 Dupont, maker of better things for better living through chemistry, salutes 167 years of American freedom as it presents Listen to the People by Stephen Vincent Benet, starring Ethel Barrymore on the Cavalcade of America. On this day when every American rededicates himself to those things for which America stands, Cavalcade presents Listen to the People by the great American patriot and poet, the late Stephen Vincent Benet. Listen to the People sounded a prophetic warning when it was first presented on the 4th of July two years ago. Tonight we hear it in retrospect. At the end of the program as Barrymore will read a salutation to Stephen Benet by another American poet, Carl Sandberg. Dupont presents Listen to the People starring Ethel Barrymore on the Cavalcade of America. This is Independence Day, 4th of July, the day we mean to keep whatever happens or whatever falls out of a sky grown strange. This is firecracker day for sunburned kids, the day of the parade. Slam banging down the street. Listen to the parade. There's J.K. Bernie's float, red, white, blue, crepe paper on the wheels, the fire department and the local grains. There are the pretty girls with their hair curled who represent the 13 colonies, the spirit of East Greenwich, Betsy Ross, democracy or just some pretty girls. There are the veterans and the legion posts, their feet are going to hurt when they get home. The band, the flag, the band, the usual crowd, good human watching, hot, silent a second as the flag goes by, kidding the local cop and eating popsicles. Jack Brown, Rosie Shapiro and Dan Shray, Paul Bunchick and the Greek who runs the Greek. The black-eyed children out of Sicily, the girls who giggle and the boys who push, all of them there and all of them a nation. And afterwards there'll be ice cream and fireworks and a speech by somebody the honorable who. The lovers will pair off in the kind dark and Tessie Jones, our other graduate, will read the declaration. That's how it is. It's always been that way. That's our 4th of July through war and peace. That's our 4th of July. Dean Farmer on a stony farm came home from mowing, buttoned up his shirt and walked 10 miles to town, musket in hand. He didn't know the sky was falling down and maybe he didn't know so much, but people oughtn't to be pushed around by kings or any such. A workman in the city dropped his tools, an ordinary small town kind of man. Found himself standing in the April sun, one of a ragged line against the skilled professionals of war, the matchless infantry who could not fail. Not for the profit, not to conquer wills, not for the pomp of the heroic tale, but first and principally since he was sore. They could do things in quite a lot of places. They shouldn't do them here in Lexington. He looked around and saw his neighbors' faces. Disperse, tree-villains! Why don't you disperse? Stand your ground, men. Don't fire unless fired upon. Do they mean to have a war? Let it begin here. Well, that was that. And later, when he died of fever or a bullet in the gut, spared generalship, starvation, dirty wounds, or any one of all the thousand things that kill a man in wars, he didn't die handsome, but he did die free. And maybe that meant something could be, oh, it's not pretty. Say it all you like. It isn't a bit pretty, not one bit. But that is how the liberty was won, that paid for the firecrackers and the band. Don't you notice an imperialist capitalist country, don't you? Don't you know it's all done with mirrors, the bosses get the gravy, don't you? Suppose some old guy with chin whiskers did get his pants shot off in a place called Lexington. What does it mean to me? My dear fellow, I myself am the son of the son of the son of the American Revolution, but I can only view the present situation with the gravest alarm, because we are rapidly drifting into a dictatorship. And it isn't my kind of dictatorship what's more. The Constitution is dead and labor doesn't know its place, and there's all that gold buried at Fort Knox and the taxes. Oh, why, what's the use of a defense contract if you can't make money out of your country? Oh, things are bad. Things are very bad. And if you let the working classes buy coal, they'll only fill bathtubs with it. Don't you realize the gravity of the situation, don't you? Won't you hide your head in a bucket and telegraph your congressman opposing everything possible, including peace and war? My worthy American listeners, I am giving you one more chance. Don't you know that we are completely invincible, don't you? Won't you just admit that we are the wave of the future, won't you? You are a very nice, mongrel, disgusting people, except, of course, for your Jews. But naturally, you need new leadership. We can supply it. We've sent the same brand to 14 nations. It comes in the shape of a bomb, and it beats as it sweeps, as it cleans. For those of you who like order, we can supply order. We give the order, you take it. For those of you who like efficiency, we can supply efficiency. Look what we did to Coventry and Rotterdam. For those of you who like Bonito Mussolini, we can supply him. Now be sensible. Give up this corrupt and stupid nonsense of democracy. Forget everything with the class struggle. Forget democracy. Hate and distrust your own government. Whisper, hate, and never look forward. Look back, wistfully