Furthering Mutual Understanding and Measuring The Price of Empire: Senator Fulbright's Message

As my Fulbright grant comes to an end I find it appropriate to reflect on Senator J. William Fulbright's philosophy and goals.  The mission of the Arkansas Senator's eponymous program is to "further mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other nations" so as to "bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs, and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship."

Senator Fulbright.

His lofty goals were grounded in robust support for mutilateralism and the UN, his pushback against McCarthyism, and more infamously his support of racial segregation.  One of his more famous speeches is titled, 'The Price of Empire' (also the title of a book he later published) and was delivered to the American Bar Association in Hawaii in the summer of 1967 set to the backdrop of race riots in American cities.  Some excerpts from his speech are below.  The connections he draws between values and government budget decisions seem particularly relevant today.

         Priorities are reflected in the things we spend money on. Far from being a dry accounting of bookkeepers, a nation’s budget is full of moral implications; it tells what a society cares about and what it does not care about; it tells what its values are. 

         Here are a few statistics on America’s values: Since 1946 we have spent over $1,578 billion through our regular national budget. Of this amount over $904 billion, or 57.29 percent of the total, have gone for military power. By contrast, less than $96 billion, or 6.08 percent, were spent on “social functions” including education, health, labor and welfare programs, housing and community development. The Administration’s budget for fiscal year 1968 calls for almost $76 billion to be spent on the military and only $15 billion for “social functions.”

         I would not say that we have shown ourselves to value weapons five or ten times as much as we value domestic social needs, as the figures suggest; certainly much of our military spending has been necessitated by genuine requirements of national security. I think, however, that we have embraced the necessity with excessive ethusiasm, that the Congress has been all too willing to provide unlimited sums for the military and not really very reluctant at all to offset these costs to a very small degree by cutting away funds for the poverty program and urban renewal, for rent supplements for the poor and even for a program to help protect slum children from being bitten by rats. Twenty million dollars a year to eliminate rats—about one one- hundredth of the monthly cost of the war in Vietnam— would not eliminate slum riots but, as Tom Wicker has written, “It would only suggest that somebody cared.” The discrepancy of attitudes tells at least as much about our national values as the discrepancy of dollars.  

And in conclusion Fulbright says,

         Some years ago Archibald MacLeish characterized the American people as follows: “Races didn’t bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world. And their manners were their own business. And so were their politics. And so, but ten times so, were their souls.” Now the possession of their souls is being challenged by the false and dangerous dream of an imperial destiny. It may be that the challenge will succeed, that America will succumb to becoming a traditional empire and will reign for a time over what must surely be a moral if not a physical wasteland, and then, like the great empires of the past, will decline or fall. Or it may be that the effort to create so grotesque an anachronism will go up in flames of nuclear holocaust. 

         But if I had to bet my money on what is going to happen, I would bet on this younger generation—this generation who reject the inhumanity of war in a poor and distant land, who reject the poverty and sham in their own country, this generation who are telling their elders what their elders ought to have known, that the price of empire is America’s soul and that price is too high.