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Show FOR A UNITED AMERICA The night after election a great meeting was held in Carnegie Hall in New York, not to celebrate a victory or mourn a defeat but to bury the hatchet. Men and women af all political beliefs, of all racial origins, all creeds and faiths, spoke the same language. lan-guage. The keynote was the one word : "Unity." Nothing could better express the spirit of democracy than this determination to stand .united .unit-ed as a people behind the leaders of the people's choice, after the most bitter and hard-fought Presidential election of many years. In the campaign cam-paign every animosity of group againt group, class against class, race against race, creed against creed, was brought out into the open and used by one side or the other to further its ends. All of the fears, the hatreds, the suspicions and the distrusts felt by any Americans against other Americans were thoroughly aired. Now, having got all those things off our chests, it is time to forget them, at least until the next election, elec-tion, and to get together as Americans, to make it our business, the business of every one of us, to revivify the true spirit of America and to keep it alive in a world where everything America stands for seems to be threatened. Nothing could make the enemies of human liberty happier than to see Americans divided among themselves. Nothing could endanger our national saftey more than to keep alive or aggravate ag-gravate the antagonisms which showed themselves them-selves in the recent campaign. We have a big job ahead of us, a job in which all must do their part and none must be permitted to hinder. That is the job of building our national defenses to the point where we can be perfectly sure that no possible pos-sible attack from outside our shores can be effective. ef-fective. Only by so safeguarding our physical boundaries can we be sure of keeping alive the spiritual heritage which is the real America. If proof were needed that the American people are united in that objective, it' is provided by the fact that there was no issue as between parties or candidates on that question. All were agreed that the first need of the nation is to speed up work on our defenses, and give all possible help to the few remaining democracies overseas who are fighting for the same objectives that we of America Amer-ica must preserve. So let us bury the hatchet and pull together togeth-er to prove that democracy is not outworn, but a living, vital force, the greatest force in the world today. |