Carefully arranged on an end table just below a window in the office of President Glenn McConnell ’69, a small gold medal about the size of a penny glistens in the late afternoon sun.
McConnell picks up the medal. It is attached to one end of a pocketwatch chain that belonged to McConnell’s grandfather. Both objects hold special meaning to him. One is a reminder of family. The other, a symbol of the liberal arts and sciences education he received at the College.
The medal was awarded to McConnell during his senior year for winning the Robert Worth Bingham Oratorical Contest. An annual tradition dating to 1907, the speech competition identified the best student rhetorician as decided by a panel of College faculty.
The 14-karat gold medal bears the College seal on its face. The back is inscribed with the name of the award, the year and the winner’s name.
McConnell has kept the medal close all these years. It was sometimes tucked away in his pocket when he served in the South Carolina Senate. When he moved into Randolph Hall last summer, he picked out a special spot to display it.
“It’s such a beautiful medal,” he says, rubbing his thumb over its smooth surface. “I just didn’t want it sitting in some drawer.”
You can admire the medal from its perch on the end table and look out the window across the Cistern Yard to Porters Lodge, where McConnell delivered his winning speech.
But there would be no more winners after 1969. McConnell is believed to be the last recipient of the Bingham medal.
Now, some 108 years after it was first awarded at the College and 46 years after the tradition faded into history, the Bingham medal – or something like it – could be coming back.
“A Household Term”
Winning the Bingham medal was a big deal.
The Charleston newspaper announced the competition in advance and printed the results and sometimes the text of the winning speech. The medal winner represented the College in a statewide oratory contest and was invited to deliver the speech to a campus audience. The recipient also got to hear his name announced at commencement and see it listed in the event program.
The award’s namesake gave the medal an air of prestige. Robert Worth Bingham was a well-known judge, politician and publisher of The Courier-Journal newspaper in Louisville, Ky.
It’s unclear exactly how the award program came to be, but the archive materials in the College’s Special Collections offer a clue: Bingham was a close friend of Harrison Randolph, president of the College from 1897 to 1945.
Bingham and Randolph had been fraternity brothers in Alpha Tau Omega at the University of Virginia in the early 1890s. College archives include correspondence from the 1910s through the 1930s in which the two men address each other warmly, discuss their families and make plans to get together.
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Bingham as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. But even as Bingham’s public profile and professional obligations grew, he continued to support the award program.
After Bingham died in 1937, Randolph reached out to Bingham’s son, Barry Bingham Sr., who had succeeded his father as publisher of the Louisville newspaper. Randolph wrote Bingham to ask if the family still wished to continue giving the oratory award at the College in light of the patriarch’s passing.
“At the College of Charleston, ‘Bingham’ contest has become synonymous with ‘oratorical’ contest and it has made, to my deep satisfaction, the name of your father a household term in this old city,” Randolph wrote.
Bingham wrote back that the award had been very important to his father and that continuing it would be a fitting memorial to him. And so, as the College grew in the ensuing years, many students continued to aspire to win the Bingham medal.
The rules for the speech competition, which was open only to male students, went largely unchanged over time. A 1947 letter in the College archives spells out the contest’s three basic rules: The speech must be original, must not exceed 10 minutes in length and must not include more than 250 words of quoted material.
A Courageous Speech
One student who knew the contest rules well was Francis William Sturcken ’51. He had won the award in 1948 and 1950. There had been other two-time winners, but no one had ever taken home three Bingham medals.
In 1951, Sturcken set out to be the first when he delivered to the judges a passionate condemnation of racial segregation titled “The Liquid South.” In it, Sturcken, a Charleston native, challenged the College’s segregation policies and those of other educational institutions of the era. Given Charleston’s racial climate in 1951, the speech was controversial. Sturcken was named the winner of the Bingham award that year, but the reaction on campus and locally was more muted than it had been after his two previous wins, according to Sturcken’s personal papers, which he donated to the College’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture in 2001.
Sturcken went on to earn a master’s in speech and theater from Catholic University and serve in the U.S. Army. He later earned a doctorate in speech, theater and television and taught at UCLA and Southwest Minnesota State University.
While Sturcken’s 1951 speech received scant attention locally, it still caught the eye of Julius Waties Waring ’00, a prominent federal judge in Charleston involved in several early civil rights legal cases.
Impressed by Sturcken’s convictions and his courage to take on the controversial topic, Waring mailed copies of the speech to friends and colleagues around the country. The speech was soon reprinted in major national newspapers, including the New York Herald Tribune. Sturcken received letters of praise from strangers as far away as California.
Another admirer of the speech was Benjamin Elijah Mays, a South Carolina native and president of Morehouse College in Atlanta from 1940 to 1967. Mays wrote a column about Sturcken’s speech, praising the College student for speaking out. Mays hailed the fact that the speech had been recognized for an award, which he took to be a sign of progress on race relations in the South.
Karen Chandler, director of the College’s arts management program, was director of the Avery Research Center in 2001 when Sturcken donated his personal papers, including a typed manuscript of his 1951 speech. She remembers her surprise when Sturcken showed up at the Avery Research Center while visiting campus for his 50th class reunion. He told her the story of what had transpired 50 years earlier.
“I was so interested in his speech and how courageous he was,” Chandler says. “The historical weight of what he had written and what he had done and the reaction from these civil rights leaders was just amazing.”
Sturcken’s donation had only two stipulations, Chandler recalls: “He really wanted Avery to have these papers, and he didn’t want a lot of fanfare.”
Sturcken died in 2006.
The Last Bingham Medal
The Bingham award program continued uninterrupted until 1958. That year, the medal was minted and mailed to the College. But it was never awarded, as the Bingham contest apparently did not take place that year.
The 1958 medal now lies unadorned in a small brown paper box in Special Collections. On the back of the medal, below the words “Won By,” no name is engraved.
College commencement programs from 1958 through 1966 include no mention of a Bingham award winner. Then, in 1967, the Bingham medal made a brief comeback. Alexander Peter Lamis ’68 was the winner that year. He won again in 1968.
As a senior in 1969, McConnell served as student government president, a role that required him to give speeches. He was comfortable in front of audiences, and there were signs even then that he possessed the gift of persuasion that would one day serve him well in politics. But the Bingham contest was no cakewalk. McConnell fretted over it.
“I was headed to law school, so speaking was an area where I knew I needed to polish my skills,” McConnell remembers. “I worked very hard on that speech and practiced it over and over.”
His speech’s topic was the Brezhnev Doctrine, a 1968 Soviet Union foreign policy that affirmed the Soviet Union’s right to intervene in other Communist countries to uphold socialism. He explained how the doctrine conflicted with the more traditional definition of sovereignty – the right of a nation to govern its population, territory and system without outside interference.
“It gave me an opportunity to take what I had learned in political science and European history and apply it to a controversy of that time,” McConnell says, adding that it meant a lot to him to receive an award with such a distinguished history at the College.
But that history ended. And now, nearly a half a century later, McConnell is considering ways to revive the lost tradition.
“It should come back,” he says.
After all, the liberal arts and sciences education that the award symbolized remains as valuable and relevant as ever.
– Ron Menchaca ’98
