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Address at the Constitution Day Ceremonies at the Library of Congress.

September 17, 1951

by Harry S Truman

Location: District of Columbia, Washington

Note: The President spoke at 10:32 a.m. at the Library of Congress. His opening words referred to Fred M. Vinson, Chief Justice of the United States, Senator Theodore Francis Green of Rhode Island, and Luther H. Evans, Librarian of Congress.

(The address was broadcast.)

Mr. Chief Justice of the United States, Senator Green, Doctor Evans, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:

We have met here this morning to put some pieces of parchment away in specially sealed cases, in order to preserve them from physical and chemical change. And I can't help but be impressed with this magnificent collection of all the ancient, medieval, and modern documents that are in this library.

I think always of the terrible destruction of the Alexandrian Library in the Middle Ages. And this library, the British Museum, and the Louvre, are our modern replicas of that great Alexandrian Library.

The documents which we are putting away today are written in a style of handwriting which are no longer familiar to us. If they were only historical relics, it might seem strange that we should make a ceremony out of this occasion of sealing them up.

But the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are more than historical relics. They are a living force in our life today.

We may have some difficulty in preserving the parchment on which these two documents have been written, but the ideas they set forth will never perish. These documents express the highest principles of political life: That all men have certain unalienable rights, that governments are set up to provide for the welfare of the people, and that the role of law stands above government and citizen alike.

These ideas have a life of their own. They have been a dynamic force in the history of our Nation. They have inspired men, all around the world, to create new and independent governments, and to improve the conditions under which they live.

These are very explosive documents, Dr. Evans. We may think we have them safely bottled up, but the ideas they express will go on forever. They will continue to give energy and hope to new generations of men, here and in other countries, in the long struggle to create a better society on earth.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, when they were written, were revolutionary documents. But they were revolutionary in a very unusual sense.

Many--I might say most--revolutions are simply a resort to force and violence to impose a new despotism upon the people. But these documents were for a very different purpose; their aim was to make despotism impossible. Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution seek to make the rule of law and the concepts of justice the dominating factors in government. To a large extent they have succeeded.

The struggle against the use of naked force as an instrument of government was an old one even before these two documents were written. Our forefathers created a new nation, but they based it upon the long experience of the English people in maintaining human freedom.

The right to trial by jury, the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, the right of habeas corpus, the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, the guarantees of freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion--all these were basic concepts in the days of our Revolution. They were concepts for which men had worked and even given up their lives for centuries.

But they never had been made the foundation stones of a government until they were put in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution of the United States and its first 10 amendments--the Bill of Rights--which are just as fundamental a part of our basic law as the original version of the Constitution that we are sealing up here today.

I hope that these first 10 amendments will be put on parchment and sealed up and placed alongside the original document. In my opinion they are the most important parts of the Constitution.

These rights have become so well established in this country that we take them for granted. They are so much a part of our lives that they may seem dry and uninteresting. But the history of other countries in recent years has shown us how vital and important they are. Recent history has demonstrated that the unrestrained use of force by government is just as great a danger to human progress now as it was in ages gone by. It has demonstrated that unless citizens have rights against the government, no one can be safe or secure.

In our own lifetime we have learned anew the human misery that an absolute, powered government can create. We have seen it in the brief history of the Fascist and Nazi tyrannies. We are witnessing it today in the tyranny of Soviet communism.

A constitution is not just a matter of words. There are other constitutions which may read as well as ours. Just take, for example, the constitution of the Soviet Union. That constitution has a lot of fine language in it--a lot of beautiful and meaningful words. That constitution of the Soviet Union says that Soviet citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly. I wonder what would happen to a citizen of the Soviet Union if he tried to exercise any of those freedoms? It professes to guarantee that citizens of the Soviet Union shall be secure in their persons and in their homes. And in addition, it purports to guarantee equality, the right to work, the right to an education, the right to rest and leisure, freedom of religion, and a lot of other fine things.

But these good words in the Soviet constitution mean less than nothing. They are empty promises, because the citizens of the Soviet Union have no way of enforcing their fights against the state.

