Speech* delivered before The Daughters of the American
Revolution, April 21, 1938
By Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(Available*
only on VDARE!)
I
thought of preaching on a text, but I shall not.
I shall only give you the text and I shall not
preach on it. I think I can afford to give you
the text because it so happens, through no fault
of my own, that I am descended from a number of
people who came over on the Mayflower.
More than that every one of my ancestors on
both sides—and when you go back four
generation or five generations it means
thirty-two or sixty-four of them—every single
one of them, without exception, was in this land
in 1776. And there was only one Tory among them.
The text
is this: Remember, remember always that all of
us, and you and I especially, are descended from
immigrants and revolutionists.
I am
particularly glad to know that today you are
making this fine appeal to the youth of America.
To this rising generation, to our sons and
grandsons and great grandson, we cannot over
estimate the importance what we are doing in
this year, in our own generation, to keep alive
the spirit of American democracy. The spirit of
opportunity is the kind of spirit that has led
us as a nation—not as a small group but as a
nation—to meet the very great problems of the
past.
We look
for a younger generation that is going to be
more American that we are. We are doing the best
that we can and yet we can do better than that,
we can do more than that, by inculcating in the
boys and girls of this country to day some of
the underlying fundamentals, the reasons that
brought our immigrant ancestors to this country,
the reasons that impelled our Revolutionary
ancestors to throw off a fascist [VDARE
comment: odd choice of word – George III was a
constitutional monarch] yoke.
March 21, 2001
