February 26, 2021 • 35 mins
One speechmaker inspired millions with his words, the other utterly destroyed his own multi-million-dollar business with just a few phrases.
Civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr (played by Jeffrey Wright of Westworld, The Hunger Games, and the James Bond films) and jewelry store owner Gerald Ratner offer starkly contrasting stories on when you should stick to the script and when you should take a risk.
Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. One late summer day in nineteen sixty three, thousands
upon thousands of people gathered on the Mall in Washington,
d C. They had come to America's capital for jobs
(00:36):
and freedom, to show the Kennedy administration that civil rights
legislation must be pushed through Congress, and to hear the
Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior speak. The official program
had been long and packed with speeches, but a quarter
of a million people defied the heat as they waited.
(00:58):
The crowd stretched back from the Lincoln Memorial, packing the
sides of the famous reflecting pool, swirling around the base
of the Washington Monument, and extending towards be in transigent
capital itself. The Mall usually dwarfs anything on a human scale.
Not that afternoon. The gospel singer Mahalia Jackson sang, I've
(01:22):
been buked and I've been scorned. Anticipation was building. All
three television networks switched to live coverage. Doctor King stepped
forward to speak to address not only the sweltering crowd,
but a national audience he had never had before and
might never have again. Doctor King had spent the night
(01:46):
laboring on his speech with a few trusted aids, weighing
every word of what he would say. For a few minutes,
the nation, even the world, would be focused on those
words from the Lincoln Memorial steps. Doctor King knew that
those words had to be perfect. But now let's leave
(02:07):
this iconic scene behind us and travel across time and
across the Atlantic. Twenty eight years later, a very different
man would give a very different speech in front of
a very different audience. This man's name was Gerald Ratner,
and he didn't have a dream. He had a nightmare.
(02:31):
I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. Gerald
(02:58):
Ratner's speech, to be clear, wasn't about civil rights. It
was about selling cheap jewelry. It became iconic because it
didn't go well. And as you've probably figured out by now,
I'm fascinated by things that didn't go well. But I'll
let you into a secret. I'm also fascinated by the
(03:19):
art of public speaking. I love doing it and i
love studying it. Public speaking is such a strange thing,
as natural as talking and yet wrenchingly difficult. And how
it was approached by these two men, Gerald Ratner and
Martin Luther King, And what happened to them could teach
us a lot. Doctor King and mister Ratner are a
(03:43):
study in contrasts. Martin Luther King took the high road
through education, earning a doctorate in theology. Gerald Ratner took
the low road. Ratner was born in London in nineteen
forty nine and expelled from school at the age of thirteen.
When he was fifteen, he joined the family business, a
(04:03):
group of six jewelry shops. Ratna worked behind the counter
for ten years years but noticed that he didn't have
many customers his age or younger. Those people had no
interest in gold and diamond rings. They were spending plenty
of money on clothes and music. Shopping malls were busy,
jewelers were not. They were dusty and intimidating. Nothing had
(04:27):
a price tag for doors would be locked behind you
when you entered. Young Gerald soon had a management role
and steered the family business towards more informal shops, selling
products that would appeal to young shoppers on a budget.
It was a canny move. By the age of thirty five,
Ratner was a millionaire. He began a series of ambitious takeovers.
(04:51):
By the age of forty, he was running fifteen hundred
stores in the UK and a thousand in the US.
His brands included k Watches of Switzerland and Ratner's itself.
Gerald Ratner had built the largest jewelry group on the planet,
and then he destroyed it in a matter of seconds.
(05:19):
Gerald Ratner had been asked to address the Institute of Directors,
a prestigious audience of six thousand British business leaders. The
venue was the Royal Albert Hall, fast and trimmed with
gold and red velvet, perhaps the grandest auditorium in London. Understandably,
Ratner started his speech looking nervous. He was a self
(05:43):
made man, a school dropout who now stood in front
of business royalty, and in fact, there were actual royalty
in the audience too. Ratner was rich and successful, to
be sure, but did he fit in? Three minutes after
starting his speech, he finds his theme mocking his own products.
(06:06):
We've got this imitation book that you lay on your
coffee table. Pages don't actually open, but they're beautiful, curled
up corners with imitation antique dust. I know it's you
might say it's not in the best possible taste, but
we sold a quarter of a million of them last year.
The audience love it, They laugh, they clap. Ratner looks braver.
(06:31):
We also do this nice cherry to cancer. It's cut
glass and it comes complete with six glasses on a
silver plated tray that your butler could bring you in
and serve your drinks on. Oh you're too funny, Gerald.
Some of the people in the audience would have employed butler's.
But Ratner's customers certainly couldn't afford one any more than
(06:53):
they could afford a genuine antique book, a decanter in
a silver tray for your butler. Nice one, and it's
really only cost four pounds ninety five pence. That's about
twelve dollars in today's money. People say to me, how
can you sell this for such a low price? I say,
(07:14):
because it's total crests more after more applause. Ratners killing
it on stage. He's also just killed his own business empire.
He didn't realize it at the time. The speech had
gone down very well with the audience in the Royal
Albert Hall, but the newspaper reporters in the room smelled
(07:35):
a story. The jokes that had played so brilliantly on
the day did not go down so well when served
up cold on the front page of the morning papers.
At the time, the UK was in the middle of
a recession. Ordinary people didn't take kindly to a multi
millionaire standing in front of his fellow one percenters and
(07:57):
mocking his own customers for their crass taste. And who
would buy an engagement ring from a company whose own
boss had declared their products were crap? Say ebbed. Ratner's
group shares fell nearly ninety percent between the speech in
April and Christmas. Ratner was sacked from his own company. Inevitably,
(08:21):
they changed the company name. Ratner's was a toxic brand,
forever tarnished to this day. In the UK, doing a
Ratner is part of the language, universally understood as committing
a humiliating career ending gaff. Ratner's name became its own
(08:45):
one word cautionary tale. The lesson seems obvious enough if
everyone's watching, choose your words with care, don't wing it.