to the good old grand old days, the days when the boys said the public be damned and got away with it. Democracy is a nasty word invented by the Reds. Just a little collaboration, and you too can be part of the new order. You too can have fine new concentration camps and shoes made out of wood pulp. You too can be as peaceful as Poland, as happy and gay as France. Just a little collaboration. We have so many things to give you. We can give you your own hess, your own Himmler, your own girding. All homegrown and wrapped in tissue. We've done it elsewhere. If you'll help, we can do it here. Democracy is dying. We will tear it apart with words and bombs and fear. Democracy is a fake. Democracy is a mistake. Democracy is finished. We are the future. The sky is dark now over the parade. The sky is an altered sky, a sky that might be. There's J.K. Bernie's flute with funny colored paper on the wheels, or no excuse me, used to be J.K.'s. But the store's under different management, like quite a lot of stores. You see, J.K. got up in church one day after it all had happened and walked out the day they instituted the new order. They had a meeting, held it in the church. He just walked out. That's all. That's all there is to say about J.K., though I remember just the way he looked, white-faced and chin-stuck out. I think they could have let the church alone, kind of dreary, shutting up the church. But don't you say I said so? Don't you say? Listen to the parade. They're the pretty girls with their hair curled back from the labor camp. They represent the league of strength through joy. At least I guess it's that. No, they don't go to high school anymore. They get told where they go. We all get told. And now and then it happens like Jack Brown. Nice fellow, Jack, ran the gas station here. But he was married to a, you know who, fond of her too. I don't know why we never used to mind why she walked around like anybody else, kept her kids clean and joined the ladies social, just shows you, doesn't it? But that's all done. You won't see her in the crowd today, her, the kids, or Jack, unless you look six feet under the ground, the lime-wash ground, the bitter prison ground that hides the martyrs in the innocent. And you won't see Dan Shade. Dan was a union man. We don't have unions anymore. They wouldn't even let him take his specks the day the troopers came around for him. We had he needed specks. He had gray hair. Funny, you keep remembering things like that. Maybe he's still alive. It's hard to say. Listen to the parade. The marching, marching, marching feet all with the same hard stamp. The bands, the bands, the bands, the flags, the flags. The sharp mechanical inhuman cheer dragged from the straining throats of the stiff crowd. It's independence. Sorry, my mistake. It's national day. The day of the new order. We let it happen. We forgot the old bleak words of common sense, you knifed or died. We fiddled and we squabbled and we scrapped. We led a filibuster in the Senate. We were quite ready for a sacrifice sometime next Tuesday, but not yet, not now. And the clock struck and the bad dream was here. But you can't do this to me. I subscribed to the party fund. You can't do this to me. We got laws. We got courts. We got unions. You can't do this to me. Why believe in Karl Marx? You can't do this to me. The Constitution forbids it. I was always glad to cooperate. It looked to me like good business. It looked to me like a class struggle. It looked to me like peace in our time. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Democracy is finished. You are finished. We are the present. That is one voice. You've heard it. Don't forget it. And don't forget it can be slick or harsh, violent or crooning, but it's still the same and it means death. There are no other voices, none at all, no voice at all out of the long parade and march so many years. Out of the passion of the Puritans, the creaking of the wagons going west, the guns of Sharpsburg, the unnumbered dead, out of the baffled and bewildered hosts who came here for a freedom hardly known, rebel in exile, bond-servant and outcast, out of the bowels of the immigrant ship, the strange sick voyage, the cheating and the scorn and yet at the end, liberty, liberty with a torch in her right hand. Whoever cheated and who ever lied, liberty for my children, liberty slowly worked out, deceived a thousand times, but never quite forgotten, always growing, growing like wheat and corn. I remember a man named Abe Lincoln. I remember the words he used to say. Oh, we can call on Lincoln and Tom Payne, Adams and Jefferson. Call on the great words spoken that remain like the great stars of evening, the thick stars. But that is not enough. The dead are mighty and are part of us and yet the dead are dead. This is our world, our time, our choice, our anguish, our decision. This is our world. We have to make it now. 130 millions of us have to and make it well or suffer the bad dream. What have we got to say? I don't know. I'm a woman with a house. I do my work. I take care of my man. I've got a right to say how things should be. I've got a right to have my kids grow up the way they ought to grow. Don't stop me there. Don't tread on me. Don't hinder me. Don't cross me. I made my kids myself. I haven't got big words to tell about them, but if you ask about