History-makers speak in these pages

THE Library of America's new collection of the greatest American political speeches is illuminating for many reasons -- and yet it may leave something of a bitter aftertaste. In the current media noise-scape, our political leaders' urge to be heard often leads to a free-fall into the muck of crude invective and insinuation, high-concept negative punch lines ("Where's the beef?") and "gotcha" insults. And so this two-volume anthology, published this week, is among other things a measure of just how far political discourse has fallen in this country.

"American Speeches" collects 128 significant speeches from 80 historical figures stretching from the Revolutionary War to the Clinton administration, and it's nice to be reminded that American politics has arguably the richest oratorical tradition in the history of Western civilization. A scan of your own memory bank will turn up many of the speeches in these two volumes, which together run to 1,685 pages: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, JFK's inaugural address ("Ask not what your country can do for you ... "), President Nixon's resignation speech from 1974. Many of the speeches from the 18th and 19th centuries might be half-remembered from an old college textbook citation.

But it's one thing to hear a stentorian swatch of oratory in a Ken Burns documentary, quite another to read the speeches in their entirety. What "American Speeches" makes clear is that the national identity was forged in the words that were spoken by the greatest speakers. In these public addresses, we find a nation reveling in open debate and the free exchange of ideas: All of the epic conflicts that lurched the country forward were hotly contested in town squares, war zones and convention halls by fiery rhetoricians and shrewd populists alike.

"We were good at speeches before we became good at other things, like poetry or writing novels," said "American Speeches" editor Ted Widmer. "People loved to listen to orations, and that's why they often went on for so long." Widmer, the director and librarian of the John Carter Brown library at Brown University, spent three years rifling through thousands of pages of speeches, winnowing his choices to accommodate the two volumes. "I wanted all aspects of oratory," he said. "Not only presidents and politicians but labor leaders, writers. I wanted the books to be historically broad-ranging."