January 19, 2024 • 36 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 American Fiction, Westworld and The Hunger Games) and jewelry store owner Gerald Ratner offer a stark contrast on when you should stick to the script - and when you should take a risk.
We're taking a short rest on Cautionary Tales this January. We'll be back again in February, with a treasure chest of gripping, hair-raising tales for your ears. While you wait, we wanted to share some classic episodes from the Cautionary Vault - this is one of our favorites.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This week was Martin Luther King Junior Day, which
reminded me that one of my favorite ever episodes of
Cautionary Tales was about Martin Luther King Junior's most famous
(00:35):
speech and about an infamous speech given by a very
different character, Gerald Ratner. A confession. I am a public
speaking nerd. I competed in international debate competitions at school
and once had a career plan to write books about
public speaking. I find the art of public speaking fascinating
(00:57):
and much misunderstood. And the more I looked into the
story of these two speeches, each of which defined a
man's career, the more I thought to myself, we're thinking
about this all wrong. We have a marvelous slate of
Cautionary Tales coming in twenty twenty four, but I hope
you'll forgive me if I and the Cautionary Tales team
(01:20):
take a short rest to recharge our batteries. We will
be back with new episodes in February. But until then,
here is another chance to hear the astonishing talents of
Jeffrey Wright in Martin Luther King Junior, the Jewelry Genius,
and the art of public speaking. One late summer day
(01:50):
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 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.
(02:15):
The official program had been long and packed with speeches,
but a quarter of a million people defied the heat
as they waited. 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 toward the
intransigent capital itself. The Mall usually dwarfs anything on a
(02:40):
human scale. Not that afternoon. The gospel singer Mahalia Jackson sang,
I've been butked 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,
(03:03):
but a national audience he had never had before and
might never have again. Doctor King had spent the night
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
(03:26):
those words had to be perfect. But now let's leave
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,
(03:51):
and he didn't have a dream. He had a nightmare.
I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. Gerald
(04:23):
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
(04:44):
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. Dr King and mister Ratner are a
(05:08):
study in con trusts. 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,
(05:28):
a group of six jewelry shops. Ratner worked behind the
counter for ten 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
(05:52):
a price tag. The 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.
(06:16):
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.
(06:44):
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, vast and trimmed with
gold and red velvet, perhaps the grandest auditorium in London. Understandably,
Ratner started his speech looking nervous. He was a self
(07:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
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 knows you might
say it's not in the best possible taste, but we
sold a quarter a million of them last year.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
The audience love it, They laugh, They clap. Ratner looks braver.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
We also do this nice sherry to canter. It's cut
glass and it comes complete with six glasses on a
silver plated tray that your butler could bring you in
he serve you drinks on.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Oh you're too funny, Gerald. Some other people in the
audience would have employed butler's, but Ratner's customers certainly couldn't
afford one any more than they could afford a genuine
antique book, a decanter in a silver tray for your butler.
Nice one, and.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
It's really only cost four pounds ninety five pence.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
That's about twelve dollars in today's money.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
People say to me, how can you sell this for
such a low price? I say, because it's total craft.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Moll laughter, more applause. Ratner's 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 a story. The
jokes that have played so brilliantly on the day did
(09:04):
not go down so well when served up cold on
the front page age 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 mocking his own
customers for their crass taste. And who would buy an
(09:27):
engagement ring from a company whose own boss had declared
their products were crap sales ebbed Ratner's group shares fell
nearly ninety percent between the speech in April and Christmas.
Ratner was sacked from his own company. Inevitably, they changed
(09:47):
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 one word
(10:11):
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 in retrospect?
(10:38):
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. Martin's father was
(11:00):
a preacher, and the boy took to the craft of
speechmaking early. At the age of fourteen, Martin traveled across
Georgia on a bus to compete in public speaking contest.
On the way home to Atlanta, things went sour, very sour.
King and his friend were sitting near the front of
(11:20):
the bus with their teacher, 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 seats.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
You buys, move it, get yourself to the back.
