In June 1941, the University of the South in Sewanee conferred forty-six undergraduate degrees, five honorary degrees, and heard the Latin salutatory of Frank Dana, Jr, which was reprinted in full (as is meet and right) in the Sewanee Purple. Also speaking was FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, whose remarks have not been widely available, but which I reprint below.
The physical text of the speech, entitled, “YOUR FUTURE TASK,” is at Harvard though a scan of it can be found on HathiTrust, if you’d like a copy of your own to pore over. Undoubtedly Hoover gave versions of this same speech at other schools, and beyond the opening nod to “the serenity and unhurried quiet of this peaceful mountain retreat,” it’s just boilerplate, the sort of thing hungover seniors have snoozed through for generations.
But the whole thing is below, at any rate, and if what you crave is a rage-filled, red-baiting performance of Christian/American/masculine demagoguery, then happy reading!
(In a future post, I may offer some thoughts of my own on this speech, and I would welcome your thoughts in the comments below. Feel free to repost– as a product of a public employee, the whole thing’s in the public domain.)
(I also plan to post what happened locally in the aftermath of this speech, which, as you could guess, is an early chapter in the history of rightwing nationalism trickling down to the regional level)
Address of John Edgar Hoover, Director,
Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice,
at the Commencement Exercises of The University of the South,
Sewanee, Tennessee, on June 9, 1941, at 10:00 A.M.
YOUR FUTURE TASK
I find it difficult, in the serenity and unhurried quiet of this peaceful mountain retreat, to discuss with you the deeply disturbing realities of the outside world in these few brief minutes I am privileged to be with you. It is a comforting and inspiring experience to look into the brave, open countenances of you young men who are about to go out into the world and take up the task which is waiting for you — to carry on the fight for the ideals and privileges of freedom and liberty which we all hold dear. The obstacles and trials in the paths of each of you are many and grave; heroic and forthright qualities of the soul are required to conquer them. Those very obstacles, however, constitute a great and glorious challenge — a challenge it is your heritage and obligation to accept so that you, too, may become welded, as did our forefathers, into the very brawn, brain and sinew of our nation.
In the acceptance of any challenge, the primary quality is courage. The founders of our great republic were the personification of courage in its finest form; today’s patriots can be equally brave, equally strong and equally essential to our sorely harassed nation. We need strong, young blood to strengthen veins which have been weakened by the creeping virus of apathy, lethargy, deceit and treachery — the rich, red blood of true Americanism!
Our forefathers remained steadfast in the face of ominous difficulties. They achieved an almost impossible task. They reached a summit of accomplishment that was the marvel of the civilized world. But they attained this only because they possessed an elemental, rugged, uncompromising courage in the face of almost overwhelming difficulties. They never knew the meaning of fear. The word “surrender” was not in their vocabulary. They were fighters, battlers for their high ideals — martyrs, if necessary. They were ready and eager to sacrifice everything that life holds dear for a cause that to them was greater and more sacred than life itself. They were proud to be Americans!
The caliber of our forebears is a precious heritage. Nothing that has been handed down to us by the fathers of our country can be retained unless we exert every possible physical, mental and moral effort for the attainment of our ideals, for the retention of our sacred heritage.
We of the FBI know how necessary is courage. The men of the FBI must meet the challenge of the lawless elements in all parts of our country. They must risk their lives in the capture of the most dangerous types of desperadoes. They must be willing to sacrifice all that man holds dear in order that the men, women and children of this country may be protected and safe in their daily life. These men have demonstrated heroically that the youth of America, properly trained and dedicated to high ideals, is the worthy successor of the youth of ’76 who won our freedom, and the youth thereafter who blazed the trails and broke the frontiers to build the greatest citadel of democracy.
It would be futile for me to attempt to point out the ways and means of living in order to acquire a balanced, forceful, effective character. Countless sermons have been preached; innumerable books have been written; the texts of righteousness are all around us. We simply need the courage to apply their principles to the attainment of worthy ends. You graduates today are the privileged possessors of what is termed “higher education.” All that men have said, done and known has been presented to you through the modern methods of education. The cultivation of mind alone, however, never will create character. There must be instilled in us and there must be developed by us those moral principles and attributes which have come down to us through the ages, with the sanctity of both divine and human authority.
To be a university graduate does not indicate by any means that a man possesses a rounded, fully developed character. A number of university graduates I have known have traveled paths that led to crime and disgrace. They have used their education to the detriment of the community, rather than for its benefit — their lives a curse to humanity and to themselves, a tragic distortion of all that youth should stand for. Therefore, you graduates will be strongly fortified in your battle of life, for battle it is, if you take into the world those time-honored and proven moral principles that have been inculcated here in this great institution, and that have been handed down to you by law-abiding, God-fearing ancestors.
