When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  This is the pivot, the moment the speech changes, the moment the arc of history is bent. The words that have preceded this passage are too well constructed to be dismissed, but none of them have quite caught the light. Even granting licence for the nature of the subject, the writing has been a little too consciously rhetorical. King had been working until 4 a.m., scribbling longhand, and had missed the deadline for submitting his text. When he had finally left his text alone the famous section about the dream was not in it. His team had drafted this speech because they were all, King himself included, as he admits in his autobiography, bored with the ‘dream’ sequence they had heard too often. In Behind the Dream, his memoir of his time as King’s speechwriter, Clarence B. Jones quotes another adviser, Wyatt Walker, as saying: ‘Don’t use the lines about “I have a dream”. It’s trite. It’s cliché. You’ve used it too many times already’.

  The script King had written was good but not his best. The tropes and metaphors are either a little obvious and too frequently repeated (the storm, the winds) or overworked (the blank cheque and the insufficient funds). It is at this point that King begins the section in which he talks himself into immortality. Each speaker was under strict instruction to take no more than five minutes. King breaks the rules and speaks for sixteen. The immediate credit has to go to Mahalia Jackson, a gospel singer who often travelled with the entourage and who had heard King deliver the dream sequence in Detroit that June. Jackson was standing behind the podium as King spoke. As King was, rather flatly, imploring the congregation to ‘go back to Louisiana’, Jackson cried out ‘Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.’ King grabbed the podium and set his prepared text to his left. The act transformed him into a Baptist preacher. ‘Aw, shit’, said Walker. ‘He’s using the dream.’

  The section that follows is improvised in the sense that it is not in the script. But King’s campaign technique was to work passages over and over, with varying modulations, so he had, at any one moment, a vast array of possible passages available to him. King was renowned not so much for writing his speeches as assembling them from poetic fragments. He had a voracious memory and had developed an allusive style drenched in references to the Hebrew prophets and the idioms of King James’s Bible. This was a vocal style, rich and melodic, that King had forged in the theological seminary and in the pulpit in the early years of his ministry. It is probable, then, that the extraordinary rhetoric that follows is being spoken out loud here, in this exact form, for the very first time. That breaks all the sensible rules of rehearsal and preparation. Should you be invited to speak at the Lincoln Memorial do not on any account do it like this. In fact, don’t even try this at home. It will never work. It shouldn’t have worked for Martin Luther King. But it is something of an understatement to say that it worked. How it worked.

  I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of ‘interposition’ and ‘nullification’ – one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; ‘and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.’

  Is there any more shaming sentence in American rhetoric, or that of any nation, than King’s demand that his children be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character? Here he gets the idea of a popular democracy into a sentence, along with a critique of a nation, which was falling so far short of its promise. The effect is clinched with the image of the little white boys and girls joining hands with little black boys and girls. An image so innocent and yet so evocative; a plainsong with the power to move even at this distance.

  Remember that King is on the high wire here, with no safety net. He is quoting the King James’s Version of the Bible, Isaiah 40: 4–5, from memory, with perfect recall. He is a pastor; it is his book. There is a case, in fact, for regarding the latter part of this speech as a sermon. King never failed to say that he was a ‘preacher’ when asked what he did. He is envisaging the realisation of the heavenly dispensation on earth. Most of the lines in the speech, spoken separately, end on a dying intonation which acts as an invitation for the audience to participate. Even in the opening half of the address the audience is audible in a call and response sequence. ‘Yeah’ and ‘My Lord’, they say. This is a sermon in the southern Baptist tradition.

  All that said, King’s fluency is still astonishing. At this moment, building to a crescendo, any stutter or pause breaks the torrent. The delivery has to flow, which is hard enough to pull off when it is intensely rehearsed and scrolling in front of you on the autocue. King is doing the biggest moment of his life off the cuff. It is a bravura effort.

  Contrast it with his planned peroration, the text he had in the script: ‘And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction. Let us go back with all the strength we can muster to get strong civil rights legislation in this session of Congress. Let us go down from this place to ascend other peaks of purpose. Let us descend from this mountaintop to climb other hills of hope.’ The original draft is a highly rhetorical piece of work. It has allusions to Shakespeare, Donne and the Bible. It uses plenty of rhetorical figures, antitheses and alliterations and regular use of anaphora, the repetition of crucial words. However, if the speech had ended by climbing the hills of hope and the peaks of purpose it is unlikely to have entered the anthologies.

