Fifty years ago, journalist Alan Barth, speaking to the assembled class of 1974, imagined the graduates in the far distant year of 2024: “I was aghast when I thought that 50 years from now—who knows?—some of you may have entirely forgotten the identity of your Commencement speaker—and even the substance of what he had to say.” Commencement speakers throughout the history of Sidwell Friends have left an indelible mark on graduates and their families.

In the early years, Thomas Sidwell invited speakers who were prominent educational, political, or religious leaders. The first speaker (1892) was Charles de Garmo, the president of Quaker-founded Swarthmore College, and he was joined by numerous other college deans and presidents in the first decades of graduation ceremonies. Occasionally, Sidwell was able to secure renowned experts in other fields, such as Melvil Dewey (1899), creator of the Dewey Decimal System, and Alexander Graham Bell (1914), inventor of the telephone.

Undoubtedly the most momentous graduation in Thomas Sidwell’s day was in 1907, when President Theodore Roosevelt spoke. TR’s son, Archie, had been enrolled at the School for several years. Sidwell could not have been more excited to introduce the president: “I have felt that … in bringing you together to hear him I would be rendering possibly the greatest service to education I have rendered in the twenty-four years of my connection with the school.” Accordingly, he went all out, inviting friends near and far, and commemorated the occasion by distributing booklets of Roosevelt’s address. 

 

“You should make it your object to be the right kind of boys at home, so that your families will feel a genuine regret, instead of a sense of relief, when you stay away.” PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 1907

History has not forgotten this speech: An excerpt of it is literally etched in stone on one of the markers at the memorial on Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River. The top of the granite marker titled “Youth” includes a line he gave that day: “I want to see you game, boys; I want to see you brave and manly, and I also want to see you gentle and tender.”

As a co-ed school from its opening in 1883, it is unclear what the female half of the graduating class made of this address, titled “The American Boy.” Even President Roosevelt’s ad-libbed open-ended remarks were directed only at the male students. “Yes, I think I have met at least some of you boys,” he playfully said to a row of students. “I believe it was you to whom I gave permission last fall to play football on the White House lot. I believe in play, and a certain amount of noise, but if I remember correctly there was a little too much noise at times.”

While President Roosevelt may have been focused on the males, decades later Thomas Sidwell extended a speaking invitation to a family friend of the Roosevelts—the first female congressional representative from Arizona, Democrat Isabella Greenway, and the School’s first woman Commencement speaker. Unfortunately, Thomas Sidwell died just eight weeks before she gave her address. While speaking to the Class of 1936 of her own inspiring journey, Greenway also took the time to honor the recently departed headmaster: “I feel that every one of you, in a sense, has his very eternal life in your hands. You are the trustees of the time he spent in building up this great institution of learning, standing for all that is best, and standing, most of all, for the three characteristics that are the greatest in the world—simplicity, sincerity, and friendliness.”

During the decades following Sidwell’s death, the School continued to invite leading Quaker speakers, as well as occasional politicians and journalists. A tradition of asking the parent of a senior also took root. In 1968, the School had originally asked senior parent and State Department official Eugene Rostow to speak, but due to his involvement in Vietnam policy and his vigorous defense of the Vietnam War, he was disinvited, and another senior parent, DC Council Chairman John W. Hechinger, was asked to take his place. It was less than two months since riots had decimated parts of DC following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and Hechinger called on the assembled families to “stop hiding behind the shrubbery of suburbia or the cities’ outlying pleasant areas, for you must make a complete turn in your attitudes and values and actively involve yourselves in the rebuilding and revitalization of the core city.”

Less than 10 years later, with Watergate having dominated the students’ young lives, the Class of 1977 invited journalist Bob Woodward to be their speaker. In no uncertain terms, he reminded them of their lives of relative comfort and ease, and of the need to challenge the status quo: “Don’t get so wrapped up in your successes as defined by the Establishment that you wind up failing.” Headmaster Bob Smith later wrote in a letter to Woodward about the event: “As one faculty member said, ‘I’ve been telling them some of those things for years—the difference is they listened to Bob Woodward.’” (He spoke again in 2015, along with his wife, journalist Elsa Walsh, as parents of a graduating senior.)

