ception of Mary, and I attended Mass that morning and prayed for help in the
competition David and I would face that afternoon. It would be a contest among
ten Allegany students to determine the school’s entrant in the annual Tasker G.
Lowndes countywide declamation contest.
My speech was “What Democracy Means to Youth" in which the author,
Eugene Lyons, a noted journalist, enjoins the young people of America to recognize
the evils of dictatorship manifested at that time in Germany, Italy and Russia, to resist
“propaganda of hatred" and to “safeguard the treasures of human freedom." Imagine
the emotional wallop a good speaker could get from lines like these:
You know what goose-stepping means; you’ve seen
pictures of soldiers doing it. Well, modern dictators
have demonstrated that it’s possible to make an entire
nation of a hundred and seventy million people do the
goose-step - not with their feet, but worse: with their
minds and their hearts.
And these:
For more than a hundred and fifty years - ever since
the American Revolution and the French Revolution - the
world has struggled to establish a few simple but towering
facts: that the state is the servant of the people and not
the other way ‘round; that the happiness and dignity and
freedom of the individual man or woman are the final test
of any system of life; that man shall be free to think and to worship.
And:
American youth, even more than the older generation,
needs to understand and to meet the challenge of the
European dictatorships. It must demonstrate that we can
attain a better life for all our people without paying
the price exacted by a Mussolini or Hitler; that we can
do it within the framework of free institutions, without
enslavement to a super-state.
It was a wonderful oration, full of lofty sentiments, strong images and
patriotic appeal. Looking back today, I see that experience as symbolic of my
inevitable immersion in a momentous period of history - World War II. With material
like that, how could I have failed to win. The fact is, I did win. I was awarded a gold
medal and the nomination as Allegany’s representative in the interscholastic contest.
On December 16, I went to 7:00 Mass and prayed that I would do well in
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