Speaker 4 (11:37):
Of the bus.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
There was a pause. Dr King later said.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
We didn't move quickly enough to suit him, so he
began cursing us.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
The driver was now hurling every racist slur you can
imagine and threatening to call the police.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Harm 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.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
It was dark outside for ninety miles. There was nothing
to look at but the seat on the bus filled
with white people.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
It was late at night, and I was tired, but
that wasn't the point. It was the humiliation.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Martin, remember, was just fourteen years old.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
That night will never leave my memory. It was the
angriest I've ever been in my life. Suddenly I realized,
you don't count. You're nobody.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
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 that unforgettable humiliation, but with
the triumphant day that had preceded it. The long and
(13:07):
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 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
(13:27):
example of Lincoln, imbued with the spirit of Christ, they
will cast down the last barrier to perfect freedom. That
speech showed off the teenage King's approach. He would research
draft redraft memorize, finally deliver with passion. King used the
(13:49):
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 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
(14:09):
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. 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
(14:33):
go along. Once he secured that job, he stuck to
that winning formula. King's responsibilities as a 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
(14:54):
on his doctorate for three hours before his pregnant wife,
Coreta woke to join him for breakfast. All the while
King lavished enormous effort on his sermons. He would begin
drafting on Tuesday and continued to research and draft throughout
the week, drawing ideas from Plato Aquinas freud Gandy. As
(15:17):
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, 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
(15:42):
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. Martin Luther King
was one of the greatest speechmakers to grace the English language,
and at first it might seem obvious why, as well
(16:06):
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, the
truth is way more interesting than that, So why would
(16:29):
a public speaker set aside the script or memorized remarks
and speak off the cuff. I asked Charles Limb. He's
a neuroscientist, a surgeon, a jazz saxophonist, and one of
very few people who's actually studied the improvising brain. Lim
(16:50):
researches people as they improvise inside brain scanners called fmur
eye machines. Imagine sliding on your back so that your
head is surrounded by a giant, white plastic doughnut with
the feel of a vintage iPod. The scanner is generating
powerful magnetic fields to illuminate the contrast between oxygen rich
(17:12):
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 random words.
If you're a jazz musician, you have to tap out
riffs on a plastic keyboard lying across your knees and
(17:34):
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, 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,
(17:58):
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 up during improvisation. On
the contrary, broad areas of it shutting down the dorso
lateral areas either side of the top of your forehead
(18:19):
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 impulses to
swear or lash out. All this requires a degree of
self control, so that filtering is a good thing. That
(18:41):
you can 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 to
flow out. The improvising brain is disinhibited, although not so
crudely as the drunk brain. That is why improvisers can
(19:02):
produce flashes of pure brilliance. It's also why improvisation feels
so risk. A script can seem protective, like a bulletproof vest,
but sometimes it's more like a strait jacket. Improvising unleashes creativity.
(19:24):
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. Not
the freedom and space to play things or to do things,
(19:46):
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 to improvise
face to face. The sociologist Sherry Turkle has been interviewing
(20:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
I'll tell you what's wrong with conversation.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
One high school senior told Sherry Turkele.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
It takes place in real time, and you can't control
what you're going to say.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
What you're going to say. This student is so used
to being able to proofread every message that he's become
scared of simply talking and seeing what happens. But then
perhaps he's right to be scared. We should ask Gerald Ratner.
(20:55):
Gerald Ratner 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? Ratner plunged into depression.
(21:15):
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
search for a good joke destroyed his business, and it
(21:37):
nearly 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 Dratner's impromptu remark about his products
(21:59):
being total crap is this. It wasn't impromptu. He chose
those words with care to circulating drafts of the speech
to get comments. He had 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.
(22:22):
His wife told him to be careful that 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
(22:46):
a millionaire 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 are.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Ratner's shots will never win any awards. Design 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.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
There's a different tone. Suddenly, there's a note of defiance,
even anger.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
So it's interesting that these shots that everyone has a
good laugh about take more money per square foot than
any other retailer in Europe.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
The hall is hush, now, nobody's laughing.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Why, because we give the customer what they want.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Gerald Ratner wasn't laughing at his customers. He identified with them.
He thought the business royalty in the hall were laughing
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
(24:09):
laughing now. Ratner's downfall wasn't caused by a lack of preparation,
but by a lack of judgment. Ratner did exactly what
he planned to do. He had simply failed to foresee
the consequences. Improvisation was not to blame. Improvising does expose
(24:30):
us to new and different risks, but even careful preparation
cannot remove Risks entirely. In December nineteen fifty five, Rosa
(24:53):
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, Yoki,
(25:17):
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, Edie 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.
