[silent]
PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN: We're assembled here on this Bill of Rights Day
to do honor to the three great documents which together
constitute the charter of our form of government.
The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution,
and the Bill of Rights are now assembled in one place for display and safekeeping.
Here, so far as is humanly possible
they will be protected from disaster and from the ravages of time.
I'm glad that the Bill of Rights is at last to be exhibited side by side
with the Constitution.
These two original documents have been separated for too long.
In my opinion, the Bill of Rights is the most important
part of the Constitution of the United States.
The longer i live, the more i am impressed by the significance of our
simple, official oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.
Perhaps it takes a lifetime of experience to understand
how much the Constitution means to our national life.
You can read about the Constitution and
you can study it in books, but the Constitution is not merely a
matter of words; the Constitution is a living force.
It is a growing thing. The Constitution belongs to no one group
of people and to no single branch of the government.
We acknowledge our judges as the interpreters of the Constitution,
but our executive branch and our legislative branch alike
operate within its framework and must apply it and its principles in all they do.
The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence can live only as long
as they are enshrined in our hearts and minds.
If they are not so enshrined they would
be no better than mummies in their glass cases and they could in time
become idols whose worship would be a grim mockery of the true faith.
Only as these documents are reflected in the thoughts and acts of Americans
can they remain symbols of power that can move the world.
That power is our faith in human liberty,
that all freedom-loving nations, not the United States alone,
are facing a stern challenge from the communist tyranny.
In the circumstances, alarm is justified. The man who isn't alarmed simply doesn't
understand the situation or he's crazy.
But alarm is one thing and hysteria is another.
Hysteria impels people to destroy the
very thing they are struggling to preserve.
Invasion and conquest by communist armies would be a horror beyond our capacity to
imagine but invasion and conquest by communist
ideas of right and wrong would be just as bad.
For us to embrace the methods and morals of communism in order to defeat
communist aggression would be a moral disaster worse than any physical catastrophe.
If that should come to pass, then the Constitution and the Declaration
would be utterly dead and what we are doing today
would be the gloomiest burial in history-- in the history of the world.
But I do not believe it is going to come to pass.
On the contrary, I believe that this ceremony here today
marks a new dedication to the ideals of liberty.
Since whether we will preserve and extend popular liberty
is a very serious question, but after all it is a very old question.
The men who signed the Declaration faced it.
So did those who wrote the Constitution, but each succeeding generation has faced it
and so far each succeeding generation
has answered it in the affirmative. I'm sure that our generation
will give the same affirmative answer, so i confidently predict that what we
are doing today is placing before the eyes of many generations to come
the symbols of a living faith and like
the sight of the flag in the dawn's early light,
the sight of these symbols will lift up their hearts.
So they will go out of this building
helped, and strengthened, and inspired.
[applause]
[silent]
[music]
MAN #1: Massachusetts, February the 6th,1788.
Maryland, April the 28th, 1788.
[inaudible voices]
[squeak of curtains opening]
[inaudible voices]
CHIEF JUSTICE FRED M. VINSON: ...Constitution and the Bill of Rights
is a common phenomenon in this country.
Americans like to pay homage to these great documents,
just as other people in other parts of
the world like to pay homage to their kings or rulers.
A stranger in our midst, ignorant of our institutions might think it odd
that we would wax so eloquent over some ancient scraps of paper.
But the fact is, these papers are not historical heirlooms,
they are the living, organic law of the land.
We've gone on, putting them to work and they have thus far worked well.
As this nation has gained maturity, so has it gained new insight and formed
fresh-- fresh aspirations for the work of its creators.
We have need of this vision today.
Ours has always been a faith based on reason.
This, then, is the time for a new and fiercer faith
in the Declaration and the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights.
This is a time for sharpening to the glistening point
the aspirations which we have for them.
We have the verdict of history, thus far, to prove the strength of our institutions
and to show their worth in man's struggle to realize the highest hopes of man.
A people, who with great pride, trace their political ancestry
to the men who created these immortal documents
should seek to emulate their valor and their vision.
We can afford to do no less.
[music]
[silent]