Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, University of Georgia Commencement, Athens, Georgia, June 10, 1957

I am deeply honored that this great University of the South should invite for this significant occasion a son of Massachusetts. While I am grateful for the personal honor accorded to me, I know that this simply demonstrates a continued strengthening of the common ties that bind Georgia and Massachusetts – a common history, a common citizenship, and an inseparable destiny.

For both Georgia and Massachusetts were settled by fugitives who brought the torch of liberty across the sea, when liberty was without other refuge on the face of the earth. Both Georgia and Massachusetts went to the same school in those early days – and their schoolmasters were tyranny and poverty and exile and starvation. They learned in that school little of the grace or the luxury of life. But they learned how to build States, mold constitutions and how to fight tyrants.

When the American Revolution and the founding of a new nation came, South Carolina and Massachusetts were joined still closer in common cause. The earliest leaders of Massachusetts, from Sam Adams to John Quincy Adams, worked closely with the leaders of Georgia from James Oglethorpe to James Jackson. Possibly the new nation would never have been formed without John Adams and Rufus King of Massachusetts – but neither would it have been possible without the man who wrote the charter for this University, the first charter for a state university in America, who is credited with saving the Constitutional Convention of 1787 from disruption and who served in the Continental Congress, House of Representatives, and the Senate – Abraham Baldwin of Georgia.

The political history of Georgia greatly intrigued me when I was writing my book “Profiles in Courage." One of my favorite chapters of the book was devoted to the courage of a member of one of Georgia’s most prominent families, the Lamars. Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar later moved to Mississippi with the Longstreets, and he represented that state in the House and the Senate; but among the prominent members of his family, including many graduates of this University, were half a dozen or more Georgia Congressmen, judges, Governors, Senators, and one United States Supreme Court Justice. The political career of Lucius Lamar was marked by his courageous insistence upon speaking as his conscience directed him on all occasions. And I think it is fitting at this time that I who sit in the seat of Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts Senator of a century ago who was hated and feared in Georgia, pay tribute to the history-making eulogy paid to Charles Sumner by Lucius Lamar.

It was a packed but hushed House of Representatives that this Democrat from Georgia and Mississippi, who had held a high place in the councils of the Confederacy, rose to speak in eulogy of the Republican Senator who was regarded as perhaps the greatest enemy the South had ever known. No one expected anything more than the usual superficial tributes - none realized that this speech would mark a turning point in relations between North and South. For, out of the fullness of his heart, Lucius Lamar told his colleagues:

"Charles Sumner, in life, believed that all occasion for strife and distrust between the North and South had passed away and that there no longer remained any cause for continued estrangement between these two sections of our common country... Is not that the common sentiment – or if it is not, ought it not to be – of the great mass of our people, North and South? Bound to each other by a common constitution, destined to live together under a common government… Shall we not… lay aside the concealments which serve only to perpetuate misunderstandings and distrust, and frankly confess that on both sides we most earnestly desire to be one; one not merely in community of language and literature and traditions and country, but more, and better than all that, one also in feeling and heart?…

"Would that the spirit of the illustrious dead whom we lament today could speak from the grave to both parties to this deplorable discord in tones which should reach each and every heart throughout this broad territory: 'My countrymen! Know one another, and you will love one another.'"

I hope the examples of Lucius Lamar and Charles Sumner, Webster and Forsyth, Adams and Baldwin, will be an inspiration to all of those whom we honor on this solemn day of Commencement. For them, this is the last of their June days on this beautiful campus – the identical group sitting here this morning will probably never gather again – and the winds of time will gradually erase most of the memories which seem so important today.

But what concerns us most on these occasions is not what you graduates leave behind but what you take with you, what you will do with it, and what contribution you can make. I am assuming, of course, that you are taking something with you, that you do not look upon this university as Dean Swift regarded Oxford. Oxford, he said, was truly a great seat of learning; for all freshmen who entered were required to bring some learning with them in order to meet the standards of admission – but no senior, when he left the university, ever took any learning away; and thus it steadily accumulated.

The high regard with which your education at Georgia is held is evidenced by the intensive competition which rages between those hoping to benefit from it. Your campus is visited by prospective employers of every kind, ranging from corporation vice-presidents to professional football coaches. Great newspaper advertisements offer inducements to chemists, engineers, and electronic specialists. High public officials plead for more college graduates to follow scientific pursuits. And many of you will be particularly persuaded by the urgent summons to duty and travel which comes from your local draft board.

But in the midst of all of these pleas, plans, and pressures, few, I dare say, if any, will be urging upon you a career in the field of politics. Some will point out the advantages of civil service positions. Others will talk in high terms of public service, or statesmanship, or community leadership. But few, if any, will urge you to become politicians.

Mothers may still want their favorite sons to grow up to be President, but, according to a famous Gallup poll of some years ago, 73% do not want them to become politicians in the process. Successful politicians, according to Walter Lippmann, are “insecure and intimidated men,” who “advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate” the views and votes of the people who elect them. It was considered a great joke years ago when the humorist Artemus Ward declared: "I am not a politician, and my other habits are good also." And, in more recent times, even the President of the United States, when asked at a news conference early in his first term how he liked "the game of politics," replied with a frown that his questioner was using a derogatory phrase. Being President, he said, is a "very fascinating experience… but the word 'politics'… I have no great liking for that."

