Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (149 page)

Economic competence is the precondition of social justice….

In all of this, at home and abroad, the same beliefs throughout: that we are a community of people, whose self-interest and mutual interest at crucial points merge, and that it is through a sense of justice that community is born and nurtured.

And what does this concept of justice consist of?

Fairness, people all of equal worth, of course. But also reason and tolerance. Justice has no favorites; not amongst nations, peoples, or faiths.

When we act to bring to account those that committed the atrocity of 11 September, we do so not out of bloodlust.

We do so because it is just. We do not act against Islam. The true followers of Islam are our brothers and sisters in this struggle. Bin Laden is no more obedient to the proper teaching of the Koran than those Crusaders of the twelfth century who pillaged and murdered represented the teaching of the Gospel.

It is time the West confronted its ignorance of Islam. Jews, Muslims, and Christians are all children of Abraham.

This is the moment to bring the faiths closer together in understanding of our common values and heritage, a source of unity and strength.

It is time also for parts of Islam to confront prejudice against America and not only Islam but parts of Western societies too.

America has its faults as a society, as we have ours.

But I think of the Union of America born out of the defeat of slavery.

I think of its Constitution, with its inalienable rights granted to every citizen, still a model for the world.

I think of a black man, born in poverty, who became chief of their armed forces and is now Secretary of State Colin Powell, and I wonder frankly whether such a thing could have happened here.

I think of the Statue of Liberty and how many refugees, migrants, and the impoverished passed its light and felt that if not for them, for their children, a new world could indeed be theirs.

I think of a country where people who do well don’t have questions asked about their accent, their class, their beginnings but have admiration for what they have done and the success they’ve achieved.

I think of those New Yorkers I met, still in shock, but resolute; the firefighters and police, mourning their comrades but still head held high.

I think of all this and I reflect: Yes, America has its faults, but it is a free country, a democracy, it is our ally, and some of the reaction to 11 September betrays a hatred of America that shames those that feel it.

So I believe this is a fight for freedom. And I want to make it a fight for justice too.

Justice not only to punish the guilty.

But justice to bring those same values of democracy and freedom to people round the world.

And I mean: freedom, not only in the narrow sense of personal liberty but in the broader sense of each individual having the economic and social freedom to develop their potential to the full. That is what community means, founded on the equal worth of all.

The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.

This is a moment to seize.

The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again.

Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.

When our twenty-seventh president attended the 1916 graduation ceremony at the United States Naval Academy, at Annapolis, he had no prepared comments. Few speakers are so confident of their ability to deliver appropriate remarks on such a formal occasion. The short speech that follows is impromptu, off the cuff, ad lib—but Woodrow Wilson must have given the matter some thought while being introduced.

President Wilson’s subsequently printed address, “Responding to the New Call of Duty,” took its title from his praise of the graduating class in the second sentence of the speech. (Wilson liked the word “new”; a collection of his campaign speeches in 1912 was called
The New Freedom
, designed to top Theodore Roosevelt’s
The New Nationalism
.) Delivered three years after his inauguration, Wilson’s talk offered four paragraphs in alluding not only to his college background but also to the gravity of the world situation in June 1916, as he was preparing to campaign for reelection with the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.”

The presidential remarks stress the “special obligation” for the graduates through direct address and parallel structure (“not of private duty merely, but of public duty also”). With parallelism even in his advice (“you get your zest by doing a thing that is difficult, not a thing that is easy”), Wilson conveyed a sense of the trouble ahead.

Ten months after President Wilson’s remarks to the class of 1916, the United States declared war on Germany.

***

MR. SUPERINTENDENT, YOUNG
gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen: It had not been my purpose when I came here to say anything today, but as I sit here and look at you youngsters, I find that my feeling
is a very personal feeling indeed. I know some of the things that you have been through, and I admire the way in which you have responded to the new call of duty. I would feel that I had not done either you or myself justice if I did not tell you so.

I have thought that there was one interesting bond that united us. You were at Washington three years ago and saw me get into trouble, and now I am here to see the beginning of your trouble. Your trouble will last longer than mine, but I doubt if it will be any more interesting. I have had a liberal education in the last three years, with which nothing that I underwent before bears the slightest comparison. But what I want to say to you young gentlemen is this: I can illustrate it in this way. Once and again when youngsters here or at West Point have forgotten themselves and done something that they ought not to do and were about to be disciplined, perhaps severely, for it, I have been appealed to by their friends to excuse them from the penalty. Knowing that I have spent most of my life at a college, they commonly say to me, “You know college boys. You know what they are. They are heedless youngsters very often, and they ought not to be held up to the same standards of responsibility that older men must submit to.” And I have always replied, “Yes; I know college boys. But while these youngsters are college boys, they are something more. They are officers of the United States. They are not merely college boys. If they were, I would look at derelictions of duty on their part in another spirit; but any dereliction of duty on the party of a naval officer of the United States may involve the fortunes of a nation and cannot be overlooked.” Do you not see the difference? You cannot indulge yourselves in weaknesses, gentlemen. You cannot forget your duty for a moment, because there might come a time when that weak spot in you should affect you in the midst of a great engagement, and then the whole history of the world might be changed by what you did not do or did wrong.

