Ladybird Speech

1

On April 9, 1964, Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, who was at the time the First Lady of the United States,
gave the following speech at the first anniversary luncheon of the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial
Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit division of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
dedicated to the works of former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who passed away in 1962. Read the
passage carefully. Write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Johnson makes to achieve her
purpose of paying tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt.
In your response you should do the following:
• Respond to the prompt with a thesis that analyzes the writer’s rhetorical choices.
• Select and use evidence to support your line of reasoning.
• Explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the rhetorical situation.
• Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument.

For me, it is a great privilege to come here today and participate in this anniversary occasion.
I met Eleanor Roosevelt first in print and admired her. I met her later in person and loved her. As she
did to many very young and very timid Congressional wives, she extended her hand and hospitality to me
. . . and Washington was warmer.
I saw her last when she came to my home on February 12, 1962, the day the Commission on the
Status of Women1
 was organized under her chairmanship and her inspiration. She was 78. I have often
thought how much she made those years count for her country.
Nobody, said Marcus Aurelius,2
 is either the better or the worse for being praised. We are engaged in
an idle ceremony, which would have brought no comfort to Eleanor Roosevelt, if we come here merely to
praise her great qualities and achievements. She does not need our praise.
All of us are familiar with people who are the partisans of departed virtue, but are afraid to defend an
unpopular truth today. Mrs. Roosevelt never stood with this timid company. Her conscience was her
counselor, and she followed its commands with unfaltering courage. Nor did she really understand what
people meant when they praised her for taking so many risks. She would have taken the greatest risk of all
if she had remained silent in the presence of wrong. She would have risked the integrity of her soul.
A rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime once said: “The most important
thing I learned is that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problems. The most urgent, the most
disgraceful, the most shameful, and the most tragic problem—is silence.”
Eleanor Roosevelt taught us that sometimes silence is the greatest sin.
Do you remember what Dr. Samuel Johnson3
 said about courage? “Unless a man has that virtue, he
has no security for preserving any other.” Mrs. Roosevelt knew what those words meant. She lived their
meaning every day of her life. Courage sustained by compassion—that was the watchword of her entire
career.
Always she thought not of abstract rights, but of living wrongs.
I watched her at close range one day when she spent two hours helping the 75th Congressional Club
give a benefit luncheon to buy a wheelchair for a crippled boy.
Only one person was involved. Where else do you start, but with one person?
She thought of the suffering individual, not of a theoretical principle. She saw an unemployed father,
and so she helped him. She saw a neglected Negro child, and so she educated him. She saw dictators
hurling the world into war, and so she worked unflinchingly for peace. She saw the United Nations
divided by the conflict of ideology and power, and so she became the prophet of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.4
 Are we ready to fight similar battles against new foes in our own day? If
not, our grief is an empty thing, and the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt is not among us.
President Wilson used to say that some people in Washington grow in office, while others merely
swell. Mrs. Roosevelt steadily grew under the compulsions and inspirations of her great office. But, it is
perhaps the ultimate tribute to Mrs. Roosevelt that she reached true greatness after the shock of her
bereavement when she went bravely forward in a new career as a spokesman for America and a servant of
world peace. In the White House she was the First Lady in the land, but after the White House she
became, as Ambassador Stevenson5
 has reminded us, the First Lady in the world. Great was her goodness,
and it was her goodness that made her so great.
Let us today earnestly resolve to build the true foundation for Eleanor Roosevelt’s memory—to pluck
out prejudice from our lives, to remove fear and hate where it exists, and to create a world unafraid to
work out its destiny in peace. Eleanor Roosevelt has already made her own splendid and incomparable
contribution to that foundation. Let us go and do likewise, within the measure of our faith and the limits
of our ability. Let Eleanor Roosevelt teach us all how to turn the arts of compassion into the victories of
democracy.
1 United States governmental body established by President John F. Kennedy to promote fair treatment for
women, particularly in the workplace
2 Roman emperor from 161 to 180 CE
3 eighteenth-century English writer
4 Roosevelt was a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952, and in that role,
played a key part in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 5 Adlai Stevenson II, an American politician who was at the time the United States Ambassador to the
United Nations