Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (153 page)

Don’t you remember that we were told all this when we were younger? But nevertheless, we got caught up in the struggle and the sweat and the frustration and the joy of small victories, and forgot it all. Until recently when we began to look back.

How simple it seems now. We thought the Sermon on the Mount was a nice allegory and nothing more. What we didn’t understand until we got to be a little older was that it was the whole answer, the whole truth. That the way—the
only
way—to succeed and to be happy is to learn
those rules so basic that a shepherd’s son could teach them to an ignorant flock without notes or formulae.

We carried Saint Francis’s prayer in our wallets for years and never learned to live the message.

Do we have the right now to tell them that when Saint Francis begged the Lord to teach him to want to console instead of seeking to be consoled—to teach him to want to love instead of desiring to be loved—that he was really being intensely selfish? Because he knew the only way to be fulfilled and pleased and happy was to
give
instead of trying to get.

We have for a full lifetime taught our children to be go-getters. Can we now say to them that if they want to be happy they must be
go-givers?

I wonder if we can, in good conscience, say these things to them today when we ourselves failed so often to practice what we would preach.

I wonder if we—who have fought, argued, and bickered and so often done the wrong thing to one another—are the ones to teach them love.

How do we tell them that one ought not to be discouraged by imperfection in the world and the inevitability of death and diminishment? How do we tell them when they lose a child, or are crippled, or know that they will themselves die too soon—that God permits pain and sickness and unfairness and evil to exist,
only
in order to permit us to test our mettle and to earn a fulfillment that would otherwise not be possible?

How can we tell our children
that
—when we have ourselves so often cried out in bitter despair at what we regarded to be the injustice of life—and when we have so often surrendered?

How can we tell them that it is their
duty
to use all that they have been given to make a better world, not only for themselves and their families, but for all who live in this world, when it was our generation that permitted two great wars and a number of smaller ones, our generation that made the world a place where the great powers are so alienated from one another that they can’t even play together in an Olympics?

Do we have the right to tell them, as our teachers told us, that they have an obligation in justice to participate in politics and government? Can we without shame say to them that our system of democracy works well only when there is involvement by all? That in our democracy the policies that become law, the rules of justice, the treatment of individuals are the responsibility of
each
citizen? That you get what you deserve out of our system, and that indifference deserves nothing good?

When we ourselves have chosen to sit at home on so many election days muttering grim remarks about the politicians who appear on the television set, instead of doing what we could to change things, for the better?

Will they believe us if we said these things?

Would we be able to explain the embarrassment of our own failures?

Do you blame me, ladies and gentlemen, for being reluctant to deliver to them the message that is traditional on commencement day?

But maybe, ladies and gentlemen, this problem is not as great as I’ve made it out to be.

I’ve been taking a closer look at these graduates. They are actually taller, stronger, smarter than we were, smart enough maybe to take our mistakes as their messages, to make our weaknesses their lessons, and to make our example—good and not so good—part of their education.

I think I see in their eyes a depth of perception that perhaps we didn’t have. A sense of truth, deeper and less fragile than ours.

As you talk to them, you get the feeling that they are certainly mature enough to see the real problems of our society: the need for peace, the need to keep pure the environment God offered us, the need to provide people the dignity of earning their own way.

Indeed, as I think about it, I have to conclude that these young people before me today are the best reason for hope that this world knows.

I see them as believers and doers who will take what we will pass on to them so clumsily, and make it something better than we have ever known. Honoring us by their works, but wanting to be better than we have been.

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.

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 counsel 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?