(25:41):
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 Gandhy. Doctor King
arrived home from the meeting with Edie Nixon and the
activists at half past six. He had to head to
(26:02):
the speech venue Holt Street Church at ten to seven.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
I had only twenty minutes to prepare the most decisive
speech of my life. I became possessed by fear.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
King knew that newspaper men would be there, perhaps even
television crews. And yet just as the stakes were highest,
the habit 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.
(26:36):
Already five minutes had ticked away while he fretted. Every
Sunday he delivered a sermon based on fifteen hours of
hard work. 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
(26:58):
and moderation. Then he prayed that was all the preparation
he could spare before driving to the Holt Street Church.
Ten thousand people stood outside, unable to cram themselves in,
listening to the proceedings via a loud speaker on the roof.
(27:20):
The Montgomery police were their in force. So were the
television cameras pointing at the pulpit as King stepped up
and began to speak.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
My friends, we're here this evening for serious business.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
The speech is brilliantly described in Taylor Branch's biography of King.
Instead of the usual careful script, lovingly prepared and committed
to memory, King was groping his way towards the right words.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
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, the ordinance, the
city ordinance, has never been totally clarified.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
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
Miles Davis's phrase, the freedom and space to hear things.
(28:25):
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
followed his speech was not a solo. It was a
(28:47):
duet with his audience. After a cautious opening, King talked
of Rosa Parks, of her character and Christian commitment, and.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Just because she refused to get up, she was arrested.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
The crowd murmured their assent. After a pause for breath,
King changed irec you.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
Know, my friends, there comes a time when people get
tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
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, a torrent of emotion and sound,
which grew stronger. Just when it seemed the soundless fade,
further waves crashed in from the thousands of voices outside.
(29:39):
The cheering was everywhere. Then King spoke up again. With
the help of the crowd, he found his theme.
Speaker 4 (29:47):
There comes a time when people get tired of getting
pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and
left standing amidst the piercing chill of an alpine November.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
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 meandering lines and a limp conclusion.
Despite all that, these improvised remarks were easily the finest
(30:20):
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 Martin
Luther King being that sort of man under these conditions.
King himself, one suspects, had not truly understood what he
(30:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Him, open your mouth and God will speak for you.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Seven and a half years later, in nineteen sixty three,
he found himself faced with see King 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 demanded the preparation of old It was too
important to be left to chance. Doctor King and his
(31:25):
aides had prepared a typewritten script, unpromisingly.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Titled almost Never Again.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
King's team was trying to navigate complex waters with the
text of this address. King needed to reach out to
white allies, 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
(31:55):
each speaker had been allotted only seven minutes. There was
no exception for Martin Luther King. All of these constraints
called for precise drafting. He knew that he would be
speaking King with a vast statue of Abraham Lincoln behind him,
one hundred years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had declared the
(32:18):
enslaved people of the United States to be free. So
King decided to open with an artful echo of Lincoln's
Great Gettysburg Address and referred to the Emancipation Proclamation as
a promisory note on which America had defaulted. As a
script normal scene never again was over formal and flawed.
(32:43):
Parts of it read like poetry. Others were clumsy legalese.
As King read out the speech, it did not stir
the soul, but then toward the end came a biblical flourish.
Speaker 4 (32:58):
We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters,
and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
And as King said those words, approving cheers rippled up
and down the mall. 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.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
Back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Behind him stood his friends and colleagues. They knew that
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
(33:54):
watching across the country.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Tell him about the dream.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Mine, yelled 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
(34:19):
for inspiration, 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.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
Words all Men are Created.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
Equal, A dream of an oasis of freedom and justice.
A dream that little black boys and black girls would
be able to join hands with little white boys and
white girls as sisters and brothers. Normalcy never again was forgotten.
(35:02):
The conclusion to the speech that shook the twentieth century
wasn't in the script. The best things usually aren't. Key
sources for this episode include Taylor Branch's book Parting the Waters,
(35:24):
Martin Luther King Junior's autobiography, and my own book MESSI
The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives. For a
full list of references, see Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales
is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's
produced by Ryan Dilly and Marilyn Rust. The sound design
(35:46):
and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia
Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of Cautionary
Tales Helena Bonham Carter, and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nizzar Elderazi
Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, copenaholbrook Smith, Greg Lockett,
(36:07):
Messea Munroe, and Rufus Wright. This show wouldn't have been
possible without the work of Mea LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fine,
John Schnaz, Carlimgliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor, Aniela
La Khan, and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production
(36:29):
of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember
to rate, share, and review.
