Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (150 page)

How can we Americans immunize ourselves? The class of ’37 must find out why small geographical, social, racial units are erupting into a virulent nationalism that threatens Western civilization. It’s your problem, esteemed descendants, but here’s a hint that might help you to solve it.

I am satisfied that the disease has its root in a lack of social faith. The thing that has bound America into one nation is tolerance—tolerance and patience; indeed, tolerance and patience upheld by a sense of duty.

At this point, dearly beloved members of the class of ’37, I propose to
reveal the screw loose in my mental processes, also to show you something of the aberration of your forebears. You have this dementia in your blood, and you might as well know it. Your fathers, mothers, and remote ancestors for several thousand years believed in the reality of duty. Upon that madness they built the world. Not that I wish to brag about it—this sense of duty—but I still hug the delirium of my generation to my heart and believe there is something in those old-fashioned eccentricities known as the Christian virtues. Don’t get excited. I am not preaching piety. I have no plan of salvation to offer you, no theology to defend. But I feel, and my generation has believed in a general way, that democracy with its freedom, with its patience, with its tolerance, with its altruism, is a sort of rough attempt to institutionalize the Christian philosophy. And when I say rough, I mean rough, something like a 20 percent realization of a noble ideal. Our American Constitution, for instance, is a national compact of our individual and of our social duties. It has worked in this country after a fashion. Yet the same Constitution, or nearly the same, has been adopted in a dozen other lands and has failed. Why has it held us to an essential unity? I am satisfied that our Constitution has stood up because Americans actually have established here a sort of code of duties. That has been the crystallizing principle that has held us together—duty of man to man, of region to region, of class to class, of race to race, of faith to faith. That duty has bred something more than neighborly tolerance. It has engendered a profound desire in every American’s heart to make life as pleasant as it may be made—not merely for himself, indeed not chiefly for himself, but for others. Thus we have found and cherished true liberty.

Liberty, if it shall cement man into political unity, must be something more than a man’s conception of his rights, much more than his desire to fight for his own rights. True liberty is founded upon a lively sense of the rights of others and a fighting conviction that the rights of others must be maintained. Only when a people have this love of liberty, this militant belief in the sacredness of another man’s self-respect, do races and nations possess the catalyzer in their political and social organism which produces the chemical miracle of crystallized national unity and strength. We Americans have had it for three hundred years on this continent. It was in the blood of our fathers. It was the basis of our faith in humanity when we wrote our Constitution. It has been with us a long time on this continent—this capacity for compromise, this practical passion for social justice and for altruistic equity in settling the genuine differences of men. This high quality of mutual respect is no slight gift. It is a heroic spiritual endowment, this knack of getting along together on a continental scale.

We have set as a national custom the habit of majority rule. This
custom is maintained not by arms but by a saving sense in the heart of every minority that any majority will not be puffed up, will not infringe upon the rights of the minority. Matching this duty of the majority to be fair, we have set up the component duty of the minority to be patient, but to agitate until the justice of a losing cause has convinced the winning majority. This American tradition of political adjustment cuts through every line of cleavage and all differences in our social organization—regions, classes, races, creeds. Here is the way it has worked. As our country has expanded geographically, this political genius for unity has tapped our store of certain basic virtues: neighborly forbearance, meekness, unselfishness, and that belief in the essential decency of one’s neighbors which for want of a better word we have called love. Now, in our land abideth these three—faith in our fellows, hope in the triumph of reason, and love for humanity. With all the grievous faults and glaring weaknesses of our federal union, these things are the centripetal spiritual forces which have solidified America.

These commonsense qualities which have grown out of the Beatitudes have helped to preserve the American Union for the last century and a half. Now, what are you going to do about it, you who stand here at the threshold of the reality of your past, looking into the evanescent horizon of your future? We who shall soon be petrified into pedestaled ghosts as your ancestors have a notion that you, our descendants, don’t have much use for duty, for patience, and for tolerance. We get the general idea that you have no sort of faith in the strength of the humble. Yet it is out of this lack of faith that a new challenge has appeared in the world, a challenge aimed at democracy, a challenge which scorns these lowly neighborly virtues that have held our world together. This challenge is finding its way into our American life. We are being told that the majority sometimes has emergency mandates to ignore the rights of the minorities. We have set up rulers all over the earth who preach against the virtue of patience. It is a new thing in our America to hear men defending the tyrannies of Europe—communism, fascism, and the Nazis—declaring that the minority may oppress the majority if the minority happens to be convinced that it is right. It is even a stranger doctrine in America, which holds that a passing majority, by reason of its being a ballot box majority at one or two elections, has an inherent right immediately to suppress and ruthlessly destroy an honest minority.

Now, as an ancestor, let me caution you, my heirs and assigns, that these new political attitudes are symptoms of greed for power. They will fool you if you channel your thinking into narrow dialectics. Don’t take your logical premise from your class self-interest. Don’t build your logic
upon a purely selfish structure. Don’t think as plutocrats. Don’t reason as members of the middle class or as proletarians. Such thinking is too sure of its own syllogisms ever to be just. Such thinking rejects the possibility that there is truth and that there may be reason in the contention of another class of society. This same discord that has torn asunder so many peoples in Europe, where fifty years ago democracy seemed to be taking root, today is seeding in our land. Capitalists are scorning labor leaders. Labor leaders are preaching distrust and hatred for capitalists. The revelations of the La Follette committee in the United States Senate now investigating the infringement of civil liberties certainly lay bare the cancer of hatred in our economic body that is poisoning our national blood. The class-conscious arrogance of wealth is creating its own class morals. Proletarian logic is justifying the use of force in class conflict and condoning cunning. The industrial enterpriser shuts his eyes to the tragedy of the farmer’s economic plight. Then the farmer envies the financier.

