Commencement Address at Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois
June 1936
For half a century, White had something to say on virtually every topic that had anything to do with Kansas or the United States. He grew up in Kansas and bought the Emporia Gazette in 1895. Thereafter until his death in 1944 he wrote countless editorials as well as articles and books that earned him the title of the "Sage of Emporia."
Yet one of his most lasting pieces dealt not with politics or business but was written as a eulogy to his daughter, Mary, who died in 1921 at the age of seventeen after she was knocked from a horse by an overhanging tree branch. Telling of her zest for life, her interests, her friends, Mr. White created an unforgettable portrait of a young girl, forever vibrant and forever young.
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"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 goods, 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 may have some
bearing, though heaven only knows what, upon you 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.
"How can we Americans immunize ourselves? The class of '37
must find out why small geographical, social racial units are
erupting into a virulent nationalism that threatens western civilization.
It's your problem, esteemed descendants, but here's a hint that
might help you to solve it.
"I am satisfied that the disease has its root in a lack of
social faith. The thing that has bound America into one nation
is tolerance - tolerance and patience; indeed, tolerance and patience
upheld by a sense of duty.
"At this point, dearly beloved members of the class of '37,
I propose to reveal the screw loose in my mental processes, also
to show you something of the aberration of your forebears. You
have this dementia in you blood, and you might as well know it.
Your fathers, mothers, and remote ancestors for several thousand
years believed in the reality of duty. Upon that madness they
built the world. Not that I wish to brag about it - this sense
of duty - but I still hug the delirium of my generation to my
heart and believe there is something in those old-fashioned eccentricities
known as the Christian virtues.
"Don't get excited. I am not preaching piety. I have no plan
of salvation to offer you, no theology to defend. But I feel,
and my generation has believed in a general way, that democracy
with its freedom, with its patience, with its tolerance, with
its altruism, is a sort of rough attempt to institutionalize the
Christian philosophy. And when I say rough, I mean rough, something
like a 20 percent realization of a noble ideal.
"Our American Constitution, for instance, is a national compact
of our individual and of our social duties. It has worked in this
country after a fashion. Yet the same Constitution, or nearly
the same, has been adopted in a dozen other lands and has failed.
Why has it held us to an essential unity? I am satisfied that
our Constitution has stood up because Americans actually have
established here a sort of code of duties. That has been the crystallizing
principle that has held us together - duty of man to man, of region
to region, of class to class, of race to race, of faith to faith.
That duty has bred something more than neighborly tolerance. It
has engendered a profound desire in very American's heart to make
life as pleasant as it may be made - not merely for himself, indeed
not chiefly for himself, but for others. Thus we have found and
cherished true liberty.
"Liberty if it shall cement man into political unity, must
be something more than a man's conception of his rights, much
more than his desire to fight for his own rights. True liberty
is founded upon a lively sense of the rights of others and a fighting
conviction that the rights of others must be maintained. Only
when a people have this love of liberty, this militant belief
in the sacredness of another man's self respect, do races and
nations posses the catalyzer in their political and social organism
which produces the chemical miracle of crystallized national unity
and strength.
"We Americans have had it for three hundred years on this
continent. It was in the blood of our fathers. It was the basis
of our faith in humanity when we wrote our Constitution. It has
been with us a long time on this continent - this capacity for
compromise, this practical passion for social justice and for
altruistic equity in settling the genuine differences of men.
This high quality of mutual respect is no slight gift. It is a
heroic spiritual endowment, this knack of getting along together
on a continental scale.
"We have set as a national custom the habit of majority rule.
This custom is maintained not by arms but by a saving sense in
the heart of every minority that any majority will not be puffed
up, will not infringe upon the rights of the minority. Matching
this duty of the majority to be fair, we have set up the component
duty of the minority to be patient, but to agitate until the justice
of a losing cause has convinced the winning majority. This American
tradition of political adjustment cuts through every line of cleavage
and all difference in our social organization - regions, classes,
races, creed. Here is the way it has worked.
"As our country has expanded geographically, this political
genius for unity has tapped our store of certain basic virtues:
neighborly forbearance, meekness, unselfishness, and that belief
in the essential decency of don'ts, neighbors which, for want
of a better word, we have called love. Now, in our land abideth
these three: faith in our fellows, hope in the triumph of reason,
and love for humanity. With all the grievous faults and glaring
weaknesses of our federal union, these things are the centripetal
spiritual forces which have solidified America.
"These commonsense qualities which have grown out of the
Beatitudes have helped to preserve the American Union for the
last century and a half. Now what are you going to do about it,
you who stand here at the threshold of the reality of your past,
looking into the evanescent horizon of your future?