But what if that lesson has the story completely backwards
(09:12):
In retrospect, the Reverend Doctor King had been preparing his
whole life to give the speech from the steps of
the Lincoln Memorial. His memory had always been prodigious. At
the age of five, he was learning Bible passages by heart.
He told his parents that when he grew up, he
was going to get some big words. So he did.
(09:34):
Martin's father was a preacher, and the boy took to
the craft of speech making early. At the age of fourteen,
Martin traveled across Georgia on a bus to compete in
a public speaking contest. On the way home to Atlanta,
things went sour, very sour. King and his friend were
sitting near the front of the bus with their teacher,
(09:58):
Sarah Grace Bradley. At a busy stop, a rush of
white passengers got on, and the bus driver, also white,
ordered King and his friend to give up their seat.
You boys moving, get yourself to the back of the bus.
There was a pause. Doctor King later said we didn't
move quickly enough to suit him, so he began cursing hers.
(10:22):
The driver was now hurling every racist slur you can
imagine and threatening to call the police. Martin, please do
what he says. So we walked to the back of
the bus and I had to stand all the way
to Atlanta. It was dark outside for ninety miles. There
was nothing to look at but the seats on the
(10:44):
bus filled with white people. It was late at night,
and I was tired, but that wasn't the point. It
was the humiliation. Martin, remember, was just fourteen years old.
That night will never leave my memory. It was the
angriest I've ever been in my life. Suddenly I realized,
(11:07):
you don't count. You're nobody. But Martin Luther King Junior
wasn't destined to be nobody for long. And the journey
on the way to being not just somebody, but somebody
who made his mark on history arguably began not with
(11:28):
that unforgettable humiliation, but with the triumphant day that had
preceded it. The long and infuriating bus journey of Martin
Luther King Junior had been on the way home from
a public speaking competition. Martin had won a prize at
(11:51):
the contest, delivering his speech titled The Negro and the
Constitution entirely from memory. My heart throbs anew in the
hope that, inspired by the example of Lincoln, imbued with
the spirit of Christ, they will cast down the last
barrier to a perfect freedom. That speech showed off the
(12:13):
teenage King's approach. He would research draft redraft, memorize, finally
deliver with passion. King used the same principles three years later,
preaching for the first time in a small meeting room
at his father's church. He was spectacular. The crowds kept
(12:35):
coming until young Martin had to move to the main auditorium.
Martin won an oratory prize in college. He used to
practice imagined court testimony in front of a mirror, dreaming
of becoming a lawyer. Instead, he applied for a job
as a minister at a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama.
(12:55):
As part of his application, he had to give a sermon,
and of course, he used something meticulously crafted, a sermon
he had preached several times before practice don't just make
it up as you go along. Once he secured that job,
he stuck to that winning formula. King's responsibilities as a
(13:16):
minister had to be fulfilled while he was still finishing
his doctorate in theology, so he rose at half past
five each morning, made coffee, shaved his stubborn bristles into
a neat mustache, then worked on his doctorate for three
hours before his pregnant wife, Coretta, woke to join him
for breakfast. All the while King lavished enormous effort on
(13:40):
his sermons. He would begin drafting on Tuesday and continued
to research and draft throughout the week, drawing ideas from
Plato Aquinas Freud Candy. As Sunday approached, he would write
it all out on yellow lined paper and commit it
to memory, just as he had done at the age
of fourteen. He would bring the script to church with him,
(14:04):
but as he ascended to the pulpit, he would leave
it in his chair and speak without notes for half
an hour or more. He was fantastic, people said. The
congregation adored him and the way he spoke with style
about matters of substance, and to achieve this mastery, the
young Reverend King spent fifteen hours or more crafting each sermon.
(14:31):
Martin Luther King was one of the greatest speechmakers to
grace the English language, and at first it might seem
obvious why, as well as being educated and prodigiously talented,
he ensured that every syllable of his oratory was meticulously prepared.
Gerald Ratner could have learned from doctor King's example, couldn't he, Well,
(14:56):
the truth is way more interesting than that, So why
would a public speaker set aside the script or memorized
remark and speak off the cuff, I asked Charles Limb.
He's a neuroscientist, a surgeon, a jazz saxophonist, and one
(15:18):
of very few people who's actually studied the improvising brain.
Limb researches people as they improvise inside brain scanners called
fm our eye machines. Imagine sliding on your back so
that your head is surrounded by a giant, white plastic
donut with the feel of a vintage iPod. The scanner
(15:42):
is generating powerful magnetic fields to illuminate the contrast between
oxygen rich blood flowing to different areas of your brain
and the oxygen depleted blood flowing away. Again, your head
is held perfectly still. If you're a hip hop artist,
you then have to spit some rhymes in response to
(16:02):
random words. If you're a jazz musician, you have to
tap out riffs on a plastic keyboard lying across your
knee and no metal, Otherwise the magnetic field would rip
the keyboard apart and pull the shrapnel into the scanner
with your head. It's a tough gig. Through these experiments,
(16:23):
Limb and other neuroscientists have been discovering hints of what
goes on in an improvising brain. There's a distinctive pattern
in the prefrontal cortex, which seems to be the seat
of consciousness, memory, morality, humor, and even the sense of self.
But the pattern isn't that the prefrontal cortex is lighting
(16:45):
up during improvisation. On the contrary, broad areas of it
shutting down the dorsolateral areas either side of the top
of your forehead and the lateral orbital areas behind your eyes.
Improvisers are escaping their internal restraints. They're letting go. Most
of us go through our days holding back our mental
(17:07):
impulses to swear or la shout. All this requires a
degree of self control, so that filtering is a good thing.