“I understand from School officials that there are about 97 of you. … The School official also says that you, the graduates, are ‘spirited.’ I have no doubt about that. But I certainly hope you are more spirited than others might think you are." BOB WOODWARD, 1977

A few years later, Alex Haley, the uncle of a member of the Class of 1980, spoke about the transformative power of education. Just after Roots and its mini-series adaptation captivated millions of Americans, Haley’s words rang out behind Zartman House. He told the story of how the gift of a stranger who paid for a year of his father’s college expenses had changed his whole family’s life trajectory. With that act of kindness, his father, long expected to be a Tennessee sharecropper like his siblings, went on to earn a graduate degree from Cornell. That stranger, Haley shared, “was a Quaker. And I was just so moved, knowing that that man had that spirit in him, that is epitomized by Sidwell here.” 

Reflecting on the impact of this serendipitous gift on his own life, Haley went on, “If one is fortunate enough to emerge into society as one of the people who is in a position in one or another way to help other people, then one has a mandate to realize that there is no investment on Earth, as rich in possible dividend, as investment in another human being.”

“I remember very distinctly, after I had done enough research about the period of slavery in this country, I really would have the instinct that every time I came upon the mention of Quakers, I always felt like standing up and cheering because I knew that what they were going to do was something courageous—indeed, beyond courageous—in the time. The people who took the most unpopular of stands at the greatest of costs to themselves, even endangering their own lives to state very explicitly what they did not believe in and what they did believe in.” ALEX HALEY, 1980

These impactful speeches, unfortunately, were not distributed in print form as Thomas Sidwell had done when President Roosevelt was the commencement speaker. That changed in 1992, when Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, was selected as the speaker the year her youngest son graduated, and her powerful remarks were printed into a booklet. Edelman shared lessons that she had written in a letter to her three sons. 

“Listen for the sound of the genuine within yourself. … There are so many noises and competing demands in our lives, that many of us never find out who we are.”MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN, 1992 

“Lesson one,” she told the graduates, “There is no free lunch. Don’t feel entitled to anything you don’t sweat and struggle for.” She advised: “Never work just for money. Money won’t save your soul or build a decent family or help you sleep at night.” And in a lesson that perhaps resonated especially deeply at a Quaker school, “Learn to be quiet enough to hear the sound of the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in other people.” 

Five years later, President Bill Clinton, also the parent of a graduate, was asked to speak. Clinton reflected that after the traditional Meeting for Worship with the Class of 1997 and their families earlier that week, he “left wishing that Congress was in the control of the Quakers.”

 

“Though we raised you for this moment of departure and we are very proud of you, a part of us longs to hold you once more as we did when you could barely walk, to read to you one more time Good Night Moon or Curious George or The Little Engine That Could.” PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON, 1997

His advice to the graduates: “Be humble and proud. Be of service. Be optimistic and grateful. Be brave, and dream your dreams.” Former Vice President Al Gore would take the podium a few years later to address the class of 2001 when his son graduated. Less than six months after giving his historic concession speech, Gore told the graduating class: “Everyone faces adversity. It’s the way you react to it that will set you apart.” A little over a decade later, another vice president spoke at a Sidwell Friends Commencement. A dedicated grandparent, then–Vice President Joe Biden, gave the address in 2012, the year his eldest grand-daughter graduated. He declared: “There’s nothing in the world you are inheriting that is needed more than the ability and the willingness to recognize that people pursue truth in different ways.” 

In recent years, the School has asked alumni to speak to the newest Sidwell Friends graduates. In fact, this year, Commencement speaker Kelsey Wirth ’87, is both an alum as well as the daughter of a past Commencement speaker. At Kelsey Wirth’s graduation in 1987, her father, Senator Tim Wirth observed, “Commencement speakers represent a secular priesthood in America. … We’re not just the keepers of the light—we’re the ones who are supposed to switch the light on.”