Alistair Cooke's 1974 Address before the House of Representatives

On September 25, 1974, Alistair Cooke delivered the principal address at the Commemoration Ceremony in Honor of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the First Continental Congress in the United States House of Representatives. Other speakers that day included Professor Cecelia Kenyon of Smith College and Professor Merrill Jensen of the University of Wisconsin.

Representative Joseph McDade of Pennsylvania introduced Mr. Cooke:

Mr. McDade: Mr. Speaker, my colleagues, and fellow citizens. Our principal speaker today, Mr. Alistair Cooke, is well known to Americans as the creator and narrator of the special television series America, on which his best-selling book of the same title is based.

The series has won 18 awards around the world, including 5 Emmys and the Peabody Award. Mr. Cooke has been an interpreter of America for the British for 27 years through his distinguished radio series, Letters from America. He is perhaps a more sensitive interpreter of the American experience because unlike many of us and like so many of our forebears, he was not born an American but chose to become one.

... A great privilege to warmly welcome Mr. Alistair Cooke.

Alistair Cooke: Mr. Speaker, Mr. McDade, Members of the House of Representatives, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen: Of all the times that I have sat in this House in the past 30-odd years as a reporter and listened to Presidents requesting from you declarations of war — not many of them anymore since you lost the power! — listening to pronouncements that the state of the Union was good or bad or indifferent; and listening to debates on everything from the price of battleships to the coloring of margarine; I can assure you that this occasion is for me far and away the most terrifying. It was not at first put up to me as an ordeal, or even as a very great privilege, which indeed it is. I understood that there was to be a cozy get-together of some Congressmen, somewhere, a breakfast perhaps, at which I might be called on to say a few impromptu words. But standing here now I feel as if I were just coming awake from a nightmare in which I see myself before you unprepared and naked, as one often does in dreams, looking around this awesome assembly and blurting out "I accept your nomination for the Presidency of the United States."

When I blithely accepted — the invitation, that is — and the grandeur of this occasion was only then made clear to me, I tried to backtrack on the grounds of a conflict of interest. Because I was supposed now to be standing before an audience not in the United States but in the Kingdom of Fife addressing the annual dinner of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. My letter of abject apology to the Secretary prompted from him a chivalrous reply. He wrote:

It is a pity that you will not be following in the footsteps of Francis Ouimet and Robert Tyre Jones, Jr., but it is splendid that you should be following in the footsteps of Lafayette and Churchill.

He added, however:

A senior member asks me to remind you that we are 20 years more ancient than the First Continental Congress, and maybe you should get your priorities straight.

I cannot help recalling — and with some pride in the great honor that you do me today — that the only native-born Englishman I ever heard address this House was Winston Churchill. He remarked then that if his father had been American, and his mother English instead of the other way around he might have got here on his own.

The wistful thought occurs to me today that if my father had been Irish, and my mother English, instead of the other wav around, I might have tiptoed, at a respectful distance, in the shadow of that mighty man.

We are met in what I take to be the first official celebration of the Bicentennial by the Congress to applaud the men who met in Philadelphia in September 1774, in response to many indignities, mainly, I think, to the military occupation of Boston and the monstrous, and, as it turned out, the fateful blunder of the Parliament, in closing the Port of Boston. This is an action which Englishmen, to this day, think of as being not particularly unreasonable, until you ask them to wonder how they would feel if the Congress of the United States were to close the Port of London.

They were, as we have been told, a very mixed bunch of aggrieved men. We tend to see them as a body of blue-eyed, selfless patriots all at one in their detestation of tyranny. But I doubt that the present Congress spans so wide a political gamut. They ranged from hide-bound radicals to bloodshot conservatives. There were, of course, many disinterested men fighting for a principle, but there were also shrewd businessmen who saw, in a possible break with England, a gorgeous opportunity to ally with Spain and control all trade east as well as west of the Appalachians.

But — and it will be worth saying over and over in the next 2 years — the lovers of liberty carry no national passport.

This seems to me a good time to recall some unsung heroes of the American Revolution who sat not in Philadelphia but in the House of Commons, some of them who jeopardized their careers by taking the colonists' side: Henry Seymour Conway, who carried through the repeal of the Stamp Act; General John Burgoyne, himself to be the invasion commander, who raised a storm by urging Parliament to convince the colonies "by persuasion and not by the sword;" the sailor Johnstone, once the Governor of Florida, who warned the House of Commons that what it was doing would provoke a confederacy and a general revolt: a flash of foresight that made the Government benches rise and tell him he had "brought his knowledge of America to the wrong market"; and most of all, Edmund Burke, who got a respectful hearing on anything and everything until he rose to refute the argument that if the citizens of Boston were taxed without representation, they were no worse off than the citizens of Manchester. Burke replied:

So, then, because some towns in England are not represented, America is to have no representative at all? They are our children, and when they wish to reflect the best face of the parent, the countenance of British liberty, are we to turn to them the shameful part of our Constitution?

He was booed to the rafters.

Now, by recalling these trans-Atlantic heroes of the Revolution, I wish only to suggest the dangers that lie ahead, and that have lain in the past, in our tendency, especially in the movies and in television, and in too many school books, to sentimentalize our history or to teach it as a continual clash between the good guys and bad guys, between America and Britain, the white man and the Indian, industry and labor, between us and them.

Now, practical men usually distrust history — Henry Ford said it was "the bunk'' — as a false guide, and they are right if we think that anything ever repeats itself in the same way. It is, rather, the tendency of history to repeat itself in every way but one, and the new element is unfortunately and usually the only one that matters.