But I feel sure the tide will turn. You who stand here, chisel in hand, about to hew out the future, have something in you; humanity’s most precious mental gift—the eternal resilience, the everlasting bounce in man. You may love for the moment the indolent sense of futility that comes with the grand cynicism of youth. But life, experience, the hazards of your day, and time will bring out of you the courage bred into you. You will find that you have the urge that we had. You will want to believe in something in spite of yourselves. You will want to construct something. For you are the sons and daughters of a creative people, inventive, resourceful, daring. And above all, in spite of the many unpleasant things you have learned in this cloister, in spite of the hard realities that have molded your youth, you are mystics, you are crusaders, you are incorrigible visionaries in the noblest sense of these words. The eternal verities of your inheritance, the organizing brains, the industry, the noble purpose that during the nineteenth century made America a kindlier and more beautiful land than ever before was brought forth on this planet, will be beckoning you, urging you, indeed, sternly commanding you to follow whatever is fine and just in the achievement of your country….

The residuum of what I am trying to say is this: you must reorganize life in your America and point your achievement toward a fairer distributive system. Abundance is here for the taking. Don’t bemoan your lost frontier. It is even now flashing on your horizon. A gorgeous land lies before you fair and more beautiful than man before has ever known. Out of the laboratories will come new processes to multiply material things for your America, to multiply them almost infinitely; but only if you will
hold open the channels of free science, unfettered thought, and the right of a man to use his talents to the utmost provided he gives honest social returns for the rewards he takes. Don’t delude yourselves about your new frontier. For on that frontier which will rise over the laboratories you will find the same struggle, the same hardships, the same inequities that your forefathers have found on every frontier since the beginning of time. You will find rapacious men trying to grab more than their share of the common bounties of the new frontier. You will find human greeds and human perfidies there as we found them fifty years ago and as our fathers found them generations upon generations before. Energetic buccaneers always thrive wherever men are pioneering. In every one of the ten long generations during which your ancestors have been conquering this continent and building a proud civilization here, they have struggled as you will struggle against the injustices of life which are bred out of the lust for power in unsocial men. But don’t let that discourage you….

And now, in closing, on behalf of your fathers who are bequeathing to you their choicest gifts, let me say that your heritage is not in these great lovely cities, not this wide and fertile land, not the mountains full of undreamed-of riches. These you may find in other continents. What we leave you that is precious are the few simple virtues which have stood us in good stead in the struggle of our generation. We will and bequeath to you our enthusiasm, our diligence, our zeal for a better world, that were the lode stars of our fathers. As our legatees we assign you our tolerance, our patience, our kindness, our faith, hope, and love, which make for the self-respect of man. These qualities of heart and mind grow out of a conviction that the democratic philosophy as mode of thinking will lead mankind into a nobler way of life….

Look, this doesn’t compare with Pericles and Patrick Henry, but every anthologist is entitled to the inclusion of one of his own. It was delivered at my alma mater, Syracuse University, on May 13, 1978, and the graduates lapped it up.

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CLASSMATES:

I entered Syracuse University with the class of ’51, dropped out after two years, and am finally receiving my degree with the class of ’78. There is hope for slow learners.

My subject today is “The Decline of the Written Word.” If the speech I have written is disjointed and confusing, you will get my point the hard way.

We have not heard a really eloquent speech out of the White House in a long time. Why? When you ask the speechwriters of Mr. Ford and Mr. Carter, they give you this explanation: they say that “high-flown rhetoric” is not their man’s style.

But that is not responsive. A flowery speech is a bad speech. Simple, straight English prose can be used to build a great speech. There has to be a more profound reason for the reluctance of the presidents of the seventies to write out their thoughts plainly and deliver them in words we can all understand.

If you press the president’s aides—and that’s my job, to press them hard—they’ll admit that their man much prefers to “ad-lib” answers to questions. He’s not good at what they call a “set” speech.

What do they really mean by that? They mean a speech—a written
speech, developing an idea—is not what people want to hear. People prefer short takes, Q. and A.; the attention span of most Americans on serious matters is about twenty seconds, the length of a television clip.

In the same way, people do not want to read articles as they once did; today, if you cannot get your message in a paragraph, forget it.

As a result, we’re becoming a short-take society. Our presidency, which Theodore Roosevelt called a “bully pulpit,” has become a forum for twenty-second spots. Our food for thought is junk food.

What has brought this about? I don’t blame President Carter for this—he reflects the trend; he did not start it. I don’t flail out at the usual whipping boy, television.

The reason for the decline of the written word—speeches, written articles—is that we, as a people, are writing less and talking more. Because it takes longer to prepare our thoughts on paper that means we are ad-libbing more, and it also means we are thinking more superficially. An ad-lib has its place, but not ad nauseam.

That’s one of those sweeping statements that pundits are permitted to make. But let me turn reporter for a minute and prove to you that we’re talking more and writing less.

Most people are not writing personal letters any more. Oh, the volume of first-class mail has doubled since 1950, but here’s the way the mail breaks down. Over 80 percent is business related; over 10 percent is greeting card and Christmas card; and only 3 percent is from one person to another to chew the fat.

More and more, we’re relying on commercial poets and cartoonists to express our thoughts for us. Tomorrow is Mother’s Day; how many of us are relying on canned sentiments? I remember my brother once laboriously handmade a card for my mother: on the front was “I’ll never forget you, Mother,” and inside it said, “You gave away my dog.” Okay, he was sore, but at least he was original.