That you could have too much of a good thing,
says Charles Limb. Too much filtering can squash our creativity.
Improvisers shut down their inner critics and allow new ideas
(17:29):
to flow out. The improvising brain is disinhibited, although not
so crudely as the drunk brain. That is why improvisers
can produce flashes of pure brilliance. It's also why improvisation
feels so risky. A script can seem protective, like a
(17:52):
bulletproof vest, but sometimes it's more like a strait jacket.
Improvising unleashes creativity. It feels fresh and honest and personal.
Above all, it turns a monologue into a dialogue. Miles Davis,
the legendary jazz trumpeter, talked about improvisation as the freedom
and space to hear things. That's a fascinating turn of phrase.
(18:17):
Not the freedom and space to play things or to
do things, but to hear things, to be more open
to the sound of your own instrument, the sound of
the group, And that matters for more than just music
or rhetoric, because we're scared of improvising, and we're not
just afraid to improvise on stage, we're also becoming afraid
(18:39):
to improvise face to face. The sociologist Sherry Turkle has
been interviewing young people about their communications through smartphone apps.
It wasn't just because the apps were convenient or addictive,
although they could be both. Texting is attractive because traditional
conversations feel scary. I'll tell you what's wrong with conversation.
(19:02):
One high school senior told Sherry Turkle it takes place
in real time, and you can't control what you're going
to say to see. This student is so used to
being able to proof freed every message that he's become
scared of simply talking and seeing what happens. But then
(19:25):
perhaps he's right to be scared. We should ask Gerald Ratner.
Gerald Ratna learned to laugh at himself a long time ago,
but he rejects the idea that somehow his mistake all
worked out for the best. People ask me if I'm
glad I said what I said? They're ridiculous. How could
I be grateful? I lost everything? Ratna plunged into depression.
(19:51):
He has bounced back in some ways. He had some success,
setting up a chain of health clubs and even an
online jewelry business. But the truth is that there was
nothing he could do, no success that he could achieve
that would ever be as famous as his gaff. The
for a good joke destroyed his business, and it nearly
(20:13):
destroyed him. Who would want to risk the fate of
Gerald Ratner when they could follow the meticulous example of
the young Martin Luther King. It seems obvious that when
speaking in public, we should prepare as diligently, as King
did when he drafted and memorized his sermons. But the
truth about Gerald Ratner's impromptu remark about his products being
(20:35):
total crap is this. It wasn't impromptu. He chose those
words with care after circulating drafts of the speech to
get comments. He'd used the total crap joke before without
running into problems, and as he prepared to deliver the
speech on a larger stage, he sought advice. His wife
(20:58):
told him to be careful, but others, including a friend
who was one of the most influential figures in the
advertising industry, encouraged him to tell even more daring jokes.
They thought Ratna would sound self deprecating and that his
audience would love the gags, which was true. Those in
the hall that day did love it. But in the
newspapers the next morning, Ratner simply sounded like a millionaire
(21:22):
mocking his struggling customers. When I listened back to Ratner's speech,
I don't hear the mockery at all. I hear something else.
Immediately after saying his own products were crap, Ratner says
our Ratner's shots will never win any awards for design
(21:45):
they're not in the best possible taste. I admit that.
In fact, some people say they can't even see the
jewelry for all the banners and posters smothering the shot windows.
There's a different tone. Suddenly, there's a note of defiance,
even anger. So it's interesting that these shots that everyone
has a good laugh about take more money per square
(22:08):
foot than any other retailer in Europe. The hall is hush, now,
nobody's laughing. Why, because we give the customer what they want.
Gerald Ratner wasn't laughing at his customers. He identified with them.
He thought the business royalty in the hall were laughing
(22:30):
at his customers and his business ideas and him. This
was his response, You laugh at us, he was saying,
but my customers are happy and I'm rich, So who's
laughing now. Ratner's downfall wasn't caused by a lack of preparation,
but by a lack of judgment. Ratna did exactly what
(22:55):
he planned to do. He had simply failed to foresee
the consequences. Improvisation was not to blame. Improvising does expose
us to new and different risks, but even careful preparation
cannot remove Risks entirely. In December nineteen fifty five, Rosa
(23:28):
Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat
on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama to a white man.
As a local church leader with a reputation as an orator,
Martin Luther King was asked to organize a boycott of
Montgomery's buses. He hesitated. He was exhausted. His newborn baby daughter, Joki,
(23:52):
wouldn't stop crying in the night. King asked for time
to mull over the idea of a bus boycott, but
an influential local activist ed Nixon would have no delays.
You ain't got much time to think, said Nixon. You're
in the chair from now on. So it was that
King found himself bounced into leading the Montgomery Improvement Association.
(24:17):
He had to give an inaugural speech, and he had
to give it immediately. Rosa Parks was news, the bus
boycott was news. There wasn't time to spend days redrafting
or consulting the sayings of Plato or Gandy. Doctor King
arrived home from the meeting with Edy, Nixon and the
activists at half past six. He had to head to
(24:37):
the speech venue Holt Street Church at ten to seven.
I had only twenty minutes to prepare the most decisive
speech of my life. I became possessed by fear. King
knew that newspaper men would be there, perhaps even television crews.
And yet just as the stakes were highest, the habit
(24:59):
of meticulous preparation that had served him so well all
his life was useless. He couldn't research, draft, redraft, and memorized.
He had no time. King looked at his watch. Already
five minutes had ticked away while he fretted. Every Sunday
he delivered a sermon based on fifteen hours of hard work.
