The legendary Al Smith Dinner turned 80 this year. And we celebrated by conceiving and creating a handsome commemorative booklet, featuring five key speeches. Included in the book is an essay by Arthur Lubow. Here’s an excerpt:
A Time Capsule of American Political Discourse
by A.D. Lubow
Seven Sitting U.S. Presidents. Seven Future Presidents. Ten Vice Presidents. Nine Candidates for the Presidency. Two retired Presidents. Six Senators. Six Governors. Seven Generals. Three Admirals. Seven Secretaries of State. One First Lady. A White House Chief of Staff. A Speaker of the House. A Director of the CIA. The head of NASA. The Secretary of Education. An Opera Diva. An FBI Director, a Supreme Court Justice, and a Presidential Representative to the Holy See. Over the course of the last 80 years, they’ve all spoken at the Al Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner. So have five Cardinals, four UN Ambassadors, seven major CEOs, seven Broadcast News Anchors and political commentators, two British Prime Ministers, a U.N. Secretary General and even a King.
The Dinner has also been graced by at least four of America’s funniest comedians. The number would be substantially higher if the attempts at comedy by most of the otherwise distinguished dignitaries were included. But, no joke, the standard is hysterically high. Bob Hope, Danny Thomas, Bob Newhart, Stephen Colbert and Jim Gaffigan have spoken. And by all accounts they were on their very best behavior. Even so, Bob Hope felt compelled to tell the audience that he’d never seen so many Catholics in one room not playing Bingo. Jim Gaffigan confided that he is Catholic because he truly believes… that is what his wife wants.
To the overall list of seriously accomplished speakers you can add a playwright, a screenwriter, a disciple of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a protégé of Bernard Baruch, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a journalist, a fiction writer, a World War II correspondent, a major critic of colonialism, an editor of Vanity Fair, a diplomat and later in life, a major Conservative and Catholic philosopher. You can add all those distinct personages when you list the single name of the Honorable Clare Boothe Luce, because she was all those things. We’re featuring her Al Smith Foundation Dinner address in this booklet because, on the subject of scientific and social progress, it resonates today perhaps even more meaningfully than when it was first delivered 68 years ago.
Some of the most serious speeches don’t quite play so well nowadays. That’s because the passage of time and the hinge of fate have gotten rudely in the way of some of the more hopeful prognoses for the future. Some of the jokes don’t fare too well either. (Perhaps you just had to be there). But some of the laugh lines have aged like a fine bottle of wine and are just as funny today. Either way, every speech and every quip provide little bits of insight onto times past, and our times, too. Think of it all as a snapshot of modern American Presidential politics. You’ll enjoy a kind of timelapse overview of how rhetoric changes but the basic societal themes remain the same.
To read the rest of the article or see a PDF of the entire book, please contact us. The booklet contains speeches by Wiinston Churchill 1947), Dwight D. Eisenhower (1954), Clare Boothe Luce (1957), John McCain (2008) and Barack Obama (2008).
