Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (26 page)

George Graham Vest, a member of the Confederate Congress during the Civil War, served as U.S. senator from Missouri from 1879 to 1903. He was a leading debater, inveighed at length against the “menace” of Mormonism, and could claim as his hometown the oxymoronic Sweet Springs in Saline County, Missouri.

He is remembered for a speech he made as a young lawyer in Georgetown, Missouri, and repeated hundreds of times around the country throughout his life. He was representing a plaintiff who sued a neighbor for the killing of his dog. He paid little attention to his own client’s charges, or to the testimony of the defendant; instead, he waited for his turn to address the jury and won the case unfairly by wringing its heart with an emotional evocation of the fidelity of dogs in general.

It is a great short speech. The logician may dismiss it as the rankest sentimentalism, and the cool intellectual may object to its shameless tear-jerking, but the rhetorician is prepared to lick the orator’s hand.

The theme is fidelity. The first paragraph, with its half dozen uses of “may,” sets forth the conditional nature of human affection, preparing for the coming contrast; the second paragraph slams home the unconditional faithfulness of the dog. (He focuses on the male dog because “he” is more personal than “it” or “they”; in my own experience, the bitch is more faithful.) The final paragraph is hearts and flowers—“the violin,” as newsmagazine writers call lyrical thematic essays—but despite Vest’s clichés about “the last scene of all” and “the cold ground,” the picture of fidelity at the graveside induces a lump in the throat of the listener every time. If there has ever been a good dog in your life, read this with a handkerchief handy; your eyes will begin to well up at “He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer….”

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GENTLEMEN OF THE
jury:

The best friend a man has in the world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter that he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name may become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has, he may lose. It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it most. A man’s reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads.

The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous is his dog. A man’s dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master’s side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer; he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings, and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens.

If fortune drives the master forth an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him, to guard him against danger, to fight against his enemies. And when the last scene of all comes, and death takes his master in its embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there by the graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws, his eyes sad, but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true even in death.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American philosopher and minor poet, recognized the major poetic talent in Scotsman Robert Burns. Although the “low” speech of Burns, writing in the Scottish vernacular, kept his reputation from rising to the level of a Keats, Shelley, or Tennyson, Emerson saw in him a “poet of the poor” and “of the middle class” who could transform “a patois unintelligible to all but natives” into “a Doric dialect of fame.”

In his eulogy, Emerson first established his subject’s political significance to his audience in Boston, on January 25, 1859: “Burns, the poet of the middle class, represents in the mind of men today that great uprising of the middle class against the armed and privileged minorities….” He proceeded to touch on Burns’s importance to poetry—“artless words, better than art”—and then evoked his poetry in a poetic peroration.

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…I HEARTILY FEEL
the singular claims of the occasion. At the first announcement, from I know not whence, that the twenty-fifth of January was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, a sudden consent warned the great English race, in all its kingdoms, colonies, and states, all over the world, to keep the festival. We are here to hold our parliament with love and poesy, as men were wont to do in the Middle Ages. Those famous parliaments might or might not have had more stateliness, and better singers than we—though that is yet to be known—but they could not have better reason.

I can only explain this singular unanimity in a race which rarely acts together—but rather after their watchword, each for himself—by the fact that Robert Burns, the poet of the middle class, represents in the mind of men today that great uprising of the middle class against the armed and
privileged minorities—that uprising which worked politically in the American and French revolutions, and which, not in governments so much as in education and in social order, has changed the face of the world. In order for this destiny, his birth, breeding, and fortune were low. His organic sentiment was absolute independence, and resting, as it should, on a life of labor.

No man existed who could look down on him. They that looked into his eyes saw that they might look down on the sky as easily: His muse and teaching was common sense, joyful, aggressive, irresistible. Not Latimer, nor Luther, struck more telling blows against false theology than did this brave singer. The Confession of Augsburg, the Declaration of Independence, the French Rights of Man, and the “Marseillaise” are not more weighty documents in the history of freedom than the songs of Burns. His satire has lost none of its edge. His musical arrows yet sing through the air. He is so substantially a reformer, and I find his grand, plain sense in close chain with the greatest masters—Rabelais, Shakespeare in comedy, Cervantes, and Butler. He is an exceptional genius. The people who care nothing for literature and poetry care for Burns. It was indifferent—they thought who saw him—whether he wrote verse or not; he could have done anything else as well.