(25:19):
Now he was about to deliver the most important speech
of his life, and he had just fifteen minutes. He
sketched a couple of thoughts with his hand shaking, pondering
the delicate balance he had to strike between militancy and moderation,
and he prayed that was all the preparation he could
spare before driving to the Holt Street Church. Ten thousand
(25:48):
people stood outside, unable to cram themselves in, listening to
the proceedings via a loud speaker on the roof. For
Montgomery police were therein force, so were the television cameras
pointing at the pulpit as King stepped up and began
to speak. My friends were here this evening for serious business.
(26:10):
The speech is brilliantly described in Taylor Branch, his biography
of King. Instead of the usual careful script, lovingly prepared
and committed to memory, King was groping his way towards
the right words. I think I speak with legal authority,
not that I have any legal authority, but I think
I speak with legal authority behind me. That the law,
(26:33):
the ordinance, the city ordinance, has never been totally clarified.
He had never in his life delivered a sermon with
a line as weak and confused as that one. Fifteen
hours of preparation always ironed out every wrinkle. But King
was finding something more valuable than time to prepare. In
(26:55):
Miles Davis's phrase, the freedom and space to hear things.
As he spoke, King listened to the crowd, feeling out
their response. Speaking in the moment. His early sentences were
experiments grasping for a theme, exploring how each sounded and
how the crowd responded. Each phrase shaped. The phrase that
(27:18):
followed his speech was not a solo. It was a
duet with his audience. After a cautious opening, King talked
of Rosa Parks, of her character and Christian commitment, and
just because she refused to get up, she was arrested.
The crowd murmured their assent. After a pause for breath,
(27:43):
King changed direction. You know, my friends, there comes a
time when people get tired of being trampled over by
the iron feet of a pressure. And suddenly the avalanche began.
A few yells of support became a roar of approval
and anger. The spirit of the crowd was self sustaining,
(28:04):
a torrent of emotion and sound, which grew stronger. Just
when it seemed the sound must fade further, waves crashed
in from the thousands of voices outside. The cheering was everywhere.
Then King spoke up again. With the help of the crowd,
he found his theme. There comes a time when people
(28:24):
get tired of getting pushed out of the glittering sunlight
of life's jula and left standing amidst the piercing chill
of an Alpine November, amid the sound of feet thundering
on the church's wooden floorboards, King was forced to pause.
As with any extemporaneous performance, Kings was imperfect, with some
(28:47):
meandering lines and a limp conclusion. Despite all that, these
improvised remarks were easily the finest speech that King had
yet given. People who had seen him speak many times
were astonished. He spoke with so much force. Nobody, said
one witness, nobody dreamed of marks In Luther King being
(29:10):
that sort of man under these conditions. King himself, one suspects,
had not truly understood what he could unleash once he
let himself go. He didn't want to improvise the speech,
preferred the script for when the situation gave him no alternative.
He came to understand what older preachers had told him,
(29:32):
open your mouth and God will speak for you. Seven
and a half years later, in nineteen sixty three, he
found himself faced with speaking to a quarter of a
million people who'd marched on Washington d C. He knew
he'd be live on every national television network. This speech
(29:53):
demanded the preparation of old It was too important to
be left to chance. Doctor King and his aids had
prepared a typewritten script, unpromisingly titled Normals Never Again. King's
team was trying to navigate complex waters with the text
of this address. King needed to reach out to white allies,
(30:15):
to rebut the hardline approach of Malcolm X and others,
and to respond to President Kennedy's Civil Rights Bill. Was
the bill to be criticized as inadequate or welcomed as progress.
There was much politicking behind the scenes, and each speaker
had been allotted only seven minutes. There was no exception
for Martin Luther King. All of these constraints called for
(30:40):
precise drafting. He knew that he would be speaking with
a vast statue of Abraham Lincoln behind him, a hundred
years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had declared the enslaved people
of the United States to be free. So King decided
(31:00):
to open with an artful echo of Lincoln's Great Gettysburg
Address and referred to the Emancipation Proclamation as a promissory
note on which America had defaulted. As a script normal
syne never again was over formal and flawed. Parts of
it read like poetry. Others were clumsy legal ease. As
(31:25):
King read out the speech, it did not stir the soul,
but then toward the end came a biblical flourish. And
we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters,
and righteousness like a mighty stream. And as King said
those words, approving cheers rippled up and down them all.
(31:49):
Then King looked down at his script. The next line
was pretentious and limp. He couldn't bring himself to say
the words, and so instead he started to improvise, telling
the crowd go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama.
Behind him stood his friends and colleagues. They knew that
(32:13):
King had stepped away from the script, and at the
moment of maximum danger and maximum opportunity, the climax of
his speech, he was looking for something to say, something
that would touch the people there at the mall and
watching across the country. Hellaa that the dream lying, yelled
(32:34):
the singer Mahalia Jackson. It was a reference to something
doctor King had been preaching of late to church congregations,
a dream of a brighter future in which whites and
blacks lived in harmony. And as he stood, facing the
television cameras and the vast expectant crowd looking for inspiration,
(32:55):
Martin Luther King heard Mahalia Jackson, and he began to
create on the fly, one of the most famous speeches
of the century about how he had a dream, a
dream that America would live up to the words all
Men are Created Equal, A dream of an oasis of
freedom and justice. A dream that little black boys and
(33:20):
black girls would be able to join hands with little
white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. Normalcy
never again was forgotten. The conclusion to the speech that
shook the twentieth century wasn't in the script. The best
(33:44):
things usually aren't. Key sources for this episode include Taylor
Branch's book Parting the Waters, Martin Luther King Junior's autobiography,
and my own book MESSI The Power of Disorder to
(34:05):
Transform Our Lives. For a full list of references, see
Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me
Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley
and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is
the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Bartin edited the scripts.
(34:28):
Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales Helena Bonham Carter,
and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazzar Elderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutterridge,
Rachel Hanshaw, copenaholbrook Smith, Greg Lockett, Miss Siamunroe and Rufus Wright.
