Luft der Freiheit

Elocution is no longer a major sport in , U. S. schools, but it is still taught and practiced. Teachers still divide up the subject into various branches: viz., recital of poems, original oration, debate, the extemporaneous speech. The latter is always regarded as the most sporting. A boy is handed a slip of paper on which a subject is written such as "Capital Punishment."* For five minutes he is permitted to twitch nervously in his seat while his undernourished brain works feverishly to synthesize all that he has read, been told, suspected about the matter. A bell rings. He marches to the platform, plunges into a sentence the end of which is invisible, stops, begins again, stutters, finally gets hold of a word, likes it, takes hold of it, and with a ridiculous but earnest gesture, gallops it into a climax, becomes suddenly convinced of the justice of his cause, imprecates the Deity, dismounts.

But no such sporting effort is expected from the boy when, a Nominee, he accepts the Nomination. Nominee Hoover was never one of the smartalecks who actually had fun at Elocution Classes. All his years, he has dreaded the necessity to extemporize. Nor has he even triumphed with the "original oration," but an original oration he had to make last week (see col. 3).

For a month, some say for three months, he had been at work on it. Two weeks before delivery he sent it to a printer, in greatest confidence. Back it came in long strips of type. He showed it first to William Joseph ("Wild Bill") Donovan of New York. He showed it to a few others. And again and again he read it all through to himself, in his Palo Alto study. Safe to say, that, years hence, he will associate that speech far more closely with that room than with the stadium in which it was for the last time voiced.

The important thing about that nicely woodworked room is the view. It includes in the distance the Golden Gate; near to the eye, Stanford University grounds; and, chiefly, a great redwood tree, solitary, centuries old, unique because no-other redwood ever grew so high at such an elevation. That tree is Stanford's emblem. Emblem and motto, joined on shield, hang on the wall by the desk on which the Hoover speech was cast and recast. The motto: "Die Luft der Freiheit weht." It is the only U. S. college motto in German just as Hoover, according to the tradition he favors, will be, if elected, the only U. S. President of German descent in the direct line.

Translated, the motto means: "Strongly blow the winds of freedom." It is itself an authentic breath from the pre-Bismarckian Germany, which loved beer and learning and the hearth and which was not at all imperialist.

That high mob-scorning redwood, that flowingly romantic verse, that Nominee--even famed Mark Sullivan, popular political commentator, tried and failed to explain what inner relation existed between them.

* For English boys, the usual test is the legality of the execution of bewhiskered Charles I.