ABSTRACT
Two days shy of Oliver Wendell Holmes ninety-fourth birthday; he died on March 6, 1935. His dear wife had predeceased him by six years, and he had never fathered children. In his will, Holmes had left some mementos for the public. They were found in a safety deposit box which his executor opened after the great man's death. We could therefore be led to believe that Holmes's final public avowal of his character was an unvarnished display of narcissism. Indeed, Holmes had little interest in dwelling glumly on death at all, nor its attendant tropes of forlornness and self-pity. What he desired to speak about, in his final public address, was life. Holmes concluded his radio broadcast with one last bid for civic pedagogy for the citizens of his beloved United States whose regime of constitutional democracy required, in his view, an unflinching ethos of manly spiritedness.
