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Speeches That Shaped Modern World Concise
There are speeches about power and about equality. There are speeches of hate and those of hope, of compassion and sorrow, politics and diplomacy, war and peace, freedom and justice. What they have in common is the rhetoric - the power of persuasion.These speeches carry the hopes and regrets of the modern world, and become even more powerful and poignant with the passage of time.
288 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 13, 2024
‘Our march to freedom is irreversible.’ – Nelson Mandela on his release from prison, 11 February 1990
This is a worthy book by Australian teacher and author Alan J Whiticker containing many famous and not so famous speeches of varying interest and importance.
On the whole an entertaining and informative read, from which we can pick and choose. I have a number of quibbles, but I we will get to them later because the speeches are what the book is about.
In 1917 Woodrow Wilson successfully asks Congress to declare war with Germany, saying: ‘we have no quarrel with the German people…it was a way determined upon in the old unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers’ (p41). It is interesting that Wilson makes the distinction between Germany’s rulers and the people themselves. He is also required to have the decision to go to war made by Congress, not the White House. I hope that is still the case.
In his inauguration speech of 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, famously asserted his ‘firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ (p67) as he sought to lead the country out of the Depression. I would have thought that the President’s ‘A date that will live in infamy’ would have got a guernsey, but it does not. For the record it goes: ‘Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan....’ The President was speaking to a joint Session of Congress the day after Pearl Harbor. Congress shortly thereafter declared a state of war. These events echoed Wilson’s speech a generation earlier. But we don’t get this speech in the book. We do get, however, an intriguing entry just days before Pearl Harbor, a speech by Japanese Prime Minister General Tojo, celebrating the East Asia co-prosperity sphere and warning the US and Britain not to ‘fish in the troubled waters of East Asia’ (p117), but with no hint of what was to come; the attack on Pearl Harbor was planned in 1940 and approved in September a year later.
Of great interest to me is Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence which gained momentum as the war progressed. On August 8, 1942 in a speech to the All India Congress Committee Gandhi made his case for independence from Britain, indeed any colonial or imperial rule, to be achieved through non-violence. There is no mention of ‘Quit India’ in the speech and indeed it is rambling and not all that coherent, but it did the trick: ‘That freedom, if it is to come, must come today.’ (p122)
Having visited Hiroshima, the city destroyed by an atomic bomb on 6 August 1945, I was surprised to learn the Americans planned to bomb a military target, not women and children. In his radio broadcast of 9 August 1945, President Harry Truman said, ‘The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base’ (p130) failing to mention the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in that city and Nagasaki.
Prior to the war we have aviator hero Charles Lindbergh urging American neutrality and after the war Senator Joseph McCarthy’s disgusting ‘Wheeling’ speech full of unsubstantiated allegations against individuals in the state department.
There are speeches relating to human rights, segregation, independence movements and moments of personal reflection or outright regret are given a public airing. So it’s not all war and politics, but a lot of the content is about conflict.
So to the quibbles. The book was published in 2005 so it becomes historic itself; there are only two speeches after 2000. That’s OK, the book is devoted to the twentieth century, but the author has constricted himself by selecting eight examples from each decade of the twentieth century, even though some decades are more speech worthy than others.
There is a preponderance of American speakers: half of the 66 speeches are by Americans, including 13 by presidents even though the most famous of them all, Roosevelt’s ‘infamy’ speech was not included. Other national leaders come in at 17, although Golda Meir was speaking in 1948, at the time of the birth of Israel, long before she became Prime Minister.
My final quibble may seem perverse for someone committed to touting Australia in this forum. There are three contributions relating to the land of Vegemite, although the first is from an English aristocrat opening the first federal parliament, which conveniently for this book came at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Incidentally the Australian parliament sat in Melbourne for the first 27 years of the Federation, before moving to Canberra, a fact often forgotten by people from New South Wales (I know I live in Sydney, but I was brought up in Melbourne).
The other two entries come from two Titans of the Australian Labour movement, Gough Whitlam, who was sacked by the Governor–General, (we have his speech to the crowd gathered in front of Parliament House that day), but he also led one of the most innovative and progressive administration in our history, but also the most chaotic. Paul Keating’s Redfern speech, celebrating native title is included. He was one time the ‘world’s greatest treasurer’ and famous for telling us that we were having ‘the recession we need to have’ and he was labelled the ‘Lizard of Oz’ by the British press for putting his hand on the back of the Queen during an official walk to guide her along. All three Australian entries, while important to us, do not quite fit the international ‘shaped the world’ character of the book. Perhaps we should have a separate volume of great Australian speeches; might be a short book, but it would be a good one. Malcolm Fraser once said: ‘Life wasn’t meant to be easy.’ And what about Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech, now that did ripple around the world:
This is a worthy book by Australian teacher and author Alan J Whiticker containing many famous and not so famous speeches of varying interest and importance.