In the Soviet Union the power of the state is above all fights. The government does not have to obey the law. As a result the citizens of the Soviet Union enjoy none of the freedoms which are guaranteed in their constitution. They do not have freedom of speech or freedom of the press. They may be arrested without cause; their homes may be invaded without a search warrant; they may be executed or exiled without a fair trial and without appeal.

Their constitutional guarantees are just as false as their treaty agreements. A Bolshevik agreement is not worth the paper it's written on. It is only a scrap of paper.

The Soviet citizen lives in fear. His society is a jungle through which the naked power of the government prowls like a beast of prey, making all men afraid.

The Communists claim that they have to use the weapons of tyranny in order to improve the conditions of the people. That just isn't true. That is a rejection of the long experience of mankind. By resorting to the worst evils of ancient tyranny, the Soviet rulers have held their citizens in terror and bondage, while freedom is growing in the rest of the world.

The evils which the Communists brought back into the world--the evils of political persecution and unrestrained state power-have grown and flourished and become much more terrible than they ever were before. Modern inventions, modern means of communication, modern methods of propaganda make the power of the state more formidable than it was in the days of the stage coach and the muzzle-loading rifle. The power of the Kremlin is more effective, more violent, more far reaching than the power of the bloodiest of the czars, or the power of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Louis XIV, Charles V of Spain, or the power of any other of the tyrants of the past.

Today, the tyrant can uproot and liquidate whole classes of people and entire nations. The death camps of Hitler Germany or of modern Siberia demonstrate that the unrestrained power of the government can be a greater evil in our modern civilization than it ever was in ancient times.

The only guarantee against such a society of fear and cruelty is the principle that the government is not above the law. Our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution proclaim that the Government is subject to the fundamental law.

The Constitution sets up a system of internal checks and balances which may seem cumbersome to us at times, but which succeeds in preventing any part of the Government from having absolute power. Under our Constitution it is not only the citizens who are made to conform to the principles of justice, but the Government itself has to conform. And the citizen has the power to enforce his rights against the Government. The rule of law is made supreme.

Our Constitution protects us from the evils of tyranny. But this is not all our Constitution does. If it were, it would not be enough.

A constitution must do more than provide restraints against the illegal use of power. It must give the people a means of dealing with their day-to-day problems of continually correcting the injustices that spring up in human society. A constitution that is not adaptable -- that prevents the government from acting for the general welfare of the people -- will not survive. It will become a mere historical curiosity, as has the Soviet constitution.

Ours is not such a constitution. We have discovered, over the years, that it offers the means for correcting present evils without throwing away past gains.

There are always those who oppose necessary reforms. Such people often turn to the Constitution to justify their position. But our Constitution has seldom proved to be a barrier to changes which were needed for the welfare of all the people. Our Constitution has not set up an aristocracy of wealth or privilege. It does not serve the privileged few at the expense of the great majority of the people.

The great advances we have made in recent years in legislation to improve the condition of labor, to bring economic security to the farmer, to provide aid for the needy, to develop the resources of the country for the benefit of all, to improve the health, the education, and the housing of the average family - all these advances have been opposed in the name of the Constitution of the United States. But it never was the purpose of the Constitution to bar such advances. On the contrary, the Constitution provides the means for carrying into effect the fundamental ideas of justice and liberty and human progress on which our Government is founded.

Acting under our Constitution we have been able to solve the problems which have driven other countries into revolution. We have been able to make necessary reforms without overthrowing the ancient guarantees of our liberty. Building on the experience of the past we have opened the way to a brighter future.

On this occasion we ought to pray to Almighty God that the American people will remain faithful to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We should ask that they be ever mindful of the great wisdom and truth that are embodied in these two documents, and through them, in our form of government.

The wisdom of our form of government is that no men, no matter how good they may appear to be, may be entrusted with absolute power. The great achievement of our form of government is that it has enabled us to meet the changing needs of the people while providing a rule of law that restrains all men, even the most powerful. The glory of our form of government lies in the fact that it has held us faithful to the concept that the aims of government are human betterment and human freedom.

If the American people remember these things and understand them well, this Nation will move forward in the future as it has in the past. And these documents, which we are today sealing against physical decay, will always be remembered and cherished, finding new life in each new generation of Americans.