and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Narrator: In the jungles of New Guinea,

on the barren shores of the Aleutians,

in the tropic heat of the Pacific Islands,

in the subzero cold of the skies over Germany,

in Burma and Iceland,

the Philippines and Iran,

France,

in China and Italy,

Americans fighting.

Fighting over an area extending seven-eighths of the way around the world.

Men from the green hills of New England;

the sun-baked plains of the Middle West;

the cotton fields of the South;

the close-packed streets of Manhattan, Chicago;

the teeming factories of Detroit, Los Angeles;

the endless stretching distances of the Southwest;

men from the hills and from the plains;

from the villages and from the cities;

bookkeepers; soda jerks; mechanics; college students;

rich man; poor man; beggar man; thief;

doctor; lawyer; merchant; chief.

Now veteran fighting men.

Yet two years ago many had never fired a gun or seen the ocean or been off the ground.

Americans, fighting for their country while half a world away from it.

Fighting for their country, and for more than their country.

Fighting for an idea, the idea bigger than the country.

Without the idea the country might have remained only a wilderness.

Without the country, the idea might have remained only a dream.

Chorus: [Singing]

Narrator: Over this ocean.

1607, Jamestown.

1620, Plymouth Rock.

Here was America: the sea, the sky, the virgin continent.

We came in search of freedom, facing unknown dangers rather than bend the knee or bow to tyranny.

Out of the native oak and pine we built a house, a church, a watchtower.

We cleared a field, and there grew up a colony of free citizens.

We carved new states out of the green wilderness: Virginia, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Carolina.

Then came the first test in the defense of that liberty: 1775, Lexington.

Our leaders spoke our deepest needs:

“Colonists are by the law of nature free-born, as indeed all men are!”

“It is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.”

“These are the times that try men’s souls.”

“But as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

In the midst of battle, it happened. The idea grew, the idea took form.

Something new was expressed by men, a new and revolutionary doctrine, the greatest creative force in human relations:

all men are created equal, all men are entitled to the blessings of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That’s the goal we set for ourselves.

Defeat meant hanging. Victory meant a world in which Americans rule themselves.

1777, Valley Forge.

We fought and froze, suffered and died, for what?

For the future freedom of all Americans.

A few of us doubted and despaired. Most of us prayed and endured all.

1781, Yorktown.

Now we were a free independent nation.

The new idea had won its first test. Now to pass it on to future Americans.

The Constitution, the sacred charter of “We the People,”

the blood and sweat of “We the People,”

the life, liberty, and happiness of “We the People.”

The people were to rule.

Not some of the people, not the best people or the worst, not the rich people or the poor,

but “We the People,” all the people.

In this brotherhood America was born, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

We began as 13 states along the Atlantic seaboard.

We pushed across the Alleghenies, the Ohio River, the Mississippi, the last far range of the distant Rockies.

We carried freedom with us.

No aristocratic classes here, no kings, no nobles or princes, no state church, no courts, no parasites, no divine right of man to rule a man.

Here humanity was making a clean fresh start from scratch.

Behind us we left new states, chips off the old blocks welded together by freedom.

Chorus: ♪ My country, 'tis of thee, ♪ ♪ Sweet land of liberty, ♪

♪ Of thee I sing; ♪

♪ Land where my fathers died, ♪ ♪ Land of the pilgrims' pride, ♪

♪ From every mountainside ♪ ♪ Let freedom ring! ♪

Narrator: Until finally we were one nation, a land of hope and opportunity that had arisen out of a skeptical world.

A light was shining, freedom’s light.

From every country and every clime, men saw that light and turned their faces toward it.

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

As strangers to one another we came and built a country, and the country built us into Americans.

The sweat of the men of old nations was poured out to build a new.

The sweat of our first settlers: the English, the Scotch, the Dutch, building the workshop of New England;

of the Italian in the sulfur mines of Louisiana;

of the Frenchmen and the Swiss in the vineyards of California and New York state;

of the Dane, the Norwegian, the Swede, seeding the good earth to make the Midwest bloom with grain;

of the Pole and the Welshman;

of the Negro harvesting cotton in the hot Southern sun;

of the Spaniard, the first to roam the great Southwest;

of the Mexican in the oil fields of Texas and on the ranches of New Mexico;

of the Greek and the Portuguese, harvesting the crop the oceans yield;

of the German with his technical skill;

of the Hungarian and the Russian;

of the Irishman, the Slav, and the Chinese working side-by-side

– the sweat of Americans. And a great nation was built.

[Music]

Yes, the sweat of the men of all nations built America – and the blood.

For the blood of Americans has been freely shed.

Five times in our history have we withstood the challenge to the idea that made our nation:

the idea of equality for all men; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The idea that made us the people we are.

Let’s take a look at ourselves before we went into this war.

Narrator 2: Well, first of all we’re a working people. On the land, at the work bench, at a desk.

And we’re an inventive people. The lightning rod, cotton gin, the telegraph,

the blessed anesthesia of ether, the rotary printing press, the telephone,

electric welding, the incandescent lamp, submarine, steam turbine,

the motor-driven airplane, the x-ray tube, the gyroscope compass, the sewing machine, television:

all these and countless more bear witness to our inventiveness.