One of the principal reasons for the demoralizing and shocking increase of crime in the past two decades has been the ineffectiveness of religious and moral influences in our individual communities. History in the past two thousand years has demonstrated that the forces that make men Christians make them good citizens. Let me remind you that as faith in The Supreme Being diminishes, so does character weaken — and so does the courage so vital to carry on the battle against the obstacles which today may be found on every side.
In the FBI, we demand that the character of our men be unsullied and above suspicion. All of the intellectual accomplishments that can be secured, all of the scholastic honors that can be attained, will not entitle a man to appointment in the FBI if it cannot be demonstrated that he possesses, in addition, a balanced, forceful, moral character. Just as there is no substitute for strong character in the work of the FBI, there is no substitute for strong character in life itself.
The world is desperately in need of young men with courage and character for today democracies are on trial. Our form of government is challenged throughout a large part of the earth by other essentially different and to us basically hateful systems, based upon the nefarious assumption of power to strangle the personal initiative, rights and freedom of the people in the priceless pursuit of the democratic way of life.
There is only one way in which democracy can answer dictatorship; that is by the proof that it is a more livable, a more intelligently human and a more humane form of government. To do this, it must be of the form which was given into the keeping of America by our forefathers; an athletic type of democracy, if I may so describe it, alert to every possible danger, yet never aggressive; quick in defense of our rights, yet never the bully or the braggart. This was the human, humble, virile, yet militantly protective democracy which grew and flourished so effectively until nearly a generation ago.
Then, did we grow too rich? Did we grow too tired? Did we become too lazy? Did we become dissatisfied with too much of plenty? Or did we forget those God-given qualities of sureness, of strength, of courage, and of vigilance which had made the eagle a symbol of this nation, and its sharpness of eye and smoothness of speed symbolical of the swiftness and unity with which we met and defeated an alien effort against our heritages?
Whatever it was, the change which came over us was fundamentally dangerous. At heart a law-abiding people, we became so lethargic, so apathetic to the encroachments of the underworld, that we permitted to grow within our boundaries a veritable army of criminally inclined men and women. Shocking as it may seem, there is a murder in our United States every 44 minutes; a major felony every 21 seconds. Of our entire population one out of every 26 persons has been arrested for some offense more serious than a minor violation of law. Was this the kind of nation for which Washington fought at Valley Forge? Was this the type of apathetic indifference to civic standards for which the soldiers of our Revolution gave of their life’s blood that they might build for us the world’s first real democracy?
With our minds engrossed in materialistic and selfish pursuits, we have allowed thousands of espousers of alien hate and foreign isms to enter our communities, our neighborhoods, our factories, our stores, our homes, and even our governmental agencies. I wonder what the heroes of 1776 would have thought could they have looked ahead to a day when disciples of destruction should be allowed to freely debate on how best to plunder our nation; or parade our streets by the thousands, jeering at our system of government while paying homage to such arch criminals as Stalin and Hitler. Could our forefathers have fought so fiercely at Bunker Hill if they had known we should allow this nation to be undermined by human termites, to be weakened by disrespect for our laws and customs, stolen from us by the very persons to whom we had given a haven of refuge from the tyrannies and godless philosophies which they would now impose upon us? There is something seriously wrong with the blood stream of America. When the paid vandals of a dictator power, dedicated to atheism, and destructionism, can be allowed to masquerade in this country as a political party, under the guise of civil liberties, then indeed there is something desperately wrong.
By whom have these persons been set upon us? By persons whom we have trusted the most — by certain teachers in our public schools and institutions of higher learning, by certain writers, fattening upon the royalties paid by the American people while fostering class hatred and discontent, by some prattle-minded politicians, grabbing for votes with one hand while waving the flag of pseudo-liberalism with the other, and worst of all by some ministers of the gospel who have loudly proclaimed the Communist’s right to destroy America and its God-fearing way of life.
That word “liberalism” is something we should weigh carefully during these dark days that confront our nation. There is nothing more cowardly than a criminal; he works in the dark, he sneaks upon you in the shadows; he hides his gun under his coat until the moment when he would terrorize you. And he lives under an alias, pretending respectability while practicing the vilest of crimes. Is there not a strange connection between such persons and certain apostles of degenerate dictatorships who, hiding their hammers and sickles under the protection of our national emblem, advance upon us in sham cloaks of liberalism, pretending to be seeking social reforms and equality for all, while in reality plotting to trample beneath their blood-stained boots the very document which has been their greatest protection, our sacred Constitution of the United States!
