A year ago last summer, when I was privately digesting the fact that I had been nominated to the presidency of the Modern Language Association of America, I happened to be sitting at the daily luncheon table with a group of teachers, some of whom were just returning from a meeting of one of the learned societies in the social sciences. The subject turned on presidential addresses and some excellent wit was broken on their demerits. For understandable reasons I kept silence while the conclusion was being arrived at that presidents were elected too late in life. There was bound to be disappointment on the part of younger men when some veteran of the profession of whom they had heard much delivered himself of commonplaces entirely unworthy of his position and of his better self. At this point one member of the group, whose own lectures are a theme of admiration, made the suggestion laughingly that every scholar who gave any promise of being ultimately chosen by his colleagues to such an office be required to write a presidential address in his younger years against the day when his talent might be required of him on an occasion like the present.

Three weeks ago this evening, Edward R. Murrow, on his televised “Small World” program, asked two distinguished poets if they could cite any instance of a poem directly affecting history. The distingished poets had no answer, I am sorry to say. They had a chance, literally, to tell the world; but, in the language of baseball, they muffed it. Yet there is a wonderfully clear instance of a poem directly affecting history—making history, indeed—and this is the subject of my paper.

Some fifteen months have passed since I last reported directly to you on the progress of the Foreign Language Program at our unseasonable September meeting in Wisconsin. At that time I had been Director of the FL Program just one month, after five years as a staff member. Today I report again, although extraordinary circumstances have persuaded me to vacate the directorship, temporarily at least. I am called upon for an evaluation of the FL Program from its inception in 1952 to the present. Lest you think a post-mortem is implied, I hasten to state emphatically that the FL Program is a continuing and organic function of the MLA, indeed, of the entire profession of teachers of modern foreign languages, and, I venture to add, of all elements in American society with an interest in strengthening education.

It is a pleasure today to congratulate you upon three quarters of a century of unique and distinguished national service. During all of this time your Association has been dedicated to the precept that communication is the very essence of cooperative society. You have pioneered the effort to advance literary and linguistic studies in our schools and colleges, sometimes in the face of apathy and even antagonism.

The main conclusion I draw from my study of the American high school can be summed up very quickly. Based upon personal visits to fifty-five high schools from coast to coast and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, this conclusion is that no radical change in the basic pattern of American secondary education is needed in order to make our high school as satisfactory as the best I have seen.