Baccalaureate Address
"The Road to the Emerald City"
President John M. McCardell, Jr.
Middlebury College
May 26, 2001
I want to think with you for a few moments this afternoon about journeys. This seems to me a most appropriate subject as we celebrate this particular moment in the lives of the Class of 2001. For this weekend you reach an important milestone in your own life journey, and we fittingly pause, if only briefly, and observe in the form of the academy's oldest rituals – Baccalaureate and Commencement – the importance of your achievement.
Indeed much of the language we employ in conducting these rituals reminds us of journeys – "processionals" and "recessionals," for example. You have completed a "course" of study. Even the word "Commencement" connotes a fresh beginning of a new stage of the journey.
This theme is reinforced by the imagery of this very Baccalaureate service. We ask for wisdom and courage as we seek to "set our feet on lofty places." We have just sung of a journey through a day – from waking, to labor, to homing to sleep – that is also the cycle of a life – birth, childhood, adulthood, old age, death. And we will conclude by singing of time's "ever-rolling stream" and "hope for years to come."
And so it is most appropriate to think today about journeys.
Now to be sure there are many ways in which the theme of journey might be developed. For example, a story is told about a man who was eagerly looking forward to his first trip to Italy. Shortly before his departure he visited his local barbershop and, while getting his hair cut, fell into conversation with his worldly barber.
"So, where is it you're going?" asked the barber.
"Italy," replied the man.
"Italy?" said the barber. "Why there? Good food maybe, but high prices, bad government, people who'll rip you off, a worthless currency. And I suppose you're starting in Rome?"
"Yes," answered the man.
"Oh, boy." said the barber, "Rome. Huge crowds, lousy climate, overpriced hotels. How are you getting there?"
"We're flying USAIR."
"USAIR! You mean the old 'Air Agony?' They're terrible! Narrow seats. Lousy service. Always late. I can't believe you're taking USAIR! Where you staying?"
"Got a great rate at the Marriott."
"The Marriott! You're going to Rome and staying at a Marriott? Do you know how crummy these American hotel chains are abroad? Overpriced, understaffed, nothing works right. I can't believe it. What do you plan to see?"
"Well, we really want to visit the Vatican."
"Yeh, right, and stand in line half the day only to finally get in where it's so noisy and crowded you can't see a thing. Skip it!"
By this point the haircut was blessedly complete, our man paid the barber and headed home.
Several weeks later the man returned.
"So how was the trip?" the barber began.
"It was great," the man replied.
"Yeah? Well how was old 'Air Agony'?"
"Amazing," said the man. We got free upgrades to first class. Great food, great service, we got in early, and had a private car to meet us."
"Wow," said the barber. "How was the world-famous Marriott?"
"Unbelievable," said the man. "When we arrived they gave us a suite with a full bar, a beautiful view of Rome, complimentary breakfast each day, and a free dinner at the 4-star restaurant right across the street."
"Well," said the barber, "was I right about the crowds?"
"Well this is amazing," said the man. "We had been standing in line at the Sistine Chapel for only a few minutes when two members of the Swiss Guard approached us and invited us in for a private audience with the Pope!"
"No kidding?" said the barber, now impressed. "And what did the Pope say to you?"
The man paused for just a moment. "He asked me where I got that awful haircut."
Some journeys – like some stories – have unintended and unanticipated outcomes. And while that may be a secondary theme in what follows, the text itself is quite familiar.
