That is what we must resist, if we are to change the world for man’s peace and security. It is not men in the mass who can and will save Man. It is Man himself, created in the image of God so that he shall have the power and the will to choose right from wrong, and so be able to save himself because he is worth saving;—Man, the individual, men and women, who will refuse always to be tricked or frightened or bribed into surrendering, not just the right but the duty too, to choose between justice and in justice, courage and cowardice, sacrifice and greed, pity and self;—who will believe always not only in the right of man to be free of injustice and rapacity and deception, but the duty and responsibility of man to see that justice and truth and pity and compassion are done.
So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth. In one generation all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandisement, and the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man’s fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it.
[Oxford Eagle, May 31, 1951; printed there entirely in italics.]
Address upon Being Made
an Officer of the Legion of Honor
NEW ORLEANS, OCTOBER 26, 1951
Un artiste doit recevoir avec humilite ce dignite conferré a lui par cette payes la quelle a ete toujours la mere universelle des artists.
Un Americain doit cherir avec la tendresse toujours chacque souvenir de cette pays la quelle a ete toujours la soeur d’Amerique.
Un homme libre doit guarder avec l’espérance et l’orgeuil aussi l’accolade de cette pays la quelle etait la mere de la liberte de l’homme et de l’esprit humaine.
[In November 1951 Faulkner gave a manuscript of this address to his editor, Saxe Commins. It was reproduced as an illustration in the Princeton University Library Chronicle, XVIII (Spring 1957), from which the text printed here has been taken, entirely without correction.]
Address to the Delta Council
CLEVELAND, MISSISSIPPI, MAY 15, 1952
When the invitation to be here today first reached me, it came from Mr. Billy Wynn. It contained one of the nicest compliments anyone ever received. Mr. Wynn said, “We not only want to honor this particular fellow-Mississippian, we want him to honor us.”
You can’t beat that. To reverse a metaphor, that is a sword with not only two edges, but with both edges on the same side; the receiver is accoladed twice with one stroke: He is honored again in honoring them who proffered the original honor. Which is exactly the sort of gesture which we Southerners like to believe that only another Southerner could have thought of, invented. And, sure enough, it happens so often as to convince us that we were right.
He also gave me the Council’s permission to speak on any subject I liked. That subject won’t be writing or farming either. In my fan mail during the past year, there was a correspondence with another Mississippi gentleman, who takes a very dim view of my writing ability and my ideas both. He is a Deltan, he may be here today, and can ratify this. In one of his last letters, having reviewed again his opinion of a Mississippian who could debase and defile his native state and people as I have done, he said he not only didn’t believe I could write, he didn’t even believe I knew anything about farming, either. I answered that it wasn’t me who made the claims about my degree as a writer, and so I would agree with him on that one; and after fifteen years of trying to cope not only with the Lord but with the federal government too to make something grow at a profit out of the ground, I was willing to agree with him on both of them.
So I shan’t talk about either writing or farming. I have another subject. And, having thought about it, maybe I don’t know very much about this one either, for the reason that none of us seem to know much about it any more, that all of us may have forgotten one of the primary things on which this country was founded.
Years ago, our fathers founded this country, this nation, on the premise of the rights of man. As they expressed it, “the inalienable right of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In those days, they knew what those words meant, not only the ones who expressed them, but the ones who heard and believed and accepted and subscribed to them. Because until that time, men did not always have those rights. At least, until that time, no nation had ever been founded on the idea that those rights were possible, let alone inalienable. So not only the ones who said the words, but the ones who merely heard them, knew what they meant. Which was this: “Life and liberty in which to pursue happiness. Life free and secure from oppression and tyranny, in which all men would have the liberty to pursue happiness.” And both of them knew what they meant by “pursue.” They did not mean just to chase happiness, but to work for it. And they both knew what they meant by “happiness” too: not just pleasure, idleness, but peace, dignity, independence and self-respect; that man’s inalienable right was, the peace and freedom in which, by his own efforts and sweat, he could gain dignity and independence, owing nothing to any man.
So we knew what the words meant then, because we didn’t have these things. And, since we didn’t have them, we knew their worth. We knew that they were worth suffering and enduring and, if necessary, even dying to gain and preserve. We were willing to accept even the risk of death for them, since even if we lost them ourselves in relinquishing life to preserve them, we would still be able to bequeath them intact and inalienable to our children.
Which is exactly what we did, in those old days. We left our homes, the land and graves of our fathers and all familiar things. We voluntarily gave up, turned our backs on, a security which we already had and which we could have continued to have, as long as we were willing to pay the price for it, which price was our freedom and liberty of thought and independence of action and the right of responsibility. That is, by remaining in the old world, we could have been not only secure, but even free of the need to be responsible. Instead, we chose the freedom, the liberty, the independence and the inalienable right to responsibility; almost without charts, in frail wooden ships with nothing but sails and our desire and will to be free to move them, we crossed an ocean which did not even match the charts we did have; we conquered a wilderness in order to establish a place, not to be secure in because we did not want that, we had just repudiated that, just crossed three thousand miles of dark and unknown sea to get away from that; but a place to be free in, to be independent in, to be responsible in.
