Constitution Day 2015 with Mr. David Shribmain

CONSTITUTION DAY

Presentation by Mr. David M. Shribman September 10, 2015—Alumni Hall

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REMARKS OF THOMAS P. FOLEY, JD

President, Mount Aloysius College

My first assignment today—a few words on the idea of Voice. Mount Aloysius is fairly unique in the ranks of higher education institutions in that we choose a theme each year and try to coordinate Orientation, the Connections courses, our Speakers Series, our faculty symposium, dorm activities, even monthly library displays—around that single idea. Our theme this year is a simple one, “Voice.”

Voice—it can be written or spoken, first or third person, active or passive, digital or analog, cyber or literal, mythic or spiritual. Voice is the original social medium, first expressed physically as drawings on a cave wall, today through emoticons in a text message.

Voices come to us in other mediums as well. Actors have voice. Musicians have voice. There are voices you will study in history, in politics, in science and the arts. Paintings, sculpture, digital art are often powerful expressions of voice— evoking emotions that range from rage to rapture and inspiring reflections that are at once philosophical, imaginary, even practical.

At Orientation, our first-year students read and discussed a piece on immigrant voices, they learned about the power of community service to develop and sustain voice and they all laughed at a six-character skit that explored one new student’s efforts to find her voice as a newbie on a college campus.

During the first week of classes, our students watched a movie about using one’s a capella voice to find their personal voice, created themed spaces in their dorms about voice and even tried out their voices at karaoke night.

In our Connections classes, the first day was focused on discussion about a seminal article on Voice in the 21st century, and all our first-year students will be exploring the theme as they read The Book of Unknown Americans this semester.

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In the Library, there are monthly displays tied to the theme, our Little People’s Place sent me a giant card to introduce their voices and there is even a discussion planned around a Steelers game about how professional athletes have learned to use their voices to advocate on issues like concussion and long term health.

At Convocation, we heard about voices of courage—Mairead, Mandela and Malala, from Northern Ireland, South Africa and Pakistan— whose life stories are not all that dissimilar from many of yours.

At Convocation, we also heard two fabulous stories about women’s voices. One was the mother of our Convocation speaker—she developed her voice with a BA in her late 20s, an MA in her 30s, a Ph.D. in her 40s and a book—about, of all things, nuns—in her 50s.

The other story was about the 98year-old mother-in-law of one of our Trustees, whose book about escaping occupied Latvia in the 1940s literally gave voice to the many thousands who never made it out. She got a standing ovation from the 500 students in the audience.

So this is where we all begin this academic year—with a focus on authentic voices. And a big part of our job here at Mount Aloysius is to help you find and develop that authentic Voice which is yours.

That effort comes back to some of the goals the faculty and I set out for you every year. First, we try to help you grow in appropriate ways, so that you are job-ready, technology-ready and community-ready.

Second, we seek to impress upon you the value of asking good questions, and as you will learn from our faculty, the key antecedent

to asking a good question is being a good listener. Third, we work to implant in you the importance of lifelong learning, encouraging you to reach beyond the classroom and to embrace careful listening, critical thinking and authentic expression as lifelong pursuits.

Most of this learning will take place initially in your classrooms. But to truly find your voice, you are going to have to take some chances outside the classroom as well, and come to more events like this event today.

What you choose to read, what opinions you dare to try out on your friends, which Ted Talks and other digital voices you choose to listen to—all will help in your journey to finding your own voice.

We will also offer you a ton of other opportunities through which to explore the idea of Voice and with which to begin the process of developing your own. We have six more guest speakers who will talk to us about the idea of voice this year and probably at least that number of less official occasions where we will have some fun exploring the notion of voice.

Today, we have the chance to hear from a profound voice who has a knack for spotting the authentic— even in the political world—who will deliver his remarks as part of our Constitution Day celebration.

David Shribman is an old friend of mine and of this college. This is his fifth appearance at Mount Aloysius.

He has spoken to us on everything from The University’s Role in Civil Discourse to The Hospitality of Writing, the former a panel discussion with three others, the latter a joint presentation with his writer/journalist/teacher wife, Cindy Skrzycki.

Most recently, David delivered the closing lecture at a summer 2015 journalism seminar here on campus that was organized and led

by Cindy (with help from Dr. Jess Costanza, Dr. Michael Jones and Assistant Librarian Shamim Rajpar), a three-day event that had a dramatic impact on the 12 lucky students in the class. David delivered a fascinating talk at the closing lunch on how decisions had been made just the day/night before on the very edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he shared with us that day.

Just a few highlights on his career and bona fides. He is, of course, the Executive Editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a position he has held for well over a decade. He is a Pulitzer Prize Winner, has been a frequent commentator on national and international televised news over the years and writes a syndicated column that appears across the country.

Of special interest to all of us, David is the author of a book about great teachers—a collection of stories that he solicited from leaders across the broad spectrum of American life.

He and Cindy have devoted their lives to good writing and to speaking truth to power—together and in their separate careers. They have worked on newspapers from The Wall Street Journal to The Washington Post, from The Boston Globe to The Buffalo News (where they first met). We were delighted to award them a joint honorary degree at graduation in 2014.

