Leaders and language:
There is a close correlation between the inspiring use of language and getting great deeds done. Abraham Lincoln won the Civil War, preserved the Union and abolished slavery in America in part because he could summon the better angels of his countrymen with his words. Martin Luther King won great civil rights battles with his golden oratory. Winston Churchill breathed defiance in a dire hour by unsheathing from the scabbard of his mind a gleaming sword of words. On the evil side, Adolf Hitler led his great nation off a cliff with his words from hell.
It is surely not a coincidence that the worst President in American history was also the most egregious of word bunglers. Any man who can say, to choose one or two examples out of hundreds, “The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country,” or “Will the highways on the internet become more few?” or “I think we agree, the past is over,” or “ One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures” – such a betrayer of good sense and mangler of the ordinary decencies of language does not, in all honesty, deserve to be President of a great country.
One reason why there is hope that Barack Obama will prove to be a great President is that he uses the English language to perfection. His eloquence, his rare ability to summon people with words and the pitch and cadence of his voice, combined with his intelligence and calmly centred persona, will assist him in confronting the multiplying crises bequeathed him by the hapless, cloth-tongued President Bush.
What a good start, for instance, that President Obama can actually speak in complete sentences which make sense – in sharp contrast to President Bush who fought desperately to put approximately the right words in approximately the right places like a man who has learned English as his third or fourth language. Of course, Obama has been criticized for how well he speaks – for example in this sharp rebuke by Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska: “Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can’t really do there, I think needing to do that isn’t tapping into what Americans are needing also.” Such is the homage an illiterate pays to the eloquent.
When he was young and getting involved in the protests against the apartheid regime in South Africa, Barack Obama realized that words have the power to transform: “with the right words everything could change – South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world.” And he has gone from strength to strength. In speech after speech he has galvanized the American people and people around the world. Already he has made at least one indisputably historic speech – his address on race in the Presidential campaign, ‘A Perfect Union.’ We can look forward to many more speeches worthy to enter the history books.
Obama has an important historical fact in his favour. The great presidents are those who enter their terms in times of immense crisis. Normal times present no opportunity to shine in the annals of man. Bill Clinton is said to lament this fact and regret he had no Independence struggle (George Washington) or Civil War (Abraham Lincoln) or Depression and World War (Roosevelt) to test his mettle. Barack Obama is ‘lucky’ – he does not have that problem. The challenge he faces befits a great historical figure. Will he measure up? We know one thing – his eloquence matches the hour. For the rest, we can only wait.
Abraham Lincoln and his use of language in the Civil War has been an inspiration to Barack Obama. Here is one speech Obama probably knows by heart. I reproduce it in full. It is perhaps the greatest and noblest of all modern speeches – standing comparison with the Sermon on the Mount and the funeral oration of Pericles. These are the “dedicatory remarks” made by Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863, in commemorating the battlefield cemetery of Gettysburg. After the main speaker, senator Edward Everett, had orated for a full two hours, Lincoln got up and spoke for three minutes – 270 words. In these words Lincoln summed up what he wanted his nation’s deepest and best beliefs to be.
The Gettysburg Address
“Fellow-countrymen – Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fit and proper that we should do this.
“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow this ground.
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”