Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association — Text and Context

The Senate as Antagonist

Across multiple orations, the United States Senate emerges as the primary foil. Speakers name specific senators—Bacon, Lodge, Heyburn, Hitchcock—who voted for limitations on arbitration treaties. The pattern is consistent: England, France, Germany, and Japan offer unrestricted arbitration; the Senate refuses, always "in the name of honor." This repeated framing turns a legislative body into a symbol of obstruction. The orators do not merely argue for peace; they argue that the Senate’s stance contradicts the nation’s own history of peace leadership, from William Penn to the Hague Conferences. The Senate becomes a character in a morality play about national hypocrisy.

Honor as a Contested Term

The word "honor" appears with striking frequency, often in anaphora. Russell Weisman’s oration, for example, devotes an entire passage to a series of exclamations beginning "Honor? No," each time redefining the term as selfishness, political cloak, or false patriotism. This rhetorical strategy—taking the opponent’s key word and turning it against them—is the collection’s most distinctive feature. The speakers do not reject the concept of national honor; they argue that true honor lies in fidelity to treaties, not in the capacity for war. The excerpts suggest a careful calibration: the orators must appear patriotic while dismantling the militarist version of patriotism.

Economic and Evolutionary Arguments

Several titles point to economic reasoning: "The Waste of War—The Wealth of Peace" and "The Present Status of International Arbitration." The excerpts, however, show that economic arguments are often woven into moral and evolutionary frameworks. Levi T. Pennington’s "The Evolution of World Peace" and Paul B. Blanshard’s "The Evolution of Patriotism" use the language of progress and development, implying that peace is the next stage in human moral evolution. The orators balance appeals to self-interest (war is wasteful) with appeals to conscience (war is barbaric). This dual strategy suggests the audience was expected to be persuaded by both pocketbook and principle.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to the orations as performances: each was delivered before a live audience and judged competitively. The recurring rhetorical patterns—anaphora, direct address to senators, historical analogies—are not merely stylistic choices but evidence of a shared argumentative toolkit. The excerpts do not reveal whether any speaker acknowledged counterarguments or addressed the practical difficulties of arbitration. The collection is best read as a snapshot of a specific reform movement’s persuasive strategies in the years just before World War I.