This show wouldn't have been possible without the work of
(34:49):
mil LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carlie mcgliory,
Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor and Yellow Lakhan and
Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
If you like the show, please remember rate, share, and
(35:11):
review
Pushkin. One late summer day in nineteen sixty three, thousands
upon thousands of people gathered on the Mall in Washington,
d C. They had come to America's capital for jobs
(00:36):
and freedom, to show the Kennedy administration that civil rights
legislation must be pushed through Congress, and to hear the
Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior speak. The official program
had been long and packed with speeches, but a quarter
of a million people defied the heat as they waited.
(00:58):
The crowd stretched back from the Lincoln Memorial, packing the
sides of the famous reflecting pool, swirling around the base
of the Washington Monument, and extending towards be in transigent
capital itself. The Mall usually dwarfs anything on a human scale.
Not that afternoon. The gospel singer Mahalia Jackson sang, I've
(01:22):
been buked and I've been scorned. Anticipation was building. All
three television networks switched to live coverage. Doctor King stepped
forward to speak to address not only the sweltering crowd,
but a national audience he had never had before and
might never have again. Doctor King had spent the night
(01:46):
laboring on his speech with a few trusted aids, weighing
every word of what he would say. For a few minutes,
the nation, even the world, would be focused on those
words from the Lincoln Memorial steps. Doctor King knew that
those words had to be perfect. But now let's leave
(02:07):
this iconic scene behind us and travel across time and
across the Atlantic. Twenty eight years later, a very different
man would give a very different speech in front of
a very different audience. This man's name was Gerald Ratner,
and he didn't have a dream. He had a nightmare.
(02:31):
I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. Gerald
(02:58):
Ratner's speech, to be clear, wasn't about civil rights. It
was about selling cheap jewelry. It became iconic because it
didn't go well. And as you've probably figured out by now,
I'm fascinated by things that didn't go well. But I'll
let you into a secret. I'm also fascinated by the
(03:19):
art of public speaking. I love doing it and i
love studying it. Public speaking is such a strange thing,
as natural as talking and yet wrenchingly difficult. And how
it was approached by these two men, Gerald Ratner and
Martin Luther King, And what happened to them could teach
us a lot. Doctor King and mister Ratner are a
(03:43):
study in contrasts. Martin Luther King took the high road
through education, earning a doctorate in theology. Gerald Ratner took
the low road. Ratner was born in London in nineteen
forty nine and expelled from school at the age of thirteen.
When he was fifteen, he joined the family business, a
(04:03):
group of six jewelry shops. Ratna worked behind the counter
for ten years years but noticed that he didn't have
many customers his age or younger. Those people had no
interest in gold and diamond rings. They were spending plenty
of money on clothes and music. Shopping malls were busy,
jewelers were not. They were dusty and intimidating. Nothing had
(04:27):
a price tag for doors would be locked behind you
when you entered. Young Gerald soon had a management role
and steered the family business towards more informal shops, selling
products that would appeal to young shoppers on a budget.
It was a canny move. By the age of thirty five,
Ratner was a millionaire. He began a series of ambitious takeovers.
(04:51):
By the age of forty, he was running fifteen hundred
stores in the UK and a thousand in the US.
His brands included k Watches of Switzerland and Ratner's itself.
Gerald Ratner had built the largest jewelry group on the planet,
and then he destroyed it in a matter of seconds.
(05:19):
Gerald Ratner had been asked to address the Institute of Directors,
a prestigious audience of six thousand British business leaders. The
venue was the Royal Albert Hall, fast and trimmed with
gold and red velvet, perhaps the grandest auditorium in London. Understandably,
Ratner started his speech looking nervous. He was a self
(05:43):
made man, a school dropout who now stood in front
of business royalty, and in fact, there were actual royalty
in the audience too. Ratner was rich and successful, to
be sure, but did he fit in? Three minutes after
starting his speech, he finds his theme mocking his own products.
(06:06):
We've got this imitation book that you lay on your
coffee table. Pages don't actually open, but they're beautiful, curled
up corners with imitation antique dust. I know it's you
might say it's not in the best possible taste, but
we sold a quarter of a million of them last year.
The audience love it, They laugh, they clap. Ratner looks braver.
(06:31):
We also do this nice cherry to cancer. It's cut
glass and it comes complete with six glasses on a
silver plated tray that your butler could bring you in
and serve your drinks on. Oh you're too funny, Gerald.
Some of the people in the audience would have employed butler's.
But Ratner's customers certainly couldn't afford one any more than
(06:53):
they could afford a genuine antique book, a decanter in
a silver tray for your butler. Nice one, and it's
really only cost four pounds ninety five pence. That's about
twelve dollars in today's money. People say to me, how
can you sell this for such a low price? I say,
(07:14):
because it's total crests more after more applause. Ratners killing
it on stage. He's also just killed his own business empire.
He didn't realize it at the time. The speech had
gone down very well with the audience in the Royal
Albert Hall, but the newspaper reporters in the room smelled
(07:35):
a story. The jokes that had played so brilliantly on
the day did not go down so well when served
up cold on the front page of the morning papers.
At the time, the UK was in the middle of
a recession. Ordinary people didn't take kindly to a multi
millionaire standing in front of his fellow one percenters and
(07:57):
mocking his own customers for their crass taste. And who
would buy an engagement ring from a company whose own
boss had declared their products were crap? Say ebbed. Ratner's
group shares fell nearly ninety percent between the speech in
April and Christmas. Ratner was sacked from his own company. Inevitably,
(08:21):
they changed the company name. Ratner's was a toxic brand,
forever tarnished to this day. In the UK, doing a
Ratner is part of the language, universally understood as committing
a humiliating career ending gaff. Ratner's name became its own
(08:45):
one word cautionary tale. The lesson seems obvious enough if
everyone's watching, choose your words with care, don't wing it.
