Civil Rights Rhetoric and the American Presidency (review)

Civil Rights Rhetoric and the American Presidency is a collection of essays originally presented at the Sixth Annual Conference on Presidential Rhetoric, held in March 2005, at Texas A&M University. The volume consists of an introduction and 11 chapters that provide in-depth analysis of civil rights attitudes and policies by various presidents and their respective administrations. Chapter authors examine discourse by presidents Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. In addition, the book also includes discussion of the nomination of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and, in what is a rather welcome inclusion, the civil rights rhetoric of Eleanor Roosevelt.

The bulk of the introduction contextualizes the chapters and, in acknowledging the inherent difficulties in putting together such a collection, provides a roadmap of broad questions for further research in this area by scholars of rhetoric. In fact, the book editors recognize that the book cannot possibly hope to capture the complex texture of its subject matter. As they note, "civil rights has been and continues to be a pervasive theme in American political culture . . .[a]ny effort to capture its protean dimensions of civil rights in a single volume is bound to include major omissions and blind spots" (10). The editors go on to assert that perhaps the "most obvious" omission is the "lack of a chapter on Richard Nixon" (10). Citing picturesque language attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the authors refer to Nixon's legacy as "a 'brooding omnipresence' hanging over the American presidency" (10).

Notwithstanding the lack of a chapter on President Nixon, two main features make the book remarkable. First, all case studies operate with the central assumption of the formative power of public discourse. Each author pays deep attention to contextual elements that illuminate the fact that civil rights discourse is a complex and intersectional rhetoric that has to be studied with sensitivity to its unique demands and challenges. Second, while each case study superbly acquaints us with its subject matter, when read together the chapters reveal the ways in which presidential discourse on civil rights, to borrow the James Boyd White phrase used by the volume editors, is "made real in performances of language" (3). All of the chapters accomplish these two goals, but three stand out: Diane Blair's essay on Eleanor Roosevelt, Trevor Parry-Giles's essay on the Clarence Thomas nomination, and Steven R. Goldzwig's essay on President Truman's committee on civil rights. According to Blair, Eleanor Roosevelt's vision and articulation of the "four equalities"—the right to an education according to ability; the right to earn a living according to ability; the right to equal justice before the law; and the right to participate in government through the ballot—was a significant part of the shaping of American postwar civil and human rights discourse and policy. Trevor Parry-Giles's essay captures the spectacular dimension of the Thomas nomination process as a political performance of celebrity, with attention to President G. H. W. Bush's role in constructing a rhetorical vision of Clarence Thomas's life as cultural topoi. Steven R. Goldzwig's essay traces the development of President Truman's President's Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR) and its significant influence to this day as "tangible achievement" on presidential initiatives on civil rights.

Civil Rights Rhetoric and the American Presidency deserves to be read for its many insights regarding the usefulness of rhetorical criticism to our understanding of what the editors assert is "the way in which American presidents and their administrations have constituted and reconstituted the meaning of civil rights from Rutherford B. Hayes to William Jefferson Clinton" (3). Additionally, and ironically in light of the editors' avowed interest in the "rhetorical constitutions and reconstitutions of the meaning of civil rights," the book should also be read precisely for the clues it can offer about why U...