democracy, democracy is the growing and the bearing mouth of the breast and child still to be born. Democracy is kids in the green grass. What have we got to say, people? You, people? I guess I haven't thought about it much. I've been too busy. The way I figure it, it's this way. We've got something. If it's crummy, the bunch of us can change what we don't like in our own way and mean it. I've got a cousin back in the old country. He says it's swell there, but he couldn't change a button on his pants without an order from somebody's pet horse. Maybe he likes it. I am sticking here. That's all. Well, sign me off. You are listening to Ethel Barrymore and Steven Vincent Bonet's prophetic Independence Day drama, Listen to the People, first presented on July 4th, 1941 and repeated tonight on The Cavalcade of America, sponsored by DuPont. People, you people living everywhere, Sioux Falls and Saugatuck and Texakana, Memphis and Goshen, Harardsburg and Troy, people who live at post marks with queer names, Blue Eye and Rohide, Santa Claus and Troubleson, people by rivers, people of the plains, people whose contour plows bring back the grass to a dust-bitten and dishonored earth and those who farm the hillside acres still and raise up fortitude between the stones, millions in cities, millions in the towns, people who spit a mile from their front doors and gangling kids, ball-playing in the street, all races and all stocks, all creeds and cries and yet one people, one and always striving. I'm on relief. I know what they say about us on relief, those who never were there, all the same we made the park, we made the road and the check dam and the culvert. Our names are not on the tablets, forget our names, but when you drive on the road, remember us also, remember Johnny Lombardo and his pick, remember us when you build democracy, for we too were part and are part. One nation, one, and the voices of young and old, of all who have faith, jostling and mingling, speaking from the ground, speaking from the old houses and the pride, speaking from the deep hollows of the heart. I was born in 63. There were many then who despaired of the Republic, many fine and solid citizens. They had good and plausible reasons and were eloquent. I grew up in the age of brass, the age of steel. I have known and heard of three wars. All through my life, whenever the skies were dark, there came to me many fine and solid citizens wringing their hands, despairing of the Republic because of an income tax or a depression, because their party had lost the last election, because we couldn't do this and shouldn't do that. And yet each time I saw the Republic grow like a great elm tree through each falls and failure, the stubborn rock, the parched soil, and spread its branches to all the people. Look at the morning sun. There's the Republic. Not yesterday, but there, the breaking day. But my worthy American listeners, all this is degenerate talk. The future rolls like a wave and you cannot fight it. Who says we can't? What's his racket? How does he get that way? You mean to tell me a little shrimp like that could run the world? A guy with a trick mustache to loot, run us, run you and me? You mistake me. Others have often made the same mistake often and often and in many countries. I never play upon a people's strength. I play upon their weaknesses and fears. I make their doubts my allies and my spies. I have a most convincing mask of peace painted by experts for one kind of sucker and for another, I'm a businessman straight from the shoulder talking trade understood. I touch this man upon his pocketbook that man upon his hatred for his boss that man upon his fear. I offer everything for offerings cheap. I make no claims until I make the claims. I'm always satisfied until I'm not. Which happens rather rapidly to those who think I could be satisfied with less than a dismembered and digested world. My secret weapon is no secret weapon. It is to turn all men against all men for my own purposes. It is to subjugate men's minds before their bodies feel the steel. It is to use all envy all despair or prejudice for my own work. If you've an envy or a prejudice a nicely grown well rounded piece of hate I'll play on it and use it to your ruin. I won't be beaten just by sitting tight. They try that out in France. I won't be beaten by hiding in the dark and making faces. And certainly I never will be beaten by those who rather like my kind of world. Or if not like it think that it must come. Those who have wings and buttoe in the ground. For I'm not betting only on the tanks the guns the planes the bombers but on your own division and disunion on your own minds and hearts to let me in. For if that happens so what have you to say? What have you got to bet against my bet? Where's your own voice? We've got a job to do. We've got a road to hold. We've got a land where men live free and we mean to keep it so. Listen and hear us speak through lightning and the night. This is the people's cause we are the people's might. We built Boulder Dam. We built the TVA. We built the cities up so high the Eagles lost their way. Wasn't enough alone. Wasn't enough somehow. But we learned our trade from the licks we took and we're building different now. That's why we turn the lathe. That's why we plow the farms. That's why a million of us learn how free men