Ted Widmer, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton who grew up around Brown's campus and was appointed director of the John Carter Brown Library over the summer, is the editor of a new two-volume anthology of American speeches.
"American Speeches," which was released last month, chronicles the history of American political oratory from the Revolution to Clinton. Together, the two volumes span 1,685 pages and include 128 speeches from 80 different historical figures.
"American Speeches" has garnered Widmer national media attention in the last month. The Los Angeles Times featured a lengthy piece on the anthology on Oct. 8, and Widmer discussed the history of American political oratory on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" on Oct. 30.
Widmer, who began serving as director of the John Carter Brown Library this summer, spent three years working on the anthology along with three editors from the Library of America, which published the book.
"The goal of the books was to restore a sense of how important speaking - and listening - have been throughout our history and to give some attention back to men and women who have not been heard from in a long time," Widmer wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.
Widmer said in an interview that he was inspired to compile an anthology of American speeches while working as a speechwriter for the Clinton administration.
"My job (as a foreign policy speechwriter) was, in a way, to look for good precedents in our own policies or to quote a great American from the 18th- or 19th-century," Widmer said. "I was in libraries in Washington, D.C., and it was often quite difficult trying to find these obscure speeches. I had the idea then that a modern book of great American speeches would really help everyone."
Though this is Widmer's first year as director of the John Carter Brown Library, it is actually his third job with the University. Widmer, a Providence native who attended Moses Brown School on Lloyd Avenue, served as a ball boy for the men's soccer team from 1975 to 1978, earning $5 a game. He also held a temporary job with a research fellow at the John Carter Brown Library in 1989.
Widmer's father, Eric Widmer, was a member of Brown's faculty from 1979 to 1994 and the dean of admission and financial aid from 1988 to 1994, according to an Oct. 16 Herald article about a new boarding school in Jordan that Eric Widmer will lead. Though Ted Widmer lived in a University-owned house at times growing up and "loved" Brown as a child, he ended up at Harvard University when it came time to choose a college.
"I applied (to Brown), and I seriously thought about coming here, but my dad was a dean and he had some responsibility for disciplinary matters, and we all agreed that it was a good idea to move along elsewhere," Widmer said. "Even when I was at Harvard, though, I always cheered for the Brown football team."
American Speeches"American Speeches" includes canonical speeches from Patrick Henry, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. as well as some lesser-known orations notable for their historical importance.
"The speeches in these books are either beautiful or important or somehow representative of an idea that meant a lot at the time of the speech," Widmer said. He said there are some speeches in the collection that are "really long and really boring," including Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner's 1856 speech "The Crime Against Kansas," but he selected these speeches because of their historical importance.
Widmer said his favorite speech in the anthology is Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.
"I love Lincoln's Second Inaugural because it is so forgiving and so wise, and it seems to be written from some place above politics," he said. "It is especially insightful on the subject of religion, which is still a very controversial topic in American politics. Lincoln says what almost no one before him or since has said, and that is that we have no idea if God approves of our system of governance, we can only hope that he will approve of it."
"I find 'hope' a more powerful word than 'trust.' The rest of America says 'in God we trust.' At Brown we say 'In Deo Speramus,' in God we hope," he said.
As of Sunday, the first volume of "American Speeches" was ranked 2,277 and the second volume was ranked 2,317 in sales on Amazon.com.
Widmer said he is mildly pessimistic about the direction of political oratory in America.
"I do think speeches today are worse than they were a generation ago. I don't think anyone out there is as good as MLK or JFK or FDR, but I also don't think anyone in the 20th century was as good as Abraham Lincoln," he said.
Widmer pointed to television, instant messaging, the Internet and political realities as major factors contributing to the decline in quality of political speechmaking.
"Honestly, I think it is really hard for people to sit still and listen for 40 minutes. Also, television is a canned medium. People don't speak spontaneously and very few debates on the floor of Congress are real debates because politicians are reading prepared statements to a half-filled chamber," he said.
"Both sides - but the Republicans especially - have figured out that really simple messages that they hammer home over and over again - often with no relationship to the truth - are very effective in American politics. So how do we raise up the level of discourse in a way that honors audiences and helps politicians get elected? I'm not sure," he said.
"At the same time, just when you think everything is going south, you see the rise of a politician like Barack Obama on the strength, basically, of a single speech," he said, referring to the Illinois senator's address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "I think it's fascinating that something as old and simple as standing up and giving a speech can still transform American politics."
But Widmer said he believes Americans are tired of "being spoken down to."
"I am cautiously optimistic that the next American presidential election will show something very old-fashioned: politicians speaking honestly to people and showing the world the heights democracy can soar to rather than the depths to which it can descend."