But what if that lesson has the story completely backwards
(09:12):
In retrospect, the Reverend Doctor King had been preparing his
whole life to give the speech from the steps of
the Lincoln Memorial. His memory had always been prodigious. At
the age of five, he was learning Bible passages by heart.
He told his parents that when he grew up, he
was going to get some big words. So he did.
(09:34):
Martin's father was a preacher, and the boy took to
the craft of speech making early. At the age of fourteen,
Martin traveled across Georgia on a bus to compete in
a public speaking contest. On the way home to Atlanta,
things went sour, very sour. King and his friend were
sitting near the front of the bus with their teacher,
(09:58):
Sarah Grace Bradley. At a busy stop, a rush of
white passengers got on, and the bus driver, also white,
ordered King and his friend to give up their seat.
You boys moving, get yourself to the back of the bus.
There was a pause. Doctor King later said we didn't
move quickly enough to suit him, so he began cursing hers.
(10:22):
The driver was now hurling every racist slur you can
imagine and threatening to call the police. Martin, please do
what he says. So we walked to the back of
the bus and I had to stand all the way
to Atlanta. It was dark outside for ninety miles. There
was nothing to look at but the seats on the
(10:44):
bus filled with white people. It was late at night,
and I was tired, but that wasn't the point. It
was the humiliation. Martin, remember, was just fourteen years old.
That night will never leave my memory. It was the
angriest I've ever been in my life. Suddenly I realized,
(11:07):
you don't count. You're nobody. But Martin Luther King Junior
wasn't destined to be nobody for long. And the journey
on the way to being not just somebody, but somebody
who made his mark on history arguably began not with
(11:28):
that unforgettable humiliation, but with the triumphant day that had
preceded it. The long and infuriating bus journey of Martin
Luther King Junior had been on the way home from
a public speaking competition. Martin had won a prize at
(11:51):
the contest, delivering his speech titled The Negro and the
Constitution entirely from memory. My heart throbs anew in the
hope that, inspired by the example of Lincoln, imbued with
the spirit of Christ, they will cast down the last
barrier to a perfect freedom. That speech showed off the
(12:13):
teenage King's approach. He would research draft redraft, memorize, finally
deliver with passion. King used the same principles three years later,
preaching for the first time in a small meeting room
at his father's church. He was spectacular. The crowds kept
(12:35):
coming until young Martin had to move to the main auditorium.
Martin won an oratory prize in college. He used to
practice imagined court testimony in front of a mirror, dreaming
of becoming a lawyer. Instead, he applied for a job
as a minister at a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama.
(12:55):
As part of his application, he had to give a sermon,
and of course, he used something meticulously crafted, a sermon
he had preached several times before practice don't just make
it up as you go along. Once he secured that job,
he stuck to that winning formula. King's responsibilities as a
(13:16):
minister had to be fulfilled while he was still finishing
his doctorate in theology, so he rose at half past
five each morning, made coffee, shaved his stubborn bristles into
a neat mustache, then worked on his doctorate for three
hours before his pregnant wife, Coretta, woke to join him
for breakfast. All the while King lavished enormous effort on
(13:40):
his sermons. He would begin drafting on Tuesday and continued
to research and draft throughout the week, drawing ideas from
Plato Aquinas Freud Candy. As Sunday approached, he would write
it all out on yellow lined paper and commit it
to memory, just as he had done at the age
of fourteen. He would bring the script to church with him,
(14:04):
but as he ascended to the pulpit, he would leave
it in his chair and speak without notes for half
an hour or more. He was fantastic, people said. The
congregation adored him and the way he spoke with style
about matters of substance, and to achieve this mastery, the
young Reverend King spent fifteen hours or more crafting each sermon.
(14:31):
Martin Luther King was one of the greatest speechmakers to
grace the English language, and at first it might seem
obvious why, as well as being educated and prodigiously talented,
he ensured that every syllable of his oratory was meticulously prepared.
Gerald Ratner could have learned from doctor King's example, couldn't he, Well,
(14:56):
the truth is way more interesting than that, So why
would a public speaker set aside the script or memorized
remark and speak off the cuff, I asked Charles Limb.
He's a neuroscientist, a surgeon, a jazz saxophonist, and one
(15:18):
of very few people who's actually studied the improvising brain.
Limb researches people as they improvise inside brain scanners called
fm our eye machines. Imagine sliding on your back so
that your head is surrounded by a giant, white plastic
donut with the feel of a vintage iPod. The scanner
(15:42):
is generating powerful magnetic fields to illuminate the contrast between
oxygen rich blood flowing to different areas of your brain
and the oxygen depleted blood flowing away. Again, your head
is held perfectly still. If you're a hip hop artist,
you then have to spit some rhymes in response to
(16:02):
random words. If you're a jazz musician, you have to
tap out riffs on a plastic keyboard lying across your
knee and no metal, Otherwise the magnetic field would rip
the keyboard apart and pull the shrapnel into the scanner
with your head. It's a tough gig. Through these experiments,
(16:23):
Limb and other neuroscientists have been discovering hints of what
goes on in an improvising brain. There's a distinctive pattern
in the prefrontal cortex, which seems to be the seat
of consciousness, memory, morality, humor, and even the sense of self.
But the pattern isn't that the prefrontal cortex is lighting
(16:45):
up during improvisation. On the contrary, broad areas of it
shutting down the dorsolateral areas either side of the top
of your forehead and the lateral orbital areas behind your eyes.
Improvisers are escaping their internal restraints. They're letting go. Most
of us go through our days holding back our mental
(17:07):
impulses to swear or la shout. All this requires a
degree of self control, so that filtering is a good thing.
That you could have too much of a good thing,
says Charles Limb. Too much filtering can squash our creativity.
