Living the Dream
I enjoyed this thoughtful and intelligent opinion piece by Philip Collins in the Times yesterday - which made me think about how history is made and how times change.
Sometimes events that seem earth shattering are forgotten within days, but at others they gain a peculiar momentum - and become capable of changing the world.
They don’t make speeches like that any more
Sometimes events that seem earth shattering are forgotten within days, but at others they gain a peculiar momentum - and become capable of changing the world.
They don’t make speeches like that any more
By Philip Collins
Unlike much of today’s rhetoric, Martin Luther King’s words made a difference — and their music is unmatched
Two score years and ten after Martin Luther King dreamt out loud, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, that every valley be exalted and that there could be no rest until justice rolled down like water, why does this speech still matter and why does nobody speak like this any longer? The answer to both questions is the same and it is visible in the man who on Wednesday paid tribute to King: Barack Obama.
The peculiar genesis of the speech which we know now as I Have a Dream explains why it could not be given today. In Behind the Speech, his memoir of being 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.” King had, indeed, used the refrain many times before, most notably once at a large rally in Detroit.
At the time, King yielded to the advice. He too was bored, as he admits in his autobiography, of this rather obvious locution, which had grown stale through repetition. He printed the final text at 4am on August 28, 1963, as the light was breaking outside. There was no reference to a dream in it anywhere.
That morning 250,000 Americans, most but not all of them black, rolled into Washington from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, from the mighty mountains of New York, from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania, from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado, from the curvaceous slopes of California, from Stone Mountain of Georgia, from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee and from every hill and molehill of Mississippi to tell their legislators that every man and woman of America was of equal worth.
The March to Washington was held, according to the diaries of Arthur Schlesinger Jr, against the express wishes of President Kennedy, who feared that any violence would be used in Congress as a pretext for opposing his Civil Rights Act. The activists proceeded anyway, although Kennedy insisted on control of the on-off button for the sound. Alcohol was banned for the first time since Prohibition as the multitude gathered. Sixteenth on the bill was the noted leader of the Southern Christians, the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King.
When King spoke, he was greeted with muted applause by a crowd that had become weary in the heat. As he was moving into his peroration, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who was standing behind King and who had seen his Detroit speech, cried out: “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin. Tell ’em about the dream.”
Watch the speech now and you can see the moment that King shifts his body and pauses, rather awkwardly. At that moment he abandoned the text crafted by his writers. “So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow,” he said, “I still have a dream.” “Aw, shit,” said Walker. “He’s using the dream.”
The passage that follows is as cogently structured and vividly rendered as any in all the history of public speech. It has all the hallmarks of having been crafted and rehearsed, which of course it had. King had said something like it many times. This was a common tactic of the era. The speaker would test an idea, rather like a comedian improving her material in every theatre. JFK had done the same with: “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .”, which he said more or less every time he went on the campaign trail.
Any speaker who tried that today would be written off as rhetorically exhausted. There are too many people watching, each with a voice that can easily be made public. The repetition is also compelling evidence that it is not the power of the words alone that make a speech memorable. All of the previous versions of I Have a Dreamare lost to posterity because they were not uttered on a suitably grand occasion or with historic cause. When the question is the legal status of the black citizens of Birmingham, Alabama, the biblical imagery works. When the issue is taking ten minutes off the commuting time to Birmingham, West Midlands, it doesn’t.
This time the words mattered and the effect lingered, which is the next lesson. Rhetoric is always written off as silver-tongued flattery or duplicity unless the words become deeds. Before King wandered off with all his talk of dreaming, the speech had the title of Normalcy, Never Again. It’s hardly a resounding phrase but it is a fine description of what a great speech has to accomplish. The reason we still refer to I Have a Dream is because it was followed by, even if it did not directly cause, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the award to King of the Nobel Peace Prize and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
After the March on Washington it was never normalcy again. It is true that the march had been called for jobs as much as for civil rights and that hope remains desperately unfulfilled. But the demand for equal treatment with respect to the civil law was won. This period marked the start of the long and incomplete American effort to expiate the greatest blemish on its history, the disgrace of slavery.
To the extent that it has done so, great speeches are harder to make. The anthologies of great speeches are full of people who righted a wrong. Like history itself, these are books full of the victors. We tend not to record fine words said in losing causes.
On Wednesday the President of the United States, the grandson of a Kenyan goatherd, commemorated King’s legacy. That sentence contains the main reason why it is hard today to speak as poetically as King did then. It is because, by conjuring unmatched oratorical power honed by years in the Church, the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King changed the world.
It would be wrong to say that the nations in the developed world are free of injustice for they never will be. The great causes, though, are mostly to be found in the dreams and the hopes of those who have a fraction of even the worst-off in the lucky countries of the world. A great speech crystallises the truth of the present and helps to create the future. The fact that no great speech has yet emerged from the Arab Spring tells you that this is an inchoate struggle across many nations that has yet to find either definition or an eloquent spokesman. Without either it will, in every country, be vulnerable to those who repel words with guns and gas. I have a dream, though, that 50 years on we might be commemorating the speech that brought civil rights to Syria, China, Iran, North Korea.
This is not the fond hope it sounds, because King offers a reminder that scribbled marks on a page, arranged in order, connect to something deep within us. I often ask people to read any Obama speech out loud. Without the President’s singing voice, the effect is flat. Then I ask them to read the final words of I Have a Dream.