Indeed, I suspect that most of you will have immediately understood the reference in the title of today's Baccalaureate Address, "The Road to the Emerald City." It is, of course, to one of the classic children's stories in our literature, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written exactly 100 years ago by L. Frank Baum. Baum was the J.K. Rowling of his time, and the Oz stories were every bit as popular as Harry Potter. As our speaker tomorrow Fred Rogers will surely attest, some of our most meaningful understandings are developed in children's literature, which adults, at a different level, may also enjoy. Though few folks today have actually read the book, it would be hard to find anyone who did not claim to know the story. That has chiefly to do with the immense popularity of the 1939 film starring Judy Garland and televised annually. But even before that, Oz was a favorite subject: a stage version written by Baum himself was mounted in 1902; a movie short was produced in 1910, a full-length silent feature (with Oliver Hardy as the tin man) in 1925, an animated motion picture version in 1933, and an NBC radio serial in 1933-34. There was an Oz board game produced in 1921, Oz dolls in 1924. The Oz stories have become a part of our culture: songs, characters, expressions, even specific dialogue have made this tale intimately familiar and beloved.
And yet there is much more to this story than you may think. Now those of you who may have heard me speak to you on April Campus Preview days might recall a version of this interpretation from four springs ago, as I use it to make a point about the unexpected twists and richness that come from a liberal arts education. You have had four years to test that proposition, and now you hear the story told again. Others of you may be hearing it for the first time. In either case, I invite you to reflect on this story of a young girl's journey and then to think about your own journey, and what you have just completed, and what now may lie ahead, and how your understanding of its meaning is apt to change as time passes and experiences accumulate.
But I must begin with a brief disclaimer: this interpretation is not original. It was first put forward in 1964 in the journal American Literature by a writer named Henry Littlefield. Its plausibility remains a matter of dispute among historians. But our purpose today is not to enter the trenches of academic warfare. It is rather to transport ourselves back in time to the 1890s, to Kansas, where a terrible tornado is bearing down on a small farmhouse, and sweeping a little girl and her dog up into the funnel cloud, and carrying them away to a distant, exotic place.
The essential elements of this story are certainly well enough known. Giving the story meaning, however, and thus fully understanding what Dorothy's journey was all about, is a very different matter. Yet if we examine the facts of the story closely and add to that examination some knowledge of the author and some grasp of the temporal context in which the story was composed, we reach a much different, and deeper, level of understanding.
First the author, L. Frank Baum. Baum was born in 1856 in upstate New York. His family was in business dealing with a new commodity – oil. In 1885, Baum went to work in the family business. Based in Syracuse, Baum traveled as a salesman across his native state proclaiming the virtues of "Baum's Ever-Ready Castorine," which was in fact simply axle grease. The business failed, one of many victims of the consolidation then taking place in the oil industry.
Undaunted, Baum and his young family moved west in 1888 to seek his fortune on the frontier, in Dakota Territory, where, in the small town of Aberdeen, he opened a dry goods store called "Baum's Bazaar."
The move to the bleak Dakota prairie could hardly have been more ill-timed. Prairie farmers had fallen on hard times. As the price of wheat fell, they planted more, and as they planted more the price fell still further. They went into debt, and then deeper into debt. There were seasons of drought. The price to transport a crop to market was set in corporate railroad offices far away. Debts to distant, impersonal banks mounted. There was no money, and thus little patronage of "Baum's Bazaar," which failed in 1890.
But Baum persevered and became editor of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer and wrote strong opinion pieces on the economic plight of the farmer - until the paper failed in 1891.
There was no choice but to move, and the choice was Chicago, where Baum settled his family while he worked as a traveling dry goods salesman across the upper Midwest.
In 1893 he attended the Chicago World's Fair, the "Columbian Exposition," and saw the wonders of modern technology. Electrical illumination created a fantasy world throughout that summer as the radiant "White City" drew thousands of awed visitors. Upon closer inspection, visitors might note that the architectural wonders of the "White City" were in fact quite impermanent structures made of papier-maché, a stage set, an illusion, that dazzled – even intimidated – from a distance, but which, from close up, seemed flimsy and vulnerable. In this same summer of 1893, and in Chicago, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous paper to the American Historical Association, noting the "disappearance" of the frontier and the end of an historical epoch.
