Individuals and Change

Baccalaureate Address
by David Schmitz,
Professor of History

Some of you may recall that I welcomed you four years ago at Convocation. Now I get to say goodbye. At Convocation I asked the question: Is Whitman College and a liberal arts education an anachronism? By now I am sure you know that the answer is a resounding no! You have learned to think more critically, independently, and to be creative and resourceful individuals. The question now is: What will you do with these skills after Sunday?

Each spring semester I teach my course on the United States since 1945. At the end I look back over the period we have examined and how it shapes the present.

The challenge now is to turn the nation's wealth into social progress, professor David Schmitz told the Class of 2000 at Baccalaureate. Above, at Commencement the next day, he waits with his colleagues for the processional to began.

The bequest of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the nation was a democratic revolution that promised broad-based improvements for all segments of society so people could obtain what is commonly called the American Dream. The first of these democratic movements was the labor movement, which allowed for the enormous prosperity of the World War II and postwar years to be shared by millions of working-class Americans and established a basic social contract on certain rights and protections within the nation.

This was a remarkable change that permanently altered the landscape of the nation and provided the preconditions for the other great democratic movements that followed, the civil rights movement and the destruction of state-sanctioned segregation in the United States, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian rights movement, and the environmental movement, among others. There was much to criticize along the way, and change often came slowly, grudgingly, and at too high a cost. It was often accompanied by tragedy, as we are reminded in the news today about the four girls killed in Birmingham in 1963 and, most notably, the Vietnam War. Still, there has been more progress made in the last 40 years than in any other time in U.S. history in terms of rights and prosperity.

If we look back at the 1950s, the nation was locked into a period of conformity and fear of change. It was enamored with wealth, material acquisitions, and the belief that economic growth could solve all social problems and bring harmony. It was believed that problems of race, poverty, and discrimination would yield, and with them the attitudes that sustained these problems, as economic abundance increased and raised all groups in society into the middle class.

That, of course, did not happen. The changes that came were due to many people, particularly young people, questioning this faith and asking America to live up to its stated ideals and values, and deliver on this promise. They found in the 1960s that poverty and racial hatred continued despite the unprece-dented wealth and power of the nation and that economic growth did not deliver an end to oppression. Rather, it seemed to entrench it at home and abroad, as the Vietnam War came to symbolize. It took individuals, seizing upon the time when institutional structures were in flux, to demand and force change that brought an end to legalized racism, and challenged traditional gender roles and the culture of abundance.

Now, at the end of the 1990s — amid the longest consecutive period of economic growth in the nation's history — we are again told about the virtues of economic expansion and free trade as the cures for the ills of the nation, be they poverty, discrimination, or violence. This has been added to by the notion that new technologies will break down barriers and, along with economic growth, promise to provide solutions to our social problems. Instinctively, most of us know that this will not happen. That in fact the disparities of wealth and power are growing both within this nation and the world, and that problems of our society will not just melt away under the magic of free trade and Internet access.

Economic growth, newly created wealth, and technological advances have to be turned into social progress by people and political will. The journey of the nation and the greater social and economic equality of the post-World War II years are always in danger of being rolled back while new advances are blocked. The question for the graduates of 2000 is: Will you turn this new wealth and advances into social progress? This is the challenge you face.

At times, of course, the task of bringing about change seems too great and too immense, the forces at work too powerful, and the actions of the individual irrelevant. But if we again look back to this recent past, we see that this is not true. When Franklin McCain, David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Ezell Blair, Jr., the Greensboro Four, sat down at a lunch counter on February 1, 1960, they had no idea that their actions would spark the non-violent, civil disobedience phase of the civil rights movement that would culminate in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When Casey Hayden and Mary King sat down in the summer of 1965 to write their memo "Sex and Caste," they had no idea how quickly their thoughts about the discrimination against women in the freedom and peace movements and the gender caste system in the nation would help spark the women's liberation movement and change the thoughts of a generation. When the organizers of the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, launched their idea, they could not imagine the movement they were beginning to protect the earth and change the way people live their lives.

So, what are your dreams? What do you want to see change? What do you want to make better? As the greatest American rock 'n' roll artist Bruce Springsteen has written: "Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?" Do not let those dreams you have die as you go about the business of traveling, launching your careers, beginning graduate work, starting families, rooting for the Mariners, and the countless other daily pursuits of our lives. Robert F. Kennedy said in 1968: "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of [the next] generation."

To conclude, again with the words of Bruce Springsteen:

Stay hard
Stay hungry
Stay alive . . .
And meet me in a dream of this hard land!