Acceptance Speech at Smithville

My Fellow-Citizens:

I accept the nomination by the Republican Party for the office of the Presidency of these United States.

Acceptance, based on the manner of my selection, is a duty which any good American citizen would feel impelled to assume.

You violated all the rules of the political game in choosing as your candidate the head of a chain-store organization and a resident of the State of Mississippi.

But you said that votes were not your prime objective. You contended that the espousal of liberal ideas was your central purpose, that votes were wanted only as liberal doctrine should be sanctioned by the American people.

You said you wanted a person who was opposed to present collectivistic trends. In this respect I qualify.

You said you were seeking a citizen who prefers his present employment even to the presidency. I prefer my own home to the White House, the operation of the business I built to the management of political structures built by others.

You said you wanted someone who believed in a Federal Government of limited powers, in free competitive enterprise, in freedom, generally, and in individualism. I am an ardent disciple of these tenets.

You said you wanted a man who wouldn’t shade a word in his faith to gain ten million votes. Let my performance speak for itself.

Your next requirement was an informed and thoroughly competent advocate of liberal principles. I cannot meet this requirement. As freedom is the ultimate in social achievement, so is an understanding of how to be free the ultimate in earthly wisdom.

In a sense, I cannot win this campaign. We cannot win it. It will never, finally, be won. We can make some gains, but maximum freedom, being social perfection, is impossible. No freedom at all can exist in the midst of effortless and ignorant living. It is attainable only to the extent that hard work, intellectual integrity and intelligence become universal.

Freedom is an assertion of man’s God-given free will, a resurrection of man from deadening arbitrary authority, whether this authority be exercised by democratic majorities through the instrumentality of the State or by oppressive men in anarchy. Authority of men over man exists in the presence of error and ignorance, folly and wrongdoing.

The principles which brought America to the greatest heights of freedom yet known on this earth are easily forgotten. Each generation, every individual, must acquire them anew. They endure only as they are learned and retained by an ever-flowing succession of citizens.

We shall win this campaign only as we succeed in substituting the good ideas and practices essential for freedom for the errors and wrongdoing incidental to arbitrary authority.

We do not need to care who is elected to the presidency if we carry our ideas. What could I do in office on behalf of liberalism if the people’s ideas were those of slaves? On the other hand, what will our collectivistic opponents be able to do in extending their authority if the people subscribe to the principle of liberty?

Let us start this campaign on the right basis and keep it there. Let us make it a contest in ideas and ideologies—but a vigorous contest. Personalities among our adversaries or among ourselves are unimportant. We betray our cause and our high purpose if we indulge in them. Encouraging hatred for any man is bad manners. On the other hand, idolatry for any human being is abandonment of individualistic principles.

It is now proper to ask, how can we achieve our purposes? What is the duty of each liberal? Since the nomination thousands have asked me, how are we to organize?

I do not favor organization in its commonly accepted sense. Again I ask, what is gained if I get into office without support among the people for our ideas? I succeed only in acquiring a job I do not want. And if you want me there under such circumstances your efforts are meaningless and this campaign is but another sham.

Our task is not to organize states, counties and precincts. Unwisdom efficiently spread is no service to our cause. Our assignment is to cultivate an understanding of freedom—in ourselves and in others. Such understanding is not acquired by a mass or a class. Only an individual can achieve wisdom.

Our campaign, then, is not one of ringing doorbells and rushing confused people to the polls. It is a much more difficult process.

It calls, first, for a personal conviction respecting the individual and his responsibility for his own welfare.

It calls, secondly, for a perfection of the individual—one’s self.

It calls for virtuous men, that is, men who are industrious, thrifty and of good faith; men distinguished by self-respect, self-reliance and self-control; men who aspire to wisdom and who prize a reputation for reliability. The virtuous man is a moral man, which is to say, one who puts being right ahead of any and all supposed expediences, whether laboring as a farm hand or contesting for the highest office in the land. The virtuous man is a good sport asking only for a fair field and no favors.

Our cause requires men and women who seek popularity with the ages, not with the moment—men and women who seek approval only of their God, their consciences and of those fellowmen whose judgments they respect.

Our fight needs those who perceive that general enlightenment begins with our own personal enlightenment: that we can become influential in any beneficial way only as our own understanding is superior in its quality. We shall hope and endeavor, first of all, to learn for ourselves rather than attempt to impose our wisdom on others.

Our campaign demands citizens who will acquire abilities in exposing the fallacies of socialism and who will strive to know how to reduce, rather than to increase, the use of coercion and restriction in our relations with one another.

In every field where arbitrary authority is imposed we shall inquire how it may be removed and replaced by a reliance on the initiative and enterprise of individual citizens. We must give to the art of self-government its American renaissance.

Our cause requires volunteers who will never give their consent to further extensions of the “Welfare State” idea. It calls for men and women who will aim to destroy the inroads already made; but at the same time, for those who are realists enough to know that perfection in freedom is only possible as individuals, themselves, become perfected.

We need patriots who will stand against wrong even though they cannot see the time when right will triumph.

Let us make one point clear to all who will listen. In our attempt to dislodge the ideas which make the present Federal administration possible, and thus to divest it of its derived power, we are not trying to acquire power for a few of us. Our aim is to take the brakes off the only real power there is—the power that is in the minds and hands of individuals.