In the vaunted peacefulness of our homeland, espousers of foreign hates have stalked at will. These sinister enemies of America seek to destroy the faith of our youth in democracy. They use easy promises to lure them into blind acceptance of the venal doctrines of gangster governments. “This is the new order,” they counsel. I challenge that contention. It is neither new nor does it bear any semblance to order. Right-thinking people recognize it as a barbaric throwback to the jungle law of kill and plunder and might makes right.
Only the subtlety of his argument cloaks the activities of this most treacherous of all enemy agents. He uses no secret codes. He does not carry a bomb with a sputtering fuse. His plots do not depend upon the cover of darkness. He expounds his harem-scarem panaceas from many forums — in the drawing rooms of the “parlor pinks” — on a soap box before the idle curious in our parks — on the lecture platforms in some of our schools — in groups of workers wearing the badge of duty in our great industrial centers.
This spokesman of foreign ideologies perverts the sacred liberties of democracy into license to plot their downfall. He is quick to claim the martyr’s crown when his exercise of these liberties is challenged. Any attempt by duly constituted law enforcement agencies at legal prosecution is attacked by him as unwarranted persecution. He makes political capital of adversity and a dupe of the innocent liberal who pleads his defense. No ruse is too vile to serve his heinous plots to undermine public confidence in law enforcement agencies.
What manner of man is this creature who stalks in our midst? He is the goose-stepping Bundsman and the godless and traitorous Communist. Each has his own vain-glorious master, but all serve a common objective. They seek to destroy democracy — the great citadel of those who believe in freedom of opportunity. They are the real saboteurs — the saboteurs of morale.
The antidote to their venom is an informed and alert public. Their slurs against our institutions and advocacy of foreign isms must not be accepted without challenge. These treacheries should be unmasked as the spawn of countries who regard their own people as vassals of the state.
We must awaken! We must again be young in mind, in heart and in our love and fealty to America. We must be interested in preserving the soul of America. We must make our nation again worthy to have the eagle as its emblem, not only of power, but of swiftness of action and of protective preparedness.
We must again become virile and strong. We must retrain ourselves to once more be the athletic nation, both in mind and body, which we believed ourselves to be. It can be done and it will be done.
Throughout America, youth is awakening — the young in mind and in heart — the young in hope, which should encompass all of us. Young America, such as you represent, is laying aside temporarily the cherished plans and hopes of careers to assume its place and responsibilities in the vibrant march of the great army of democracy. Your forefathers made such sacrifices to establish a nation where the God-given privileges of freedom could be enjoyed by all.
Now that freedom of not only our generation, but of future generations, is threatened. You will have no greater satisfaction than to dedicate your efforts to the continuation of the principles of Christianity and democracy. Youth must take America tight to its heart — and love America for its Americanism. There is no way to face but forward. There is no “ism” but that of patriotism. There is no course but that which pays homage to the Stars and Stripes, and those things this emblem stands for — not what the Communists, Nazis or Fascists of the world have attempted to smear it with in the last generation.
These foreign isms, views and theories are entirely alien to the spirit of America and to everything which America has held dear. They would have been utterly abhorrent to the founders of our Republic. They should be just as abhorrent to us. They would have been unanimously rejected by those who founded this country and who formed its institutions. They should be just as unanimously rejected by us. They are an ancient, alien, diabolical, cancerous growth, and they flourish in the dark, noisome swamps of medieval despotism. They cannot possibly live on this side of the water if the sun of American thought and feeling continues to shine, unclouded by the abhorrent fallacies of foreign viewpoints, forms of government, policies and hatreds.
Seeing that the godless forces of totalitarianism shall gain no further strength is the task of a generation of young men and women soon to establish the homes of future America. They, above all, must be kept unsullied from the inoculation of the deadly virus that kills spiritual development. In the homes which you graduates will establish, teach respect for God and His laws, and then respect for man and his law will inevitably follow. Take that which is divine out of the home and the school and you wreck the foundations upon which all order and all law, moral and human, rest.
And let us give to our honored nation what she so badly needs — that transfusion of which I have spoken before. Let us inject into her veins love of decency, power of right, courage, the vitality of patriotism, and the energy of unity upon which this, our beloved democracy, may feed and strengthen, that she may stand supreme, her pulse that of patriotism, and her every heart beat that of inspired Americanism! That is our duty and we must not fail in its fulfilment if our free and unfettered way of life is to continue its uninterrupted course under a Constitution created by free men. Let that eternal triad of our United States, forever be before us — love of God, love of liberty and love of country.
uncomelyandbroken 
