Street speaking is widely different from hall lecturing and this the reason so many speakers succeed at one and fail at the other. The hall lecturer opens easily and paves the way for the treatment of his theme, but the street speaker would get no crowd or a small one by such a method.
He must plunge at once into the heart of his talk and put as much energy into addressing the first dozen as when his crowd grows larger. As soon as he adapts his voice and manner to the size of his crowd the crowd will stop growing. The only way to add another hundred is to talk as if they were already there.
A hall lecture should have one subject and stick to it because the audience is the same in its composition throughout. At a street meeting about half the audience is constantly changing, and hopping from one question to another has many advantages. A street speaker must be interesting or he will lose his crowd, and the better his crowd the sooner he will lose it. If he is talking to “bums” they will stay whether he talks or not, but if he has an audience of people who have other things awaiting their attention they will pass on the moment the speaker loses his grip.
This is why telling stories at street meetings is not so good a thing as some unobserving speakers suppose. No matter how good a story is, it has a tendency to break up a crowd. I noticed it often before I caught the reason. A story always carries its own conclusion and it thereby makes a sort of a breaking off place in a speech like the end of a chapter in a book. At the end of a good story the audience will laugh and take a moments rest. For about a minute your spell is broken and men whom you might of held the rest of the evening remember during that minute that they have stayed too long already. Of course this does not apply to a story of two or three sentences thrust into the middle of an argument without breaking or closing it. Longer stories may be used to advantage but they are not very useful to a speaker who has much to say and knows how to say it. Of course wit is a valuable factor but wit shows itself in a lightning dart, not in a long story.
The street speaker should use short sentences of simple words. He should avoid oratory and talk as if he were telling something to another man and in dead earnest about it. I have watched a man talk to another man on the street forgetting the outside world completely and using forceful language and eloquent gestures. If such a man could only talk like that to an audience he would be surprised at his own success. Put him before an audience and his natural manner disappears, he shuffles his feet, does not know what to do with his hands, and brings forth a voice nobody ever heard him use before.
DISTURBERS
As to people who disturb your meeting, if you are speaking in hobo-dom you may well despair. There are so many drunks, that interruptions are constant and irrepressible, and every interruption breaks your grip on the audience. Moral: Don’t speak there.
On a corner where you get an audience of typical working men disturbances are rare and in a majority of cases if they are not easily suppressed it is lack of tact on the part of the speaker. A speaker should never try to be smart at the expense of a man in the audience, even when he speaks out of his turn. A courteous explanation of why you wish him to keep his questions until after your speech is much better. If he persists after that, he is either an ignoramus or drunk. If drunk ask two or three of your supporters in the audience to lead him off down the street. If he is a natural fool the problem is not so easy. But if you keep unbroken courtesy and he keeps up his unprovoked interruptions some indignant person standing near will abate the nuisance with a punch in the eye—which is the most effectual method in such cases.
POLICE INTERFERENCE
There is no easier task in the world than to defeat the police authorities in a free speech fight. In the few cases where we lose it is our own fault. The police are usually acting under orders when making arrests and nothing is gained by making bitter enemies of them unless they treat you brutally.