From Ben Franklin to MLK, a glorious marathon of oratory

American Speeches: Political Oratory From the Revolution to the Civil War
Edited by Ted Widmer
The Library of America, 810 pp., $35

American Speeches: Political Oratory From Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton
Edited by Ted Widmer
The Library of America, 872 pp., $35

What was the greatest American speech? Was it Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, perhaps the most memorized speech in history? Or his Second Inaugural, urging Americans to bind up the nation's wounds and achieve a just and lasting peace? Was it Franklin Roosevelt's First Inaugural, when he said Americans had nothing to fear but fear itself? Or General George C. Marshall's speech laying out the plan for European economic recovery? Maybe John F. Kennedy's plea to Americans to ask not what their country could do for them? Perhaps Ronald Reagan's admonition to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall?

Damned if I know, and you don't know either. This is a rich, rich country -- Lyndon Johnson, in his 1965 speech on voting rights, called it "this great rich, restless country" and argued that "this was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose" -- and amid its wealth is the richness of its spoken word. In 230 years we have had Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural ("We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists") and Woodrow Wilson's war speech ("It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war") and Franklin Roosevelt's eighth State of the Union Address ("We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms"). We have had Huey Long's "Every Man a King" speech and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. We have had Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech and Reagan's "Challenger" speech.

These speeches and scores of others -- 128 in all, delivered by 77 Americans at times of peace, war, challenge, crisis, reflection , and revolution -- have been deftly assembled by Ted Widmer, director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, in two splendid volumes published by the Library of America. These two volumes are at once keepsakes and reminders, and above all compendiums of the best that has been thought and said by Americans.

Selecting the great speeches of American history is a formidable challenge . Widmer has chosen wisely but daringly, including a few ideological icons (Betty Friedan on feminism, Mario Savio on campus free speech) to sprinkle amid the war horses (Daniel Webster on the Compromise of 1850, Douglas MacArthur as a soldier fading away). One can quibble for hours, asking, for example, why George Washington's Farewell Address (never delivered orally) was omitted while Dwight Eisenhower's was included. Where is Mario Cuomo's address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention, and Calvin Coolidge's speech on the Boston police strike?

In all, Lincoln rates eight speeches, FDR checks in with eight, and Kennedy and Reagan have five each. Sojourner Truth and Chief Joseph each get one . Webster, whose collected speeches fill six volumes, rates three here, each evocative and important, though it might have been nice to have included his appeal to the Supreme Court in the Dartmouth College Case. Webster's Second Reply to Hayne of 1830 takes up 72 nearly impenetrable pages, and yet we remember only the last 10 words: "Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!"

But the best of all endings come from Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan. The Great Commoner takes second prize with his speech to the Democratic National Convention in 1896: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." But first place, by a mile, belongs to Lincoln, in the First Inaugural, delivered in 1861: "I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

If there is one theme to these speeches, it is the theme that underlines all of the American story, for ultimately American history is about the extension of rights. In these volumes are Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Booker T. Washington, and, taking up the cause of extending Americans' rights, Lincoln, Kennedy, and Johnson -- and Hubert H. Humphrey, whose 1948 speech to the Democratic National Convention is sometimes forgotten as one of the landmarks of American history: "To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on state's rights, I say this, the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of state's rights to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights."

At the end of this glorious marathon of speechmaking we are prompted to wonder what exactly makes for a great American speech. There is no simple answer, but perhaps this will do: A great American speech either reflects the times in which it is given (as Kennedy's Inaugural Address so eloquently does) or changes the times in which it is given (as King's civil rights speeches so powerfully do). In their time as in ours, and for all time, we should be grateful for what some Americans said, and did.

David M. Shribman, for a decade the Globe's Washington bureau chief, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.