Also during 1893 came the early signs of economic downturn and financial collapse and the beginning of four years of the worst depression in American history up to that point. Chicago saw violence first-hand during the summer of 1894 when, in the midst of a workers' strike at Pullman, some 30 workers were killed during a riot. President Grover Cleveland, whose strict adherence to the gold standard as a backing for the currency seemed, to many, to have deepened the depression, sided with management during the Pullman Strike.
At its worst, the Depression of the 1890s saw four million Americans unemployed. And, if there was unrest in Chicago, there was also intellectual ferment, as young writers and thinkers – Jane Addams, Carl Sandburg, Thorstein Veblen, Theodore Dreiser, John Dewey, Upton Sinclair – took a hard look at unregulated capitalism and its social effects.
All these lines converged in the presidential election of 1896, and, more specifically, in Chicago, where the Democratic Party convened to nominate a candidate for President.
By this time a majority of the party opposed the policies of Cleveland and had come to embrace much of the platform of the Populists, a third-party movement that had nominated its own candidate for President four years earlier. The Populists were staunch reformers. They sought to forge a political alliance between the workers in the cities and the farmers of the south and west, the victims, they believed, of the economic forces that had wracked the country for the past three years.
The centerpiece of their platform was their insistence that more money be put into circulation. (The economics of this really isn't important – what matters is the psychology.) More money would mean jobs for workers and better prices for farmers, and it would mean inflation, which would in turn mean enabling farmers to pay off their debts with cheaper dollars. All the government needed to do was to put silver coinage into circulation – at a rate of 16 ounces to one ounce of gold – and the country would recover.
Seizing the platform, literally and rhetorically, was 36 year-old William Jennings Bryan, who stood before the Chicago convention and proclaimed, "Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: 'You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.' "
Invoking a union of farmers and workers and demanding an end to the gold standard, Bryan takes the convention by storm and wins the presidential nomination. He takes to the stump traveling thousands of miles campaigning for free silver and calling for a powerful alliance of workers and farmers.
Baum watched all this carefully. He is believed to have been a Bryan supporter, since his wife had become an advocate of women's issues and many Populists supported female suffrage. Though Bryan went down to defeat at the hands of William McKinley and the Republicans, his dream did not die. Indeed, four years later, in 1900, he was renominated.
And in that same year, 1900, L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Perhaps, just perhaps, Baum had more in mind than a mere children's tale. Dorothy, after all, came from Kansas, geographical center of the country and a state deeply affected by the agricultural crisis. The tornado may have been the storm by which Bryan took the Chicago convention. Dorothy's house lands on and kills the Wicked Witch of the East, home of Wall Street, banks, and corporate headquarters. That frees the munchkins, the little people, from serfdom. In gratitude, and with the assistance of the Good Witch of the North (Dakota, perhaps?), the Munchkins tell Dorothy how she might find her way home. She needs the help of the Wizard, they say, who lives in the Emerald City, which lies at the end of a yellow-brick road, a road she may traverse in safety by wearing not ruby, as in the movie, but silver slippers. Silver slippers. Yellow brick road. To Oz (the abbreviation of ounces). Perhaps?
And so Dorothy and Toto (Latin for total – many Populists were prohibitionists) begin their journey. They first encounter the scarecrow (the farmer?). He scares no one; he seems powerless, and he thinks he has no intelligence. He believes that all he needs is a brain, and that the Wizard can help him. And so he joins Dorothy on her journey.
They next encounter the tin man. In Baum's book version, the tin man had once been human, but so repetitious and dangerous had been his work environment that one by one he had lopped off every limb and become a mechanical, hard, seemingly heartless person. Perhaps the urban factory worker? With a little bit of oil (Baum's Ever-Ready Castorine?) he is able to move and, seeking a heart from the Wizard, joins the coalition on the road to the Emerald City.
