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                               PAPER XIII

"The American peace which we celebrate today has no quality of weakness 
in it! We are prepared to maintain it and to defend it to the fullest 
extent of our strength, matching force to force if any attempt is made 
to subvert our institutions, or to impair the independence of any one of 
our group." 

Address to the Governing Board of the Pan American Union, Washington,
   D. C., April 14, 1939

Gentlemen of the Pan American Union: 

I am glad to come here today on our Pan American forty-ninth birthday. 

The American family of Nations pays honor today to the oldest and most 
successful association of sovereign Governments which exists in all the 
world. 

Few of us realize that the Pan American organization as we know it, has 
now attained a longer history and a greater catalogue of achievements 
than any similar group known to modern history. Justly we can be proud 
of it. With even more right we can look to it as a symbol of great hope 
at a time when much of the world finds hope dim and difficult. Never was 
it more fitting to salute Pan American Day than in the stormy present. 

For upwards of half a century the Republics of the Western World have 
been working together to promote their common civilization under a 
system of peace. That venture, launched so hopefully fifty years ago, 
has succeeded. The American family is today a great cooperative group 
facing a troubled world in serenity and calm. 

This success of the Western Hemisphere is sometimes attributed to good 
fortune. I do not share that view. There are not wanting here all of the 
usual rivalries, all of the normal human desires for power and 
expansion, all of the commercial problems. The Americas are sufficiently 
rich to have been themselves the object of desire on the part of 
overseas Governments; our traditions in history are as deeply rooted in 
the Old World as are those of Europe. 

It was not accident that prevented South America, and our own West, from 
sharing the fate of other great areas of the world in the nineteenth 
century. We have here diversities of race, of language, of custom, of 
natural resources; and of intellectual forces at least as great as those 
which prevailed in Europe. 

What was it that has protected us from the tragic involvements which are 
today making the Old World a new cockpit of old struggles? The answer is 
easily found. A new, and powerful ideal-that of the community of 
nations-sprang up at the same time that the Americas 

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became free and independent. It was nurtured by statesmen, thinkers and 
plain people for decades. Gradually it brought together the Pan American 
group of Governments; today it has fused the thinking of the peoples, 
and the desires of their responsible representatives toward a common 
objective.

The result of this thinking through all these years has been to shape a 
typically American institution. This is the Pan American group, which 
works in open conference, by open agreement. We hold our conferences not 
as a result of wars, but as the result of our will to peace. 

Elsewhere in the world, to hold conferences such as ours, which meet 
every five years, it is necessary to fight a major war, until exhaustion 
or defeat at length brings Governments together to reconstruct their 
shattered fabrics. 

Greeting a conference at Buenos Aires in 1936, I took occasion to say 
this: 

"The madness of a great war in another part of the world would affect us 
and threaten our good in a hundred ways. And the economic collapse of 
any Nation or nations must of necessity harm our own prosperity. Can we, 
the Republics of the New World, help the Old World to avert the 
catastrophe which impends? Yes, I am confident that we can." 

I still have that confidence. There is no fatality which forces the Old 
World towards new catastrophe. Men are not prisoners of fate, but only 
prisoners of their own minds. They have within themselves the power to 
become free at any moment. 

Only a few days ago the head of a great Nation referred to his country 
as a "prisoner" in the Mediterranean. A little later, another chief of 
state, on learning that a neighbor country had agreed to defend the 
independence of another neighbor, characterized that agreement as a 
"threat" and an "encirclement." Yet there is no such thing as encircling 
or threatening, or imprisoning any peaceful Nation by other peaceful 
nations. We have reason to know that in our own experience. 

For instance, on the occasion of a visit to the neighboring Dominion of 
Canada last summer, I stated that the United States would join in 
defending Canada were she ever attacked from overseas. Again at Lima in 
December last, the twenty-one American Nations joined in a declaration 
that they would coordinate their common efforts to defend the integrity 
of their institutions from any attack, direct or indirect. 

At Buenos Aires, in 1936, all of us agreed that in the event of any war 
or threat of war on this continent, we would consult together to remove 
or obviate that threat. Yet in no case did any American Nation regard 
any of these understandings as making any one of them a "prisoner," or 
as "encircling" any American country, or as a threat of any sort or 
kind. 

Measures of this kind taken in this hemisphere are taken as guarantees, 
not of war but of peace, for the simple reason that no Nation on this 
hemisphere has any will to aggression, or any desire to establish 
dominance or mastery. Equally, because we are interdependent, and 
because we know it, no American Nation seeks to deny any neighbor access 
to the economic and other resources which it must have to live in 
prosperity.

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In these circumstances, my friends, dreams of conquest appear to us as 
ridiculous as they are criminal. Pledges designed to prevent aggression, 
accompanied by the open doors of trade and intercourse, and bound 
together by common will to cooperate peacefully, make warfare between us 
as outworn and useless as the weapons of the Stone-Age. We may-proudly 
boast that we have begun to realize in Pan American relations what 
civilization in intercourse between countries really means. 

If that process can be successful here, is it too much to hope that a 
similar intellectual and spiritual process may succeed elsewhere? Do we 
really have to assume that nations can find no better methods of 
realizing their destinies than those which were used by the Huns and the 
Vandals fifteen hundred years ago? 

The American peace which we celebrate today has no quality of weakness 
in it! We are prepared to maintain it, and to defend it to the fullest 
extent of our strength, matching force to force if any attempt is made 
to subvert our institutions, or to impair the independence of any one of 
our group. 

Should the method of attack be that of economic pressure, I pledge that 
my country will also give economic support, so that no American Nation 
need surrender any fraction of its sovereign freedom to maintain its 
economic welfare. This is the spirit and intent of the Declaration of 
Lima: the solidarity of the continent. 

The American family of Nations may also rightfully claim, now, to speak 
to the rest of the world. We have an interest, wider than that of the 
mere defense of our sea-ringed continent. We know now that the 
development of the next generation will so narrow the oceans separating 
us from the Old World, that our customs and our actions are necessarily 
involved with hers, whether we like it or not. 

Beyond question, within a scant few years air fleets will cross the 
ocean as easily as today they cross the closed European seas. Economic 
functioning of the world becomes therefore necessarily a unit; no 
interruption of it anywhere can fail, in the future, to disrupt economic 
life everywhere. 

The past generation in Pan American matters was concerned with 
constructing the principles and the mechanisms through which this 
hemisphere would work together. But the next generation will be 
concerned with the methods by which the New World can live together in 
peace with the Old. 

The issue is really whether our civilization is to be dragged into the 
tragic vortex of unending militarism punctuated by periodic wars, or 
whether we shall be able to maintain the ideal of peace, individuality 
and civilization as the fabric of our lives. We have the right to say 
that there shall not be an organization of world affairs which permits 
us no choice but to turn our countries into barracks, unless we are to 
be the vassals of some conquering empire. 

The truest defense of the peace of our hemisphere must always lie in the 
hope that our sister nations beyond the seas will break the bonds of the 
ideas that constrain them toward perpetual warfare. By example we can at 
least show them the possibility. We, too, have a stake in world affairs. 

Our will to peace can be as powerful as our will to mutual defense; it 
can command greater loyalty, greater devotion, greater discipline than 
that enlisted elsewhere for temporary conquest or equally futile 

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glory. It will have its voice in determining the order of world affairs 
in the days to come. 

This, gentlemen, is the living message which the New World can and does 
send to the Old. It can be light opening on dark waters. It shows the 
path of peace. 

-----------------------------

See Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1939 Volume 
pp. 199-201, for work of Pan American Conferences. Note Papers I, VI, IX 
and XV of this series.