And we did it. Even while we were still battling the wilderness with one hand, with the other we fended and beat off the power which would have followed us even into the wilderness we had conquered, to compel and hold us to the old way. But we did it. We founded a land, and founded in it not just our right to be free and independent and responsible, but the inalienable duty of man to be free and independent and responsible.
That’s what I am talking about: responsibility. Not just the right, but the duty of man to be responsible, the necessity of man to be responsible if he wishes to remain free; not just responsible to and for his fellow man, but to himself; the duty of a man, the individual, each individual, every individual, to be responsible for the consequences of his own acts, to pay his own score, owing nothing to any man.
We knew it once, had it once. Because why? Because we wanted it above all else, we fought for it, endured, suffered, died when necessary, but gained it, established it, to endure for us and then to be bequeathed to our children.
Only, something happened to us. The children inherited. A new generation came along, a new era, a new age, a new century. The times were easier; the life and future of our nation as a nation no lo
nger hung in balance; another generation, and we no longer had enemies, not because we were strong in our youth and vigor, but because the old tired rest of earth recognized that here was a nation founded on the principle of individual man’s responsibility as individual man.
But we still remembered responsibility, even though, with easier times, we didn’t need to keep the responsibility quite so active, or at least not so constantly so. Besides, it was not only our heritage, it was too recent yet for us to forget it, the graves were still green of them who had bequeathed it to us, and even of them who had died in order that it might be bequeathed. So we still remembered it, even if a good deal of the remembering was just lip-service.
Then more generations; we covered at last the whole face of the western earth; the whole sky of the western hemisphere was one loud American affirmation, one vast Yes; we were the whole world’s golden envy; never had the amazed sun itself seen such a land of opportunity, in which all a man needed were two legs to move to a new place on, and two hands to grasp and hold with, in order to amass to himself enough material substance to last him the rest of his days and, who knew? even something over for his and his wife’s children. And still he paid lip-service to the old words “freedom” and “liberty” and “independence;” the sky still rang and ululated with the thunderous affirmation, the golden Yes. Because the words in the old premise were still true yet, for the reason that he still believed they were true. Because he did not realize yet that when he said “security,” he meant security for himself, for the rest of his days, with perhaps a little over for his children: not for the children and the children’s children of all men who believed in liberty and freedom and independence, as the old fathers in the old strong, dangerous times had meant it.
Because somewhere, at some moment, something had happened to him, to us, to all the descendants of the old tough, durable, uncompromising men, so that now, in 1952, when we talk of security, we don’t even mean for the rest of our own lives, let alone that of our and our wife’s children, but only for so long as we ourselves can hold our individual place on a public relief roll or at a bureaucratic or political or any other organization’s gravy-trough. Because somewhere, at some point, we had lost or forgot or voluntarily rid ourselves of that one other thing, lacking which, freedom and liberty and independence cannot even exist.
That thing is the responsibility, not only the desire and the will to be responsible, but the remembrance from the old fathers of the need to be responsible. Either we lost it, forgot it, or we deliberately discarded it. Either we decided that freedom was not worth the responsibility of being free, or we forgot that, to be free, a man must assume and maintain and defend his right to be responsible for his freedom. Maybe we were even robbed of responsibility, since for years now the very air itself—radio, newspapers, pamphlets, tracts, the voices of politicians—has been loud with talk about the rights of man,—not the duties and obligations and responsibilities of man, but only the “rights” of man; so loud and so constant that apparently we have come to accept the sounds at their own evaluation, and to believe too that man has nothing else but rights:—not the rights to independence and freedom in which to work and endure in his own sweat in order to earn for himself what the old ancestors meant by happiness and the pursuit of it, but only the chance to swap his freedom and independence for the privilege of being free of the responsibilities of independence; the right not to earn, but to be given, until at last, by simple compound usage, we have made respectable and even elevated to a national system, that which the old tough fathers would have scorned and condemned: charity.
In any case, we no longer have responsibility. And if we were robbed of it by such as this which now seems to have taken over responsibility, it was because we were vulnerable to that kind of ravishment; if we simply lost or forgot responsibility, then we too are to be scorned. But if we deliberately discarded it, then we have condemned ourselves, because I believe that in time, maybe not too long a time, we will discover that, as was said about one of Napoleon’s acts, what we have committed is worse than a crime: it was a mistake.