Politics, in short, has become one of our most neglected, our most abused, and our most ignored professions. It ranks low on the occupational list of a large share of the population; and its chief practitioners are rarely well or favorably known. No education, except finding your way around a smoke-filled room, is considered necessary for political success. "Don't teach my boy poetry," a mother recently wrote to the headmaster of Eton; "don't teach my boy poetry, he’s going to stand for Parliament." The worlds of politics and scholarship have indeed drifted apart.

For both students and teachers find it difficult to accept the differences between the laboratory and the legislature. In the former, the goal is truth, pure and simple, without regard to changing currents of public opinion; in the latter, compromises and majorities and procedural customs and rights affect the ultimate decision as to what is right or just or good. And even when they realize the difference, most intellectuals consider their chief function to be that of the critic – and politicians are sensitive to critics (possibly because we have so many of them). "Many intellectuals," Sidney Hook has said, "would rather 'die' than agree with the majority, even on the rare occasion when the majority is right." Of course, the intellectual's attitude is partly defensive – for he has been regarded with so much suspicion and hostility by political figures and their constituents that a recent survey of American intellectuals by a national magazine elicited from one of our foremost literary figures the guarded response, “I ain’t no intellectual.”

But this mutual suspicion was not always the case – and I would ask those of you who look with disdain and disfavor upon the possibilities of a political career to remember that our nation's first great politicians were traditionally our ablest, most respected, most talented leaders, men who moved from one field to another with amazing versatility and vitality. A contemporary described Thomas Jefferson as "A gentleman of 32, who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin."

Daniel Webster could throw thunderbolts at Hayne on the Senate floor and then stroll a few steps down the corridor and dominate the Supreme Course as the foremost lawyer of his time. John Quincy Adams, after being summarily dismissed from the Senate by the Massachusetts Legislature for a notable display of independence, could become Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and then become a great Secretary of State. (Those were the happy days when Harvard professors had no difficulty getting Senate confirmation.)

This link between American scholarship and the American politician remained for more than a century. A little more than one hundred years ago in the Presidential campaign of 1856, the Republicans sent three brilliant orators around the campaign circuit: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Those were the carefree days when the "egg-heads" were all Republicans.)

I would urge therefore that each of you, regardless of your chosen occupation, consider entering the field of politics at some stage in your career, that you offer to the political arena, and to the critical problems of our society which are decided therein, the benefit of the talents which society has helped to develop in you. I ask you to decide, as Goethe put it, whether you will be an anvil – or a hammer. The formal phases of the "anvil" stage are now completed for many of you, though hopefully you will continue to absorb still more in the years ahead. The question now is whether you are to be a hammer – whether you are to give to the world in which you were reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of that education.

This is a great university, the University of Georgia. Its establishment and continued functioning, like that of all great universities, has required considerable effort and expenditure. I cannot believe that all of this was undertaken merely to give the school’s graduates an economic advantage in the life struggle. "A university," said Professor Woodrow Wilson "should be an organ of memory for the state for the transmission of its best traditions. Every man sent out from a university should be a man of his nation, as well as a man of his time." And Prince Bismarck was even more specific – one-third of the students of German universities, he once stated, broke down from overwork; another third broke down from dissipation; and the other third ruled Germany. (I leave it to each of you to decide which category you fall in.)

But if you are to be among the rulers of our land, from precinct captain to President, if you are willing to enter the abused and neglected profession of politics, then let me tell you – as one who is familiar with the political world - that we stand in serious need of the fruits of your education. We do not need political scholars whose education has been so specialized as to exclude them from participation in current events – men like Lord John Russell, of whom Queen Victoria once remarked that he would be a better man if he knew a third subject – but he was interested in nothing but the Constitution of 1688 and himself. No, what we need are men who can ride easily over broad fields of knowledge and recognize the mutual dependence of our two worlds.

I do not say that our political and public life should be turned over to college-trained experts who ignore public opinion. Nor would I adopt from the Belgian Constitution of 1893 the provisions giving three votes instead of one to college graduates (at least not until more Democrats go to college). Nor would I give the University of Georgia a seat in the Congress as William and Mary was once represented in the Virginia House of Burgesses.

But I do urge the application of your talents to the public solution of the great problems of our time – increasing farm foreclosures in the midst of national prosperity – record small business failures at a time of record profits – pockets of chronic unemployment and sweatshop wages amidst the wonders of automation – monopoly, mental illness, taxation, international trade, and, above all, the knotty, complex problems of war and peace, of untangling the strife-ridden, hate-ridden Middle East, of preventing man’s destruction of man by nuclear war or, even more awful to contemplate, by disabling through mutations generations yet unborn.

We want from you graduates not the sneers of the cynics or the despair of the faint-hearted. We ask you for enlightenment, vision, illumination.

In his book, “One Man’s America”, Alistair Cooke tells the story which well illustrates this point. On the 19th of May, 1780, as he describes it, in Hartford, Connecticut the skies at noon turned from blue to gray and by mid-afternoon had blackened over so densely that, in that religious age, men fell on their knees and begged a final blessing before the end came. The Connecticut House of Representatives was in session. And as some men fell down in the darkened chamber and others clamored for an immediate adjournment, the Speaker of the House, one Colonel Davenport, came to his feet. And he silenced the din with these words: "the Day of Judgment is either approaching - or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment. If it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish, therefore, that candles may be brought."

Graduates of the University of Georgia, we who are here today concerned with the dark and difficult task ahead ask once again of you that candles may be brought to illuminate our way.

Source: Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Senate Files, Box 897, "University of Georgia Commencement, Athens, Georgia, 10 June 1957." John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.