[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Pages 20281-20283]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                    THE GREAT GENERATIONS OF AMERICA

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, in his book, ``The Greatest Generation,'' 
NBC's news anchorman Tom Brokaw discusses the greatness of the 
generation of Americans who withstood the problems, the terrors, the 
doubts, the fears of the 1930s and the 1940s. He points out that it was 
this generation of Americans who ``came of age in the Great Depression 
when economic despair hovered over the land like a plague.'' When Pearl 
Harbor made it irrefutably clear that America was not a fortress, he 
writes, ``This generation . . . answered the call to help save the 
world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever 
assembled.'' Afterward, those people ``helped convert a wartime economy 
into the most powerful peacetime economy in history.'' This was ``the 
greatest generation any society has ever produced.''
  Like Mr. Brokaw, I, too, admire the generation of Americans who 
survived the hardships of the Great Depression and won World War II. 
They were truly outstanding Americans, a great generation. I am proud 
to say they are of my generation.
  But ever since reading Mr. Brokaw's book, I can't help but think 
about the greatness of not only that generation of Americans, but also 
the greatness of generation after generation of Americans. It seems 
that in almost every age of our history, Americans have risen to meet 
the challenges and difficulties of their times to move our country 
forward toward even further greatness.
  I immediately think of the generation of Americans about which I love 
so much to read and to speak--the generation of Americans who won our 
independence and established this Government of the people, by the 
people, and for the people. In the Declaration of Independence, these 
Americans took the ideas of the English enlightenment and made them a 
national vision. These Americans infused into the very nature of our 
political life the egalitarian, democratic impulses that guide us 
today.
  In seeking our independence, those Americans demonstrated remarkable 
determination, remarkable courage.
  Just by putting their names on this Declaration of Independence, 
which I hold in my hand, the 56 signers became guilty of high treason 
against the British Crown. It was a crime that was punishable by death. 
But the unflagging determination of that generation was expressed in 
the words of Patrick Henry, who declared: ``Give me liberty or give me 
death.'' It was also demonstrated by a 21-year-old schoolteacher turned 
soldier-patriot named Nathan Hale.
  If your American history book doesn't tell the story of Nathan Hale, 
it is not a history book. It is probably a book on social studies, not 
a book of American history. I studied American history by reading 
Muzzey back in 1927, 1928, by the light of an old kerosene lamp. 
Muzzey. He told the story of Nathan Hale: When about to be executed by 
the British for supplying GEN George Washington with important 
information--drawings of the British gun emplacements, and so on, and 
about the location and the strength of the British troops, Nathan Hale 
uttered those immortal words: ``I only regret that I have but one life 
to lose for my country.''
  The leaders of that generation of revolutionary Americans were not 
your down and out, nothing-left-to-lose, rebel-rousing revolutionaries.
  Benjamin Franklin was a transatlantic figure, a world figure of great 
accomplishments. He was a world-renowned and respected scholar, 
philosopher, inventor, diplomat, and scientist.
  George Washington was a highly respected, wealthy landowner. He did 
not have to leave his beautiful, vast country estate and risk 
everything, including his family fortune and death, to