Two hundred years ago, the Irish statesman, John Curran, said, “God hath vouchsafed man liberty only on condition of eternal vigilance; which condition if he break it, servitude is the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.” That was only two hundred years ago, because our own old New England and Virginia and Carolina fathers knew that three hundred years ago, which was why they came here and founded this country. And I decline to believe that we, their descendants, have really forgotten it. I prefer to believe rather that it is because the enemy of our freedom now has changed his shirt, his coat, his face. He no longer threatens us from across an international boundary, let alone across an ocean. He faces us now from beneath the eagle-perched domes of our capitols and from behind the alphabetical splatters on the doors of welfare and other bureaus of economic or industrial regimentation, dressed not in martial brass but in the habiliments of what the enemy himself has taught us to call peace and progress, a civilization and plenty where we never before had it as good, let alone better; his artillery is a debased and respectless currency which has emasculated the initiative for independence by robbing initiative of the only mutual scale it knew to measure independence by.
The economists and sociologists say that the reason for this condition is, too many people. I don’t know about that, myself, since in my opinion I am even a worse sociologist and economist than my Delta fan considers me a writer or a farmer. But even if I were a sociologist or economist, I would decline to believe this. Because to believe this, that man’s crime against his freedom is that there are too many of him, is to believe that man’s sufferance on the face of the earth is threatened, not by his environment, but by himself: that he cannot hope to cope with his environment and its evils, because he cannot even cope with his own mass. Which is exactly what those who misuse and betray the mass of him for their own aggrandisement and power and tenure of office, believe: that man is incapable of responsibility and freedom, of fidelity and endurance and courage, that he not only cannot choose good from evil, he cannot even distinguish it, let alone practice the choice. And to believe that, you have already written off the hope of man, as they who have reft him of his inalienable right to be responsible, have done, and you might as well quit now and let man stew on in peace in his own recordless and oblivious juice, to his deserved and ungrieved doom.
I, for one, decline to believe this. I decline to believe that the only true heirs of Boone and Franklin and George and Booker T. Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson and Adams and John Henry and Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed and Lee and Crockett and Hale and Helen Keller, are the ones denying and protesting in the newspaper headlines over mink coats and oil tankers and federal indictments for corruption in public office. I believe that the true heirs of the old tough durable fathers are still capable of responsibility and self-respect, if only they can remember them again. What we need is not fewer people, but more room between them, where those who would stand on their own feet, could, and those who won’t, might have to. Then the welfare, the relief, the compensation, instead of being nationally sponsored cash prizes for idleness and ineptitude, could go where the old independent uncompromising fathers themselves would have intended it and blessed it: to those who still cannot, until the day when even the last of them except the sick and the old, would also be among them who not only can, but will.
[Delta Democrat-Times, May 18, 1952; one correction has been made from the pamphlet printing of the speech published by the Delta Council, May 1952.]
Address to the Graduating Class
Pine Manor Junior College
WELLESLEY, MASSACHUSETTS, JUNE 8, 1953
What’s wrong with this world is, it’s not finished yet. It is not completed to that point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, “It is finished. We made it, and it works.”
Because only man can complete it. Not God, but man
. It is man’s high destiny and proof of his immortality too, that his is the choice between ending the world, effacing it from the long annal of time and space, and completing it. This is not only his right, but his privilege too. Like the phoenix it rises from the ashes of its own failure with each generation, until it is your turn now in your flash and flick of time and space which we call today, in this and in all the stations in time and space today and yesterday and tomorrow, where a handful of aged people like me, who should know but no longer can, are facing young people like you who can do, if they only knew where and how, to perform this duty, accept this privilege, bear this right.
In the beginning, God created the earth. He created it completely furnished for man. Then He created man completely equipped to cope with the earth, by means of free will and the capacity for decision and the ability to learn by making mistakes and learning from them because he had a memory with which to remember and so learn from his errors, and so in time make his own peaceful destiny of the earth. It was not an experiment. God didn’t merely believe in man, He knew man. He knew that man was competent for a soul because he was capable of saving that soul and, with it, himself. He knew that man was capable of starting from scratch and coping with the earth and with himself both; capable of teaching himself to be civilized, to live with his fellow man in amity, without anguish to himself or causing anguish and grief to others, and of appreciating the value of security and peace and freedom, since our dreams at night, the very slow evolution of our bodies themselves, remind us constantly of the time when we did not have them. He did not mean freedom from fear, because man does not have the right to be free of fear. We are not so weak and timorous as to need to be free of fear; we need only use our capacity to not be afraid of it and so relegate fear to its proper perspective. He meant security and peace in which to not be afraid, freedom in which to decree and then establish security and peace. And He demanded of man only that we work to deserve and gain these things—liberty, freedom of the body and spirit both, security for the weak and helpless, and peace for all—because these were the most valuable things He could set within our capacity and reach.