This ques­tion came from two dif­fer­ent inquir­ers, one being the Library of Con­gress. On National Pub­lic Radio’s Week­end Edi­tion (Sat­ur­day, Jan­u­ary 26, 2008), Scott Simon read some­thing he called “A Time­less Polit­i­cal Speech.” You can lis­ten to it at the Week­end Edi­tion Sat­ur­day page of NPR’s web site. Simon said it was writ­ten by Andrew Parker Nevin, Prince­ton Class of 1895, and that it was printed in the Oct. 28, 1905 issue of the Prince­ton Alumni Weekly.

How­ever, the cita­tion given with the story was wrong. In A. Parker Nevin’s alumni file I was able to find a copy of “An Address for All Occa­sions” which was pub­lished in the PAW of 14 August 1936 on page 9. The edi­to­r­ial com­ment on the top of the page describes this print­ing as “res­ur­rect­ing” the speech, so I assume it was printed in some ear­lier PAW or Princeton-based pub­li­ca­tion, but I was unable to find any other evi­dence of the first pub­li­ca­tion. Another note in Nevin’s alumni file said that it was pub­lished some time after his death in 1926. An online search sug­gests to me that it may have also been pub­lished in Harper’s in Decem­ber 1951 as well. (Read the full text by click­ing on the image here to open the image in a new win­dow.) I lis­tened to part of the NPR story while read­ing along with the speech in the 1936 PAW. It is not exactly word-for-word, but is def­i­nitely the same speech.

Sin­cerely,

Jen­nifer M. Cole