On the whole an entertaining and informative read, from which we can pick and choose. I have a number of quibbles, but I we will get to them later because the speeches are what the book is about.
In 1917 Woodrow Wilson successfully asks Congress to declare war with Germany, saying: ‘we have no quarrel with the German people…it was a way determined upon in the old unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers’ (p41). It is interesting that Wilson makes the distinction between Germany’s rulers and the people themselves. He is also required to have the decision to go to war made by Congress, not the White House. I hope that is still the case.
In his inauguration speech of 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, famously asserted his ‘firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ (p67) as he sought to lead the country out of the Depression. I would have thought that the President’s ‘A date that will live in infamy’ would have got a guernsey, but it does not. For the record it goes: ‘Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan....’ The President was speaking to a joint Session of Congress the day after Pearl Harbor. Congress shortly thereafter declared a state of war. These events echoed Wilson’s speech a generation earlier. But we don’t get this speech in the book. We do get, however, an intriguing entry just days before Pearl Harbor, a speech by Japanese Prime Minister General Tojo, celebrating the East Asia co-prosperity sphere and warning the US and Britain not to ‘fish in the troubled waters of East Asia’ (p117), but with no hint of what was to come; the attack on Pearl Harbor was planned in 1940 and approved in September a year later.
Of great interest to me is Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence which gained momentum as the war progressed. On August 8, 1942 in a speech to the All India Congress Committee Gandhi made his case for independence from Britain, indeed any colonial or imperial rule, to be achieved through non-violence. There is no mention of ‘Quit India’ in the speech and indeed it is rambling and not all that coherent, but it did the trick: ‘That freedom, if it is to come, must come today.’ (p122)
Having visited Hiroshima, the city destroyed by an atomic bomb on 6 August 1945, I was surprised to learn the Americans planned to bomb a military target, not women and children. In his radio broadcast of 9 August 1945, President Harry Truman said, ‘The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base’ (p130) failing to mention the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in that city and Nagasaki.
Prior to the war we have aviator hero Charles Lindbergh urging American neutrality and after the war Senator Joseph McCarthy’s disgusting ‘Wheeling’ speech full of unsubstantiated allegations against individuals in the state department.
There are speeches relating to human rights, segregation, independence movements and moments of personal reflection or outright regret are given a public airing. So it’s not all war and politics, but a lot of the content is about conflict.
So to the quibbles. The book was published in 2005 so it becomes historic itself; there are only two speeches after 2000. That’s OK, the book is devoted to the twentieth century, but the author has constricted himself by selecting eight examples from each decade of the twentieth century, even though some decades are more speech worthy than others.
There is a preponderance of American speakers: half of the 66 speeches are by Americans, including 13 by presidents even though the most famous of them all, Roosevelt’s ‘infamy’ speech was not included. Other national leaders come in at 17, although Golda Meir was speaking in 1948, at the time of the birth of Israel, long before she became Prime Minister.
My final quibble may seem perverse for someone committed to touting Australia in this forum. There are three contributions relating to the land of Vegemite, although the first is from an English aristocrat opening the first federal parliament, which conveniently for this book came at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Incidentally the Australian parliament sat in Melbourne for the first 27 years of the Federation, before moving to Canberra, a fact often forgotten by people from New South Wales (I know I live in Sydney, but I was brought up in Melbourne).
The other two entries come from two Titans of the Australian Labour movement, Gough Whitlam, who was sacked by the Governor–General, (we have his speech to the crowd gathered in front of Parliament House that day), but he also led one of the most innovative and progressive administration in our history, but also the most chaotic. Paul Keating’s Redfern speech, celebrating native title is included. He was one time the ‘world’s greatest treasurer’ and famous for telling us that we were having ‘the recession we need to have’ and he was labelled the ‘Lizard of Oz’ by the British press for putting his hand on the back of the Queen during an official walk to guide her along. All three Australian entries, while important to us, do not quite fit the international ‘shaped the world’ character of the book. Perhaps we should have a separate volume of great Australian speeches; might be a short book, but it would be a good one. Malcolm Fraser once said: ‘Life wasn’t meant to be easy.’ And what about Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech, now that did ripple around the world:
I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man; I will not.....If he [Tony Abbott – the Leader of the Opposition] wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn't need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror. That's what he needs.
November 28, 2007
the book, to me, is a very good look at historical moments in time.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews