Founding Words

Bradford Morse

Former Under-Secretary General of the UN and Member of the Center’s Honorary Board of Trustees.

Delivered on October 3, 1986 at The Concord School of Philosophy & Literature, on the occasion of the founding of the Center for American Studies at Concord. The inauguration was attended by a Concordium of local, national and global guests and friends, including Fulbright Scholars representing 21 nations.

Concord is a unique community in these United States. It was the very first inland community in what is now a continental nation. It is appropriately called the “Birth-Place of Our Nation,” the town in which the first shots of resistance were fired in the American Revolution, the War of Independence. And soon after that conflict began, the town found time to build, with its other hand, the foundations of peace, education. Harvard College, occupied by the Continental Troops, moved to this small community and boarded its students in your homes.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the town was the site of a Cultural Revolution of perhaps equal proportions to its political act. Inspired by the genius of Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and others, Transcendentalism conveyed something of the American Spirit, the American Genius to people around the world, including Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Martin Luther King on our own shores. ‘We need uncommon schools; the village must become the university.’ Thoreau’s words you have wisely adopted and are building upon.

Through the years, beginning in 1776, when Concord became the first community in the country to call for a Constitutional Convention to establish a government of the people, the town has become a symbol of the very best of American democracy and values. And now, two centuries later, you are faced with the question of how to carry this heritage on. I think, if the studies you envision can arise in this community, that lessons can be extracted which will have significance not only for us as Americans, but for foreign scholars, statesmen, and citizens of the world. I’m glad, indeed, to be here this evening to help you lay the foundation stone for the work.

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