A Moment of Silence

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Longtime Claremont resident T. Willard Hunter died this past Monday at the age of 93, and the city's 4th of July festivities will never be the same.

Hunter, who lived in the Pilgrim Place retirement community, started Claremont's 4th of July Speakers Corner back in 1977 as way of reminding people what the true meaning of the holiday is supposed to be. Daily Bulletin columnist David Allen explained:

Just as Charlie Brown lamented that Christmas was too commercial, Hunter, who died Monday at age 93, felt the message of Independence Day had been lost amid hot dogs and fireworks.

And so in 1977 Hunter created the Speakers Corner, an area of the park with a lectern, microphone and stage. Patterned after London's Hyde Park speakers corner, the Claremont version became an annual event and a distinctive part of the city's approach to the holiday.

Anyone who signs up in advance gets 10 minutes to reflect, hold forth or spout off on any topic they choose - city politics, organic farming, the Iraq war, whatever.

Of course, no one is obligated to pay attention - it's not called the Listeners Corner - but people do wander over and linger a while. This year's event is scheduled from 10:45 a.m. to 3 p.m.

In years gone by, you'd see Hunter get up and fill the unscheduled Speakers Corner slots with famous speeches he'd committed to memory - the Gettysburg Address or Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

So, sometime today we can expect an ironic moment of silence to remember Hunter, who, as David Allen noted, once orated for a world record 34 hours 8 minutes. The list of speakers for today's Speakers Corner is full except for noon when there will be a memorial to Hunter. The event ends with Hunter's friend Claremont Graduate University president emeritus John McGuire reading the Declaration of Independence, according to the Bulletin's obituary for Hunter.

Hunter was also the author of several books, but he may have achieved his greatest notoriety in 1930's and 1940's for his involvement with the Moral Re-Armament movement. MRA grew out of something called the Oxford Group, which was founded by an American Lutheran pastor named Frank Buchman.

The Oxford Group's Wikipedia entry tells how the group became MRA and how the group influenced the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous:

By the 1930s the Group had fallen into public disfavor, the public associated it with revivalist Protestantism which many mainstream Protestants and most Roman Catholics rejected. It began to be ridiculed in popular plays and books.[7]

In 1938, a time of military re-armament, Buchman proclaimed a need for "moral and spiritual re-armament" and that phrase - shortened to Moral Re-Armament - became the movement's name. Protest grew towards the group grew after it underwent the name change and its style became less religious and more political. It fell from favor and lost respect. Many of its critics believed it influenced appeasement policies at the beginning of the Second World War. The group later became identified with anti-communism stances before and during the Cold War.[8][9]

The Oxfords Group's influence can be found in Alcoholics Anonymous. Both Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, the two founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, were members of the Oxford Group. Though early AA sought to distance itself from the Oxford Groups, Wilson later acknowledged: "The early AA got its ideas of self-examination, acknowledgment of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Group and directly from Sam Shoemaker, their former leader in America, and from nowhere else."[10]

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Hunter's involvement with MRA brought him into contact with Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman, and Hunter later corresponded with Truman's daughter Margaret. In 1988, Hunter the Truman Library interviewed Hunter as part of an oral history project.

Hunter told the Truman Library how he got involved with MRA:

I decided that I wanted to get into politics. When I was graduated from Carleton in 1936, I went to the Harvard Law School, which has sometimes been known as a "stepping stone to greatness." Michael Dukakis is one of those that followed a similar trail.

Before too long I decided that law and politics and diplomacy weren't really going to do that much. Besides, I had always from the beginning felt that I was called to get into something that dealt with people and changing people. Unless you deal with human nature, you're still always going to have the same problems, I think, because most problems stem from human nature.

While I was still a student, the program of Moral Re-Armament came by. It had been initiated by Frank Buchman back in the twenties. It was known as the Oxford Group for a while, and out of it came Alcoholics Anonymous. He was so good at life-changing that a number of alcoholics were changed. Some of them wanted to apply the Oxford Group idea only to the one problem. So they separated off. The twelve steps of AA were Frank Buchman's life-changing principles. There are over a million living recoveries and it is growing around the world.

I kept on with the Moral Re-Armament program for 18 years fulltime and a good deal of that was in Washington, D.C. I was one of the movement's Washington operatives, you might say.

Hunter's funeral will be held 10:30am Tuesday at the Claremont United Church of Christ. The UCC is located at 233 W. Harrison Ave.

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The Claremont Courier gave a rundown of today's T. Willard Hunter Speakers Corner, which begins at 11am in Claremont's Memorial Park:

11:00 - Claremont Mayor Corey Calaycay
11:10 - CUSD Board Member Steve Llanusa
11:20 - Barney Path
11:30 - Richard Harris
11:40 - Butch Henderson
11:50 - C. Freeman Allen
Noon - Tribute to T. Willard Hunter
12:10 - Claremont Councilmember Sam Pedroza
12:20 - Chuck Doskow
12:30 - Claremont Courier Publisher Peter Weinberger
12:40 - Michael Fay
12:50 - Claremont Mayor Pro Tem Linda Elderkin
1:10 - Claremont Councilmember Peter Yao
1:20 - Dick Bunce
2:00 - Michael Keenan
2:10 - David Levering
2:40 - John D. Maguire

Also, don't forget today's 4th of July Parade, which starts at 4pm at 10th St. and Indian Hill Blvd. The parade runs south on Indian Hill to Harrison Ave. and then heads west to Mountain Ave.

And the gates for tonight's concert and fireworks show open at 6:30pm. The show takes place at Pomona College's Strehle Track at the corner of 6th St. and Mills Ave. The fireworks start at 9pm. If you haven't purchased tickets, you might still be able to get them at the gate for $8 if there are any available.

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.