Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History

by Unknown

  I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, looking at them now, closer and harder than I have before, I have a feeling about these people that makes me want to live long enough to see and be part of the world they will create.

  Now, ladies and gentlemen, parents and grandparents, I would like to tell them, the graduates, all of this, and I know that if we thought they wouldn’t be embarrassed by hearing it, we would all be telling them about how proud we are of them and how much we believe in them and their future. But again maybe we don’t have to tell them; maybe they know. Maybe they can tell just by seeing the love in our eyes today.

  Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen, on the good children you have cared for and raised.

  Labor’s Lane Kirkland Rejects the Labels “Liberal” and “Conservative”

  “As for those terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ as one who has been afflicted by both labels,… I doubt their utility in this day and age for anyone except slapdash journalists.”

  Lane Kirkland was revered by speechwriters as one of their own who made it to the top of his profession. He began as a merchant seaman during World War II and later drafted nautical charts to pay for his college degree at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, but he veered from diplomacy to the labor movement in 1948 as a researcher. The AFL-CIO lent him to the Truman and later the Stevenson campaigns as a speechwriter; in 1961, he became an assistant to George Meany, writing that redoubtable labor leader’s speeches, and in 1979 succeeded Meany as president of the AFL-CIO. He died in 1999.

  In speeches, as in his career, he was an organizer; his speeches march to a point. He returned to his native state of South Carolina (where his great-great-grandfather signed the Declaration of Secession) in 1985 to deliver the commencement address to the University of South Carolina. The opening makes the proper obeisance to the lessons of life required of commencement speakers, but with a twist: his quotation is taken from a recent western movie. (A mark of originality in a speech is a fresh source to cite, especially one unlikely to yield wisdom; by reading universal meaning into a colorful statement, the speaker shows both his common touch and his philosophical depth.) Its message about the relevance of history is reprised, extended, and deepened at the end in an unfamiliar quotation from Sidney Hook and a famous line from George Santayana.

  The second section centers on the social changes of the past two generations. Short paragraphs begin with “I remember” (sometimes with a poetic evocation, as “I remember a South Carolina that was too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash”) and are followed by “When I note” or “When I see” lines that chide today’s healthy patients for throwing their old crutches at the doctor.

  With a transition line, “I did not come here today to organize but to philosophize,” he then applies the lesson of those hard-fought-for social changes to current political labeling. The students, and a broader public beyond, needed this clarification of labels: the labor movement under his leadership was liberal in economic affairs and conservative or hawkish in foreign affairs; its staunch espousal of the rights of Poland’s Solidarity movement worried many U.S. doves who usually associate with domestic liberals—a situation that confused those who like their categories tidy. Kirkland delivers the message at the end that “there really are things one ought to be conservative about and things one ought to be liberal about, and they do change.” Unlike most commencement addresses, which tend to meander self-indulgently, this is an easy-to-hear speech with a shape and a purpose.

  ***

  I UNDERSTAND THAT commencement audiences are tolerant, to a degree, of speakers who reminisce and wax philosophical about what lessons they have picked up along the way about life and all that.

  As to the lessons of life, I can’t improve on some lines from a western movie called Missouri Breaks.

  Two cutthroats with murderous designs on each other are sharing a campfire. One is strumming a guitar and singing an old gospel song called “Life Is like a Mountain Railroad.”

  He stops and asks the other fellow in a taunting manner, “Is life really like a mountain railroad?” “Naw,” the other replies. “Then what is life like?” asks the first character. “Mister,” came the reply, “life ain’t like nothing I ever heard of before.”

  That takes care of what life is all about, and I can vouch for it. I can assure the graduates here that life ain’t going to be like anything you ever heard of before.

  Nevertheless, nothing in my experience has contradicted what I absorbed in my youth in South Carolina, and I remember it well.

  I remember the names of the six Confederate generals from Camden, enshrined in the Pantheon, where I played as a kid: Cantey, Chesnut, Deas, Kennedy, Kershaw, and Villepigue.

  There still echoes in my mind the sound of the hours struck by the old bell in the clock tower of the Opera House in Newberry, where for a dime on Saturdays I could join my peers in tribute to Ken Maynard and Hoot Gibson and even witness the last death throes of live vaudeville in America.

  I remember it well.

  I remember some other things whenever I return to a thriving and beautified South Carolina.

  I remember a South Carolina that was too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash.

  And the more fiercely the current national debate rages about the appropriate role of the federal government and its various programs, the more clearly I remember a South Carolina before there was such a role, when states’ rights ruled and enterprise was free to do as it pleased.

  I remember when the destitute aged were sheltered not in the bosom of a warm and loving family but in county poor farms. Then Social Security came and tore those poor houses down, freeing young and old alike of that specter.

