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January 2010 
Great Speeches of the 20th Century
Posted on May 1st, 2007
by 
Albert
Albert
The UK's Guardian newspaper is in the middle of presenting a truly fabulous mini-series of the best speeches of the 20th Century. Here is the list of speeches, that are being presented daily from 21st April - 4th May:
Winston Churchill, We shall fight on the beaches, June 4, 1940
John F Kennedy, Ask not what your country can do for you, January 20, 1961
Nelson Mandela, An ideal for which I am prepared to die, April 20, 1964
Harold Macmillan, No going back, February 3, 1960
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, March 4, 1933
Nikita Khrushchev, The cult of the individual, February 25, 1956
Emmeline Pankhurst, Freedom or death, November 3, 1913
Martin Luther King, Jr., I have a dream, August 28, 1963
Charles de Gaulle, The flame of French resistance, June 1940
Margaret Thatcher, The lady's not for turning, October 10, 1980
Jawaharlal Nehru, A tryst with destiny, August 14, 1947
Virginia Woolf, A room of one's own, 1928
Aneurin Bevan, We have to act up to different standards, December 5, 1956
Earl Spencer, The most hunted person of a modern age, September 6, 1997
[Some have audio; others don't. And to date, the first seven are available; the rest are to come.-CM]
You can read transcripts, as well as listen to the actual speeches at www.guardian.co.uk/greatspeeches.
Guardian Editor Tom Clark considers what makes fine words great.
Launching our major series, editor Tom Clark considers what makes fine words great
Saturday April 21, 2007 The Guardian
The man who first spelled out the ground rules for great speeches was himself blessed with the sharpest tongue in Rome. Cicero used it to attain high office, win court cases and secure changes to the policy of the Roman republic.It could not, however, protect him from the broader sweep of history. As the republic began to give way to the empire, Cicero was decapitated. Fulvia, the wife of Mark Antony, is said to have pulled out the famously fluent tongue from his severed head and jabbed it with her hairpin.
Great oratory can send a shiver down the spine, but a speech will only be truly great when it chimes with the times in which it is delivered. That is what unifies the Guardian's Great Speeches of the 20th Century - it is what enabled them to change the world.
Several of the speeches established in the public mind a personality of great importance. For example, Charles de Gaulle's wartime broadcasts began his journey to being regarded as the saviour of France. Likewise, the towering personality of 1980s Britain was only established once Margaret Thatcher stood up and insisted that despite rocketing unemployment "the lady's not for turning".
In another of the speeches, made by Nikita Khrushchev to the Soviet Union's Communist party in 1956, this process is reversed. An even more important personality - that of Stalin - was decisively demolished. Such was the impact that this is the only one of the speeches that Guardian reports from the time suggest caused members of the audience to faint.
Other speeches again rally opponents of the powerful, by welding arguments together into a devastating weapon. In very different ways, this was achieved both by Nelson Mandela's speech from the dock in his 1964 treason trial and Aneurin Bevan's masterly parliamentary demolition job on the Eden government's case for making war on Egypt in 1956.
In a different age Earl Spencer's eulogy to his sister, Princess Diana, delicately but unsparingly condemning the cruelty of the media and the coldness of the royal family, had a similar effect.
Many great speeches paint a picture of what a better world might be like. But for some - most obviously Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" - the transmission of this vision around the world was itself a significant political consequence.
Though their consequences are varied, each of the speeches in our selection had an impact on the world. The same reasoning explains many omissions from the collection. In his mastery of the rhetorical art alone, Margaret Thatcher's Labour opponent Neil Kinnock frequently outdid her. It is history - a history that put her in power, and him in opposition - that ensures it is her speeches that are now remembered.
Influential speeches are given by those to whom society is ready to listen. Often this rules out many people. For much of the 20th century, women struggled to make themselves heard, and that is the principal reason for the depressing male domination of the collection.
Indeed, the two female contributors that we do have from the century's early years - Emmeline Pankhurst in her 1913 American lecture on the war being waged by the suffragettes, and Virginia Woolf, speaking at the Cambridge lectures that were to become A Room of One's Own - both shed valuable light on how female voices were drowned out.
