Writing Boots

The President of the United States gave a major address last week at the United Nations General Assembly, and we’re not printing it in Vital Speeches of the Day magazine.

Though our archives are not searchable in such a way that I can say this for absolute certain: After 91 years of publishing, I’m pretty sure this is a first.

We’re not refusing to publish the speech because we don’t like it, or the man who delivered it. We have published every one of President Trump’s UNGA speeches heretofore.

And in the 17 years I’ve edited Vital Speeches—a monthly collection of the world’s most important speeches founded in 1934—I’ve included plenty of speeches I loathed, disrespected, found empty, absurd, disingenuous and irresponsible.

In addition to all the wonderful speeches we’ve published over the years, we’ve published many dumb and dangerous speeches by American presidents, foreign leaders, CEOs, nonprofit heads, university presidents, celebrities and even unknown people giving strange addresses in public libraries and at local malls.

We’ve certainly published speeches that supported every theme the president hopscotched across Tuesday: that the United Nations is ineffective and worse, that immigration is a global evil, that climate change is not real.

In fact, my reign as editor of Vital Speeches—and for the last decade its publisher, too—has actually seen a liberalization of the original policy of this oldest continuously printed American magazine, sternly laid down by my predecessors:

The publisher of Vital Speeches of the Day believes that it is indeed vital to the welfare of the nation that important, constructive address by recognized leaders in both the public and private sectors be permanently recorded and disseminated—both to ensure that readers gain a sound knowledge of public questions and to provide models of excellence in contemporary oratory. These speeches represent the best thoughts of the best minds on current national and international issues in the fields of economics, politics, education, sociology, government, criminology, finance, business, taxation, health, law, labor, and more.

It is the policy of the publisher to cover both sides of public questions. Furthermore, because Vital Speeches of the Day was founded on the belief that it is only in the unedited and unexpurgated speech that the view of the speaker is truly communicated to the reader, all speeches are printed in full. … Speeches featured in Vital Speeches of the Day are selected solely on the merit of the speech and the speaker, and do not reflect the personal views, or pre-established relationships of the publisher.

I have unofficially but demonstrably added to that policy that Vital Speeches publishes some speeches purely as documents of oral history—a term popularized after Vital Speeches forged its mission—and also on the pure basis of wanting future scholars, who may search our archives in library databases as today’s scholars do today, to utter the by-then-equivalent term for, “WTF.”

(As I often do, reading speeches in our archives. For a single instance: In January, 1941, University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins gave a radio address urging the U.S. stay out of the war in Europe because our own democracy wasn’t perfect and we committed human rights violations of our own. “We Americans have hardly begun to understand and practice the ideals that we are urged to force on others,” Hutchins said. “As Hitler made the Jews his scapegoat, so we are making Hitler ours. But Hitler did not spring full-armed from the brow of Satan. He sprang from the materialism and paganism of our times. In the long run we can beat what Hitler stands for only by beating the materialism and paganism that produced him.” WTF?)

But even with the guidance I get from our founders about political neutrality, and the new permissions I have added to our mission, I can’t bring myself to pay to publish Trump’s, 8,200-word, nearly hourlong U.N. speech. Why? Because it’s not a speech. Rather, it’s the oratorical representation of what the Wizard of Oz called the Tin Man: “a clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous junk.”

Former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was famous for giving hours-long orations—one lasting over seven. He gave a four-and-a-half-hour critique of American imperialism at the United Nations General Assembly in 1960, going a little over the 15-minute time limit for delegates.

Vital Speeches’ publisher didn’t pay to print that oral marathon, either—and not just because it would have taken up half the magazine. Because it too was not a speech, but a fulminating filibuster that obviously regarded the audience as mere stuffage. (Stuffage: “human or animal figures added as subordinate elements to the painting of a landscape.” I remembered this term from my interview years ago with Danish rhetoric scholar Christian Eversbusch, about how Hitler regarded his audiences.)

To Castro, it was irrelevant whether its hearers agreed with it as individual human beings or were emotionally galvanized by it as a community. Their only role was to endure it, en masse, to show the world who was in charge.

Leaders who want to use a speech to truly get an idea or a feeling across to an audience—and the speechwriters who help them—know the watchwords are focus, clarity and brevity.

The only reason to speak as long and meanderingly (not to mention as sloppily and belligerently) as Trump did at the U.N. is as a show of power. I’ll say whatever I feel like, and I’ll sit down when I’m good and goddamned ready.

Fine. But that’s not communication. I’m not paying to print it. And you shouldn’t feel obligated to listen to it, either.

For every time we complain about the callow kids these days, we should remember more clearly, how desperate we felt, trying to make our way into the workplace ourselves. A trove of post-college cover letters I discovered, helps me to do that. (This was first published here in 2011.) —DM

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It’s karma. Bad karma.

I have publicly lampooned bad cover letters written by recent college graduates seeking work. Such letters range, not too widely, from the goofy—”I think outside of the box (without even realizing it)”—to the insanely overeager—”I’m wicked good at successfully multitasking.”