  When I note the now flourishing institutions of higher learning spread across this state, I remember when some fine little colleges were one jump ahead of the sheriff, were hard-pressed to put meals on their student tables, and couldn’t meet their payrolls. They were rescued and made solvent by the National Youth Administration, wartime training programs, and the GI Bill of Rights.

  When I see now the clear waters of our rivers, I remember when the Broad, the Wateree, the Bush, and the Saluda ran brick-red from the erosion of farms and deforested uplands. The Soil Conservation Service and the millions of trees planted by the thirty or so CCC camps that were placed in South Carolina had something to do with the improvement. Free enterprises such as the paper and forest products industries shared abundantly in the benefits of those government initiatives.

  I remember when kerosene lit the farms of this land until the REA electrified and humanized them, bridging the cultural gap between town and country—and incidentally creating new markets for the appliance industry.

  When I hear complaints about affirmative action, I remember some mean things that used to happen in this land, in the treatment of people by people. While we still have a way to go, does anyone really think we would have approached our present level of equity and civility without the intervention of the federal government? I have met no South Carolinian who has expressed to me any desire to return to the old days of racial cruelty and exclusion.

  I did not come here today to organize but to philosophize. Yet, when I hear it said that southern working people have some cultural aversion to the exercise of the right of freedom of association, I cannot help but remember the old days when cotton mills sometimes bristled with National Guard bayonets and machine guns to enforce that alleged aversion. Still today the question returns to my mind: if southern workers don’t want their own unions, why have states and corporations found it so expedient to collaborate in forging measures to thwart the effective pursuit of that aspiration?

  Lest it be thought that these reflections are just another expression of outmoded “liberal” balderdash, let me point out that such stout conservatives as James Byrnes, Olin Johnston, and Burnet Maybank were among the authors of the larger federal role that helped bring this state into the modern age.

  I do not cou
nsel worship at the altar of government for its own sake, for I share fully the wholesome antipathy to government—federal, state, or local—unrestrained by strong free and private institutions, for one of which I speak.

  I do suggest that the citizens of a modern republic should not go too far in support of those who would dismantle or ruin the benign capacity of their government, for they may need it badly some day. When it happens to you, you’ll know it’s true.

  As for those terms “liberal” and “conservative,” as one who has been afflicted by both labels, depending on the stance of the afflictor and the foreign or domestic nature of the issue, I doubt their utility in this day and age for anyone except slapdash journalists.

  Real meaning has surely been drained from a term when the clammy hand of fashion appears in the form of a hyphen preceded by “neo,” as in “neo-conservative” and “neo-liberal.” In all areas of human discourse, “neo hyphen” is a sure sign of something that is not long for this world.

  If, as has been said, a modern “liberal” is someone who believes that his country’s adversaries are probably right, I strongly reject that label.

  And what is the objective meaning of the word “conservative,” when its leadership has brought us a $200 billion annual deficit, put forward a measure that will mindlessly gut our defense forces year after year, and now, in the wake of Geneva, escorts clamoring hordes of businessmen east in pursuit of Moscow gold, exposing to that “evil empire” the soft underbelly of freedom, the stateless avarice of capital?

  Hear now the words of Shakespeare, in Henry IV, on this matter: “From the Orient to the drooping West… stuffing the ears of men with false reports. I speak of peace, while covert enmity, under the smile of safety, wounds the world.”

  Today’s graduates ought not waste too much time worrying about which category they ought to fit. There may be a few pure liberals and pure conservatives about who march in lockstep, but I don’t really know any, present parties included.

  The great rank and file of the American people are liberal about some things and conservative about others, and the shifting distribution of such impulses depends largely upon circumstances and interest.

  That is the way it should be, because there really are things one ought to be conservative about and things one ought to be liberal about, and they do change.

  I owe to Sidney Hook a thought that I offer as my final conclusion from all this. From him I learned the difference between a truth and a deep truth. A deep truth is a truth the converse of which is equally true.

  For example, it is true, as Santayana said, that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

  Yet it is equally true that those who do remember the past may not know when it is over.

  That is a deep truth.

  Thank you, and good luck to you all.

  General Colin Powell Urges African-American Students to Reject Racial Hatred

  “African-Americans have come too far and we have too far yet to go to take a detour into the swamp of hatred. We, as a people who have suffered so much from the hatred of others, must not now show tolerance for any movement or philosophy that has at its core the hatred of Jews or anyone else.”

  Colin Powell’s speaking was done mainly in the spacious rooms along the corridors of Pentagon power. As aide to Reagan Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and later as National Security Advisor to President George H. W. Bush, the softspoken Powell—son of a Harlem merchant who ultimately rose to the highest rank ever held by an African-American in the United States armed forces—was a superb military briefer: succinct, confident, prepared to be interrupted with penetrating questions.

  That experience served him well in a more public role as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Persian Gulf War. His appearances before the press played to his rhetorical strength: factual, decisive, confident, but good-humored and never overbearing, in contrast to the bombastic, domineering briefings of General Norman Schwarzkopf.