Yet how true a poet is he! And the poet, too, of poor men, of hodden-gray, and the Guernsey-coat, and the blouse. He has given voice to all the experiences of common life; he has endeared the farmhouse and cottages, patches and poverty, beans and barley; ale the poor man’s wine; hardship, the fear of debt, the dear society of weans and wife, of brothers and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so few, and finding amends for want and obscurity in books and thought. What a love of nature! And—shall I say?—of middle-class nature. Not great, like Goethe, in the stars, or like Byron, on the ocean, or Moore, in the luxurious East, but in the homely landscape which the poor see around them—bleak leagues of pasture and stubble, ice, and sleet, and rain, and snow-choked brooks; birds, hares, field mice, thistles, and heather, which he daily knew. How many “Bonny Doons,” and “John Anderson My Joes,” and “Auld Lang Synes,” all around the earth, have his verses been applied to! And his love songs still woo and melt the youths and maids; the farm work, the country holiday, the fishing cobble, are still his debtors today.

And, as he was thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity, so had he the language of low life. He grew up in a rural district, speaking a patois unintelligible to all but natives, and he has made that Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. It is the only example in history of a language made classic by the genius of a single man. But more
than this. He had that secret of genius to draw from the bottom of society the strength of its speech, and astonish the ears of the polite with these artless words, better than art, and filtered of all offense through his beauty. It seemed odious to Luther that the devil should have all the best tunes; he would bring them into the churches; and Burns knew how to take from fairs and gypsies, blacksmiths and drovers, the speech of the market and street, and clothe it with melody.

But I am detaining you too long. The memory of Burns—I am afraid heaven and earth have taken too good care of it to leave us anything to say. The west winds are murmuring it. Open the windows behind you, and hearken for the incoming tide, what the waves say of it. The doves, perching always on the eaves of the Stone Chapel opposite, may know something about it. Every home in broad Scotland keeps his fame bright. The memory of Burns—every man’s and boy’s, and girl’s head carries snatches of his songs, and can say them by heart, and, what is strangest of all, never learned them from a book, but from mouth to mouth. The wind whispers them, the birds whistle them, the corn, barley, and bulrushes hoarsely rustle them; nay, the music boxes at Geneva are framed and toothed to play them; the hand organs of the Savoyards in all cities repeat them, and the chimes of bells ring them in the spires. They are the property and the solace of mankind.

When police tried to prevent former slave Frederick Douglass from attending the inaugural reception in 1865, President Lincoln went to the door and said, “Here comes my friend Douglass.” Later, Douglass was to observe, “In all my interviews with Mr. Lincoln I was impressed with his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race.”

The tall, articulate Douglass was the leading black abolitionist for the generation preceding the Civil War. A fugitive slave himself. he used his lecture fees to aid others; he raised money for John Brown, though he opposed that fiery abolitionist’s Harpers Ferry raid; during the war, he recruited Negroes for the Union Army. The leading spokesman for what later became known as the black community often had to repress his emotions and bite his tongue, although—in a passage once quoted by Clarence Thomas—he cried, “Oh! Had I the ability and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would today put out a fiery stream of biting ridicule… and stem reproach…. We need the storm, the whirlwind and the earthquake.”

In 1876, Douglass was asked to speak at the dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington, D.C., in a ceremony attended by President U. S. Grant and all the capital’s notables. The sculptor had expressed a familiar theme: the Great Emancipator standing over a kneeling black, who was gazing at him in gratitude. Douglass chose not to give the usual Lincoln encomium, to join the line of those creating the Lincoln myth. He gave an assessment that shocked the Republicans present, who were trying to forget their 1860 priority of union over abolition; speaking to the whites present as
you
and the blacks as
we
, he dared point out that Lincoln was not “either our man or our model…. He was preeminently the white man’s president….” Douglass’s speech reads well today; he was one of the lone observers in a century that followed
who saw Lincoln without tears—as a man and politician, not as a martyred saint.

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…FELLOW CITIZENS, IN
what we have said and done today, and in what we may say and do hereafter, we disclaim everything like arrogance and assumption. We claim for ourselves no superior devotion to the character, history, and memory of the illustrious name whose monument we have here dedicated today. We fully comprehend the relation of Abraham Lincoln both to ourselves and to the white people of the United States. Truth is proper and beautiful at all times and in all places, and it is never more proper and beautiful in any case than when speaking of a great public man whose example is likely to be commended for honor and imitation long after his departure to the solemn shades, the silent continents of eternity. It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.

He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other president to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed constitutional guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the government. The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow citizens, a preeminence in this worship at once full and supreme. First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham
Lincoln. We are at best only his stepchildren—children by adoption, children by force of circumstances and necessity. To you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory, to multiply his statues, to hang his pictures high upon your walls, and commend his example, for to you he was a great and glorious friend and benefactor. Instead of supplanting you at this altar, we would exhort you to build high his monuments; let them be of the most costly material, of the most cunning workmanship; let their forms be symmetrical, beautiful, and perfect; let their bases be upon solid rocks, and their summits lean against the unchanging blue, overhanging sky, and let them endure forever! But while in the abundance of your wealth, and in the fullness of your just and patriotic devotion, you do all this, we entreat you to despise not the humble offering we this day unveil to view; for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.