And I have been roundly excoriated by readers, many of whom see my attacks on these children as mean-spirited. In my own defense, I have wanted to say, “I criticize from a position of empathy! My post-college cover letters were also impossibly callow and insanely overeager!”

But no one would have ever believed that my letters were as silly as the ones I was lampooning. Maybe I wouldn’t have believed it myself.

Cleaning out my writing closet last week, I ran across a notebook containing the first drafts of cover letters written by the guy on the right, just out of Kent State University.

It was the spring of 1992, exactly 20 years ago. I had graduated in December and moved from Ohio to St. Louis to live with my girlfriend, who was working there, selling shoes. I soon convinced her that we should move to Chicago because I’d have a better chance of getting a writing job there and she could sell shoes anywhere.

I started buying the Sunday Chicago Tribune and answering classified ads. I hoped to stand out from the crowd.

Dear Sir,   I am willing to bet that what you’re about to read is the first scathing cover letter ever to come across your desk. Please do not confuse the mood of the letter with my general attitude.

At tender twenty-two, I have had it up to here with business. My experience with a single company has provided all the anger I’ll ever need. I am a writer, so maybe you already understand. Let me explain, in case you don’t.

The other day, I interviewed with an engineering firm [in St. Louis] whose name would only be important if the firm was unique. And if that was the case, I wouldn’t bother with this commentary. I’ll tell you the story.

The personnel director ushered me into his office … [here, a section is missing, literature lost to history; but the letter continues] …

Obviously, I did not get either the job or even the second interview, only a letter that told me I was “being considered for the position,” which I received two days after the secretary told me that the copywriter position was filled.

Nothing I have told you qualifies me for a job at your agency, however I hope something I have told you qualifies me for an interview there. And I hope, again, that you don’t construe the angry sarcasm of my commentary as being representative of my attitude.

I want to write for a living. I will do almost anything to achieve that end. What can I do for you? I look forward to your response.

But angry sarcasm wasn’t my only rhetorical approach:

Ms. Belknap,

I am answering your advertisement in the Chicago Tribune; my interest is in the writing position, not only for the job itself, but for the goals of the Laboratory as well. As a recent student, I have a great interest in the learning and teaching processes.

At Kent State, I concentrated heavily on sociology and psychology, and recognized both the possibilities and the limitations of both fields; and, though vague, I think there is further connection between my knowledge and your needs ….

When vague connections are all you’ve got, vague connections are what you use. And my connections with the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory were vague indeed:

Dear Ms. —   

I write in response to your advertisement in the Tribune. The writer position is where my qualifications and interests lie.

What especially caught my eye was your commentary about the goals of NCREL: “bridging the gap between research and practice.” As a recent college student (and a fairly recent high school graduate) I have ideas and opinions and feelings where all aspects of teaching and learning are concerned.

And although I understand my duties as a copywriter would not necessarily include the shaping of the organization’s strategy, my passion for the subject makes the job all that much more attractive.

Lately I have been interviewing for various positions in the writing field, but I want to say I gave your’s [sic] a great deal more thought and attention. (This, if I may admit it, is the fourth draft.) [A lie.]

Currently I am living in the St. Louis area, but can interview at your convenience, and plan a permanent move to Chicago within the month. You could accellerate [sic] that process considerably. I eagerly await your call.

That call never came—she was clearly intimidated by my willingness to shape the organization’s strategy— but one of these letters, not in my records, did actually get me an interview, at a little family-owned newsletter publisher called Ragan Communications. Mark Ragan is the kind of guy who likes a brash young fool. (And in his early thirties, he probably sort of still was one.)

Mark’s dad Larry, not so much. Mere weeks after signing on at Ragan, I proposed that I take over the column, on the front page of the flagship publication, that Larry had been writing for 30 years. “I’m pretty creative,” I remember saying as the temperature began to plummet. But four years later—four very hard years later—I did take over that column, at the age of 26. I eventually became editorial director there, and then went on to become the illustrious writer whose literary stylings you enjoy today.

So lookee, Young Graduate: Being fresh out of college is a desperate time—probably the most desperate time you’ll ever know, and the one reason I would never want to be young again: You’ve got a degree, you’ve got some talent, but you have no experience, the economy is crap, and the business world has been getting along quite well without your bright shiny self for all these years.

How can you convince someone to give you a chance? Try everything. Hang in there. Try to keep calm, and remember you only need to find one person crazy enough to hire you. And for heaven’s sake, don’t listen to assholes who tell you your cover letters are weird.

If I had written sane cover letters, I might have gotten the job at NCREL.

And what would have become of me then?

And perhaps more importantly, what would have become of NCREL?

The President’s U.N. Speech Wasn’t a ‘Vital Speech’; in Fact, It Wasn’t a Speech at All

Friday Happy Hour Photo

It’s Damned Hard to Be Young (So Let’s Give the Young Grace)