Try it yourself now. Even in your voice, in your home, 50 years after the event, you have to be hard of heart not to feel their force: “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!”
So to make things easy for readers - here's a clip of that famous speech again
Unlike much of today’s rhetoric, Martin Luther King’s words made a difference — and their music is unmatched
Two score years and ten after Martin Luther King dreamt out loud, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, that every valley be exalted and that there could be no rest until justice rolled down like water, why does this speech still matter and why does nobody speak like this any longer? The answer to both questions is the same and it is visible in the man who on Wednesday paid tribute to King: Barack Obama.
The peculiar genesis of the speech which we know now as I Have a Dream explains why it could not be given today. In Behind the Speech, his memoir of being 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.” King had, indeed, used the refrain many times before, most notably once at a large rally in Detroit.
At the time, King yielded to the advice. He too was bored, as he admits in his autobiography, of this rather obvious locution, which had grown stale through repetition. He printed the final text at 4am on August 28, 1963, as the light was breaking outside. There was no reference to a dream in it anywhere.
That morning 250,000 Americans, most but not all of them black, rolled into Washington from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, from the mighty mountains of New York, from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania, from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado, from the curvaceous slopes of California, from Stone Mountain of Georgia, from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee and from every hill and molehill of Mississippi to tell their legislators that every man and woman of America was of equal worth.
The March to Washington was held, according to the diaries of Arthur Schlesinger Jr, against the express wishes of President Kennedy, who feared that any violence would be used in Congress as a pretext for opposing his Civil Rights Act. The activists proceeded anyway, although Kennedy insisted on control of the on-off button for the sound. Alcohol was banned for the first time since Prohibition as the multitude gathered. Sixteenth on the bill was the noted leader of the Southern Christians, the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King.
When King spoke, he was greeted with muted applause by a crowd that had become weary in the heat. As he was moving into his peroration, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who was standing behind King and who had seen his Detroit speech, cried out: “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin. Tell ’em about the dream.”
Watch the speech now and you can see the moment that King shifts his body and pauses, rather awkwardly. At that moment he abandoned the text crafted by his writers. “So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow,” he said, “I still have a dream.” “Aw, shit,” said Walker. “He’s using the dream.”
The passage that follows is as cogently structured and vividly rendered as any in all the history of public speech. It has all the hallmarks of having been crafted and rehearsed, which of course it had. King had said something like it many times. This was a common tactic of the era. The speaker would test an idea, rather like a comedian improving her material in every theatre. JFK had done the same with: “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .”, which he said more or less every time he went on the campaign trail.
Any speaker who tried that today would be written off as rhetorically exhausted. There are too many people watching, each with a voice that can easily be made public. The repetition is also compelling evidence that it is not the power of the words alone that make a speech memorable. All of the previous versions of I Have a Dreamare lost to posterity because they were not uttered on a suitably grand occasion or with historic cause. When the question is the legal status of the black citizens of Birmingham, Alabama, the biblical imagery works. When the issue is taking ten minutes off the commuting time to Birmingham, West Midlands, it doesn’t.
This time the words mattered and the effect lingered, which is the next lesson. Rhetoric is always written off as silver-tongued flattery or duplicity unless the words become deeds. Before King wandered off with all his talk of dreaming, the speech had the title of Normalcy, Never Again. It’s hardly a resounding phrase but it is a fine description of what a great speech has to accomplish. The reason we still refer to I Have a Dream is because it was followed by, even if it did not directly cause, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the award to King of the Nobel Peace Prize and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
After the March on Washington it was never normalcy again. It is true that the march had been called for jobs as much as for civil rights and that hope remains desperately unfulfilled. But the demand for equal treatment with respect to the civil law was won. This period marked the start of the long and incomplete American effort to expiate the greatest blemish on its history, the disgrace of slavery.
To the extent that it has done so, great speeches are harder to make. The anthologies of great speeches are full of people who righted a wrong. Like history itself, these are books full of the victors. We tend not to record fine words said in losing causes.
On Wednesday the President of the United States, the grandson of a Kenyan goatherd, commemorated King’s legacy. That sentence contains the main reason why it is hard today to speak as poetically as King did then. It is because, by conjuring unmatched oratorical power honed by years in the Church, the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King changed the world.
It would be wrong to say that the nations in the developed world are free of injustice for they never will be. The great causes, though, are mostly to be found in the dreams and the hopes of those who have a fraction of even the worst-off in the lucky countries of the world. A great speech crystallises the truth of the present and helps to create the future. The fact that no great speech has yet emerged from the Arab Spring tells you that this is an inchoate struggle across many nations that has yet to find either definition or an eloquent spokesman. Without either it will, in every country, be vulnerable to those who repel words with guns and gas. I have a dream, though, that 50 years on we might be commemorating the speech that brought civil rights to Syria, China, Iran, North Korea.
This is not the fond hope it sounds, because King offers a reminder that scribbled marks on a page, arranged in order, connect to something deep within us. I often ask people to read any Obama speech out loud. Without the President’s singing voice, the effect is flat. Then I ask them to read the final words of I Have a Dream.
Try it yourself now. Even in your voice, in your home, 50 years after the event, you have to be hard of heart not to feel their force: “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!”
So to make things easy for readers - here's a clip of that famous speech again
