A Brill Calendar: September 18

Few human actions can shape and change the world as we perceive it as fundamentally as a well-crafted public speech.

Since the ages of Pericles and Demosthenes and Cicero, the active use of a concise train of thought - addressing an audience under peculiar or special conditions - is the embodiment of a supreme cultural power. This can be attested by any anthology of speeches which have been cherished by earlier centuries and generations.

Very often – if not in the majority of cases – such an autonomous work of (literary) art may not give rise to a recorded and documented version; the words in which medieval kings and warlords addressed their councils and supporters have hardly been preserved. In a much later and a much different world, the majesty of the spoken word was preserved in a written form; almost coeaval with speech itself. The Fathers of the American Revolution were sophisticated gentlemen; some of them with an exceptionally fine ear for fine rhetoric.

The act of performance before large audiences has been tested and validated a long time before Presidents like Obama, certainly since the Declaration of Independence, July 4 1776, but also earlier, particularly in the King James translation of the Bible. In Obama’s case it would seem to be likely that sooner or later reference will be made to a seminal speed delivered September 18 1895 at the Atlanta Georgia Exposition: “In all things that are purely social we can be separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Words of Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915), another great orator in the proud American tradition.