Improvisers shut down their inner critics and allow new ideas
(17:29):
to flow out. The improvising brain is disinhibited, although not
so crudely as the drunk brain. That is why improvisers
can produce flashes of pure brilliance. It's also why improvisation
feels so risky. A script can seem protective, like a
(17:52):
bulletproof vest, but sometimes it's more like a strait jacket.
Improvising unleashes creativity. It feels fresh and honest and personal.
Above all, it turns a monologue into a dialogue. Miles Davis,
the legendary jazz trumpeter, talked about improvisation as the freedom
and space to hear things. That's a fascinating turn of phrase.
(18:17):
Not the freedom and space to play things or to
do things, but to hear things, to be more open
to the sound of your own instrument, the sound of
the group, And that matters for more than just music
or rhetoric, because we're scared of improvising, and we're not
just afraid to improvise on stage, we're also becoming afraid
(18:39):
to improvise face to face. The sociologist Sherry Turkle has
been interviewing young people about their communications through smartphone apps.
It wasn't just because the apps were convenient or addictive,
although they could be both. Texting is attractive because traditional
conversations feel scary. I'll tell you what's wrong with conversation.
(19:02):
One high school senior told Sherry Turkle it takes place
in real time, and you can't control what you're going
to say to see. This student is so used to
being able to proof freed every message that he's become
scared of simply talking and seeing what happens. But then
(19:25):
perhaps he's right to be scared. We should ask Gerald Ratner.
Gerald Ratna learned to laugh at himself a long time ago,
but he rejects the idea that somehow his mistake all
worked out for the best. People ask me if I'm
glad I said what I said? They're ridiculous. How could
I be grateful? I lost everything? Ratna plunged into depression.
(19:51):
He has bounced back in some ways. He had some success,
setting up a chain of health clubs and even an
online jewelry business. But the truth is that there was
nothing he could do, no success that he could achieve
that would ever be as famous as his gaff. The
for a good joke destroyed his business, and it nearly
(20:13):
destroyed him. Who would want to risk the fate of
Gerald Ratner when they could follow the meticulous example of
the young Martin Luther King. It seems obvious that when
speaking in public, we should prepare as diligently, as King
did when he drafted and memorized his sermons. But the
truth about Gerald Ratner's impromptu remark about his products being
(20:35):
total crap is this. It wasn't impromptu. He chose those
words with care after circulating drafts of the speech to
get comments. He'd used the total crap joke before without
running into problems, and as he prepared to deliver the
speech on a larger stage, he sought advice. His wife
(20:58):
told him to be careful, but others, including a friend
who was one of the most influential figures in the
advertising industry, encouraged him to tell even more daring jokes.
They thought Ratna would sound self deprecating and that his
audience would love the gags, which was true. Those in
the hall that day did love it. But in the
newspapers the next morning, Ratner simply sounded like a millionaire
(21:22):
mocking his struggling customers. When I listened back to Ratner's speech,
I don't hear the mockery at all. I hear something else.
Immediately after saying his own products were crap, Ratner says
our Ratner's shots will never win any awards for design
(21:45):
they're not in the best possible taste. I admit that.
In fact, some people say they can't even see the
jewelry for all the banners and posters smothering the shot windows.
There's a different tone. Suddenly, there's a note of defiance,
even anger. So it's interesting that these shots that everyone
has a good laugh about take more money per square
(22:08):
foot than any other retailer in Europe. The hall is hush, now,
nobody's laughing. Why, because we give the customer what they want.
Gerald Ratner wasn't laughing at his customers. He identified with them.
He thought the business royalty in the hall were laughing
(22:30):
at his customers and his business ideas and him. This
was his response, You laugh at us, he was saying,
but my customers are happy and I'm rich, So who's
laughing now. Ratner's downfall wasn't caused by a lack of preparation,
but by a lack of judgment. Ratna did exactly what
(22:55):
he planned to do. He had simply failed to foresee
the consequences. Improvisation was not to blame. Improvising does expose
us to new and different risks, but even careful preparation
cannot remove Risks entirely. In December nineteen fifty five, Rosa
(23:28):
Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat
on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama to a white man.
As a local church leader with a reputation as an orator,
Martin Luther King was asked to organize a boycott of
Montgomery's buses. He hesitated. He was exhausted. His newborn baby daughter, Joki,
(23:52):
wouldn't stop crying in the night. King asked for time
to mull over the idea of a bus boycott, but
an influential local activist ed Nixon would have no delays.
You ain't got much time to think, said Nixon. You're
in the chair from now on. So it was that
King found himself bounced into leading the Montgomery Improvement Association.
(24:17):
He had to give an inaugural speech, and he had
to give it immediately. Rosa Parks was news, the bus
boycott was news. There wasn't time to spend days redrafting
or consulting the sayings of Plato or Gandy. Doctor King
arrived home from the meeting with Edy, Nixon and the
activists at half past six. He had to head to
(24:37):
the speech venue Holt Street Church at ten to seven.
I had only twenty minutes to prepare the most decisive
speech of my life. I became possessed by fear. King
knew that newspaper men would be there, perhaps even television crews.
And yet just as the stakes were highest, the habit
(24:59):
of meticulous preparation that had served him so well all
his life was useless. He couldn't research, draft, redraft, and memorized.
He had no time. King looked at his watch. Already
five minutes had ticked away while he fretted. Every Sunday
he delivered a sermon based on fifteen hours of hard work.
(25:19):
Now he was about to deliver the most important speech
of his life, and he had just fifteen minutes. He
sketched a couple of thoughts with his hand shaking, pondering
the delicate balance he had to strike between militancy and moderation,
and he prayed that was all the preparation he could
spare before driving to the Holt Street Church. Ten thousand
(25:48):
people stood outside, unable to cram themselves in, listening to
the proceedings via a loud speaker on the roof. For
Montgomery police were therein force, so were the television cameras
pointing at the pulpit as King stepped up and began
to speak. My friends were here this evening for serious business.