Cat: Meow.

Narrator 2: And this inventiveness and enterprise, plus our hard-won democratic ideal of the greatest good for the greatest number,

created for the average man the highest standard of living in the world.

Thirty-two and a half million registered automobiles, two-thirds of all the automobiles there are in the entire world.

We demand the highest standards in sanitation, purity of food, medical care.

Our hospitals are models for the world to copy.

We want the best for the average man, woman, or child – particularly child.

We have reduced the hazard of being born.

From then on we protect, foster, and generally spoil the majority of our children.

But it doesn’t seem to hurt them much.

They go to school, all kinds of schools:

to kindergartens, public schools, private schools, trade schools, high schools (to 25,000 high schools), and to college.

In the last war 20 percent of all the men in the armed forces had been to high school or college; in this war, 63 percent.

We’re a great two weeks vacation people.

We hunt, and we fish.

Up north, down south, back east, out west – when the season opens we hunt and fish.

We’re a sports-loving people.

[Cheering and crowd noises]

[Music]

And we’re probably the travelingest nation in all history. We love to go places.

We have the cars, we have the roads, we have the scenery.

We don’t need passports, but sometimes we need alibis.

We sleep by the road; we eat by the road.

The foreigner is enchanted and amazed by what we like to put on our stomachs.

[Music]

And we’re a great joining people. We join clubs, fraternities, unions, federations.

Shove a blank at us, we’ll sign up.

Radios – we have one in the living room,

the dining room,

the bedroom,

the bathroom,

in our cars,

in our hands, and up our sleeves.

Radio Announcer: Does your cigarette taste different lately?

Narrator 2: Music – we couldn’t be without it.

[Music]

The press? Yes it’s the biggest, but most important it’s the freest on Earth:

over 12,000 newspapers of all shades of opinion;

books on every conceivable subject;

and more than 6,000 different magazines, not counting the comics.

Churches? We have every denomination on Earth.

Sixty million of us regularly attend and no one dares tell us which one to go to.

We elect our own neighbors to govern us.

We believe in individual enterprise and opportunity for men and women alike.

We make mistakes. We see the results.

We correct the mistakes.

We skyrocket into false prosperities, and then plummet down into false needless depressions.

But in spite of everything, we never lose our faith in the future.

We believe in the future. We build for the future.

Narrator: Yes, we build for the future and the future always catches up with us.

Before we’re done building, we’ve developed something new and have to start rebuilding.

That’s roughly the kind of people we are: boastful, easy-going, sentimental.

But underneath, passionately dedicated to the ideal our forefathers passed on to us: the liberty and dignity of man.

We’ve made great material progress, but spiritually we’re still in the frontier days.

Yet deep down within us there’s a great yearning for peace and goodwill toward men.

Somehow we feel that if men turn their minds toward the fields of peace as they have toward the fields of transportation, communication, or aviation,

wars would soon be as old-fashioned as the horse and buggy days.

We hate war. We know that in war it’s the common man who does the paying, the suffering, the dying.

We bend over backwards to avoid it.

But let our freedoms be endangered, and we’ll pay and suffer and fight to the last man.

That is the America, that is the way of living, for which we fight today.

Why? Is that fight necessary? Did we want war?

In 1917, before most of you fighting men were born,

our fathers fought the First World War to make the world safe for democracy, for the common man.

They fought a good fight and won it.

There was to be no more war in their time or their children’s time.

Faithful to our treaty obligations we destroyed much of our naval tonnage.

Our army went on a reducing guide until it became little more than a skeleton.

For us, war was to be outlawed. For us, Europe was far away.

And as for Asia, well that was really out of this world, where everything looked like it was torn from the National Geographic.

Yet in this remote spot in Asia in 1931, while most of you were playing ball in the sandlots, this war started.

Without warning Japan invaded Manchuria.

Once again, men who were peaceful became the slaves of men who were violent.

In Washington, D.C. our Secretary of State made a most vigorous protest:

“The American government does not intend to recognize any situation, treaty, or agreement which may be brought about by means of aggression.”

But we the people hadn’t much time to think about Manchuria.

We were wrestling with the worst depression in our history.

Some of us were out of jobs, some of us stood in bread lines,

some of us suffered homemade aggression,

some of us were choked with dust, some of us had no place to go.

Two years later in 1933, while most of you were graduating from high school,

we read that a funny little man called Hitler had come into power in Germany.

We heard that a thing called the Nazi Party had taken over.

“Today we rule Germany, tomorrow the world.”

What kind of talk was that? It must be only hot air.

In 1935, about the time you had your first date, we read that strutting Mussolini had attacked far-off Ethiopia.

A disease seemed to be spreading, so Congress assembled to insulate us against the growing friction of war.

We want no war, we’ll have no war, saving defense of our own people or our own honor.

Narrator: Toward this end our chosen representatives passed the Neutrality Act.

No nation at war could buy manufactured arms or munitions from the United States.

In 1936, when you were running around in jalopies, we were disturbed by news from Spain.

In our newsreels we saw German and Italian air forces and armies fighting in Spain and wondered what they were doing there.

For the first time we saw great cities squashed flat, civilians bombed and killed.