Freedom of Expression
Viewpoint Diversity
Intellectual Humility
Critical Thinking
Graduate
Finalist Speeches
Elizabeth Baldwin
*Winner*
Speech Transcript:
In humans, you can tell where someone was born and grew up from chemical markers in our teeth. It’s embedded there like a map. Where we’re born shapes our instincts. It’s an invisible hand guiding us to repeat patterns from stories we forget we ever heard. A country is like that too. This country is like that. And the Declaration of Independence is our birth certificate. It tells us who we are. And one thing we’ve inherited from it is that we like a story to start with a bit of patient sufferance. We like a story built like the one the Declaration tells: patient sufferance until the burden is too great, then a revolution and a vindication of our natural rights. It’s in our bones, our DNA. So let me tell you a story like that.
It’s cold in Memphis in February. It’s cold and it’s rainy and it’s wet. And it was on a cold, rainy, wet day in Memphis in February that Echol Cole and Robert Walker died taking shelter from the rain. Cole and Walker were sanitation workers, which is another way to say garbage men. And on that day in February 1968 when they sought shelter inside their garbage truck, it malfunctioned, and the compactor crushed them to death.
In another world it could be called unlucky. But not in Memphis in 1968. Because Cole and Walker were not the first to die this way. For Memphis’sanitation workers pay was bad and conditions were worse. Men would go home smelling like garbage to families they couldn’t feed with the wages they earned. They’d requested better pay and safer conditions, but the city kept ignoring them and they kept working. Kept the city clean. In the words of the Declaration: such has been the patient sufferance of these sanitation workers.
But revolution is our birthright too. And Cole and Walker’s deaths marked the end of patient sufferance. Eleven days later, sanitation workers went on strike. 10,000 tons of trash piled up throughout the city.
What were their demands? Well, there were official demands about safety and pay. But the message, the words covering the signs they carried as they marched through the city? They did not say “better pay” and they did not say “better conditions.” They settled on something so simple and universal and integral to the founding of this country that it would stir that part inside of all of us that tells us where we’re from. When the thousand workers took to the streets, their signs declared “I am a man.”
What they didn’t add was: didn’t the Declaration say all men were created equal? They didn’t need to. Any American who reads those words can finish that sentence themselves. It’s the words so intwined with who we are that we call it up on instinct. Invoking the Declaration is enough. Because what is the Declaration of Independence but the beginnings of a strike? Declaring we have endured too much to endure any further. Demanding a government that will stand between us and the cruelties and indignities of the world. And 192 years later, that same story, etched into the consciousness of the Memphis sanitation workers, was made manifest as they fought to be treated with dignity and respect for doing the work that everyone needs done but no one wants to do.
The last line of the Declaration of Independence, right at the end before the signatures says, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” The sanitation worker’s strike was no different. Lives were lost. Which brings us to the part of this story you probably know. On April 4th 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis after coming to aid in the protests.
The city settled with the workers 12 days later.
Where we’re born shapes our instincts. And this country was born of revolution. We were born demanding dignity. These instincts, this story, these words – they are what place a garbage man and a Founding Father on equal footing. This is the story that tells us who we are, what we deserve and how to fight for it.
Thomas Murphy
Speech Transcript:
Nuts! N-U-T-S. Nuts!
December 22, 1944. The Battle of the Bulge. On the winter solstice, the darkest evening of the year in Bastogne, France, America’s 101st Airborne were surrounded by Nazi German troops. The Germans sent a message to the American commander, Anthony McAuliffe, demanding complete surrender, or death. McAuliffe sent a one-word reply: Nuts!
With that one word, the Americans re-committed their lives and honor in the fight against tyranny, thus summoning that great ideal set forth in the Declaration and cherished ever since: brash, unshakable determination to the point of recklessness.
Don’t get me wrong – the Declaration is, of course, filled with worthy expressions of noble ideals. It is an inspiring and aspiring document revealing self-evident truths. But, let’s be honest, in its own way, the Declaration is absurd.
