The 250th Anniversary of America's
Beginning Will soon Be here!
Speech #1
Democracy Emerges Intact
This page and its tabs are under major construction.
Here will be the plans and progress for a series of speeches on America, in anticipation of its 250th birthday in 2026.
I witnessed the first TV broadcasts of the Senate Watergate Hearings in May 1973. I was a high school senior and co-editor and illustrator for the school's newspaper. As Watergate unraveled, I planned to be the next Jeff MacNelly, following in his footsteps at UNC-Chapel Hill. There he'd dropped out of college and continued drawing editorial cartoons for the town's weekly newspaper. He went on to Richmond to win his first Pulitzer prize for cartooning in 1972, and I felt honored to hear him speak briefly twice in the summer of 1973 as a freshman at Chapel Hill, first at a scholastic media workshop and then at a fraternity house.
My Daily Tar Heel cartoon was very clunky in September of 1973, but it expressed well the sentiments of the great majority of students regarding the Watergate tapes and the respect for North Carolina's Senator Sam Ervin, the chairman of the investigative committee.
This review and expanded research will lay the groundwork for other speeches on events often before my time, including the Pilgrims and even the Revolution. There will be events I witnessed like sharecropping and Jim Crow laws and segregation, etc. My intention will be explore early events with great significance to the nation's founding and also to mix in perspectives with events personally witnessed.
