Generations Hear From World Leaders
Poets, Politicians and Activists Remind Students of Responsibilities and Dangers in Democracy

Since 1922, the Academy has hosted some of the world’s most creative, important and provocative thinkers as War Memorial Lecture speakers. Lecturers have included Franklin D. Roosevelt, T.S. Eliot, Gen. George C. Marshall, Carlos Fuentes, William F. Buckley Jr., Helen Suzman, Oscar Arias, Maya Angelou and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The great thinkers have not always been met with great and universal applause, however.Dr. Oppenheimer’s appearance on campus in 1965, for instance, brought alumni outrage according to Peter Keyes (history). “During McCarthyism, Oppenheimer lost his national security clearance,” Peter explains. In 1953, at the height of U.S. anticommunist feeling, Oppenheimer was accused of having communist sympathies. A documented lie in Oppenheimer’s file—not directly related to political leanings—was the reason given for stripping the scientist’s clearance. “Many alumni wrote letters suggesting that this single lie was an indication of general unreliability,” Peter says.


With leadership in a democracy as a theme, many guests have pondered out loud how progress affects a democracy. Speakers have also addressed the role the United States has played in the international community—and how freedom at home and abroad are inextricably linked.

Mass culture might make citizens less capable of leadership, Eliot says
In 1948, having just been awarded the Nobel Prize, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Class of 1906, returned to Milton to deliver the 17th lecture, “Leadership and Letters.” He discussed what the relationship of literature to leadership in a democracy might be and mused on the evolution of the publishing world—how a widening audience for books, made possible by advances in production capabilities and a larger population of readers, might have a dark side in commercialization. “[These dangers] may be summed up as the one danger that a democracy of educated individuals who think for themselves may transform itself into a democracy of mass-society which does not think at all … These are dangers that must be combated if we are not to be led in the wrong direction by the wrong people.”

Eliot also suggested that, in a democracy, leadership should not be total but be specialized and that there should always be, in our following of a leader, a voluntary element. Eliot said that the ideal of democracy is most closely met when “we find it impossible to distinguish clearly who are the ‘leaders’ and who are the ‘led.’ For there we find the widest diffusion of freedom and responsibility, of submission and initiative.”

Service to others means service to ourselves, Franklin D. Roosevelt asserts
Twenty-two years earlier and before his Presidency, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered, “Whither Bound?”, a review and analysis of past and present world achievement, and calculations of how changes might affect citizens’ lives. A cousin of FDR, James Alfred Roosevelt, was among the Milton Academy graduates killed in World War I.
Roosevelt said that following without thinking endangers our country and world. He said that materialism and conformity might not destroy our greatness if we embrace “something spiritual.”

“Service to mankind has been much taught of late, and this word ‘service’ is, like the material things, still in its infancy of development. True service will not come until all the world recognizes all the rest of the world as one big family. To help a fellow being is not enough. We treat that help too much as a duty, too little as an interest,” Roosevelt told students.


In democracy, laws should be acceptable to majority
Helen Suzman, founder and former leader of Britain’s Progressive Party and leader of the Helen Suzman Foundation promoting liberal democracy in South Africa, addressed Milton Academy at the 1988 lecture; she discussed apartheid and the lasting effects of “separate and unequal” in South Africa. “If laws are passed that are not acceptable to the majority of the people to whom they apply, the normal process of the law will not suffice to maintain law and order,” Suzman told students.

"I hate bullies. I stand for simple justice, equal opportunity and human rights,” Suzman says on her foundation’s Web site. “[These are] the indispensable elements in a democratic society—and well worth fighting for."

Keeping peace at home and abroad are the lifeblood of democracy
In 1932, Sir Frederick Whyte talked with students about, “The Unfinished Task,” citing Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” as an example of how complacency—even when success is reached—is not compatible with greatness or with goodness.

“I ask you to mark two things in Abraham Lincoln’s mind,” Whyte said. “At Gettysburg he speaks of the unfinished work and defines, in some of the noblest words in English oratory, the great task which still remains to be done. And, secondly, in the Inaugural Address delivered only 40 days before his death he links the American duty of establishing free government and a lasting peace at home with that other great duty of all men, to keep peace among the nations of the earth. These two are the life-blood of our political destiny.
“They make together the Cause which shall not, must not fail…At present, nations are cling[ing] to their old security in arms, yet denounce war as an instrument of national policy. They wrestle with the problem of limiting armaments, but only dimly realize that there is a moral disarmament which must precede the abolition of war…So, once more the human race is at the cross-roads, confronted by a great decision.”

Victory of peace lies ahead
In 1945, at the close of World War II (in fact, just one day after Victory in Europe Day on May 8, 1945), Headmaster Cyril Hamlen Jones introduced Sumner Welles, an ambassador to Cuba and foreign policy advisor, as the War Memorial Lecturer.
The headmaster told students, “We are gathered here this evening, ladies and gentlemen, in a great cause—the Cause of Peace. That is the cause in which 24 members of this School laid down their lives in one great war. And now, in another tragic conflict, 36 of our beloved graduates have already made the greatest sacrifice which lay within their power.

“They have striven in their youth and gallantry, to crush for all time the monstrous shape of evil which twice within our memory has arisen to threaten our peace and menace our security.
“It is the solemn task of everyone of us to assure, each to the best of his ability, that such a need for sacrifice shall not arise again. Within the last few hours a mighty victory has been won and a page of History turned…And yet the greatest victory, a victory of peace, still lies ahead,” the headmaster asserted.

Sumner Welles, a strong force in FDR’s administration through 1943, talked to students that evening about the war and its implications for the world’s future:

“No greater contribution could be made towards the establishment of that new and free world of which we wish to create than the swift eradication from American life of every last trace of class hatred and of religious or racial antagonism.... Unless the present generation can procure for the peoples of the earth the assurance of peace, the opportunity for reconstruction, and the chance to achieve moral regeneration, and arrest the plunge towards further regeneration, the inevitable outcome will be the total destruction of every manifestation of civilization which still survives.

“You and I know that the modern weapons of destruction which the development of science has made possible can in the most literal sense bring about a total physical destruction of every part of the civilized world. You and I also know that unless peoples make up their minds to co-operate together with understanding and good-will, hatred and antagonisms between them will bring about further civil and international strife.

“The great problem before the coming generation of Americans is whether they will see to it that their country, as, because of its power and its influence, it can, leads the nations of the world along the roads of progress, towards freedom, and towards peace.

“We are heading into a period when this country of ours is going to have many setbacks and many disappointments in the field of international relations. There is often going to be pressure from many elements within our own midst to seek the immediate and selfish interest rather than the enlightened and long-range interest which can only be found in the general welfare of the community of nations,” Welles told students.

He closed, saying, “Only by helping to safeguard the future of the world, can we hope to safeguard our own national destiny.”
Scores of esteemed leaders in their fields have spoken to Milton students and graduates, urging them to aspire to the highest standards of citizenship in often-uncertain times.


(Editor’s note: The texts cited are from the Milton Academy archives.)

Heather Sullivan