Dwight Eisenhower: "Costs of War Speech," April 1953
INTRODUCTION AND QUESTIONS
In this powerful speech, President Eisenhower called into question the escalating peacetime militarization of the 1950s--even as he supported such policies. It's a rueful speech that accepts as necessary a strong American military--but asks its audience to consider the costs. In truth, Eisenhower would oversee tremendous military and infrastructure growth, his signature domestic achievement being the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, which was a larger public works project than FDR's entire New Deal. By the 1960s, the term "guns and butter" became a reference for the tension between military and social service expenditures. After you read, try to answer Eisenhower's question: "Is there no other way the world may live?" As president of the United States, why did Eisenhower seem powerless to change the course? What other options might he have taken? Image credit: By the White House [public domain], via Wikipedia Commons. (Click photo for link.)
Speech source: excerpted in Engel et al., America in the World, 196-197 (Incorrectly dates speech to 1954 rather than 1953; complete citation in Sources). Complete speech found here: the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum, and Boyhood Home. Web. 5 May 2015. |
This has been the way of life forged by 8 years of fear and force.
What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road? The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated. The worst is atomic war. The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth. 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 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane 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, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. 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. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that comes with this spring of 1953. This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live? |