Before the Rhetorical Presidency

On the Forms of Rhetorical Leadership

On the Forms of Rhetorical Leadership jeffrey฀k.฀tulis Mel Laracey’s chapter, reflecting a summary of his recent book, Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public, deserves our attention and compels me to revisit some familiar territory.1 Presidents and the People is a well-written, thorough, and hard-hitting critique of several contemporary studies of presidential leadership. It reads like a legal brief, mustering evidence at every turn to support the proposition that there is no significant difference between nineteenth- and twentiethcentury presidential leadership while giving little credence to evidence to the contrary. Presidents were “popular leaders” from the beginning of the republic , according to Laracey, and although some nineteenth-century presidents were less rhetorically engaged than others, this more subdued political style reflected the views of a political party rather than an adherence to an overarching constitutional norm. Indeed, Laracey seeks to replace the distinction or contrast between “constitutional” and “popular” leadership by arguing that both styles are “Constitutional”—one extending the Federalist tradition and the other advancing the Anti-Federalist project. Laracey’s own effort continues a partisan project to the extent that he takes the side of the AntiFederalists in his historical story and thereby seeks to enhance the legitimacy of presidential appeals to the people in our time. jeffrey฀k.฀tulis  For me, the most striking fact about Presidents and the People is the extent to which it actually confirms the propositions that it attempts to challenge . Although presidents in the nineteenth century gave significantly fewer popular speeches than presidents in the twentieth century, they did utter well over one thousand speeches. Since my own account of these rhetorical efforts relied heavily on biographies and other secondary sources, I thought it possible that I missed some speeches and therefore misclassified some of the nineteenth-century presidents when I described them as avoiding policy on the stump. Perhaps Laracey’s second look, an examination of more of the primary materials and additional secondary sources, would show that many presidents engaged in some exercises of popular leadership. Not so. Laracey rediscovered essentially the same picture that I described in The Rhetorical Presidency. Virtually all presidents in the nineteenth century avoided giving speeches directly to the people on matters of public policy or pending legislation , according to Laracey’s own findings. The only exceptions to this pattern were Andrew Johnson, whom I discuss as an exception that “proves the rule” since he was politically punished for such a speech, and William McKinley, who served at the end of the century.2 Laracey’s account of McKinley is a very useful corrective to mine. His instructive reading caused me to revisit the paragraph on that subject in The Rhetorical Presidency, where I claim that McKinley did not even allude to major issues of public policy. I was simply wrong.3 McKinley made a number of speeches on pending matters of legislation, including his last speech the day before he was assassinated in which he lent support to reciprocal-tariff treaties that were being held up in the Senate. Many other scholars have also overlooked McKinley’s popular rhetoric, perhaps because his policy references , which were so clear to his audiences, seem muted to our ears.4 In his last speech, for example, McKinley argues for the expansion of trade but does not refer explicitly to the fact that a treaty on that issue was pending business in the Senate, as Woodrow Wilson later did with the Treaty of Versailles. McKinley’s political practices do indeed complicate my account of the turnof -the-century constitutional development.5 This is a constructive criticism, but the larger story of the nineteenth century in Presidents and the People is a picture of a constitutional order in which policy rhetoric by presidents was written and addressed to Congress rather than spoken and performed for a popular audience, just as I had maintained in The Rhetorical Presidency. What, then, prompts Laracey’s insistence that there was no important transformation of the U.S. constitutional order at the end of the nineteenth century? Why does Laracey think that popular leadership has always been a forms฀of฀rhetorical฀leadership  legitimate component of the presidency? The intellectual burden of Laracey’s book is carried by the fact that in the nineteenth century partisan newspapers were often used to advance presidential policy agendas. While almost no presidents gave policy speeches, many, about 40...