stand to arms not for the chains of lord and slave the chains we left behind but for all the years since Lexington and the years we've still defined. We came from want and fear. That's what we mean to build today. We mean to build it here. Build it and spread it out. Build it and make it stay till no one man should dare to take another's hope away. Justice and hope and right growing like wheat and corn. The old world died in its boots last night. The new world isn't born. We mean to see that it's born all right for the decent and the free for you and me and the folks next door and the great word liberty. You've heard the long parade and all the voices that cry out against it. What did the people say? Well, you've just heard some questions and some answers. Not all, of course. No man can say that's all. But look in your own minds and memories and find out what you find and what you keep. It's time we did that and it won't be earlier. I don't know what each one of you will find. It may be only half a dozen words carved on a stone carved deeper in the heart. It might be all a life but look and find it. Sun on Key West snow on New Hampshire Hills warm rain on Georgia and the Texas wind blowing across an empire and all parts all one, all indivisible and one. Find it and keep it and hold on to it for there's a buried thing in all of us deeper than all the noise of the parade the things the haters never understood and never will the habit of the free out of the flesh out of the minds and hearts of thousands upon thousands common men cranks, martyrs starry-eyed enthusiasts slow-spoken neighbors hard to push around women whose hands were gentle to their kids and men with a cold passion for mere justice we made this thing, this dream this land unsatisfied by little ways this peace-less vision groping for the stars not as a huge devouring machine rolling and planking with remorseless force over-submitted bodies and the dead but as live earth where anything could grow your crankiness, my notions and his dream grow and be looked at grow and live or die but get their chance of growing and the sun we made it and we make it and it's ours we shall maintain it it shall be sustained democracy is the morning when it's new democracy is kids and the green grass we shall maintain it it shall be sustained in just a moment, Miss Barrymore will read a salutation to Stephen Benet especially written for this performance on the Cavalcade of America by Carl Sandberg, poet of the people meanwhile we have an Independence Day message from Cavalcade sponsor the DuPont Company of Wilmington, Delaware only a quarter of a century younger than the Republic itself DuPont's history closely parallels that of the nation in five wars DuPont has placed itself unreservedly at the service of the nation to provide the essentials of battle and now again, our entire facilities are completely at the disposal of the government DuPont was founded to provide the tools for peaceful conquest of a vast new country whatever success it has attained has come in greatest measure from serving the arts of peace and not those of war in common with all Americans DuPont holds no brief for war hopes fervently for the day of universal peace today it is completely dedicated to bringing that day speedily to pass through complete and unconditional victory of our arms tomorrow in a free world it will turn again to its happier pursuit of producing better things for better living through chemistry and now the star of tonight's Cavalcade Miss Ethel Barrymore many men knew Stephen Benet by thought fixed in print one who knew him as a friend as well was Carl Sandberg for this performance of Listen to the People Mr. Sandberg has written a salutation I would like to read it to you now Stephen Benet saw America standing for certain hopes and promises creeping towards this America he saw strange shadows he spoke his warning Benet lived long enough to see his country living up to the finest of its past he kept her heart ready for battle and a mind and voice that fought in the arena of ideas how well did he know that men of ideas vanish first when freedom vanishes the seeding motors of many historic forces move and shift with the right earth thinker and dreamer who is gone from us but his voice and a brave essence of him is still alive Stephen Benet was a whimsical man I would have pleased him to know that a radio play he wrote goes marching on like John Brown's body next week the Cavalcade of America will present Ralph Bellamy in Soldiers of the Cloth an authentic and typical story of the chaplain's corps as it serves men in battle our play by Milton Wayne is based on the actual experiences of chaplain Thomas M. Reardon from the South Pacific don't forget be with us next week when Dupont presents Ralph Bellamy in Soldiers of the Cloth the drama of the chaplain's corps in battle the orchestra and musical score of Listen to the People was under the direction of Donald Burry's with a special musical score by Arden Cornwell for permission to repeat Listen to the People Cavalcade is indebted to the Council for Democracy for whom Stephen Benet originally wrote his poem this is Clayton Collier sending best wishes from Cavalcade's sponsor the Dupont Company of Wilmington, Delaware this program has come to you from New York this is the National Broadcasting Company