  This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. And this will be the day – this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, From every mountainside, let freedom ring! And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that: Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

  Goodness and heavens above but that is good. Just pause to hear the emotion in the stress on the final all. Listen to the way King makes the sense climb up to that word and then descend from it. This is a peak of purpose. This is how to say everything in a single word. The word all contains the full injustice and the full force of the call for progress. The momentum is maintained through ‘the words of the old Negro spiritual’ to the brilliant thrice-repeated invocation of freedom at the end. There is no more uplifting a conclusion to a speech in the h
istory of rhetoric.

  The key to its greatness may be that, notwithstanding the pulpit style and the practised ministry-rhetoric of its improvised and inspirational coda, this speech is not an exclusively black speech or a speech addressed to a Christian audience. It is a consciously American speech that ranges, as the American speech book does and as Lincoln had done in the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address, from the Declaration of Independence through the Emancipation Proclamation and from the American constitution to the Bible. King was not questioning the values of the founding fathers. On the contrary, he was asking that their promise be extended to all. Equal and exact justice to all men.

  There is one break in the river-like flow of the rhetoric, and it is crucial to the effect. The pause comes with the apparently incongruous, prosaic throat-clearer: ‘but not only that …’ King is doing two things with this break. First, he is granting the audience a brief rest before he strikes out for the next summit, this time the peak of the range. But, more important, he is also bracketing off the North from the South. The revolution for liberty must extend to the South, he is saying. To the places of most contention. It breaks the passage into two, both in time and in substance.

  The river of King’s prose then begins again, flowing like the righteous stream. The elimination of legal segregation is perhaps the last historic moral victory in America for which there is still a national consensus. This was the last victory before the start of the culture wars. King gives the definitive account of this impulse towards justice and equality. It is for this reason that this speech has become scriptural in American history. Greil Marcus called it ‘a rhetorical Woodstock’, so perfectly did it come to stand for the times. The Dream speech has entered the annals along with Gettysburg. Martin Luther King was a well-regarded figure when he stood up to the podium. By the time he stepped off he was a legend.

  NEIL KINNOCK

  Why Am I the First Kinnock in a Thousand Generations?

  Welsh Labour Party conference, Llandudno

  15 May 1987

  Neil Kinnock was the saviour of the Labour Party, at least temporarily. To anyone who grew up caring at all about Labour in its dark days in the 1980s Kinnock was a hero. Migrating from left to right in the party, he took it from the brink of the abyss to the threshold of power. He was not able to take it further, but the governments that followed, led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, would have been inconceivable without the preparatory work done by Neil Kinnock.

  Kinnock was born in 1942 in Tredegar, Wales, to a coal miner and a district nurse. After a short spell as a tutor for the Workers’ Educational Association he became Labour MP for Bedwellty in 1970. His talent was clear and by 1979 he had been appointed by James Callaghan as shadow education spokesman. Two years later the leftward swing of the Labour Party led to the creation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) as a direct competitor for Labour’s vote. Labour responded with an unrepentant manifesto for the 1983 general election, which one of its leading politicians, Gerald Kaufman, described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. An unelectable leader, Michael Foot, was offered to the public on a manifesto of narrow appeal in the most chaotically organised campaign in modern political history.

  This was the fiasco that Kinnock inherited when he became Labour leader on the resignation of Foot in 1983. No one in British history has held the position he inherited, leader of the Opposition, as long as Kinnock. He took the hard road as well as the long road. The trouble began when Kinnock set himself against the National Union of Mineworkers, the praetorian guard of the Labour movement, in the strike of 1984. This, though, was just a prelude to the great struggle of his career, which was the quest to expel the hard-left pressure group Militant from the Labour Party. The fight-back was conducted in the constant grind of organisation, but it was defined and given momentum in a magnificent speech that Kinnock gave at the Labour Party conference in 1985 when he denounced Militant for its irresponsible conduct in refusing to set a budget in Liverpool: ‘the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers’.

  Kinnock modernised the Labour Party’s communication methods. His changing the party logo to a red rose, for example, was a dalliance with newfangled methods that the elders of the party regarded as tantamount to betrayal. Kinnock himself featured very prominently in the 1987 general election campaign, which produced what Private Eye described as ‘Labour’s brilliant defeat’. In retrospect, Kinnock’s victory in 1987, and it was significant, was to see off the threat of the SDP.

