Proclamation 5803 --
Loyalty Day, 1988
By
the President of the
A
Proclamation
Loyalty
Day, May 1, is a day we set aside to promise allegiance to our country; to
revere our heritage of individual freedom, limited government, and respect for
every man's divinely bestowed dignity; and to reaffirm our sacred trust to
preserve, for our children and for all generations to come, this blessed land
of liberty we call America.
We
Americans have both pledged and practiced loyalty from the moment the first
patriots conceived the idea of a new and independent Nation where only freedom
would reign -- where people would live as free as God made them and where
tyranny alone would never find welcome. We have given our loyalty generously,
in times of peace and times of peril. That we will always do, God willing.
Loyalty
Day says much about the meaning of our country. In other parts of the world, as
we know, totalitarian states proclaim May 1 a day of fealty and require a show
of loyalty from the people. No such demand is needed here, of course, because
in
The
self-government that protects our rights and liberties has been won and
defended in each generation by loyal Americans. That remains true, of course,
of our gallant service men and women at home and in a hundred foreign climes.
It is true as well of every American in home or office, in factory or farm, in
hall of government or place of worship, who calls upon the Author of Liberty to
guide and bless our land; of every citizen who cherishes brotherhood and
patriotism; of every boy and girl who begins the day with the Pledge of
Allegiance to the Flag.
The
allegiance we Americans owe, and give gladly, on Loyalty Day and throughout our
lives, is to a land and an ideal that beckon human hearts today just as always,
here and around the globe -- the land of the free, where the only command and
the only loyalty are freedom's way and freedom's sway.
To
foster loyalty and love of country, the Congress, by joint resolution approved
Now,
Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the
In
Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-eighth day of April,
in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-eight, and of the
Ronald
Reagan
[Filed with the Office
of the Federal Register,