So that the personal feeling I have for you is this: we are all bound together, I for the time being and you permanently, under a special obligation, the most solemn that the mind can conceive. The fortunes of a nation are confided to us. Now, that ought not to depress a man. Sometimes I think that nothing is worthwhile that is not hard. You do not improve your muscle by doing the easy thing; you improve it by doing the hard thing, and you get your zest by doing a thing that is difficult, not a thing that is easy. I would a great deal rather, so far as my sense of enjoyment is concerned, have something strenuous to do than have something that can be done leisurely and without a stimulation of the faculties.

Therefore, I congratulate you that you are going to live your lives under the most stimulating compulsion that any man can feel, the sense,
not of private duty merely, but of public duty also. And then if you perform that duty, there is a reward awaiting you which is superior to any other reward in the world. That is the affectionate remembrance of your fellow men—their honor, their affection. No man could wish for more than that or find anything higher than that to strive for. And, therefore, I want you to know, gentlemen, if it is any satisfaction to you, that I shall personally follow your careers in the days that are ahead of you with real personal interest. I wish you Godspeed, and remind you that yours is the honor of the United States.

In 1896, the new editor of the
Emporia
(Kansas)
Gazette
—a Republican and a liberal—wrote a ringing editorial titled “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” This blast at the Populist party helped elect William McKinley and called national attention to a small-town newspaperman who could express the values of tens of millions of upright, tolerant people. He coined the phrase “tinhorn politician” and styled himself as an authentic voice of
the grass roots. He was editor of the
Gazette
for forty-nine years; though its circulation never rose to more than eight thousand, it became his platform for commentary that gained and held international recognition.

In June of 1936, he gave a commencement address to the graduating class of Northwestern University, in Illinois. These graduates were the young men and women who in five years would be bearing the brunt of the American participation in World War II. He revealed “the screw loose in [his] mental processes,” warning, “You have this dementia in your blood,” and identifying its manifestation: “Your fathers, mothers, and remote ancestors for several thousand years believed in the reality of duty. Upon that madness they built the world.”

He presents long thoughts in short sentences. He anticipates by a generation the longing for a “new frontier,” and packs much food for thought in such passages as “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.”

***

ABOUT ALL THAT
a commencement orator can do for his auditors is to turn their faces around. He looks back upon the world as he thinks it was. Then he considers the world as he thinks it is. Finally in his receding perspective he discloses the pictured phantasm which he hopes will be the future. Thereupon his young listeners may see mirrored in the gloss of his picture the world which they think they will make. It is a pleasant exercise. This commencement oratory which floods our land every June may be an effective anesthetic which youth may take at its second birth, out of the solid, unyielding, factual environment of childhood and of books, out of the substantial fabric of the curriculum with its sure reward of grade, class standing, and satisfying compensation into the bewildering, hazy, and altogether ironic mockeries that we call, in humorous euphony, real life. I stand here tiptoeing near the end of my three score years and ten. There you sit across an abysm scarcely fifty feet wide but deeper than the distance to the moon. I come out of one dream world that is memory. You go into a visionary world that is hope. I tell you of the things that I imagine are true in my world. You hold in your hearts the picture of your world that shall be. We dwell on these two different planets. How can I hope to get across the chasm of time and space any hint, even a flickering shadow of my truth that will reach your hearts? For my world seemed to be a static world when I stood fifty years
ago where you stand now. My forebears since Caesar’s day had not greatly changed the tools with which they made their clothes, got their food, built their houses; nor had they changed greatly in those twenty centuries the philosophy upon which they erected their future. Today you look back upon a world that has moved so far in one hundred years that nothing you see and feel, touch and taste, hope, believe, and love is as it was when your grandfathers learned from their grandfathers how to live in another day. So what I shall say here you may well discount. It is only the truth as I see it. Yet it may have some bearing, though heaven only knows what, upon your lives. Perhaps I can tell you something, and being called here, I shall try….

We know we have not done God’s work perfectly. The world we have made out of the inheritance of our grandfathers is a pretty sad botch. It is full of gross injustices. Obviously a couple of centuries of hard work needs to be done on it, before America is turned out, finished in its millennial beauty. But with all these inequities, the old thing does hold together. We turn our country over to you in one piece—which is something. Even if it isn’t a pretty piece, it is yours, with its spiritual hereditaments. And may I be pardoned the vanity of one who worked on the job if I try to give you some idea of what has held this nation in unity during a century and a half when in many other parts of the globe races and tongues and economic units have been breaking into small states, magnifying nationalism into a vice.

Today, as never before, nationalism in small geographical areas is pulling men into bitter disunion and controversy. Some flame of envy and rancor is abroad in the world. We see it moving across the face of Europe in various tyrannies, each exalting its own nationalism, each challenging liberty in its own way—Italy under fascism, Germany under the Nazis, Russia under communism, Spain boiling with confusion, while the two principles of dictatorship, that of the plutocracy and that of the proletariat, struggle for possession of that brave land. These isms are types of one pestilence which is threatening civilization. That this spiritual pestilence will attack America, no one can doubt.