Pushkin. This week was Martin Luther King Junior Day, which
reminded me that one of my favorite ever episodes of
Cautionary Tales was about Martin Luther King Junior's most famous
(00:35):
speech and about an infamous speech given by a very
different character, Gerald Ratner. A confession. I am a public
speaking nerd. I competed in international debate competitions at school
and once had a career plan to write books about
public speaking. I find the art of public speaking fascinating
(00:57):
and much misunderstood. And the more I looked into the
story of these two speeches, each of which defined a
man's career, the more I thought to myself, we're thinking
about this all wrong. We have a marvelous slate of
Cautionary Tales coming in twenty twenty four, but I hope
you'll forgive me if I and the Cautionary Tales team
(01:20):
take a short rest to recharge our batteries. We will
be back with new episodes in February. But until then,
here is another chance to hear the astonishing talents of
Jeffrey Wright in Martin Luther King Junior, the Jewelry Genius,
and the art of public speaking. One late summer day
(01:50):
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 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.
(02:15):
The official program had been long and packed with speeches,
but a quarter of a million people defied the heat
as they waited. 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 toward the
intransigent capital itself. The Mall usually dwarfs anything on a
(02:40):
human scale. Not that afternoon. The gospel singer Mahalia Jackson sang,
I've been butked 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,
(03:03):
but a national audience he had never had before and
might never have again. Doctor King had spent the night
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
(03:26):
those words had to be perfect. But now let's leave
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,
(03:51):
and he didn't have a dream. He had a nightmare.
I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. Gerald
(04:23):
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
(04:44):
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. Dr King and mister Ratner are a
(05:08):
study in con trusts. 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,
(05:28):
a group of six jewelry shops. Ratner worked behind the
counter for ten 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
(05:52):
a price tag. The 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.
(06:16):
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.
(06:44):
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, vast and trimmed with
gold and red velvet, perhaps the grandest auditorium in London. Understandably,
Ratner started his speech looking nervous. He was a self
(07:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
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 knows you might
say it's not in the best possible taste, but we
sold a quarter a million of them last year.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
The audience love it, They laugh, They clap. Ratner looks braver.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
We also do this nice sherry to canter. It's cut
glass and it comes complete with six glasses on a
silver plated tray that your butler could bring you in
he serve you drinks on.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Oh you're too funny, Gerald. Some other people in the
audience would have employed butler's, but Ratner's customers certainly couldn't
afford one any more than they could afford a genuine
antique book, a decanter in a silver tray for your butler.
Nice one, and.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
It's really only cost four pounds ninety five pence.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
That's about twelve dollars in today's money.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
People say to me, how can you sell this for
such a low price? I say, because it's total craft.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Moll laughter, more applause. Ratner's 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 a story. The
jokes that have played so brilliantly on the day did
(09:04):
not go down so well when served up cold on
the front page age 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 mocking his own
customers for their crass taste. And who would buy an
(09:27):
engagement ring from a company whose own boss had declared
their products were crap sales ebbed Ratner's group shares fell
nearly ninety percent between the speech in April and Christmas.
Ratner was sacked from his own company. Inevitably, they changed
(09:47):
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 one word
(10:11):
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 in retrospect?
(10:38):
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. Martin's father was
(11:00):
a preacher, and the boy took to the craft of
speechmaking early. At the age of fourteen, Martin traveled across
Georgia on a bus to compete in public speaking contest.
On the way home to Atlanta, things went sour, very sour.
King and his friend were sitting near the front of
(11:20):
the bus with their teacher, 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 seats.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
You buys, move it, get yourself to the back.