Next they meet the cowardly lion. How does he fit? Well, one of the young Chicago poets who had been enthralled by the Bryan campaign was Vachel Lindsay, who subsequently wrote a famous poem about that election. One of the memorable lines in that poem praised the "prairie avenger, mountain lion, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West, and just a hundred miles behind, tornadoes piled across the sky . . ." All this lion lacks is courage. With the support of the scarecrow and the tin man, in the company of Dorothy, he, too, will go to Oz and meet the Wizard and gain the courage to be "king of the forest."
Though harassed by the Wicked Witch of the West – the owners of the railroads and the mines and the promissory notes, perhaps? – our unlikely alliance reaches Oz. At first they are awed – much as Baum must have been awed by the "White City" at the 1893 World's Fair. And they are intimidated. But then they discover that the Wizard is simply an ordinary, even timid man, who has created an illusion of power and authority – as illusory as that papier-maché "White City" in Chicago. And though the Wizard is able only symbolically to grant their wishes, they discover that they possessed brains and heart and courage all along. The Wicked Witch of the West melts away. Water dissolves her, even as rain ends the drought on the plains and brings farms back to life. The Good Witch of the South (the southern poor white farmers?) gives her blessing, and Dorothy finds herself, at last, back home.
Now you may well by this point have determined that all this is utter nonsense and that a simple children's tale has been distorted beyond recognition. And you may be right. But you also may not be right. And that is where the application of this little parable begins.
1. Expect the unexpected. Preparation is surely a virtue, but preparation needs to be broadly understood. Over the past four years you have studied history and literature and languages and science and mathematics and the arts. You have majored in a subject, studied it in depth. And you have also learned to manage time. But if you believe that the way the world works is easily reducible to a set of rules or formulas, or that life is neatly organized into 12 or 4-week blocks with two weeks off for Christmas, or that the proper measure of the education you have received here is the first job you will hold, then your preparation is incomplete. Your lives are not likely to unfold in neat, predictable patterns. You are apt to encounter tornadoes and witches and wizards on your journey and perhaps all at once. You will hold more than one job. So expect the unexpected, and calculate the value of your Middlebury education by the degree to which you are able to continue your journey with confidence and purpose, prepared to adapt to, and to master, whatever may come your way.
2. Things are not always what they seem. People may appear to be heartless or stupid or cowardly. But look closely, try to see things through eyes other than your own, and remember the biblical injunction to judge not lest ye be judged. Look for that spark of good in every human soul. Consider other interpretations of the stories you hear, especially when the informed crowd insists that there can be but one way to understand. Challenge. Test. Think.
3. And then commit. Understand that thought must lead to action, to decision; thought is not an end in itself. Boxes of notes don't make a book. Palettes of color don't make a painting. These must be structured and shaped by your hands and by your mind into something of meaning and beauty. Don't become addicted to the perfume of the flower of somnolent ease. Continue the journey.
4. Cherish your friendships. They will strengthen you in times of adversity, support you in times of uncertainty and bring you greater joy in times of happiness. Your friends will sustain you, and you them, all long life's journey.
5. And finally, do remember that Dorothy did, at last, return home, and there, at her homing, she found a family that loved her. There is abundant familial love on this campus this weekend, and much of that love can be found in the many family circles that your journey has brought to points of intersection on these special days. But do also keep in mind that you are joining the extended family of Middlebury College graduates; that alma mater will follow the progress of your lives and careers with deep and genuine and abiding interest, and that, at your homings, we will be here with hands quick to welcome, with arms to embrace.
And so we bid you farewell. Go softly yet confidently forth. Know that our thoughts and prayers go with you. Know, too, that you are always welcome here. May you seek, in the journey you are about to begin, to set your feet on lofty places, and may you find bliss in your new life's dawn, strength in its noontime, and peace at the end of the day. And finally may you from time to time lift your eyes to these hills, from whose strength generations of Middlebury men and women have drawn confidence and courage and hope.
We shall not forget you. And we wish you well, until we meet again.
God-speed, Class of 2001.