  After 1987 Kinnock oversaw a more vigorous attempt to change party policy, jettisoning some of the sacred tenets of the socialist Left, notably the outworn promise to nationalise industry and the commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament. As Mrs Thatcher’s government fell into a trap of its own making with the community charge system for local finance, Labour moved into an opinion-poll lead that was, at its height, more than 20 points. The Conservatives acted with ruthless dispatch against Mrs Thatcher in November 1990 but, after a sharp recession, most Labour figures expected Kinnock to beat the new prime minister, John Major. Defeat sent a tremor through the Labour Party. Broken, and blaming adverse media coverage for his defeat, Kinnock resigned. There was then a second act to his political life as one of the UK’s European commissioners. From 1999 to 2004 he served as vice-president of the European Commission under Romano Prodi.

  The speech that follows was used as the basis for a renowned party-political broadcast in the election campaign of 1987. Entitled simply ‘Kinnock’, it was directed by Hugh Hudson and it is one of the few examples of its genre that bears repeated viewing. It was not nearly enough for Labour to win, but it was in its way magnificent, as was the speech. When he first become MP for Bedwellty, Kinnock’s father Gordon had said to him: ‘Remember Neil, MP stands not just for Member of Parliament, but also for man of principle.’ He never forgot. Kinnock had his flaws. He didn’t take the Labour Party far enough down the long, hard road and the nation never found him prime ministerial. But in the history of the Labour Party he is a giant.

  Mrs Thatcher said this week that she was full of ideas for continuing in the direction they have been going. We know what she means: new ideas like privatising schools; new ideas like decontrolling rents; new ideas like paying for health care. Wonderful new ideas. But anyone attracted to them had better ask themselves why every single one of these new ideas was abandoned fifty and more years ago. If payment for schooling was so wonderful, why was free schooling celebrated as a leap forward for this country? If uncontrolled rents did so much for housing, why were they ever ended? If paying for health care was such a blessing, why was the ending of that system hailed as the greatest step forward in post-war history? The reason is simple: the system that existed before that – the system that Margaret Thatcher wants to return to – was wrong and wretched, it was squalid and brutal. It was rotten with injustice and misery and division. That is why it was discarded. That is why it must never be restored.

  There isn’t much sign in this opening passage of the brilliance that is to come. Here Kinnock opens with a section of standard party-political name-calling that works much less well than the protagonists think it does. The trouble with this opening – and in this respect its faults are representative of many such instances – is that it is not even a cartoon truth. There is a place for clever caricature in political knockabout, but this is too far from the truth to be persuasive. Thatcher was not really proposing to privatise schools and the audience in the country knows this. The accusation therefore says more about Neil Kinnock than it does about Margaret Thatcher.

  It is overwrought to reach straight for ‘wrong and wretched, squalid and brutal’ in the opening paragraphs. A verdict so harsh needs building up to. This is like melodramatic characterisation in a poorly conceived opera. The drama starts in histrionic mood without any justification. The audience senses at once that this is Kinnock’s
starting assumption rather than his reasoned conclusion. If you do not already share his starting assumption then the bald assertion is unlikely to be persuasive.

  Here is a paradox of political rhetoric. Kinnock needs to win people over to the Labour cause who, not long ago, voted for the Tories he is disparaging. Telling them they are associated with, or even to blame for, something squalid and brutal, something wrong and wretched, is not exactly an enticing invitation.

  And that is why the election is just in time. Just in time for those whose lives and skills are wasted by unemployment. Just in time for the children in a school system that is being deprived and derided by an Education Secretary who won’t send his own children to local schools. Just in time for the old who are being cheated out of pensions and housing benefits. Just in time for our health service with its three quarters of a million list of people who wait in pain. The election has come in time for all those who are not poor, do not have children going through school, and are not old and anxious, not young and unemployed, not badly housed, not waiting for an operation. All the people who are not badly off but who know that Tory Britain has become an increasingly divided, deprived and dangerous place. They know, as you know, that when Britain has a Prime Minister who has allowed unemployment and poverty and waiting lists and closures and crime to go up and up and up, Britain cannot afford such a Prime Minister to go ‘On and on and on’.