Neither will the Chinese reactionaries nor the aggressive forces of U. A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.
A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. Chiang Kai-shek always tries to wrest every ounce of power and every ounce of gain from the people. And we? Our policy is to give him retaliation and to fight for every inch of land. We act after his fashion. He always tries to impose war on the people, one sword in his left hand and another in his right. We take up swords, too, following his example As Chiang Kai-shek is now sharpening his swords, we must sharpen ours too.
IV, pp. Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution. The basic reason why all previous revolutionary struggles in China achieved so little was their failure to unite with real friends in order to attack real enemies. A revolutionary party is the guide of the masses, and no revolution ever succeeds when the revolutionary party leads them astray.
To ensure that we will definitely achieve success in our revolution and will not lead the masses astray, we must pay attention to uniting with our real friends in order to attack our real enemies. To distinguish real friends from real enemies, we must make a general analysis of the economic status of the various classes in Chinese society and of their respective attitudes towards the revolution.
Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism - the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big Landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right wing may become our enemy and their left wing may become our friend - but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks.
Whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary. Whoever sides with imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism is a counter-revolutionary. Whomever sides with the revolutionary people in words only but acts otherwise is a revolutionary in speech. Whoever sides with the revolutionary people in deed as well as in word is a revolutionary in the full sense.
I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political party, an army or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves.
It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work. George Washington, engraving by Charles Willson Peale. In the autumn of , newly returned from Constitution-making in Philadelphia, the proprietor of Mount Vernon turned his attention to more prosaic matters. George Washington needed a gardener, and he approached the job search with the same psychological insight that had so impressed his fellow delegates.
At length he drew up a contract with a hard-drinking candidate, after solemnly binding him to perform his duties sober for one year "if allowed four dollars at Christmas, with which to be drunk four days and four nights; two dollars at Easter, to effect the same purpose; two dollars at Whitsuntide, to be drunk for two days, a dram in the morning, and a drink of grog at dinner and at noon. It was vintage Washington: a fine medley of bemused tolerance for human frailty and the rigidly methodical demands made upon himself across a lifetime of self-improvement.
Nearly two hundred years after his death, no American is more instantly recognizable to--or more remote from--his descendants. Standing in a thousand city parks, frozen in marbled veneration, the Father of His Country inspires more awe than affection. According to Newsweek, 14 percent of all American preschoolers think that George Washington is still sitting in the Oval Office. To the rest of us, Washington appears every February to sell cars and appliances before vanishing into the historical mists, the Ultimate Dead White Male.
His contemporaries were less willing to let him go. On the last night of his life, having defied the might of the British empire and planted the seeds of republican government, the old hero was invited to challenge the very laws of nature. Among those who learned of Washington's lethally sore throat was his friend William Thornton, a practicing doctor and amateur architect who had secretly designed the new Capitol building in Washington city as a final resting place for his friend.
In hopes of forestalling that event, Dr. Thornton hurried to Mount Vernon to perform an emergency tracheotomy. He arrived too late, or so it seemed to everyone but the good doctor. Refusing to accept the verdict of death, this quintessential child of the Enlightenment proposed to resurrect Washington "in the following manner. First to thaw him in cold water, then to lay him in blankets, and by degrees and by friction to give him warmth, and to put into activity the minute blood vessels, at the same time to open a passage to the lungs by the trachea, and to inflate them with air, to produce an artificial respiration, and to transfuse blood into him from a lamb.
Washington's friends intervened to permit him a peaceful departure. Yet just four years later, John Marshall would attempt in five ponderous volumes what Dr. Thornton had only theorized with his blankets and his lamb's blood--to restore George Washington to life. By most accounts he failed. According to the waspish John Adams, Marshall's work was not a biography at all but "a Mausoleum, one hundred feet square at the base and two hundred feet high. Artists fared no better than writers.
Even during Washington's lifetime, family members complained that his portraits barely did him justice. Gilbert Stuart insisted that conveying Washington's personality on canvas was the most difficult thing in the world. In truth, Stuart and Washington did not exactly hit it off during their numerous sessions together, and the painter's revenge--the so-called postage slot mouth caused by stuffing cotton in place of the President's badly made dentures--has shaped, or warped, our image of Washington ever since.
Sooner or later everyone who writes about Washington must come to terms with the bloodless image stamped upon our currency and our car sales. In an age suspicious of heroics and squeamish about duty, it is no exaggeration to say that our first President falls victim to his own well-publicized virtues. Blame it on Parson Weems and his adulatory imitators, who robbed Washington's life of conflict, tension, and the slowly gathering forces of character. Since few of us can identify with human perfection, it is hardly surprising that Weems's Saint George should have inspired the shallow debunkers of the s or the well-meaning yet distorting "humanizers" of more recent years.
All too often the humanizers wound up merely trivializing Washington, telling us more than we need to know about his false teeth and expense accounts, his shadowy passion for Sally Fairfax, or his amply documented lust for land and social status. Here an adulatory verse completes the picture:. In the words of Oscar Wilde, "the only duty we have to history is to rewrite it. Imagine yourselves in the presence of George Washington in the spring of The man before you is fifty-seven years old, of noble carriage and an almost regal gravitas.
At six feet three inches tall, he towers over most of his contemporaries by at least half a foot. His two hundred pounds are evenly distributed over a bony, muscular frame hardened by a lifetime of outdoor exercise and physical adversity.
