Hillary in '69: 'A very unique American experience'
Last edited Tue Jul 14, 2015, 01:22 PM - Edit history (2)
from Chris Wild for Retronaut at Mashable:
It's 1969, and 22-year-old Hillary Rodham, delivering the commencement address at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, is being interviewed by LIFE magazine.
Hillary, who enrolled there in 1965, served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans during her first year there. After Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968, she worked with black students at the college to organize a two-day strike and a drive to recruit more black students and tutors.
...She was instrumental in keeping Wellesley free of the student-staged disruptions that were common at other colleges at the time. Concern about these disruptions was so high, in fact, that 20 states had passed laws curbing campus activism; the U.S. government was considering withholding college funds if activism was not dealt with firmly.
But Hillary's key moment came when she was elected to be the first student in Wellesley college history to give its commencement address, a powerful speech that received a seven-minute standing ovation.
At the time of her commencement speech in 1969, LIFE ran a story on student activism and photographed Hillary. In the accompanying interview, she talked about protest as a way of forging an identity and of questioning great institutions, including the universities, in a quest to find a better and more real existence...
read: http://mashable.com/2015/04/25/hillary-clinton-early-days/
It was her first big speech, but there would be many more to follow. At her graduation from Wellesley College in 1969, Hillary Rodham became the first student in the college's history to deliver a commencement address. She was president of student government at the time.
Before beginning her prepared remarks, though, she criticized the event's previous speaker, Sen. Edward Brooke. In his speech, he had urged graduates to reject "coercive protest," which was a polite euphemism for near-riotous student demonstrations. It was an idea at which Rodham pointedly aimed when she took the podium. He was, it seemed to Rodham, too complacent. So she set aside her prepared speech and embarked on an elegantly efficient, impromptu response.
"What does it mean to hear that 13.3 percent of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction," she said.
read: http://people.howstuffworks.com/10-famous-commencement-speeches2.htm
Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham, President of the Wellesley College Government Association and member of the Class of 1969, on the occasion of Wellesley's 91st Commencement, May 31, 1969
excerpt:
___Many of the issues that I've mentioned -- those of sharing power and responsibility, those of assuming power and responsibility have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world. But underlying those concerns there is a theme, a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar. It talks about integrity and trust and respect. Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multi-media age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling. We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. The questions about those institutions are familiar to all of us. We have seen heralded across the newspapers. Senator Brooke has suggested some of them this morning. But along with using these words -- integrity, trust, and respect -- in regard to institutions and leaders we're perhaps harshest with them in regard to ourselves.
Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper, Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness. Within the context of a society that we perceive -- now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see -- but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. There's a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left, collegiate protests that I find very intriguing because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of original ideas. And it's also a very unique American experience. It's such a great adventure. If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere.
But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves. To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action, and here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect. Those three words mean different things to all of us. Some of the things they can mean, for instance: Integrity, the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know. Integrity -- a man like Paul Santmire. Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said "Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust." What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted? All they can do is keep trying again and again and again. There's that wonderful line in East Coker by Eliot about there's only the trying, again and again and again; to win again what we've lost before.
And then respect. There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people. Where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word "consequences" of course catapults us into the future. One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now...
(Hillary Rodham read this poem by Nancy Scheibner at the end of her address)
My entrance into the world of so-called "social problems"
Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.
The hollow men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.
And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle
For all those myths and oddments
Which oddly we have acquired
And from which we would become unburdened
To create a newer world
To transform the future into the present.
We have no need of false revolutions
In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds
And hang our wills up on narrow pegs.
It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives.
And once those limits are understood
To understand that limitations no longer exist.
Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free
Not to save the world in a glorious crusade
Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain
But to practice with all the skill of our being
The art of making possible.
read entire address: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-rodhams-1969-commencement-address/
Hillary Rodham Clinton, at her 1969 graduation, is flanked by (left) John Quarles, chairman of the board of Wellesley College; Ruth M. Adams, president of Wellesley; and Sen. Edward W. Brooke. (Sygma/Corbis)
...one of a series of bios:
Bernie Sanders: 'My Life is My Life'
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251444572
Martin O'Malley: Born to Run
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251444399
= new reply since forum marked as read
...it's an unnecessary distraction in an interesting take on her speech, so I'll just edit that out. 
