Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (76 page)

We cannot sit huddled within our own borders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond. Such a policy would defeat even its own end; for as the nations grow to have ever wider and wider interests, and are brought into closer and closer contact, if we are to hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our power without our own borders. We must build the Isthmian canal, and we must grasp the points of vantage which will enable us to have our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of the East and the West….

The army and the navy are the sword and the shield which this nation must carry if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth—if she is not to stand merely as the China of the Western Hemisphere. Our proper conduct toward the tropic islands we have wrested from Spain is merely the form which our duty has taken at the moment. Of course, we are bound to handle the affairs of our own household well. We must see that there is civic honesty, civic cleanliness, civic good sense in our home administration of city, state, and nation. We must strive for honesty in office, for honesty toward the creditors of the nation and of the individual; for the widest freedom of individual initiative where possible, and for the wisest control of individual initiative where it is hostile to the welfare of the many. But because we set our own household in order we are not thereby excused from playing our part in the great affairs of the world. A man’s first duty is to take his own home, but he is not thereby excused from doing his duty to the state; for if he fails in this second duty it is under the penalty of ceasing to be a freeman. In the same way, while a nation’s first duty is within its own borders, it is not thereby absolved from facing its duties in the world as a whole; and if it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits its right to struggle for a place among the peoples that shape the destiny of mankind….

England’s rule in India and Egypt has been of great benefit to England, for it has trained up generations of men accustomed to look at the larger and loftier side of public life. It has been of even greater benefit to India and Egypt. And finally, and most of all, it has advanced the cause of civilization. So, if we do our duty aright in the Philippines, we will add to that national renown which is the highest and finest part of national life, will greatly benefit the people of the Philippine Islands, and, above all, we will play our part well in the great work of uplifting mankind. But to do this work, keep ever in mind that we must show in a very high degree the qualities of courage, of honesty, and of good judgment. Resistance
must be stamped out. The first and all-important work to be done is to establish the supremacy of our flag. We must put down armed resistance before we can accomplish anything else, and there should be no parleying, no faltering, in dealing with our foe. As for those in our own country who encourage the foe, we can afford contemptuously to disregard them; but it must be remembered that their utterances are not saved from being treasonable merely by the fact that they are despicable.

When once we have put down armed resistance, when once our rule is acknowledged, then an even more difficult task will begin, for then we must see to it that the islands are administered with absolute honesty and with good judgment. If we let the public service of the islands be turned into the prey of the spoils politician, we shall have begun to tread the path which Spain trod to her own destruction. We must send out there only good and able men, chosen for their fitness, and not because of their partisan service, and these men must not only administer impartial justice to the natives and serve their own government with honesty and fidelity, but must show the utmost tact and firmness, remembering that, with such people as those with whom we are to deal, weakness is the greatest of crimes, and that next to weakness comes lack of consideration for their principles and prejudices.

I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.

He came and went with Halley’s comet, which appeared in 1835 and 1910. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, America’s greatest and most embittered humorist took the pseudonym Mark Twain from a term used on the Mississippi River for “two fathoms deep.” The author of
Huckleberry Finn
and
The Innocents Abroad
, Twain gained fame not only as a major figure of American literature but also as a first-rate raconteur, able to move as well as amuse his audiences.

With white hair, white mustache, and white suit, Twain took to the stage and entertained his listeners with barbed observations and humorous anecdotes. Among the best of these seemingly impromptu talks is “Mark Twain’s First Appearance,” delivered after one of his daughters had made her singing debut as a contralto in Norfolk, Connecticut. He attended her recital and then addressed the audience about his own stage debut.

In the speech, given on October 5, 1906, Twain recounts his own first public appearance with a style more folksy than formal. Through a careful use of direct address and asides, interjections and well-timed pauses, Twain’s rhetorical techniques combine to lend his words an offhand quality, a sense of familiarity that provokes sympathy as well as laughter.

***

MY HEART GOES
out in sympathy to anyone who is making his first appearance before an audience of human beings. By a direct process of memory I go back forty years, less one month—for I’m older than I look.

I recall the occasion of my first appearance. San Francisco knew me then only as a reporter, and I was to make my bow to San Francisco as a lecturer. I knew that nothing short of compulsion would get me to the theater. So I bound myself by a hard-and-fast contract so that I could not escape. I got to the theater forty-five minutes before the hour set for the lecture. My knees were shaking so that I didn’t know whether I could
stand up. If there is an awful, horrible malady in the world, it is stage fright—and seasickness. They are a pair. I had stage fright then for the first and last time. I was only seasick once, too. It was on a little ship on which there were two hundred other passengers. I—was—sick. I was so sick that there wasn’t any left for those other two hundred passengers.

It was dark and lonely behind the scenes in that theater, and I peeked through the little peek holes they have in theater curtains and looked into the big auditorium. That was dark and empty, too. By and by it lighted up, and the audience began to arrive.

I had got a number of friends of mine, stalwart men, to sprinkle themselves through the audience armed with big clubs. Every time I said anything they could possibly guess I intended to be funny, they were to pound those clubs on the floor. Then there was a kind lady in a box up there, also a good friend of mine, the wife of the governor. She was to watch me intently, and whenever I glanced toward her she was going to deliver a gubernatorial laugh that would lead the whole audience into applause.