Widmer is also the author of "American Presidents: Martin Van Buren," a profile of the eighth president, and "Young America: The Flowering of American Democracy in New York City," which examines the intersection of American politics and literature in the years between the presidency of Andrew Jackson and the Civil War and received the Washington Irving Literary Medal in 2001.
Writing for ClintonWidmer graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in the history and literature of France and America, an A.M. in history and a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization, according to a Jan. 10 John Carter Brown press release. From 1993 to 1997 he was a lecturer at Harvard in its History and Literature Program, winning a prize for teaching excellence.
In 1997 Widmer was teaching at Harvard and writing for the now-defunct George Magazine when he received a call from a friend informing him of an opening for a foreign policy speechwriter in the Clinton administration.
"I applied thinking it was unlikely to work out and unsure if I would want to do it even if it did, but to my amazement it fell into place and I got the job," he said. "Speechwriting was 100 times harder than I had ever worried it to be. It was extremely demanding. You were either thinking about speechwriting or working on a speech or if you were asleep you could be paged at any moment, so it was almost a 24-hour-a-day job."
Widmer, who served as special assistant to the president for national security affairs and director of speechwriting for the National Security Council, said his work frequently focused on writing speeches for Clinton to deliver on visits to other countries.
"I often wrote speeches that he would give where he would urge people to try democracy in their own way and to hold up American history as an example," Widmer said. "For me that was very satisfying to borrow from American history to make a persuasive case that democracy and civil liberties and the separation of church and state are all pretty effective ways of organizing societies."
Widmer said the speechwriting team he worked on heard directly from the president if it had screwed up and occasionally when Clinton complimented the writers on a particularly well-written speech.
Widmer said Clinton was a gifted orator.
"He embellished every single speech. By the second term he was so skilled at giving speeches that he didn't need a lot of prep work to deliver the speech. He just had a natural ability to improvise," he said.
Despite the stress, frequent traveling and exhausting nature of speechwriting, Widmer said, in retrospect, his time working for Clinton was extremely rewarding.
"I loved working there. I feel that even more so now that I am a number of years apart from it. I was able to witness history up close and not many historians get to have that experience," he said.
Widmer's involvement with Clinton did not end when the president left office; in fact, Clinton hired him to assist in the process of writing his autobiography, "My Life."
"Once a month for three years I would meet with him and ask him questions about his life and tape-record his responses," Widmer said. "This way he had something to work with to jumpstart his writing process."
Widmer also blogged for the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in September. At the CGI, Widmer's job was to follow Clinton wherever he went and to write four or five blog entries a day for the organization's Web site.
Widmer remains in touch with Clinton, having dined with him in October following a fundraiser for then-Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Sheldon Whitehouse in Providence. He also received a handwritten note from the former president complimenting him on "American Speeches."
"He really is a classy guy," Widmer said.
Coming to the John Carter BrownWidmer, who is 43, comes to the John Carter Brown Library following a six-year tenure as the inaugural director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Md.
In 2005 an old connection from Brown urged Widmer to apply for the job of director at the library. Widmer said he was hired as the seventh director in the library's history after a long search that took several detours and initially left him out of the running. As a research fellow at the library in 1994, Widmer worked on the history of African drumming in Haiti.
"During my time as a research fellow, I loved it here. It's a very special place and a great place to do research for a lot of reasons," he said.
"The John Carter Brown has an unbelievably deep collection and it's a very international place so you come in expecting to do research on the English American colonies and suddenly you are studying the Caribbean colonies and the French-speaking colonies," he said. "The staff was so great when I was here, and I found that there was much more camaraderie at the John Carter Brown than at most serious research institutions. I loved my old job but I have always loved the John Carter Brown and when the job opened up I knew I couldn't say no."
Widmer said that as director of the 160-year-old library, his big goal is to "get more members of the Brown community, both faculty and staff, aware that one of the world's great book collections is housed on campus."
"I would like to increase student participation in John Carter Brown events," he said. "That can mean anything from coming to exhibits, to coming into the John Carter Brown and looking at this beautiful piece of architecture, to taking an interest in the subjects raised by the John Carter Brown's collection. Because it is such a deep and international collection, I think we can do a lot to support Brown's international initiative and help people understand that American history has always been international history."
After traveling the world with Clinton and spending six years in Maryland, Widmer said he is glad to be back at Brown and in Providence.
"The John Carter Brown is a rare books library, but it is a center also for advanced research. New discoveries are being made all the time, new problems come up and new books need to be bought, it's a place of constant fast-paced activity," he said. "It has been an adjustment but it has also been a lot of fun. It reminds me a little of the Clinton White House. Who knew that 16th-century history could be so invigorating?"
