Memorized Debates

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To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Once again the members of a Harvard Debating Team are to read speeches in a radio debate. The short time allowed to each speaker and the need to hold an impersonal audience by rapid appeals to the attention make necessary set, memorized speeches. The sacrifice is made for the sake of the radio, which like the talkies is supposed to stand for progress.

A witty CRIMSON editorial note would have us confuse radio debating with a telegraphic golf match. The identification is not at all inapt. The one meeting is about as artificial and provides about as effective a clash as the other. Both suffer from a lack of common grounds. In debating it is the prerogative of the affirmative to set the issues, and the duty of the negative to follow them. The memorized speech can follow nothing but its predestined path, no matter how little it may bear on the points in dispute.

The speaker who looks up arguments, arranges them in outline form, and reels them off in more or less impassioned fashion is engaged in exposition; he is not really debating. For the essence of debating is give and take. The speakers should bring up a point, toss it back and forth, crush it between two fires, restore it to life, balance it against another factor, and present it to their audience in fresh relationships. To facilitate this contact each speaker formerly spoke twice. Now rarely more than one speaker to a side speaks for the second time, and the non-memorized part of his rebuttal is cut to two or three poor minutes. The memorized speech, because it does not lend itself to an effective exchange of arguments, has taken the heart, or rather the head, out of debating. All that is left is the memory. Henry C. Friend '31.