Speaker 4 (11:37):
Of the bus.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
There was a pause. Dr King later said.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
We didn't move quickly enough to suit him, so he
began cursing us.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
The driver was now hurling every racist slur you can
imagine and threatening to call the police.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Harm 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.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
It was dark outside for ninety miles. There was nothing
to look at but the seat on the bus filled
with white people.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
It was late at night, and I was tired, but
that wasn't the point. It was the humiliation.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Martin, remember, was just fourteen years old.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
That night will never leave my memory. It was the
angriest I've ever been in my life. Suddenly I realized,
you don't count. You're nobody.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
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 that unforgettable humiliation, but with
the triumphant day that had preceded it. The long and
(13:07):
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 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
(13:27):
example of Lincoln, imbued with the spirit of Christ, they
will cast down the last barrier to perfect freedom. That
speech showed off the teenage King's approach. He would research
draft redraft memorize, finally deliver with passion. King used the
(13:49):
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 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
(14:09):
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. 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
(14:33):
go along. Once he secured that job, he stuck to
that winning formula. King's responsibilities as a 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
(14:54):
on his doctorate for three hours before his pregnant wife,
Coreta woke to join him for breakfast. All the while
King lavished enormous effort on his sermons. He would begin
drafting on Tuesday and continued to research and draft throughout
the week, drawing ideas from Plato Aquinas freud Gandy. As
(15:17):
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, 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
(15:42):
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. Martin Luther King
was one of the greatest speechmakers to grace the English language,
and at first it might seem obvious why, as well
(16:06):
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, the
truth is way more interesting than that, So why would
(16:29):
a public speaker set aside the script or memorized remarks
and speak off the cuff. I asked Charles Limb. He's
a neuroscientist, a surgeon, a jazz saxophonist, and one of
very few people who's actually studied the improvising brain. Lim
(16:50):
researches people as they improvise inside brain scanners called fmur
eye machines. Imagine sliding on your back so that your
head is surrounded by a giant, white plastic doughnut with
the feel of a vintage iPod. The scanner is generating
powerful magnetic fields to illuminate the contrast between oxygen rich
(17:12):
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 random words.
If you're a jazz musician, you have to tap out
riffs on a plastic keyboard lying across your knees and
(17:34):
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, 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,
(17:58):
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 up during improvisation. On
the contrary, broad areas of it shutting down the dorso
lateral areas either side of the top of your forehead
(18:19):
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 impulses to
swear or lash out. All this requires a degree of
self control, so that filtering is a good thing. That
(18:41):
you can 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 to
flow out. The improvising brain is disinhibited, although not so
crudely as the drunk brain. That is why improvisers can
(19:02):
produce flashes of pure brilliance. It's also why improvisation feels
so risk. A script can seem protective, like a bulletproof vest,
but sometimes it's more like a strait jacket. Improvising unleashes creativity.
(19:24):
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. Not
the freedom and space to play things or to do things,
(19:46):
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 to improvise
face to face. The sociologist Sherry Turkle has been interviewing
(20:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
I'll tell you what's wrong with conversation.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
One high school senior told Sherry Turkele.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
It takes place in real time, and you can't control
what you're going to say.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
What you're going to say. This student is so used
to being able to proofread every message that he's become
scared of simply talking and seeing what happens. But then
perhaps he's right to be scared. We should ask Gerald Ratner.
(20:55):
Gerald Ratner 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? Ratner plunged into depression.
(21:15):
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
search for a good joke destroyed his business, and it
(21:37):
nearly 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 Dratner's impromptu remark about his products
(21:59):
being total crap is this. It wasn't impromptu. He chose
those words with care to circulating drafts of the speech
to get comments. He had 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.
(22:22):
His wife told him to be careful that 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
(22:46):
a millionaire 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 are.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Ratner's shots will never win any awards. Design 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.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
There's a different tone. Suddenly, there's a note of defiance,
even anger.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
So it's interesting that these shots that everyone has a
good laugh about take more money per square foot than
any other retailer in Europe.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
The hall is hush, now, nobody's laughing.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Why, because we give the customer what they want.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Gerald Ratner wasn't laughing at his customers. He identified with them.
He thought the business royalty in the hall were laughing
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
(24:09):
laughing now. Ratner's downfall wasn't caused by a lack of preparation,
but by a lack of judgment. Ratner did exactly what
he planned to do. He had simply failed to foresee
the consequences. Improvisation was not to blame. Improvising does expose
(24:30):
us to new and different risks, but even careful preparation
cannot remove Risks entirely. In December nineteen fifty five, Rosa
(24:53):
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, Yoki,
(25:17):
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, Edie 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.
(25:41):
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 Gandhy. Doctor King
arrived home from the meeting with Edie Nixon and the
activists at half past six. He had to head to
(26:02):
the speech venue Holt Street Church at ten to seven.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
I had only twenty minutes to prepare the most decisive
speech of my life. I became possessed by fear.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
King knew that newspaper men would be there, perhaps even
television crews. And yet just as the stakes were highest,
the habit 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.