The symmetry of Washington's face is ruined by a blunt Roman nose and cavernous sockets in which rest eyes variously described as blue or gray, dull or flashing. By modern standards Washington would be nearly eighty years old in this, the first spring of his presidency. The chestnut hair of his youth is turning white; contrary to popular imagery, he never wore a wig. The President's low, rather indistinct voice makes him anything but a Great Communicator.
In fact, he is painfully awkward when delivering a speech. Elevating a shortcoming to the level of principle, he advises a nephew elected to the Virginia Assembly against becoming what he calls "a babbler. A bulging set of dentures contributed to this famous--if unflattering--portrait of Washington by Gilbert Stuart. View in National Archives Catalog. Contemporaries find it easier to describe Washington than to explain him. Abigail Adams made a good start at both when she wrote, "He has a dignity which forbids familiarity mixed with an easy affability which creates love and reverence.
We are seeking more men and more women to run them. We are working longer hours. We are coming to realize that one extra plane or extra tank or extra gun or extra ship completed tomorrow may, in a few months, turn the tide on some distant battlefield; it may make the difference between life and death for some of our own fighting men.
We know now that if we lose this war it will be generations or even centuries before our conception of democracy can live again. And we can lose this war only if we slow up our effort or if we waste our ammunition sniping at each other. Here are three high purposes for every American:. We shall not stop work for a single day. If any dispute arises we shall keep on working while the dispute is. We shall not demand special gains or special privileges or special advantages for any one group or occupation.
We shall give up conveniences and modify the routine of our lives if our country asks us to do so. We will do it cheerfully, remembering that the common enemy seeks to destroy every home and every freedom in every part of our land.
This generation of Americans has come to realize, with a present and personal realization, that there is something larger and more important than the life of any individual or of any individual group- something for which a man will sacrifice, and gladly sacrifice, not only his pleasures, not only his goods, not only his associations with those he loves, but his life itself.
In time of crisis when the future is in the balance, we come to understand, with full recognition and devotion, what this Nation is, and what we owe to it. The Axis propagandists have tried in various evil ways to destroy our determination and our morale. Failing in that, they are now trying to destroy our confidence in our own allies. They say that the British are finished- that the Russians and the Chinese are about to quit. Patriotic and sensible Americans will reject these absurdities.
And instead of listening to any of this crude propaganda, they will recall some of the things that Nazis and Japanese have said and are still saying about us. Ever since this Nation became the arsenal of democracy--ever since enactment of lend-lease- there has been one persistent theme through all Axis propaganda.
This theme has been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power- but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not unite and work and fight. From Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo we have been described as a Nation of weaklings- "playboys"--who would hire British soldiers, or Russian soldiers, or Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us.
Let them repeat that now! Let them tell that to General MacArthur and his men. Let them tell that to the sailors who today are hitting hard in the far waters of the Pacific. Let them tell that to the boys in the Flying Fortresses.
Let them tell that to the Marines! The United Nations constitute an association of independent peoples of equal dignity and equal importance. The United Nations are dedicated to a common cause. We share equally and with equal zeal the anguish and the awful sacrifices of war.
In the partnership of our common enterprise, we must share in a unified plan in which all of us must play our several parts, each of us being equally indispensable and dependent one on the other. We have unified command and cooperation and comradeship. We Americans will contribute unified production and unified acceptance of sacrifice and of effort. That means a national unity that can know no limitations of race or creed or selfish politics.
The American people expect that much from themselves. And the American people will find ways and means of expressing their determination to their enemies, including the Japanese Admiral who has said that he will dictate the terms of peace here in the White House.
We of the United Nations are agreed on certain broad principles in the kind of peace we seek. The Atlantic Charter applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic but to the whole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of Nations and peoples, and the four freedoms--freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
The British and the Russian people have known the full fury of Nazi onslaught. There have been times when the fate of London and Moscow was in serious doubt. But there was never the slightest question that either the British or the Russians would yield.
And today all the United Nations salute the superb Russian Army as it celebrates the twenty-fourth anniversary of its first assembly. Though their homeland was overrun, the Dutch people are still fighting stubbornly and powerfully overseas. The great Chinese people have suffered grievous losses; Chungking has been almost wiped out of existence--yet it remains the Capital of an unbeatable China.
The task that we Americans now face will test us to the uttermost. Never before have we been called upon for such a prodigious effort. Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much. That was when Washington's little army of ragged, rugged men was retreating across New Jersey, having tasted nothing but defeat.
And General Washington ordered that these great words written by Tom Paine be read to the men of every regiment in the Continental Army, and this was the assurance given to the first American armed forces:. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the sacrifice, the more glorious the triumph. So speak Americans today! Franklin D.
Skip to main content. The American Presidency Project. Toggle navigation. February 23, It is obvious what would happen if all of these great reservoirs of power were cut off from each other either by enemy action or by self-imposed isolation: First, in such a case, we could no longer send aid of any kind to China--to the brave people who, for nearly five years, have withstood Japanese assault, destroyed hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers and vast quantities of Japanese war munitions.
Here are three high purposes for every American: 1. That is the conquering spirit which prevails throughout the United Nations in this war. And General Washington ordered that these great words written by Tom Paine be read to the men of every regiment in the Continental Army, and this was the assurance given to the first American armed forces: "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
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