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lead a ragtag revolutionary army against the mighty British military 
machine.
  Thomas Jefferson was a great scientist, a great mathematician, 
author, educator, architect, inventor, political leader.
  This list of greats in the revolutionary generation also includes 
such giants as James Madison, George Mason, Alexander Hamilton, James 
Otis, Samuel Adams, John Adams, and the list goes on and on. And it 
does not stop with the leaders. The list includes colonial merchants 
such as Robert Morris. It includes colonial craftsmen such as Paul 
Revere. It includes tens of thousands of colonial workers who made up 
the famous correspondence committees, the Sons of Liberty who enforced 
the boycotts of British goods, carried out the Stamp Act protests, and 
dumped the British tea into Boston Harbor.
  It was these nameless colonial workers who made up that Revolutionary 
Army, who shivered through the cold winter at Valley Forge, who made 
that daring crossing over the Delaware River on that frigid Christmas 
Eve, and who turned the world upside down at Yorktown.
  After winning the Revolution, this generation put their vision of 
America into a workable form, a government that embodied the 
principles, ideals, and values for which they had fought and died. So 
many of our Founding Fathers assembled in Philadelphia that hot summer 
of 1787 and formulated the U.S. Constitution, a copy of which I hold in 
my hand.
  Mr. President, it simply does not get any greater than that when we 
speak of the greatest generation, but I cannot and I will not say that 
generation was greater than the generation that prevailed during the 
Great Depression and saved the world from the tyranny, the Nazi 
tyranny, nor can I say it was greater than the generation of Americans 
who experienced the events that led up to the Civil War, who saved the 
Union, and who ended the ugliest, most tragic chapter of American 
history: the chapter concerning the institution of human slavery. That 
generation of American greats included President Abraham Lincoln, 
Senators Charles Sumner, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Solomon Foot, and 
Henry Wilson. It included writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry 
Thoreau, the great contemporary of Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman 
Melville.
  After the Civil War came a collection of extraordinary Americans that 
included John D. Rockefeller, the great grandfather of my colleague 
from West Virginia, Commodore Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, J.P. Morgan, 
Andrew Carnegie, James Drew, James Hill, and Collis P. Huntington, who 
founded the city of Huntington, WV. These are just to name a few.
  Referred to by such titles as ``captains of industry'' and ``empire 
builders,'' this was the generation that industrialized America as the 
United States soared from fifth in the world in economic productivity 
to become the world's foremost economic power. With little 
exaggeration, industrialist Jay Gould stated:

       We have made the country rich. We have developed the 
     country.

  Mr. President, they certainly made modern industrial America that 
gave the United States the industrial base that enabled us to win World 
War I and then World War II. They, too, certainly qualify for having 
made up a great generation.
  Between 1900 and 1920, a period of American history sometimes 
referred to as the ``progressive era,'' a generation of reformers 
sought to clean up the mess created by the industrialization and 
urbanization of the late 19th century, including child labor, sweat 
shops, corrupt political machines, industrial and banking monopolies, 
and urban slums. These tenacious progressive reformers broke the 
control that railroad, lumber, and coal companies possessed over their 
State legislatures.
  These men enacted many of the laws that still regulate and guide us 
today, including those that established the Federal Reserve System and 
Federal Trade Commission, as well as antitrust laws and the national 
income tax. They adopted four constitutional amendments, including the 
direct election of U.S. Senators, without which amendment I certainly 
would not be here and perhaps the Senator from Rhode Island, who 
presently presides over the Senate with such a degree of dignity and 
skill, aplomb that is so rare as a day in June, Jack Reed.
  That generation included some of our greatest political leaders, such 
as President Woodrow Wilson, during whose second administration I was 
born, and President Theodore Roosevelt and Senators Robert LaFollette, 
Henry Cabot Lodge, and William E. Borah.
  It included some of the greatest journalists in American history, 
such as Ida Tarbell, David Graham Phillips, and Lincoln Steffens. It 
included some of the greatest labor leaders in American history, such 
as Samuel Gompers, and Mother Jones.
  Mr. President, rather than pitting one generation of Americans 
against another in some sort of intergenerational competition, I like 
to recognize the greatness of a society, the greatness of a government, 
the greatness of a culture that is so instrumental in producing one 
great generation after another great generation and then another great 
generation.
  It is not the singular greatness of any particular generation of 
Americans that we should recognize and celebrate but the greatness of a 
way of life that is ours, a way of life that not merely allows but 
encourages the American people to do our best, and allows and 
encourages the best to rise to the top, allows the cream of the crop to 
rise and become its own and fulfill its own talents, to excel, to 
succeed, and to make us a better Nation.
  It is also important and fascinating to recall from where this 
greatness has come. Some, such as George Washington, the Roosevelts, 
and the Kennedys, did come from families of wealth, power, and 
education.
  But the leader of the country during its darkest hours was a humble 
rail splitter who was born in a log cabin in western Kentucky. The 
leader of American military forces during the invasion of Normandy was 
a Kansas farm boy.
  Look at the great industrialists of the late nineteenth century. John 
D. Rockefeller was the son of an itinerant patent medicine salesman. 
Andrew Carnegie was the son of a poor Scottish weaver. Jay Gould, 
Philip Armor, and Daniel Drew were children of poor farmers. James J. 
Hill began his career as an office clerk.
  I daresay that the vast majority of Americans who have contributed to 
the greatness of this country, such as those who made up George 
Washington's motley revolutionary army, were plain, ordinary Americans, 
from ordinary places, doing ordinary things, until their country needed 
them. This included the men who fought at San Juan hill. This included 
the men who fought at Gettysburg. It included the men who stormed the 
beaches of Normandy, and, who, more recently, won Desert Storm.
  Now we are seeing another generation of extraordinary Americans 
meeting the challenges and demands of our extraordinary times.
  I am speaking foremost about the men who exemplified that New York 
spirit. Most of these were firefighters, policemen, and rescue workers 
at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon who rushed in to save 
other lives, including many who gave their own lives in the process. 
Then we think of those who have labored so long and so hard, day after 
day, week after week, digging through the rubble of the worst disasters 
in American history, seeking to save one more life.
  I am also speaking of those countless Americans who have given blood, 
money, and other forms of assistance to the victims of those disasters.
  I am speaking of the men and women who wear our Nation's uniform, and 
may soon be put in harm's way to protect our country and defend the 
liberties and principles that we hold so dear.
  I am speaking of the courageous men and women aboard United flight 
93, who brought that plane down in the desolate fields of Somerset 
County,

