Emmanuel Macron just mixed up his American presidents.
“We must remember the warning of President Theodore Roosevelt,” the French president told a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, handed on for them to do the same.”
That’s a quote well worth remembering, but it actually came from Ronald Reagan.
The line “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction” was oft-repeated by Reagan throughout his political career, but the full quote recited by Macron is from an address he delivered to the Phoenix Chamber of Congress in March of 1961. (Audio of that speech can be found here, and the relevant portion of Reagan’s remarks begin at 42:50.)
The first line itself is a popular Reagan quote, but all three sentences cited by Macron have been widely circulated as well, especially among movement conservatives. The speech in question is found in “A Time for Choosing,” the compilation of Reagan speeches from 1961-1982 edited by Alfred Baltizer. Reagan reused the full quote in a speech to the Orange County Press Club later that year, which was included in an issue of Vital Speeches of the Day photographed here.
I could not find any attribution of the quote to Theodore Roosevelt at all.
A search of the Reagan Library’s archives produces many additional uses of “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” including in a commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, an American Bar Association meeting, and a radio address on voter participation.
Macron’s mistake isn’t all bad news though, because it provides an opportunity to revisit the Reagan quote in its full context.
The speech itself is has echoes of the 40th president’s iconic “Time for Choosing” address, and the excerpt Macron attributed to Roosevelt was used by Reagan at the end of his remarks to raise the stakes, describing the communist threat with a sense of pressing urgency. “There can be only one end to the war we are in. We can’t just out-wait it and hope by not looking, that it will go away. Wars like this one end in victory or defeat. One of the foremost authorities on communism in the world today, a former medical missionary, has said that we have ten years, not ten years in which to make a decision, we have ten years to decide the verdict because within this decade, the world will become either all free or all slave,” Reagan argued.
The rest of the speech is excerpted below.
