A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution by Carolyn Eastman (review)

ANation of Speechifiers convincingly demonstrates that there was a broad participatory culture among non-elites at the beginning of the Republic. In an important addition to our understanding of educational history, which has long associated language studies with nationalism, Eastman argues that “print and oral media helped lay Americans think of themselves as a unified body before nationalism had cohered and could be buttressed by institutions” (4; emphasis added). As education spread and nationalism was grafted onto an earlier version of public behavior based on civility, refinement, and sensibility, citizen subjectivity was shaped to become more passive.

Chapter 1 explores rhetorical education for non-elites. Researchers of rhetoric in the early Republic have struggled to examine non-elite education because of a lack of standardized curricula or widely printed textbooks to provide evidence. Eastman helpfully shows uniformity across small prints because the book publishers often reprinted each others’ material in much the same way newspaper editors did during the Revolutionary period. Furthermore, even very disparate schools (in terms of expense, region, rural or urban) often took part in speech exhibitions, which were then further distributed via newspaper and broadside reprints. But with the rise of education for the poor, the low student-to-teacher ratio that was necessary to teach toward the exhibition disappeared. Consequently, an active view of oratory as something that one practiced oneself gave way to a passive view of oratory as something that instead happened to the auditor.

Chapter 2 illustrates, using an impressive array of letters, commonplace books, diaries, and women’s exhibition speeches, that a period existed before the consolidation of the ideal of the Republican mother when women’s oratory was acceptable. In a moment when “heterosociab[ility]” (60), rather than domesticity or nationalism, was expected of women, oratory education was justifiable. Although women still felt compelled to justify their public speaking, “most . . . rules” for oratory “were strikingly gender neutral” (61). Just as her first chapter demonstrates that we incorrectly read back onto the early Republic’s educational system a nationalism that probably arose later, so her second chapter shows that the public and private were not as clearly demarcated as public sphere theorists have assumed.

Eastman next turns to Indian (her term) oratory. Early on, speeches by Native Americans reproduced in textbooks “provided ordinary Americans with emotional frameworks and imagined narrative outcomes for considering policies, and . . . thus had profound political implications” (86). Invoking the elocutionary requirement that a speaker should actually experience the emotions emulated in a speech, Eastman argues that Indian speeches encouraged Americans to recognize “generations of white betrayal” and to feel “a collective responsibility” (85). Indian oratory, despite provoking discomfort, advantageously gave “Americans a history that marked their uniqueness from Europeans” and that “obfuscated how far [nationality] was a contemporary construct” (99). Eastman’s work insightfully attends to the effects of peripheral factors, rather than consistent policy or authorial intention, on the formation of gender, race, and class identities. For instance, she argues that the “vanishing Indian” trope may have appealed in part as “a far more consistent narrative than was otherwise available” to make sense of the “picture of Indian affairs,” because each tribe and region worked out its policies separately (101). As time passed, the movement (especially through the rewritings of the Pocahontas story) to paraphrase Indian eloquence silenced Indian characters and obscured related policy issues. Likewise, later anthologies and oratory textbooks tended to reproduce speeches out of context, thus removing any connection to government policies. With these changes, Eastman posits, the potential for guilt to result in responsible policymaking evaporated.

The book’s second half offers three case studies showing how non-elites championed their right to public participation; the ensuing debates were less about gender or class than about how active the public should be in forming policy and what forms public discussion should take. The first chapter of this second half offers...