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Pennsylvania, and saved the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of 
their fellow Americans.
  It does not get any greater than that. There can be no greater 
generation than these. All of these Americans qualify for greatness. 
They have made their generation yet another great generation of 
Americans.
  It was people such as these who won our independence. It was because 
of people such as these that this country has survived a Civil War, a 
Great Depression, two world wars, and will now prevail in our current 
crisis. It is because of people such as these that our country has 
been, is, and will remain a great country.
  I think of some verses from J.G. Holland.

     God give us men!
     A time like this demands strong minds, great hearts, true 
           faith, and ready hands.
     Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
     Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
     Men who possess opinions and a will;
     Men who have honor; men who will not lie.

     Men who can stand before a demagogue
     And brave his treacherous flatteries without winking.

     Tall men, sun-crowned;
     Who live above the fog,
     In public duty and in private thinking.
     For while the rabble with its thumbworn creeds,
     It's large professions and its little deeds, mingles in 
           selfish strife,
     Lo! Freedom weeps!
     Wrong rules the land and waiting justice sleeps.
     God give us men!

     Men who serve not for selfish booty;
     But real men, courageous, who flinch not at duty.
     Men of dependable character;
     Men of sterling worth;
     Then wrongs will be redressed, and right will rule the earth.
     God Give us Men!

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senator from 
Ohio is recognized.
  Mr. VOINOVICH. Mr. President, I cannot help but comment about the 
eloquent words we have just heard from the Senator from West Virginia. 
When I go home, people are quite concerned about our country, the state 
of our homeland security, the state of our security abroad, the 
situation with our economy. The eloquent words of the Senator from West 
Virginia speak to that and underscore the fact that when we have ever 
been challenged, we have had the people who will rise to the occasion 
and solve those problems that have been confronting our country.
  One of the things I have been really impressed with is how thankful 
the people are that those of us who are Republicans and Democrats have 
been working together and putting aside partisan politics for the 
benefit of our country. We need to really not forget how important that 
is to our people at this very critical time. So I thank the Senator 
from West Virginia for his remarks.
  Mr. BYRD. I thank my friend, the Senator from Ohio, for his kind 
comments.

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