If historical circumstance is the most important factor in any great speech, the choice of the right words for the occasion is another essential part of the mix.
It was the former governor of New York Mario Cuomo who said: "You campaign in poetry, but you must govern in prose".
In a parliamentary setting an effective speech deploys forensic rigour enlivened with wit. But a great performance at a political rally is very different - more than anything, it requires emotive language to provoke the right mix of inspiration and indignation.
But even where great speeches have very different form and purpose, there are some rhetorical ingredients - like good cooking oil in the kitchen - that come in useful with all sorts of dishes. There are tricks of the trade, many known to orators since Cicero's time, that crop up time and again.
One of the most basic is the "rule of three". No one quite knows why, but speakers have always found that by clumping things together in threes they can hammer home their message.
De Gaulle put the rule to particularly good use. Instead of calling on men who have served in "any of France's armed forces" he issued his summons in sequence to men of the army, navy and air forces ("de terre, de mer et de l'air"). The rhythm reinforces the entreaty for everyone to do their bit.
After a decade of New Labour, many are disdainful of soundbites, but turning a phrase that encapsulates a message has always been an essential part of crafting a great speech, and it remains so.
Even the best soundbites rely on very old tricks. One is phrase reversal - John F Kennedy's "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country". Another is taking an established cliche and adapting it. Margaret Thatcher, for example, wheeled out the then well-worn phrase about Labour's "winter of discontent" but then held out promise in its place of "an autumn of understanding" and "a winter of common sense".
One of the oldest oratorical controversies was whether, however artful the craftsmanship, a great speech must in the end be animated by the veracity of its argument. Even before Cicero, Plato insisted against the Sophists that it must be - 2,500 years later the dispute remains a live one.
We ran into it in considering Enoch Powell's anti-immigration "rivers of blood" speech, made in 1968 as Kenyan Asians arrived in the UK. Powell was a classical scholar, steeped in the rhetoric of the ancient world, and he drew on it heavily - even, in line with the best Roman practice, enhancing the urgency of his tone by holding in his urine in advance of delivering a big speech.
His speeches were said to "smell of the wick" - he sat late into the night, weaving in allusions to and oratorical tricks from the ancient world. Much of that is in "rivers of blood", and no doubt it helped create the immediate impact, seen as racist protesters came out on to the street in support of a man who they felt had finally articulated their fears.
Looking back at the text today, well-crafted as the words are, they look pernicious above all else. More than that, the predictions they make have proved unambiguously false - immigration happened, and blood was not spilt in the way Powell predicted. In the end, although remarkable, Powell's notorious speech falls short of being great.
As the 20th century wore on, what audiences expected changed, and great speech-makers had to adapt. Public meetings ceased to be the draw that they once were, and - in an increasingly distracting world - attention spans declined. No modern political leader would write a speech running to tens of thousands of words, as Pankhurst and Khrushchev did, when it would mean expecting audiences to sit still and listen for hours at a time. We had to edit down several speeches, and especially those from the century's early years.
Another huge change was technological. A momentous speech would traditionally reach most people as newsprint; but as first radio and then TV became all-important that changed. Delivery came to matter to those beyond the immediate audience, and truly great delivery - like that of Martin Luther King, who harnessed his voice as a virtuoso would a Stradivarius - developed an enhanced capacity to propel speeches into greatness.
So some of the criteria of greatness have evolved. But looking across a series that stretches from 1913 to 1997, what is equally striking is one constant: namely, the extraordinary and enduring power of the spoken word.
Access: Public
Elza S. Maalouf is the co-founder and CEO of the Center for Human Emergence-Middle East. She was born in Lebanon and is a former attorney and business executive. Elza is now leading innovation within the Arab world to identify complex thinking that will unblock many of the stalemates and facilitate the emergence of Arabs into their 21st century Renaissance. She is engaged in various integral projects in Lebanon, Syria, Palestinian Territories and Kuwait.
Dr. Don E. Beck is the Founder of the Global Center for Human Emergence and the coauthor of The Crucible: Forging South Africa's Future (with Graham Linscott, 1991) and Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership & Change.