At last I began. I had the manuscript tucked under a United States flag in front of me where I could get at it in case of need. But I managed to get started without it. I walked up and down—I was young in those days and needed the exercise—and talked and talked.

Right in the middle of the speech I had placed a gem. I had put in a moving, pathetic part which was to get at the hearts and souls of my hearers. When I delivered it, they did just what I hoped and expected. They sat silent and awed. I had touched them. Then I happened to glance up at the box where the governor’s wife was—you know what happened.

Well, after the first agonizing five minutes, my stage fright left me, never to return. I know if I was going to be hanged I could get up and make a good showing, and I intend to. But I shall never forget my feelings before the agony left me, and I got up here to thank you for her for helping my daughter, by your kindness, to live through her first appearance. And I want to thank you for your appreciation of her singing, which is, by the way, hereditary.

An undistinguished catcher for the St. Louis Browns, Branch Rickey reached baseball’s Hall of Fame for inventing the minor-league “farm system” to develop young players, and—as general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers—for breaking the major-league color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson to play in 1947.

He was manager of the St. Louis Cardinals in the early twenties, failed to win a pennant, and was moved upstairs to find his real talents as an off-the-field baseball executive. On November 12, 1926, he made this speech, entitled “The Greatest Single Thing a Man Can Have,” to the Executives Club of Chicago. It offers a good example of beginning with an anecdote and closing with its lesson; the movement from the specific to the general and finally to the universal makes an effective speech with a memorable point.

Rickey began by telling of Ty Cobb’s baserunning. His Cardinals were playing the Detroit Tigers; it was the eleventh inning, Cobb had drawn a walk, and he made his move to steal second base….

***

WELL, WHEN THE
ball was finally thrown to second base, it hit in front of the bag and bounced over Levan’s head. Cobb came down, touched second base, and angularly went on towards third without a ghost of a chance to make it. The third baseman, knowing the abandonment of that fellow Cobb, and his slide—knowing that, when he set out voluntarily to get an objective, he was willing to pay the price to get it—having this knowledge in his head, had one eye on Cobb’s shiny spikes and the other eye on the ball.

I then saw the quickest reflex action I ever saw in my life. That boy Cobb had reflex centers in his heels; he did not have time to telegraph his brain. He slid twelve feet in front of third base; and when the dust had
cleared away, the ball had fallen out of the hands of the third baseman and was going over toward the concrete in front of the grandstand—and before we could get that ball, he scored. I saw the crowd tumbling out from every place.

I said to the umpire, “Interference, interference, Tom, at third base. He did not make a slide for the base, but he made a play for the ball.”

He paid no attention to me—they have a habit of doing that. I followed him and said, “Tom, listen to me!”

“Mr. Rickey,” he said then, “listen to me. Give the boy credit. He made his own breaks.”

Oh, I tell you as I went down towards the clubhouse, with the crowd joshing me and guying us, I thought to myself, as I passed the Detroit players, I did not hear a man saying, “See what luck did for us today. Old Billiken was on our side.” I heard everybody saying, “He is a great player. He won the game by himself.”

As I came to my locker and listened to the remarks about the game, I commenced to ask myself what it was that made a man a distinguished ballplayer. Take two men with equal ability; one of them will always stay in mediocrity and another will distinguish himself in the game. What is the difference?

The more we compress and confine the element of luck—luck has its place in games; it is in the English language; it is in the dictionary, and we ought to keep it there—and put it in a small area, just to that extent do you enlarge the area for the exercise of a man’s own functions in controlling his workings, his destinies, and his game.

The more that a man exercises himself and asserts his own influence over his work, the less the part that luck plays. It is true in baseball that the greatest single menace that a man has is a willingness to alibi his own failures; the greatest menace to a man’s success in business, I think, sometimes is a perfect willingness to excuse himself for his own mistakes.

What is the greatest single thing in the character of a successful enterprise, in the character of a boy, in the character of a great baseball player? I think it is the desire to be a great baseball player, a desire that dominates him, a desire that is so strong that it does not admit of anything that runs counter to it, a desire to excel that so confines him to a single purpose that nothing else matters.

That thing makes men come in at night, that makes men have good health, that makes men change their bad technique to good technique, that makes capacity and ability in men. That makes a team with 80 percent possibility come from 60 to 70 percent, that makes them approach
their possibility; and with a dominant desire to excel, that simply transcends them into a great spiritual force.

The greatest single thing in the qualification of a great player, a great team, or a great man is a desire to reach the objective that admits of no interference anywhere. That is the greatest thing I know about baseball or anything else.

As a young union officer, Oliver Wendell Holmes told President Lincoln, visiting his battery, to get his head down before it was blown off. In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt appointed the Harvard law professor, then sixty, to the Supreme Court. Justice Holmes emerged from the shadow of his famous father, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, to become what biographers called the Yankee from Olympus. Though he wrote only 173 dissents in his thirty years on the Court, their quality earned him the sobriquet the Great Dissenter—a judge whose disagreements with the majority presaged a judicial movement toward free expression and a more liberal reading of the Constitution.