings, races and incomes."

"It is the party through which the many things that still need doing will soonest be done--and will be done by enlisting the fullest energies of free, creative, individual people."

Through quiet action, and by enlisting public support and participation, it has brought about "more genuine--and often voluntary--progress toward equal justice and opportunity in the last three years than was accomplished in all the previous twenty." True, said the President, "there are still enough needless sufferings to be cured, enough injustices to be erased . . . Republicans, independents, discerning Democrats, come on in and help!"

Finally, he drove a few nails into the coffin that holds the isolationist elements of his party. U.S. security, he said, can be maintained only by the maintenance of U.S. moral, economic and military power. Another imperative for peace is collective security--"not [for] military strength alone" but to help other nations "realize their own potentialities." But even that is not enough to insure peace "in the era of the thermonuclear bomb"--which has made war "not just tragic, but preposterous." Hence, the final imperative for peace is to "try to bridge the great chasm that separates [us] from the peoples under Communist rule."

Of course, he said, little can come of this effort unless the Communist leaders are willing. In the recent slight lifting of the Iron Curtain, Ike saw "signs [of] some small degree" of a new Communist spirit of conciliation. His fervent hope: "Little by little, mistrust based on falsehoods will give way to international understanding based on truth."

For his conclusion, the President borrowed a line from the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher: "Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith." Holding fast to the handle of faith--in himself, in his party, and in the ability of the nation to respond to the challenges of the new era--Dwight David Eisenhower "humbly but confidently" accepted his second nomination for the presidency.

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