do something with me and accepted me in the program.
The first event in public speaking would be the annual Tasker Lowndes
Declamation Contest among the high schools of Allegany County, Maryland, to be
held in December. To each boy and girl in our program Miss Murphy assigned a
piece not only to be used for training in the nitty-gritty of speaking but also ultimately
to serve as the student’s contest piece. There was session after session of reading our
speeches before our coach and receiving her corrections of pronunciation and local
accents and her directions as to appropriate emphasis, feeling, inflection. I spent
hours in my room memorizing my piece and then rehearsing it before Miss Murphy.
Then came the contest before the student body in our auditorium to determine the boy
and girl who would represent Allegany in the county finals.
My contest piece was a speech that had been given in the 1930’s by a United
States senator on the Senate floor. It was entitled “The Integrity of a U. S. President,"
an impassioned defense of the deceased President Woodrow Wilson who, the senator
declared, had been falsely accused of being “compelled by the House of Morgan to
drag this nation into the World War and to sacrifice the lives of our boys." Of course
it was not intended that I, a sixteen-year-old boy, impersonate an elderly senator;
nevertheless, I could see smiles as, with great seriousness, I uttered this rhetoric:
“If it were permissible in the Senate to say that
any man who would asperse the integrity and veracity of
Woodrow Wilson is a coward, if it were permissible to say
his charge is not only malicious but positively
mendacious, that I would be glad to say here and elsewhere
to any man because the charge would be not only destitute
of decency but would be such a shocking exhibition as never
has happened in the thirty-five years I have served in the
Congress of the United States."
As an inexperienced junior, I did not expect to win, and I didn’t. But I had
proved that I could speak on my feet and I had made a good start on acquiring a less
regional-sounding speech pattern.
It wasn’t long before I was caught up in the next speaking event: the annual
interscholastic debate. The question: “Resolved, that the several states should adopt
the unicameral system of legislation." As a member of the negative team I was to
attempt to show that Nebraska’s unicameral legislature had not been successful,
therefore that system was not a likely remedy for the alleged evils in the bicameral
system. Miss Murphy wrote our speeches, drawing heavily upon the “canned" debate
material available to schools by scholastic publishers. This, it could be argued,
robbed the students themselves of a valuable experience in research and logical
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