[This past
weekend, my younger son and co-favorite-Guest
Poster Kyle Railton graduated from high school. As I wipe away
proud Dad tears, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and contexts
for this momentous occasion—leading up to a special weekend post on what’s next
for the new grad!]
On two of
the many vital 2025 lessons from a 1930 speech to high school graduates.
I wrote a
good bit about W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1930 address “Reflections
upon the Housatonic River,” delivered to the graduates of Searles High
School (in his hometown of Great Barrington, MA), in this prior
post. In lieu of a full first paragraph here, I’d ask you to check out
both the speech and my post if you would, and then come back for a couple
further thoughts.
Welcome
back! One of my favorite things about Du Bois (a very long and competitive
list, as readers of this blog know well) was how much he loved rivers, and his
love of the Housatonic River of his childhood in particular contributed to the publication
in his NAACP magazine The Crisis of the first poem by none other
than Langston Hughes, as I discussed
in this post. He opens his speech with a recognition that that love, and
thus the speech’s titular subject, might seem silly, that “on hearing the
subject of my speech, some of you may have thought of it as a joke.” But it is
anything but, and not just because of his personal affiliation with and
fondness for this particular river. Instead, the central subject of Du Bois’s
speech is an overarching argument for taking better care of our rivers and all our
natural spaces, an impassioned plea that, as he concludes his speech, we “should
rescue the Housatonic and clean it as we have never in all the years before
thought of cleaning it, and seek to restore its ancient beauty; making it the
center of a town, of a valley, and perhaps—who knows?—of a new measure of civilized
life.” Never has that call been more necessary than here in the summer of 2025.
Such
environmental conservation is a key part of Du Bois’s speech, but I would argue
that he makes the case for it through an even more overarching concept: that of
what we collectively owe to the communities that we are part of. Earlier this
year, the film historian and American Studies scholar Vaughn
Joy focused her excellent review
of High Noon on the defining American debate between the individual
and the community. Like both Vaughn and me, Du Bois was a lifelong advocate for
the communal emphasis, for the idea that we are all profoundly connected to one
another and the concurrent concept that society only functions at all (much
less approaches its more perfect unions) when we seek to strengthen such
communal connections. And he also ends this moving speech, just before that
quote about rescuing and restoring the river, with an appeal to his audience
based precisely on that sentiment, through the lens of the high school from
which they all had graduated: “And so I have ventured to call to the attention
of the graduates of the Searles High School this bit of philosophy of living in
this valley.” If America is to survive, and certainly if has a chance to thrive
in the years ahead, we must all hang together, not just out of necessity but
out of such communal connection.
Next
graduation connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Graduation texts or topics you’d share?