(26:10):
The speech is brilliantly described in Taylor Branch, his biography
of King. Instead of the usual careful script, lovingly prepared
and committed to memory, King was groping his way towards
the right words. I think I speak with legal authority,
not that I have any legal authority, but I think
I speak with legal authority behind me. That the law,
(26:33):
the ordinance, the city ordinance, has never been totally clarified.
He had never in his life delivered a sermon with
a line as weak and confused as that one. Fifteen
hours of preparation always ironed out every wrinkle. But King
was finding something more valuable than time to prepare. In
(26:55):
Miles Davis's phrase, the freedom and space to hear things.
As he spoke, King listened to the crowd, feeling out
their response. Speaking in the moment. His early sentences were
experiments grasping for a theme, exploring how each sounded and
how the crowd responded. Each phrase shaped. The phrase that
(27:18):
followed his speech was not a solo. It was a
duet with his audience. After a cautious opening, King talked
of Rosa Parks, of her character and Christian commitment, and
just because she refused to get up, she was arrested.
The crowd murmured their assent. After a pause for breath,
(27:43):
King changed direction. You know, my friends, there comes a
time when people get tired of being trampled over by
the iron feet of a pressure. And suddenly the avalanche began.
A few yells of support became a roar of approval
and anger. The spirit of the crowd was self sustaining,
(28:04):
a torrent of emotion and sound, which grew stronger. Just
when it seemed the sound must fade further, waves crashed
in from the thousands of voices outside. The cheering was everywhere.
Then King spoke up again. With the help of the crowd,
he found his theme. There comes a time when people
(28:24):
get tired of getting pushed out of the glittering sunlight
of life's jula and left standing amidst the piercing chill
of an Alpine November, amid the sound of feet thundering
on the church's wooden floorboards, King was forced to pause.
As with any extemporaneous performance, Kings was imperfect, with some
(28:47):
meandering lines and a limp conclusion. Despite all that, these
improvised remarks were easily the finest speech that King had
yet given. People who had seen him speak many times
were astonished. He spoke with so much force. Nobody, said
one witness, nobody dreamed of marks In Luther King being
(29:10):
that sort of man under these conditions. King himself, one suspects,
had not truly understood what he could unleash once he
let himself go. He didn't want to improvise the speech,
preferred the script for when the situation gave him no alternative.
He came to understand what older preachers had told him,
(29:32):
open your mouth and God will speak for you. Seven
and a half years later, in nineteen sixty three, he
found himself faced with speaking to a quarter of a
million people who'd marched on Washington d C. He knew
he'd be live on every national television network. This speech
(29:53):
demanded the preparation of old It was too important to
be left to chance. Doctor King and his aids had
prepared a typewritten script, unpromisingly titled Normals Never Again. King's
team was trying to navigate complex waters with the text
of this address. King needed to reach out to white allies,
(30:15):
to rebut the hardline approach of Malcolm X and others,
and to respond to President Kennedy's Civil Rights Bill. Was
the bill to be criticized as inadequate or welcomed as progress.
There was much politicking behind the scenes, and each speaker
had been allotted only seven minutes. There was no exception
for Martin Luther King. All of these constraints called for
(30:40):
precise drafting. He knew that he would be speaking with
a vast statue of Abraham Lincoln behind him, a hundred
years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had declared the enslaved people
of the United States to be free. So King decided
(31:00):
to open with an artful echo of Lincoln's Great Gettysburg
Address and referred to the Emancipation Proclamation as a promissory
note on which America had defaulted. As a script normal
syne never again was over formal and flawed. Parts of
it read like poetry. Others were clumsy legal ease. As
(31:25):
King read out the speech, it did not stir the soul,
but then toward the end came a biblical flourish. And
we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters,
and righteousness like a mighty stream. And as King said
those words, approving cheers rippled up and down them all.
(31:49):
Then King looked down at his script. The next line
was pretentious and limp. He couldn't bring himself to say
the words, and so instead he started to improvise, telling
the crowd go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama.
Behind him stood his friends and colleagues. They knew that
(32:13):
King had stepped away from the script, and at the
moment of maximum danger and maximum opportunity, the climax of
his speech, he was looking for something to say, something
that would touch the people there at the mall and
watching across the country. Hellaa that the dream lying, yelled
(32:34):
the singer Mahalia Jackson. It was a reference to something
doctor King had been preaching of late to church congregations,
a dream of a brighter future in which whites and
blacks lived in harmony. And as he stood, facing the
television cameras and the vast expectant crowd looking for inspiration,
(32:55):
Martin Luther King heard Mahalia Jackson, and he began to
create on the fly, one of the most famous speeches
of the century about how he had a dream, a
dream that America would live up to the words all
Men are Created Equal, A dream of an oasis of
freedom and justice. A dream that little black boys and
(33:20):
black girls would be able to join hands with little
white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. Normalcy
never again was forgotten. The conclusion to the speech that
shook the twentieth century wasn't in the script. The best
(33:44):
things usually aren't. Key sources for this episode include Taylor
Branch's book Parting the Waters, Martin Luther King Junior's autobiography,
and my own book MESSI The Power of Disorder to
(34:05):
Transform Our Lives. For a full list of references, see
Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me
Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley
and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is
the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Bartin edited the scripts.
(34:28):
Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales Helena Bonham Carter,
and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazzar Elderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutterridge,
Rachel Hanshaw, copenaholbrook Smith, Greg Lockett, Miss Siamunroe and Rufus Wright.
This show wouldn't have been possible without the work of
(34:49):
mil LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carlie mcgliory,
Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor and Yellow Lakhan and
Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
If you like the show, please remember rate, share, and
(35:11):
review
Host
Tim Harford
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.