It is an audacious letter – it’s intended audience is the whole world and the King of Britain! – explaining the natural rights of man to this guy who thinks he’s born with the divine right of kings!
To speak of Independence? No – America is a colony, and colonies are places from which wealth is extracted and delivered to English aristocrats. The Americans are just a bunch of cow-boys, rejects with poor pedigree.
These truths – what makes them so self-evident? The people declaring a universal birthright to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness do so from the Master house of their slave plantation. To follow up this philosophy with a bunch of grievances about taxation – it’s unserious, it’s unsophisticated. It’s Nuts!
These Americans are lost in the unknown, surrounded by a death machine, the conquerors of Europe, conquerors of the world. They have no reason to think that any of this will work out.
Americans, surrounded. Well, the 101st Airborne are paratroopers – they’re supposed to be surrounded. The Americans held their position under heavy fire from the Germans for four days before the 4th Armored Division arrived and liberated Bastogne. The Allied forces proceeded to liberate Europe.
Ask any foreigner who deals with us Americans – we are a brash people. We talk too loud, we talk too much. But we are sincere. And that’s what the Declaration is above all else – beyond its nobility, beyond its philosophy and audacity, beyond the grievances and hypocrisies. It is sincere.
We the People are sincerely dedicated to the cause of liberty and self-determination. And folks from across this fine country have persevered through long, dark, cold nights of tyranny waiting for the 4th Armored Division to arrive. Whether it be at Valley Forge, or in Bastogne, France, our sincere, brash, reckless Declaration of Independence in the face of overwhelming odds is our founding ideal.
And so to the Nazis in 1944, we say Nuts. And to the British in 1776, we say Nuts. And if you would rather surrender your rights for the cold comfort of tyranny on the other side of that battlefield, I say Nuts to you.
Because we will stay here. Americans, surrounded. Night is closer and will be longer and darker than it has ever been before.
But tomorrow, dawn’s rose light is going to creep over that horizon, and it will break the night into day. Until then, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Brandon Morgan
Speech Transcript:
When we hear the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, we picture the Founding Fathers signing their names in bold strokes. We think of liberty bells, battle cries, and the birth of a nation. But those words were never meant to reside solely in 1776; they were meant to move, to grow, to light the way for generations yet to come. And in 1936, in the quiet fields and small towns of rural America, those words echoed once more. Not through a revolution of muskets and marching armies, but through something far more humble: the arrival of electricity.
When President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862 to grant free land to those willing to cultivate it, he sought to make manifest his vision of the purpose of government: “to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to afford an unfettered start and fair chance in the race of life”.
By 1930, this once-shining ideal had begun to grow dim. While urban and rural populations were nearly equal, ninety percent of urban homes had power. The same was true of only ten percent of rural homes. Imagine that: Families milking cows by lantern light. Children doing homework by the flicker of an oil lamp. Mothers cooking meals on wood stoves and cleaning clothes on washboards. Rural Americans were no longer being given a fair chance. While city streets bustled under electric lamplight and hummed with progress, millions of Americans remained in the dark.
Did rural families lack effort or ambition? No. They simply lacked access to opportunity. As Nebraska Senator George Harris wrote, “they were growing old prematurely; dying before their time; conscious of the great gap between their lives and the lives of those whom the accident of birth or choice placed in towns and cities”. The great promise of equality, written in our founding document, flickered faintly.
On May 20, 1936, seventy-two years to the day after President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act, one of the most important pieces of legislation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. This law allowed the federal government to make low-cost loans to farmers who had banded together to form cooperatives to bring electricity to rural America. It wasn’t about government doing everything; it was about government enabling its citizens to achieve prosperity. With the stroke of a pen, the course of everyday life in America was forever changed.
Farmers and neighbors formed cooperatives. They pooled their resources, mapped their lands, and together they raised the poles and strung the wires that would bring light to the countryside. The government provided the loans, but the people built the future with their own hands. That, to me, is the Declaration of Independence made real. Our Founders believed government exists to secure the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And in the 1930s, electricity became the key that unlocked those rights for millions.
