Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement (review)

In the late 1930s, U.S. Commissioner of Education John Studebaker created the Federal Forum Project, an initiative to educate citizens and boost civic participation through community discussions. The project funded thousands of forums in urban and rural areas nationwide, drawing crowds of Americans eager to participate. This turn to discussion as an ideal form of political talk coincided with developments in the nascent field of speech. In Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement, William M. Keith demonstrates that this overlap between the forum project and the speech discipline was, in fact, no coincidence. On the contrary, “these two institutions, their ideas and practices, developed in tandem, with mutual, if indirect, influences” (12). In highlighting the symbiotic relationship between these institutions, Keith seeks (1) to give the forum movement—long overlooked by academe—its rightful due, and (2) to provide valuable historical and philosophical contexts for present-day efforts to improve civic deliberations. Accordingly, this book should find a welcome audience among deliberative democratic theorists and practitioners alike.

Democracy as Discussion proceeds topically and chronologically in three parts. Part 1, “Teaching Speech, Teaching Democracy,” details the emergence of speech as an independent department in universities. Shifting attitudes in the nineteenth century about the purpose of the liberal arts, along with educators’ preoccupation with aesthetics and elocution, had wrenched rhetoric from its civic moorings. This dissociation concerned many speech teachers of the twentieth century. Compounding this problem was the growing discontent many felt as overlooked faculty members in English departments. The tensions eventually reached a boiling point, and in 1914, a group of speech educators formed the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking to express their grievances and lobby for independent departments.

Once speech professors eventually won their own departments, however, they struggled to define their discipline. Their conversations typically revolved around three sets of questions: concerning communication’s role in society, its place in the curriculum, and its disciplinary identity. Along with these questions raged an intense debate about debate, for a number of speech professors were also debate coaches and former debaters themselves. Intercollegiate debate competitions, which began in the 1890s, grew out of informal literary societies long present on American university campuses. Once viewed merely as intellectual sport, debate was later exalted by advocates as “the heir to the civic traditions in communication” (66). But debate also drew its share of critics, most notably Teddy Roosevelt, who felt that the competitions encouraged sophistry: “What we need is to turn out of our colleges young men with ardent convictions on the side of the right; not young men who can made [sic] a good argument for either right or wrong as their interests bid them” (69).

Perhaps the greatest criticism leveled at debate was that it cultivated conflict rather than cooperation in the public sphere. This allegation grew out of conversations in the speech community about the types of communication that educators should encourage and how best to instill civic values in their students. John Dewey was vocal in these conversations and instrumental in turning attention toward discussion as a preferable alternative to debate. Soon, speech departments began to add classes on discussion to their course listings.

In part 2, “Teaching Discussion,” Keith charts the rise of the discussion movement, describing it as an outgrowth of Progressive Era idealism and a renewed interest in participatory democracy. Textbooks like Alfred Sheffield’s Joining in Public Discussion and A. Craig Baird’s Public Discussion and Debate—both of which celebrate discussion as a democratic form of speech—added momentum to the movement. Indeed, “discussion” came to be quite the buzzword in the 1930s, as people struggled to conceptualize it, distinguish it from debate, and evaluate its relative merits and shortcomings. In general, discussion was characterized as constructive inquiry, whereby participants representing diverse interests joined together in open-minded, cooperative problem-solving.

Keith argues that the popularity of...