  For a whirlwind few months in the fall of 1995, Powell—who had turned down an offer from President Clinton to become secretary of state—became the media favorite for the Republican nomination for president. His television interviews, culminating with his surprise declination at a world-watched press conference, showed a fine combination of pride and humility as he fielded questions with agility and a command presence.

  His “set” speech—essentially autobiographical, anecdotal, patriotic, and noncontroversial, in the Eisenhower tradition—drew high lecture fees and leaned heavily on platitudes. But before he hit the lecture trail, in this short commencement speech made on May 14, 1994, to the mostly black student body at Howard University in Washington, D. C., Powell stepped into a tense situation: Three weeks before, anti-Semitism had appeared on the campus of the 126-year-old institution in the person of Khalid Abdul Muhammed, a former top aide to Minister Louis Farrakhan. A rally audience of fifteen hundred, including few Howard students, cheered the attack on the sins of whites, particularly Jews; this subsequently roiled the academic atmosphere with controversy about who should be allowed to speak about what. The university president resigned in the wake of the furor.

  In his commencement address, the calming Powell juxtaposed the recent examples of peacemaking by Nelson Mandela and Yitzhak Rabin, a black and a Jew. As the most successful American black, Powell’s unequivocal words—from “We must find nothing to stand up and cheer about or applaud in a message of racial or ethnic hatred” to the evocation of Lincoln in “the last best hope of Earth”—carried great weight with the graduates. Though Powell supported the use of campus facilities for what was essentially “hate speech,” his disapproval of its content positioned him apart from the separatist message gaining strength in the black community of Minister Farrakhan, culminating the following year in his “Million Man March.” General Powell found reason not to attend.

  ***

  THE REAL CHALLENGE in being a commencement speaker is figuring out how long to speak.

  The graduating students want a short speech, five to six minutes and let’s get it over. They are not going to remember who their commencement speaker was anyway. P-O-W-E-L-L.

  Parents are another matter. Arrayed in all their finery they have waited a long time for this day, some not sure it would ever come, and they want it to last. So go on and talk for two or three hours. We brought our lunch and want our money’s worth.

  The faculty member who suggested the speaker hopes the speech will be long enough to be respectable, but not so long that he has to take leave for a few weeks beginning Monday.

  So the poor speaker is left figuring out what to do. My simple rule is to respond to audience reaction. If you are appreciative and applaud a lot early on, you get a nice, short speech. If you make me work for it, we’re liable to be here a long time.

  You know, the controversy over Howard’s speaking policy has its positive side. It has caused the university to go through a process of self-examination, which is always a healthy thing to do.

  Since many people have been giving advice about how to handle this matter, I thought I might as well too.

  First, I believe with all my heart that Howard must continue to serve as an institute of learning excellence where freedom of speech is strongly encouraged and rigorously protected.

  That is at the very essence of a great university and Howard is a great university.

  And freedom of speech means permitting the widest range of views to be present for debate, however controversial those views may be.

  The First Amendment right of free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word, and not just comforting platitudes, too mundane to need protection.

  Some say that by hosting controversial speakers who shock our sensibilities, Howard is in some way promoting or endorsing their message. Not at all. Howard has helped put their message in perspective while protecting their right to be heard. So that the message can be exposed to the full lig
ht of day.

  I have every confidence in the ability of the administration, the faculty and the students of Howard to determine who should speak on this campus. No outside help needed, thank you.

  I also have complete confidence in the students of Howard to make informed, educated judgments about what they hear.

  But for this freedom to hear all views, you bear a burden to sort out wisdom from foolishness.

  There is great wisdom in the message of self-reliance, of education, of hard work, and of the need to raise strong families.

  There is utter foolishness, evil, and danger in the message of hatred, or of condoning violence, however cleverly the message is packaged or entertainingly it is presented.

  We must find nothing to stand up and cheer about or applaud in a message of racial or ethnic hatred.

  I was at the inauguration of President Mandela in South Africa earlier this week. You were there too by television and watched that remarkable event.

  Together, we saw what can happen when people stop hating and begin reconciling.

  DeKlerk the jailer became DeKlerk the liberator, and Mandela the prisoner became Mandela the president.

  Twenty-seven years of imprisonment did not embitter Nelson Mandela. He invited his three jail keepers to the ceremony.

  He used his liberation to work his former tormentors to create a new South Africa and to eliminate the curse of apartheid from the face of the earth. What a glorious example! What a glorious day it was!

  Last week you also saw Prime Minister Rabin and PLO Chairman Arafat sign another agreement on their still difficult, long road to peace, trying to end hundreds of years of hatred and two generations of violence. Palestinian authorities have now begun entering Gaza and Jericho.

  In these two historic events, intractable enemies of the past have shown how you can join hands to create a force of moral authority more powerful than any army and which can change the world.