For instance, the real power imagined of a president is fallacious. He has no more than others equally endowed with virtues. What he actually has is derived power—derived from others who, voluntarily, surrender some of their liberty to give power to government. This derived power, police force, if used beyond its properly limited purposes, merely magnifies the damage done by his mistakes which, being fallible, he must make. It is as though one were so strong that he breaks the bones in the hands he shakes; or kills the people on whose back he slaps a friendly paw.

Real power, that is, power properly acquired, comes only with the perfection of the individual—perfection to the point where others seek counsel and guidance. Real power comes only with moral and mental development. Derived power must be sparingly permitted only sufficient adequately to suppress fraud, violence (private coercion), predatory practices and monopolistic abuses. It is never a power we should permit anyone to seize for himself.

As we begin this campaign let it be understood that even we who think of ourselves as liberals and as individualists shall find many points of disagreement.

Our adversaries, on the other hand, those who wish a master chosen from fallible men, who seek for themselves human shepherds and sheep dogs, who would transfer their responsibilities to other shoulders, have a simple platform of agreement. They want to he led. To accomplish this, they need only to let themselves go—stop thinking and learning, stop working and saving, stop planning and trying. To lose freedom, no more effort or thought is required than that needed to fall down an elevator shaft. Acting in this fashion they can if they wish, choose someone to lead them or, failing even in this, there will be many professional “leaders,” (likewise among our adversaries), ready and anxious to assume for them that direction over their lives which they have so carelessly or lazily abandoned to others.

As liberals and individualists we can agree that we do not want to be led; that we do not want to “lead” by force; that government must be a servant and not a master. We can agree that we do not like what we are getting nor the direction in which we are trending. But, as there are thousands of ways to be wrong and only one way to be right, so there are thousands of variations in what even liberals believe to be a perfect freedom.

Freedom, like justice, is difficult to define. Justice is the absence of injustice. Acts of injustice can be identified and described, but who can describe a condition of complete justice? So it is with freedom. Freedom is the absence of restriction and coercion. Acts of restriction and coercion can be seen and felt. They can be attacked. This is why liberals are so often regarded as “agin-ers” and are referred to as destructive. The only way to guard freedom is to remove, to destroy, unwarranted restrictions and coercion.

However, our disagreements, which assuredly will be evident, must not discourage us. Variation is a primary fact of nature. We are all different in our ideas as well as in our physical make-ups. The genius of the liberal philosophy is that it recognizes these differences by denying that government shall make conformists of us. The liberal philosophy accepts the individual in his variety and insists that the State be only an instrument to protect these natural, variable conditions. If we do not disagree among ourselves we should look about us for something very wrong.

I shall make several speeches during the campaign period, but only the number necessary to make it plain what I stand for and what I stand against. These will be made at places convenient to our work and with an eye to the minimum of expense. Which state or states does not matter. Being in the Union is qualification enough. Any town is sufficiently large if it can accommodate the wire services and radio hook-ups. I am not going on a political parade, either around the country or within a town.

If our ideas are good they will travel under their own power. It is not your nominee who is at issue—it is the cause of human freedom. Therefore, it is our ideas and our philosophy which should be put on parade.

This is why I have come to Smithville for the acceptance speech. True, I was born on a nearby ranch to which some sentiment attaches. But making this speech in this village, where large audiences are impossible, symbolizes my belief that the personality should be subordinated to the principles one holds. An idea can be better appraised if detached from a person.

It is important to remember that the campaigning devices used by our opponents, such as glamorizing and idolizing an individual, radio trumpetry, being all things to all people, expediency, and appeals to mass emotions, are neither available to, nor wanted by, us. Should we use any or all of these we, as persons, might get into office, but liberalism would achieve no victory. We do not want victory without substance.

This campaign is not going to be organized by me or by any nationally-centralized, super-strategy board. It is going to be conducted as liberals would have the work of the nation conducted—by individuals working in their own way, using their own enterprise and initiative and responsible for their own actions.

Does this approach appear inadequate, impractical, a denial of effective organization? Then the appearance is deceptive. The persons who will respond to common-denominator prescriptions, and to platitudinous directives, or who can be “organized,” are not people who can spread our ideas.

The aid which we need primarily to hope for is that which arises from personal conviction that our cause is right. Men and women with convictions thus gained will apply that genius peculiar to their persons to their own areas of influence. Conformity to a pattern set by someone doing the thinking and the directing from above only frustrates individuals who act from honest convictions.

The power of organization can be as conducive to the promotion of evil, which is ignorance, as it can be helpful to the extension of good, which is wisdom.

Organization, therefore, to be useful, has to come into existence as the result of convictions born in wisdom.

The truly helpful organization work will originate among those inspired to our support, acting in those sectors with which they have familiarity; where they know what they are doing; where they are able to use the power of organization wisely.

It is spontaneous organization that we want, from and of individuals. This is the American method, already operating in infinitely various ways. We are so much a part of it, so close to it, that we are hardly aware of its nature, its strength or even its existence.

I shall do my best, in my own way, to state the liberal case. You do what you want to in your own way. Only if this proves sufficient is true liberalism possible.