So, it is a normal impulse in men of action — and I take it that I am looking at men who are nothing but men of action — to distrust history because it is done with. Americans are all activists in the sense that they have always believed that tomorrow is going to be at least as good as today, and certainly better than yesterday. Nothing could be more American than the famous remark of Lincoln Steffens after he visited the Soviet Union: "I have seen the future and it works." Bertrand Russell saw the same future at the same time, and what he saw was the past in a new guise, and it chilled his blood. But then Russell had a passion for human liberty and he could smell tyranny even when he couldn't see it. Steffens, on the other hand, was a reporter — of a type not yet extinct — a reporter who believed everything he was told.

We are about to launch ourselves on a 2-year festival of commemoration of the American past. And from the early promises of some chambers of commerce, television producers, motel proprietors, and the manufacturers of buttons and medals, it could turn into an orgy of self-righteousness.

Practically every man who signed the Declaration of Independence is at this moment being measured for a halo, or at worst a T-shirt. This is done, I think, from a fear that the truth might turn out to be dull. Well, it's often embarrassing, but it's never dull.

By sentimentalizing our history we do, most of all, an enormous disservice to the young. We imply or proclaim that the United States was invented by saints with a grievance. Now any perceptive 12-year-old knows from his own experience of life that this is nonsense, and any perceptive 5-year-old from her experience in life. So, they transfer their healthy suspicions from the teacher to what is being taught and conclude that American history is a great bore.

Professor Jensen has reminded us that we have the word of a man who was in the thick of things from the start — John Adams — that in 1776 no more than a third of the population was on the revolutionary side. One-third was openly or covertly Loyalist. And the other third was that dependable minority to whom the Gallup poll pays regular tribute: the people who know nothing, feel nothing, and stand for nothing.

We are also undoubtedly going to be plunged; through the TV tube, into a public bath of immigrants, all of whom will be warm-hearted, simple, courageous and abused. But it would do no harm to young Americans — it ought, rather, to fortify their ideals — to learn that many a shipload of immigrants from 1848 into our own time contained also men jumping military service, and delinquents, both adult and juvenile: a lot of people with a lot to hide. This does not demean, indeed, to me, it glorifies the legions who struggled for a decent and tidy life. To know this will only confirm the daily experience of many young people growing up today in a community of mixed national and racial origins. It seems to me that by such teaching of the truth — of the way it was — in all its maddening complexity, they might learn early on the simple lesson that courage and cowardice know no national frontiers or racial frontiers, and that when we say a man or woman is a credit or discredit to their race, we should mean no more or less than the human race.

The war against injustice and bigotry and greed started well before 1774 — in fact, with Cain and Abel — and will trouble our history till the end of time.

Now, I think it is good and proper that in 1976 we should celebrate what is best in the American past. But we should remember that our history, like that of all nations, is sometimes fine and sometimes foul. The important thing is to know which is which.

For if we accept at any given time the inevitable complexity of human motives and desires that make up the past, and the present, there is no need to fear. But some people say, "Won't a strong dose of reality disillusion the idealism of the young? It is the same question that a member of the Constitutional Convention put to James Madison when he said that good government could only be based on "ambition counteracting ambition." Was he saying, asked a mocking delegate, that ''the frailties of human nature are the proper elements of good government?"

Madison replied, "I know no other." That simple sentence which reflects Madison's unsleeping sense of reality and his ability to get the Convention to set up a system that hopes for the best in human nature, but is always on guard against the worst.

That is what I believe has guaranteed the survival of the Constitution as a hardy and practical instrument of government.

So I suggest that we would be making a foolish spectacle of ourselves if we spent the Bicentennial year proclaiming to a bored world that we are unique and holier than anybody, for today national sovereignty is a frail commodity. Today we and Western Europe are laced in common with a triple threat to representative government. For the first time since the 15th century our cities are threatened by the success of violence. For the first time since the 1920's our countries are threatened by an unstoppable inflation. And for the first time in human history our planet is threatened by an unstopped nuclear arms race.

We are very much in the parlous situation of the Thirteen Colonies. We don't have much time, if any, to think of ourselves as separate nations whose fate is in our hands. Franklin's warning is apt: '"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

More and more we and many more nations are, as the Bible warned us, "members one of another."

I think that honest persons who are concerned for the reputation of this country abroad had much cause for misgiving in the past year or two, when our image was rendered alarming to free men by the gradual growth in the executive branch of Government — and it began at least a dozen or 14 years ago — of a kind of domestic Politburo, which in the end, in its malignant form, was indifferent of the Congress and contemptuous of the people and the law.

But then, through the gloom and the squalor that lay on this city, there came a strong beam of light, and it came from this House. Nothing that I can remember has redeemed, in Europe anyway, the best picture of America, which is always the one that ordinary men and women want to believe in, more than the recent public sessions — and how fortunate it was that they were public — of your Judiciary Committee.

Here after a welter of truth, and possible truth, and rumor and hearsay, we saw and heard 38 men and women debating, with sense and dignity and seriousness, the most dire threat to the constitutional system since 1860. And so long as the standing committees of Congress remember that they are standing in for nobody but the people, the state of the Constitution, I think, will be sound. And just so long will the Executive be "the servant and not the proprietor of the people."

So it seems to me a happy thing, and enough of a celebration for today, at any rate, that 200 years after the First Congress met as a team of watchdogs eager to corner a tyrannical executive, this House should have made it possible for us today to say, without complacency, and with some legitimate pride: "I have seen the past — and it works!"