July 4 Speakers at Monticello
A list of July 4 feature speakers at Monticello from 1936 to the present.
"It is not beyond our power to re-light that sacred fire. There are no limitations upon the Nation's capacity to obtain and maintain true freedom, no limitations except the strength of our Nation's desire and determination." -Franklin Delano Roosevelt ✨
July 4, 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, standing on Monticello's West Portico during the depths of the Great Depression, delivered an Independence Day speech that spoke to the nation, bridging the lessons of America's past with its then-current challenges. Join us this (and every) July 4 for our annual Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization, in person or online! Find out more at monticello.org/july4.
Senator Glass, Governor Peery, Mr Gibboney, ladies and gentlemen, as my old friend Carter Glass has so well suggested I have come here today to renew my homage to the sage of Monticello.
It seems to me that it was symbolic that Thomas Jefferson should live on this mountaintop of Monticello. On a Mountaintop all sides unite and Jefferson was the meeting point of all of the vital forces of his day.
there are periods in history when one man seems great because those who stand beside him are small. Jefferson was great in the presence of many great and free men. when we read the patriots of 1776 and the fathers of the Constitution, we are taken into the presence of man who caught the fire of greatness from one another and all became elevated above the bottom run of mankind.
The source of their greatness was the stirring of a new sense of freedom they were tasting the first fruit of the government and freedom of conscience. They had broken away from a system of peasantry, away from indented servitude, and they could build for themselves a new economic independence. Theirs were not the gods of things as they were but that the gods of things as they ought to be.
And so, as Monticello itself so well proves, they used new means and new models to build a new structures. I've always thought that of all the builders of those days it is perhaps a generally to be conceded that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson possessed what may be roughly described as the most fertile minds. Franklin was no stranger to science, to no theory of philosophy, to venue of invention. Jefferson had those qualities in equal parts. But with greater opportunity in the days of Peace which followed the revolution was enabled more fully to carry Theory into practice. Farmer, lawyer, mechanic, scientist, architect, philosopher, statesman, he encompassed the full scope of the knowledge of his time, and his life was one of the richest diversity. To to him knowledge and ideal were fuels to be used to feed the fires of his own mind, not just wood to be left neatly piled in the wood box.
More than any historic home in America, Monticello appeals to me as an expression of the personality of its builder. In the design not of the whole alone but of every room, of every part of every room, in the very furnishing which Jefferson devised on his own drawing board and made in his own workshop. And all of that does speak ready capacity for detail and, above all, creative genius.
He was a great gentleman. He was a great commoner. And my friends the two are not incompatible. He applied the culture of the past to the needs in the life of the America his day. His knowledge of history spurred him to inquire into the reason and the justice of laws and habits of institutions. His passion for liberty led him to interpret and adapt them in order to better the lot of mankind.
Shortly before taking the office of president, he wrote to a friend, “I have sworn on the Altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
His life served that consecration. Constantly he labored to enlarge the freedom of the human mind, to destroy the bondage imposed on it by ignorance, poverty, and political and religious intolerant.
On one day of his long life he gave to the worldly Declaration of Independence on behalf of political freedom for himself and his fellow Americans. But his Declaration of Independence for the human mind was a continuing achievement renewed and reiterated every day of his whole life.
Yes, 160 years have passed since the Fourth of July 1776. On that day, Thomas Jefferson was 33 years old. His imagination, his enthusiasm, and his energy, the qualities that youth offers in every generation, were symbolic of that generation of men, who not only made a nation in the wealth of their imagination and energy but because their youthful wings had not been clipped, were able to grow with the nation and guide it in wisdom throughout their lives.
And so through all the intervening years, America has lived and grown under the system of government established by Jefferson and his generation. As Nations go, we live under one of the oldest continuous times of democratic government in the whole world, and in that sense we are old. But the world has never had as much human ability as it needs, and a modern democracy, in particular, needs above all things the continuance of the spirit of youth.
Our problems of 1936 call greatly for the continuation of imagination and energy and capacity for responsibility as did the age of Thomas Jefferson and his fellows.Democracy needs now today as it found then, men developed to the limit of their capacity -- their capacity through education for ultimate responsibility. Energy, decisions in our individual, community and National lives. All of these recurring emergencies are the stuff out of which national character is made.
Preparation of the mind, preparation of the spirit of our people for our such emergencies, for such decisions, is the best available insurance against the security and the development of our democratic institutions. Was the spirit of such men as Jefferson, the spirit of a golden age gone now and never to be repeated in our history. Was the feeling of fundamental freedom which lighted the fire of their ability a miracle we shall never see again? That is not my belief.
It is not beyond our power to relight that sacred fire. There are no limitations upon the nation's capacity to obtain and maintain true freedom. No limitations except the strength of our nation's desire and determination.
On the hillside below where we stand is the tomb of Thomas Jefferson. He was given many high offices in state and nation. But the words recorded above his grave, chosen by himself, are only these: “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, of the statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia. The honors which other men had given him were unimportant. The opportunities he had given to other men to become free were all that really counted