Farmers could work safely after sunset, children could study at night, and hospitals could power life-saving machines. And a boy in the San Miguel Basin of Southern Colorado - my grandfather - could become the first in his family to graduate high school and live a proud and happy life as an American farmer.
The Declaration promises that we are all created equal, but equality doesn’t mean sameness. It means fairness. It means every person should be afforded a fair chance in the race of life. The Rural Electrification Act gave that chance to people who had been left behind. And in this story is a kind of patriotism we rarely discuss: the unity of neighbors and communities working together for the good of all.
Independence isn’t standing alone; freedom often starts when people join hands. Afforded the opportunity by their government, rural Americans built their future one pole, one wire, one spark at a time. And when the lights came on for the first time in those farmhouses, it wasn’t just the bulbs that glowed. It was the American dream.
Michael Rattner
Speech Transcript:
The “pursuit of happiness” can seem insignificant compared to life and liberty. It is a bit of a kid brother, joined to its older, more dignified siblings by a conjunction.
However, I would argue that its inclusion in the Declaration of Independence is no afterthought. Imagine a life without joy, or liberty without the following of one’s passions. Suddenly, the two pillars of freedom are rendered hollow and cold.
The pursuit of happiness is a common thing known to everyone in this country, but its ubiquity does not render it mundane. While life and liberty are monolithic columns which gird democracy, individual pursuits of joy form the mosaic of hope that stretches between them, shimmering in all colors. In that way it is uniquely American, and distinctly wonderful.
I would argue that no event in history better illustrates this country’s commitment to the pursuit of happiness than the signing of the G.I. Bill in 1944.
As the Second World War drew to a close, policymakers began to wonder what the day after would look like. Millions of service members would return to civilian life following years away from home, from work, and from education. The collapse of veteran’s benefits following the First World War indicated the gravity of the task.
Prior to the Second World War, less than half of Americans owned homes, one in twenty went to college, and many had grown up in the breadlines of the Great Depression.
In this context, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 became a structural reimagining of the American education system and the social contract. The bill provided subsidized education, zero-interest home loans, and enhanced unemployment benefits to all veterans.
By the time the original G.I. Bill ended in 1956, 7.8 million veterans had used its education and training benefits. 4.3 million home loans had been guaranteed. And 9 million veterans received enhanced unemployment protection. The swords had been beaten into ploughshares.
The post-war economy thrived as millions of American families enjoyed higher-paying jobs, better housing, and greater economic stability. Their government had given them the tools to flourish. Their individual experiences of joy rippled across the nation and formed lasting currents of progress.
The final message was supposed to be clear: if you serve your country, we will facilitate your pursuit of happiness. But this was not entirely the case. Despite its race-neutral language, Black veterans were systematically excluded from the benefits of the G.I. Bill. One of the bill’s chief architects, John Rankin, specifically sought language in it which allowed states in the Jim Crow South to deny home loans to Black vets. In addition, many colleges in the South effectively banned Black Americans from attending well into the 1960s. The scourge of racism still permeated America’s banks and schools.
Reconciling the incredible accomplishments of the G.I. Bill with its statutory discrimination and unequal application is difficult. The same can be said about much of American history. How could the man who proclaimed “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” have owned slaves?
These hypocrisies are stains on that mosaic of happiness which hangs between the columns of life and liberty. But as we slowly wash those stains away, we must first consider them so that we may avoid marring the artwork again.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unambiguously good. Education, housing, and economic stability are unambiguously good. The problems in this country come not from our ideals but in our execution of them. In that way, the G.I. Bill’s vast, but selective, positive impact truly illustrates the Declaration of Independence. It is a Declaration of incredible promise, but we must be forever diligent in ensuring its equal application.
One day, the mosaic of this country will truly shine without a blemish. I look forward to basking in that multicolor happiness. Thank you.