Before the Rhetorical Presidency

Talking without Speaking, and Other Curiosities

Talking without Speaking, and Other Curiosities mel฀laracey One of the most notable works in the fields of presidential and rhetorical studies in the past twenty years has been Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency (1987). With the publication of that book, some topics essentially became closed to further scholarly discussion. In my book, Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public (2002), I seek to reopen those topics. The two main topics I reexamine are, first, whether virtually all nineteenth -century presidents did actually avoid communicating directly with the people on policy issues—what we now call going public; and, second, whether there really was a universally held, constitutionally based norm that presidents direct their communications on policy matters to Congress and not to the people. These topics ceased to be discussed much after the publication of The Rhetorical Presidency because the arguments presented in that book seemed so compelling.1 After all, it really was true, as Professor Tulis pointed out, that hardly any presidents—he cited just Andrew Johnson—went public by making speeches about policy-related matters. And it really was true that Andrew Johnson wound up getting impeached after making a wild speaking tour around the country. And there are passages in the Federalist Papers that speak of the dangers of demagoguery. Although these passages never refer specifically to the president and present a somewhat confusing distinction talking฀without฀speaking  between “good” and “bad” demagogues, they can be read to mean that all public officials, including presidents, should avoid speaking to the public about policy matters. And finally, some nineteenth-century presidents did make statements that, at first glance and taken out of context, can also be read to support this position. But can it really be true that almost all pre-twentieth-century presidents were so different from those who followed them? After all, if, as Richard Neustadt observed, “presidential power is the power to persuade,” is it plausible that all the presidents (except Andrew Johnson) during the first century of our government’s existence made no effort at public persuasion on policy matters?2 Moreover, the nineteenth century was not exactly a quiet time politically . It has been described by Philip Abbott as “a period, especially at its close, of intense political participation and partisan organization.”3 Would all the presidents really have stayed quiet in such a time? It was with these sorts of questions in mind that I set out several years ago to reexamine the attitudes and behavior of all the pre-twentieth-century presidents concerning their public involvement in the national policymaking process. My reexamination produced some significantly different conclusions about presidential communication behavior in the nineteenth century. Let me start out with one big difference in my findings from those of Professor Tulis. I found that eleven presidents, not just one, went public in the nineteenth century, while an equal number, eleven, did not. Put another way, instead of fewer than 5 percent of the twenty-two presidents in the nineteenth century going public, 50 percent did. What accounts for the radical difference in our findings? There are three reasons. First, there was actually another president in the nineteenth century besides Andrew Johnson who made speaking tours in which he made speeches about policy matters—William McKinley. From 1898 to 1901, McKinley made scores of speeches on several tours around the country about such issues as domestic economic policy, the Spanish-American War, and whether we should keep the Philippines territory that we had captured as a result of that war. In fact, McKinley was assassinated in 1901 in Buffalo after he had made a speech before fifty thousand people about trade policy. Somehow, the very modern-looking efforts of President McKinley at going public were overlooked in The Rhetorical Presidency. A second reason for the discrepancy in our findings is that I count Abraham Lincoln as a president who engaged in the practice of going public, albeit very carefully and strategically. Lincoln made an average of over nineteen speeches a year, a number of which addressed national policy issues such mel฀laracey  as emancipation and reconstruction. He also publicized his policy positions in open letters to citizens and messages to Congress that were immediately published in newspapers across the country. It is true that Lincoln would sometimes decline to speak, even in situations when a speech seemed clearly appropriate. For example, on the...