"We who shall soon be petrified into pedestaled ghosts as
your ancestors have a notion that you, our descendants, don't
have much use for duty, for patience, and for tolerance. We get
the general idea that you have no sort of faith in the strength
of the humble. Yet it is out of this lack of faith that a new
challenge has appeared in the world, a challenge aimed at democracy,
a challenge which scorns these lowly neighborly virtues that have
held our world together. This challenge is finding its way into
our American life. We are being told that the majority sometimes
has emergency mandates to ignore the rights of the minorities.
We have set up rulers all over earth who preach against the virtue
of patience. It is a new thing in our America to hear men defending
the tyrannies of Europe - communism, fascism, and the Nazis -
declaring that the minority is right. It is even a stranger doctrine
in America, which holds that a passing majority, by reason of
its being a ballot box majority at one or two elections, has an
inherent right immediately to suppress and ruthlessly destroy
an honest minority.
"Now, as an ancestor, let me caution you, my heirs and assigns,
that these new political attitudes are symptoms of greed for power.
They will fool you if you channel your thinking into narrow dialectics.
Don't take your logical premise from your class self-interest.
Don't build your logic upon a purely selfish structure. Don't
think as plutocrats. Don't reason as members of the middle class
or as proletarians. Such thinking is too sure of its own syllogisms
ever to be just. Such thinking rejects the possibility that there
is truth and that there may be reason in the contention of another
class of society. This same discord that has torn as under so
many peoples in Europe, where fifty years ago democracy seemed
to be taking root, today is seeding in our land.
"Capitalists are scoring labor leaders. Labor leaders are
preaching distrust and hatred for capitalists. The revelations
of the La Follette committee in the United States Senate now investigating
the infringement of civil liberties certainly lay bare the cancer
of hatred in our economic body that is poisoning our national
blood. The class-conscious arrogance of wealth is creating its
own class morals. Proletarian logic is justifying the use of force
in class conflict and condoning cunning. The industrial enterpriser
shuts his eyes to the tragedy of the farmer's economic plight.
Then the farmer envies the financier.
"But I feel sure the tide will turn. You who stand here,
chisel in hand, about to hew out the future, have something in
you; humanity's most precious mental gift - the eternal resilience,
the everlasting bounce in man. 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. You will find
that you have the urge that we had. You will want to believe in
something in spite of yourselves. You will want to construct something.
For you are the sons and daughters of a creative people, inventive,
resourceful, daring. And above all, in spite of the many unpleasant
things you have learned in this cloister, in spite of the hard
realties that have molded your youth, you are mystics, you are
crusaders, you are incorrigible visionaries in the noblest sense
of these words. The eternal verities of your inheritance, the
organizing brains, the industry, the noble purpose that during
the nineteenth century made America a kindlier and more beautiful
land than ever before was brought forth on this planet, will be
beckoning you, urging you, indeed, sternly commanding you to follow
whatever is fine and just in the achievement of your country.
"The residuum of what I am trying to say is this: You must
reorganize life in your America and point your achievement toward
a fairer distributive system. Abundance is here for the taking.
don't bemoan your lost frontier. It is even now flashing on our
horizon. A gorgeous land lies before you fair and more beautiful
than man before has ever known. Out of the laboratory will come
new processes to multiply material things for your America, to
multiply them almost infinitely; but only if you will hold open
the channels of free science, unfettered thought, and the right
of a man to use his talents to the utmost provided he gives honest
social returns for the rewards he takes.
"Don't delude yourselves about your new frontier. For on
that frontier which will rise over the laboratories you will find
the same struggle, the same hardships, the same inequities that
your forefathers have found on every frontier since the beginning
of time. You will find rapacious men trying to grab more than
their share of the common bounties of the new frontier. You will
find human greeds and human perfidies there as we found them fifty
years ago and as our fathers found them generations upon generations
before. Energetic buccaneers always thrive wherever men are pioneering.
In every one of the ten long generations during which your ancestors
have been conquering this continent and building a proud civilization
here, they have struggled as you will struggle against the injustices
of life which are bred out of the lust for power in unsocial men.
But don't let that discourage you...
"And now, in closing, on behalf of your fathers who are bequeathing
to you their choicest gifts, let me say that your heritage is
not in these great lovely cities, not this wide and fertile land,
not the mountains full of undreamed of riches. These you may find
in other continents. What we leave you that is precious are the
few simple virtues which have stood us in good stead in the struggle
of our generation. We will and bequeath to you our enthusiasm,
our diligence, our zeal for a better world, that were the lode
stars of our fathers. As our legatees we assign you our tolerance,
our patience, our kindness, our faith, hope, and love, which make
for the self-respect of man. These qualities of heart and mind
grow out of a conviction that the democratic philosophy as mode
of thinking will lead mankind into a nobler way of life..."
