TheChance for Peace speech, also known as theCross of Iron speech, was an address given by U.S. PresidentDwight D. Eisenhower on April 16, 1953, shortly after the death ofSoviet leaderJoseph Stalin. Speaking only three months into his presidency, Eisenhower likenedarms spending to stealing from the people, and evokedWilliam Jennings Bryan in describing "humanity hanging from across of iron."[citation needed] Although Eisenhower, a former military man, spoke against increased military spending, theCold War deepened during his administration and political pressures for increased military spending mounted. By the time he left office in 1961, he felt it necessary to warn of themilitary-industrial complex inhis final address.
Eisenhower took office in January 1953, with theKorean War in a stalemate. Three and a half years prior, the Soviet Union had successfully detonated theatomic bomb namedRDS-1, and appeared to reach approximate military parity with the United States.[1] Political pressures for a more aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union mounted, and calls for increased military spending did as well. Stalin's demise on March 5, 1953, briefly left apower vacuum in the Soviet Union and offered a chance forrapprochement with the new regime, as well as an opportunity to decrease military spending.[2]
The speech was addressed to theAmerican Society of Newspaper Editors, inWashington D.C., on April 16, 1953. Eisenhower took an opportunity to highlight the cost of continued tensions and rivalry with the Soviet Union.[3] While addressed to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the speech was broadcast nationwide, through use of television and radio, from theStatler Hotel.[4] He noted that not only were there military dangers (as had been demonstrated by the Korean War), but anarms race would place a huge domesticburden on both nations:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. Thecost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a singledestroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.[1][5]
Eisenhower's "humanity hanging from a cross of iron" evokedWilliam Jennings Bryan'sCross of Gold speech. As a result, "The Chance for Peace speech", colloquially, became known as the "Cross of Iron speech" and was seen by many as contrasting the Soviet Union's view of the post-World War II world with the United States' cooperation and national reunion view.[6]
Despite Eisenhower's hopes as expressed in the speech, the Cold War deepened during his time in office.[7] Hisfarewell address was "a bookend" to his Chance for Peace speech.[1][8] In that speech, he implored Americans to think to the future and "not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow",[9] but the large peacetime military budgets that became established during his administrationhave continued for half a century.[10]
