Education: Oratory

Five high-school boys sat in a row. One got up and then there were four. Behind these four sat a gathering of foreign diplomats, three members of the Coolidge Cabinet—Secretaries Wilbur, Work and New—U. S. Superintendent Ballou of Education, John Hays Hammond* and President Coolidge himself. A band was playing “O Canada,” which some of those present tried and others pretended to sing. When the band stopped the schoolboy who had left his seat in the row began to make a speech.

The scene was a big auditorium in Washington, D. C. Some 5,000 school children were massed before the platform, rustling the flags they had brought to wave at the conclusion of President Coolidge’s speech. The event was the international finals of an oratorical contest worked up by leading U. S. newspapers to promote, not the art of oratory, but the interest of young people in the science of government. As President Coolidge had explained after being introduced by Mr. Hammond: “It will be a help to the youth of different nations to learn of the benefits which each is deriving from its own institutions.”

It was, therefore, of Canada’s beneficial institutions that the first boy-speaker, Herbert Moran of Toronto, told. After he had finished, the band played “God Save the King,” which a lot of the children mistook for “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” because the tune was the same, and up stepped William Meades Newton of Liverpool, England, to tell about the benefits of the British Empire. Nearly every one recognized the next anthem without difficulty, “The Star Spangled Banner,” which heralded the performance of the champion U. S. school orator, Herbert Wenig of Los Angeles. Herbert repeated the piece on “The Constitution” which had won him the national championship last June. It included the sentences: “The pages of this sacred document are fast crumbling away. . . .Baptized by our fathers’ blood, consecrated by our mothers’ tears, dedicated to immortality by a free people, may our Constitution ever stand as the emblem of ‘Peace on earth, good will towards men.’ ”

Followed an anthem which practically no one knew, the national song of Mexico. Jet-eyed young José Munoz-Cota of the National Preparatory School (Mexico City) required no further encouragement to launch again upon his famed oration “Bolivar and the Latin-American Peoples” with which he defeated all-comers for the Mexican title (TIME, June 28). Master José’s audience understood but little of what he said, for he spoke in purest Spanish. The final oration, by Maxime Raymond Fuel of Nancy, France, was also unintelligible to most of those present though it sounded very well.

Five judges had been picked, however, who all understood French and Spanish quite as well as they did English. Senor Alejandro Padilla, the newly arrived Spanish

Ambassador, was one; the others: Dr. Richard Henry Wilson of the University of Virginia, Dr. R. F. A. Muller (Belgian engineer), Dr. L. A. J. Mercier (French professor at Harvard), Dr. Robert M. Sugars of McGill University (Irish-born). When these five—four foreigners to one U. S. citizen—voted, they were unanimous in awarding the international championship and a silver loving cup to Orator Wenig of the U. S.; second honors to Orator Munoz-Cota of Mexico.

*It had not been difficult for the newspapers to prevail upon Mr. Hammond to preside. His interest in education, early stimulated by friendship with Cecil Rhodes (scholarship) whose consulting engineer he was in South Africa, has lately quickened. Some months ago he addressed “all June graduates” by radio on the subject of “Success.”