I’m delighted to present for the fifth time at Mount Aloysius College Mr. David Shribman who will speak to us today about “Presidential Voices and What They Tell Us About the Politics of Today.”

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REMARKS OF DAVID M. SHRIBMAN

Executive Editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I’m delighted to be back here at Mount Aloysius College and to participate in this year’s celebration of Voice in our lives and our culture.

The notion of “Voice” is one of those simple things that is very complex. The word is a noun, and it is a verb. We have a voice, and we have the capacity to give voice. We can voice an opinion, and we can write in a certain discrete voice. In fact, sometimes our voice can be indiscreet. And so by choosing this topic—this theme—President Foley has launched you on a very sophisticated journey. It is one that will allow your outside speakers, and then you, to voice certain views, to give voice to certain perspectives, to provide a voice for those who sometimes have no voice. I wish you luck-and patience. This will be quite a journey, and quite a worthwhile one.

Our journey here this afternoon will traverse nearly two and a quarter centuries. It will involve presidents

from the third to the 44th. One was a slave owner, and one is an African American. One was a nearpacifist who took us into war, one a Southerner who took us to a new place in race relations. Two of them were very wealthy men from established families who nonetheless understood the fears, needs and ambitions of the poor and striving. One was elected twice from Illinois, another not even elected but appointed vice president and then became president amid a constitutional crisis.

All spoke to their times, in words—in voices— endearing and enduring. All took on issues that are eternal, with special meanings in their eras and newfound meanings in ours. They grappled with war and peace, with justice, with the difficulty of choice, with the burden of obligation. Not all of our presidents have been great, and in truth some of those we will examine today were not especially great, but almost all of them have possessed great thoughts,

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great ambitions, great ideals, and almost all of them have expressed great truths.

So this afternoon we will take a journey, into history to be sure, but also into the creases and crevices of our own time. We will do so with 10 quotes from American presidents. Remember that none of these presidents was destined to hold the office, that all of them faced opposition, first in their election battles and then in the White House itself. Remember, too, that while they acted out of certain values, none could be certain that his ideas would prevail, or that he would. That is why the presidency is above all an office of great risk—and, so often, of unforgettable voice.

And here we go. Here’s the first one.

“We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

These are the remarks of Thomas Jefferson, from his First Inaugural, delivered in 1801. Many of you will know that while we speak with ease of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe none of that history was foreordained, and while the ascendancy of Jefferson as chief executive may seem to many of you as inevitable it was not.

In this passage, Mr. Jefferson speaks of two things. The first— We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists—should be familiar to you all from 11th grade history.

It’s the most famous sentence of the speech. He is saying that while factions and parties had emerged in American politics, all Americans owed allegiance to a greater ideal, the country, not the party.

This was a time when people used the plural verb, are—as in the United States are, rather than the singular verb we use today, is—as in the United States is. So Jefferson was saying something timely, and timeless.

And that is as far as it goes for most people who quote that passage.

But let’s read one sentence farther: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

Now that’s pretty heavy stuff.

Here, in 1801, he is raising the specter of secession, which did not become part of the parlance of politics until the 1830s and didn’t become reality until 1861. He is, in essence, addressing a problem 60 years ahead of his time. That’s extraordinary. But then again this is Jefferson we are talking about.

What is more extraordinary is what comes next: “The safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

Here is a ringing endorsement of the central idea of the First Amendment, that in our country we will let even the most foolish idea be thrown across the landscape because we possess the sure knowledge and confidence that reason will combat it. This is by far the most important statement and element in the speech. Let’s now skip ahead almost precisely two-thirds of a century.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up

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the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Many of you will recognize this as the end of Mr. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered in 1865. Here the Civil War hostilities are almost over, but the wounds still are raw, and they hurt. And yet here the commander in chief of the Union forces is speaking of “malice toward none” and “charity for all.” He is speaking up for binding “up the nation’s wounds.”

This is a profound statement of compassion, wrapped in a chrysalis of determination—determination “to finish the work we are in,” which is to say to win the war.

This marriage of compassion and determination then becomes admonition—and if you go to Washington, to the building that houses the nation’s veterans programs, you will see, on the front wall, an excerpt from this sentence—to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan— which states our obligation to our fighting men and women, after the fight is over. This is an obligation we have honored mostly in the breach, and all of us who are on the home front today need to recommit ourselves to that obligation for the men and women who still fight for our freedom in places faraway.

And speaking of war: “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and

disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.

But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”

This is an excerpt from Woodrow Wilson’s speech asking Congress to declare war in 1917, to permit the United States to join World War I. Look carefully at this language—It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war—and then see why Mr. Wilson feels he must do it, and you will see, plain as day, the word “voice” in there: for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments.

America would be in World War I only at the end, but it joined World War II a bit after the beginning.

This speech was delivered 11 months before Pearl Harbor: “As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone. Those who man our defenses, and those behind them who build our defenses, must have the stamina and the courage which come from unshakable belief in the manner of life which they are defending. The mighty action that we are calling for cannot be

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based on a disregard of all things worth fighting for.”