(26:36):
Already five minutes had ticked away while he fretted. Every
Sunday he delivered a sermon based on fifteen hours of
hard work. 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
(26:58):
and moderation. Then he prayed that was all the preparation
he could spare before driving to the Holt Street Church.
Ten thousand people stood outside, unable to cram themselves in,
listening to the proceedings via a loud speaker on the roof.
(27:20):
The Montgomery police were their in force. So were the
television cameras pointing at the pulpit as King stepped up
and began to speak.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
My friends, we're here this evening for serious business.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
The speech is brilliantly described in Taylor Branch's biography of King.
Instead of the usual careful script, lovingly prepared and committed
to memory, King was groping his way towards the right words.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
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, the ordinance, the
city ordinance, has never been totally clarified.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
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
Miles Davis's phrase, the freedom and space to hear things.
(28:25):
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
followed his speech was not a solo. It was a
(28:47):
duet with his audience. After a cautious opening, King talked
of Rosa Parks, of her character and Christian commitment, and.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Just because she refused to get up, she was arrested.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
The crowd murmured their assent. After a pause for breath,
King changed irec you.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
Know, my friends, there comes a time when people get
tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
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, a torrent of emotion and sound,
which grew stronger. Just when it seemed the soundless fade,
further waves crashed in from the thousands of voices outside.
(29:39):
The cheering was everywhere. Then King spoke up again. With
the help of the crowd, he found his theme.
Speaker 4 (29:47):
There comes a time when people get tired of getting
pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and
left standing amidst the piercing chill of an alpine November.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
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 meandering lines and a limp conclusion.
Despite all that, these improvised remarks were easily the finest
(30:20):
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 Martin
Luther King being that sort of man under these conditions.
King himself, one suspects, had not truly understood what he
(30:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Him, open your mouth and God will speak for you.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Seven and a half years later, in nineteen sixty three,
he found himself faced with see King 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 demanded the preparation of old It was too
important to be left to chance. Doctor King and his
(31:25):
aides had prepared a typewritten script, unpromisingly.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Titled almost Never Again.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
King's team was trying to navigate complex waters with the
text of this address. King needed to reach out to
white allies, 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
(31:55):
each speaker had been allotted only seven minutes. There was
no exception for Martin Luther King. All of these constraints
called for precise drafting. He knew that he would be
speaking King with a vast statue of Abraham Lincoln behind him,
one hundred years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had declared the
(32:18):
enslaved people of the United States to be free. So
King decided to open with an artful echo of Lincoln's
Great Gettysburg Address and referred to the Emancipation Proclamation as
a promisory note on which America had defaulted. As a
script normal scene never again was over formal and flawed.
(32:43):
Parts of it read like poetry. Others were clumsy legalese.
As King read out the speech, it did not stir
the soul, but then toward the end came a biblical flourish.
Speaker 4 (32:58):
We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters,
and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
And as King said those words, approving cheers rippled up
and down the mall. 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.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
Back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Behind him stood his friends and colleagues. They knew that
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
(33:54):
watching across the country.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Tell him about the dream.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Mine, yelled 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
(34:19):
for inspiration, 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.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
Words all Men are Created.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
Equal, A dream of an oasis of freedom and justice.
A dream that little black boys and black girls would
be able to join hands with little white boys and
white girls as sisters and brothers. Normalcy never again was forgotten.
(35:02):
The conclusion to the speech that shook the twentieth century
wasn't in the script. The best things usually aren't. Key
sources for this episode include Taylor Branch's book Parting the Waters,
(35:24):
Martin Luther King Junior's autobiography, and my own book MESSI
The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives. For a
full list of references, see Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales
is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's
produced by Ryan Dilly and Marilyn Rust. The sound design
(35:46):
and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia
Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of Cautionary
Tales Helena Bonham Carter, and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nizzar Elderazi
Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, copenaholbrook Smith, Greg Lockett,
(36:07):
Messea Munroe, and Rufus Wright. This show wouldn't have been
possible without the work of Mea LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fine,
John Schnaz, Carlimgliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor, Aniela
La Khan, and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production
(36:29):
of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember
to rate, share, and review.
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