Speech-Making at Its Claremont Best

Yesterday's Daily Bulletin had an article by Will Bigham about the 4th of July Speakers' Corner in Memorial Park. The article said it was the 31st year the event has been in existence, but we here at the Insider think it might be even older than that.

The Bulletin also has a photo gallery of the goings on in Claremont along with a similar gallery showing the 4th of July parade in La Verne.

The Courier also has a video by publisher Peter Weinberger showing some of the day's events, including the Kiwanis Club's pancake breakfast and the annual parade. Judy Wright even has a cameo.

Claremont, as the video shows, can be a marvelous community to live in, though there is also something about the video and the event that reminds us of the William Inge play "Picnic," or more specifically the montage of the town's Labor Day celebration from the movie version with William Holden and Kim Novack.

Apropos of Inge and our not-so-humble little town, the late Claremonter John Murphy once gave a speech at the 15th Annual William Inge Festival in Independence, Kansas, back in 1996. In a speech titled "Anger and Violence in the Plays of William Inge and August Wilson," Murphy captured the essence of what we 're trying to write about in this and other posts:

As do most plays, the ones in question here offer us both individuals and communities. These two worlds are in some ways symbiotic—each causes and effects the actions of the other. As in all plays, things begin in the middle—the individuals and their communities have their origin in the past. How the characters respond to that past—how we all respond to the past—is what makes them (our characters) so interesting.

....

Picnic offers us Hal, a younger version of Doc [a character from Inge's play Come Back, Little Sheba], who finds it difficult to reach satisfaction either in wanderlust or in apparently settled, small-town Kansas. His anger comes from a desire for acceptance by a community that he knows instinctively will reject him. He even lays claim to Jefferson’s doctrine—he says he has rights just like everybody else. Flo and Rosemary are angry characters as well, torn between their own desires and the demands of the community—what the neighbors or the school board will say. There are many well-defined angry women in Inge’s plays, but two of the most intriguing can easily go unnoticed. The two women who rob Hal at gunpoint seem well ahead of their time. What would William Inge make of Thelma and Louise?

In Claremont, we often see that dramatic tension between the desire for acceptance by the groups that run things and having to deal truthfully with the past. And don't get us started on angry women. Claremont has a League led by several of them from Mayor Taylor on down.

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Speaking of truthfulness...

The Bulletin article about the Speakers' Corner talked about what the event means to some of the participants:

But for participants and audience members, the Speakers' Corner seems to carry a higher level of significance.

"It is a fundamental right that everyone should have and unfortunately the majority of people in the world don't have," said Bil Seymour, an organizer of the event.

"It's important to celebrate it in America, because it's such a rarity in the world."

Mayor Ellen Taylor said the Speakers' Corner concept exists outside Claremont in only one other place - Boston.

Not to be sticklers for detail, but keeping in the spirit of responding well and truthfully to the past, Queen Ellen is wrong. There are Speakers' Corners in many places in America and abroad.

The most famous is the one in London's Hyde Park from which the founder of Claremont's Speakers' Corner, T. Willard Hunter, may have taken his inspiration. There are also speakers' corners in Australia, Canada, Malaysia (sort of), the Netherlands, Singapore (again, sort of), Trinidad and Tobago, and in various locations in the United States (besides Boston).

Some of the U.S locations that have speakers' corners are the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, Virginia, the city of Denver, Bughouse Square in Chicago's Washington Square Park, the Muir Woods National Monument in Northern California, and Murray State University in Kentucky,

And, there was once a Speakers' Corner in New York's Harlem at which people from Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X once spoke.

The city of Toronto even had a Speakers' Corner television show where people could, for a nominal fee that was donated to charity, record a video of a speech at a public kiosk. (Alberta's version of the show was free.) Some of the speeches were then aired.

Long story short: Many Speakers' Corners, not just two. As usual, with the voice of supreme authority, Ellen tosses off a remark that is utterly false, and it's just absorbed by the public as gospel. It's great that Claremont has a Speakers' Corner, but do we have to falsely inflate it into something it's not?

And there's a lesson there: When Ellen opens her mouth, not everything that drops out is a pearl of wisdom. Take everything with a grain of salt.