This is from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms Speech of 1941. In this speech he sets forth the rationale for American involvement in a war in which there is yet no American involvement. He gives us a glimpse of the post-war world he envisions, and at the heart of that are his four freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. This is one of the most moving of all Roosevelt speeches, and it moved a nation.

Now to a speech given by the man who commanded American troops in Europe and then became the 34th president of the United States.

“Don’t join the book burners.

Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.”

This is one of only two speeches in this collection that was not delivered in Washington, D.C. This

was delivered in the small college town where President Foley and I were educated more than a third of a century ago. It was Dwight Eisenhower’s Commencement Speech at Dartmouth College in 1953, and here you will need some context.

America had just completed a war against a nation, Nazi Germany, where the burning of books had become a satanic ritual. Nazi Germany brooked no freedom of speech, and ideas deemed noxious quickly became tinder for mass bonfires. So, too, in the post-war Soviet Union, which likewise

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banned ideas that were anathema to the ruling regime. Here in the United States there was a building hysteria—it was a Red Scare, often called McCarthyism—that led to very dangerous notions, including the banning of dangerous books.

So President Eisenhower went to Hanover, N.H., and spoke out against this notion.

He believed-we believe-that the way to battle noxious ideas is to explore them openly, and to let the intellectual marketplace drive out the bad ones, not the government or a library board.

Now we come to perhaps the most remarkable couple of days

in American presidential rhetoric.

Let’s start with June 10, 1963: “What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.”

This excerpt comes from John F. Kennedy’s Commencement Address at the American University. It is known as the “Peace Speech,” and in it a president who was bellicose in his Inaugural Address, re- examines the world and, in his postCuban-Missile Crisis clarity, sees peril-and the error of man’s ways.

This is detente before the word was applied to Soviet-American affairs.

In Moscow, Party Chairman Nikita Khrushchev called it perhaps the greatest speech ever given by an American president. In it Kennedy says that in the end we are not Soviets or Americans but humans.

And it is in the next speech, delivered only a day later, that Kennedy examines the human

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condition at home and finds it wanting. The context is increasing racial tension in the United States, and increasing pressure on the president to take sides in monumental events occurring in the American South, where civilrights activists are pressing for the desegregation of the principal institutions of civic life, especially educational institutions.

Here is President Kennedy again: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”

Here the American president— seared by the confrontation and obstruction at the University of Alabama—recognizes that if he is to be the spokesman for freedom abroad he must be the spokesman for freedom at home. His speech is his acknowledgement that the great contradiction in American life is the country’s willingness to project strength internationally to defend freedom, but its unwillingness to do so domestically. Mr. Kennedy was late to the civil-rights front, but with this speech puts his presidency on the line.

He was, of course, assassinated five months later, and the struggle redounded to his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, born in the South, tutored in the ways of Washington and the Senate by strong segregationists. An accidental president, he was told

at the start that he did not need to take on the civil-rights fight. His answer was his commitment to the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a crucial turning point was the confrontation in Selma, Alabama.

“What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

It was that last line for which Johnson is remembered. The civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. watched this speech, delivered in the House chamber, on television. When the president took up the anthem of the civil-rights movement—we shall overcome—King cried.

The nation, and the Congress, responded as well.

The country was torn apart in the decade that followed. Torn apart by civil-rights, by the Vietnam War, by the youth rebellion that spread in protest to them both. And then by the Watergate scandal, which had its climax with Gerald R. Ford—the only unelected president—proclaiming that our long national nightmare is over, and pleading to his countrymen: “I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your President

by your ballots, and so I ask you to confirm me as your President with your prayers.”

Ford was a breath of fresh air after Richard Nixon, and his ascension to the presidency, by unique and unconventional means, was nonetheless an affirmation that the country’s core values—that this is a nation of laws and not of men— were still alive and vibrant. The years that followed were no easier.

Jimmy Carter spoke for human rights, Ronald Reagan for traditional values and for the American spirit. Mr. Reagan and George H.W. Bush helped the nation win the Cold War. But the result was not the national serenity that the country expected. Great tensions remained, especially on race, and here we conclude with some remarks of the first black president, Barack Obama: “As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves. We may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency, and short-sightedness and fear of each other but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace.

“But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude, and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift.”

These remarks came earlier this year, at the president’s eulogy for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney in South Carolina. They reflect

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the inner grace of the man Mr. Obama sought to praise, but also the inner grace that so often comes to the person who inhabits the White House and bears its terrible burden of the presidency.

But as we have seen this afternoon, that burden comes with hope, with inspiration, with a sense of constancy about our values, and with a voice—a voice that proclaims liberty throughout the land and seeks to extend it, that sees injustice and seeks to end it, that speaks humbly but mightily about the American spirit and the American purpose.

The country is sometimes called an experiment. It surely is that.

But it is also a symphony—an unfinished symphony. It is your privilege and burden to be part of that symphony, and to give it voice for your generation and those that follow.