Before the Rhetorical Presidency

Present at the Founding: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective

Present at the Founding: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective stephen฀e.฀lucas Few ideas have had more impact in presidential studies during the past twenty years than Jeffrey Tulis’s concept of the rhetorical presidency. Indeed, the phrase “rhetorical presidency” has become an integral part of the vocabulary of political scientists and rhetorical critics alike. It has also become highly controversial. Part of the controversy has revolved around the question of whether the emergence of the rhetorical presidency has been a salutary development . With a few notable exceptions, political scientists have tended to see the rhetorical presidency as an unfortunate departure from the conceptions of government held by the Founders when they created the Constitution . There is certainly ample room for debate on this question, but to some extent the discussion is purely academic. Regardless of whether one applauds or condemns the emergence of the rhetorical presidency, its presence is a fact of modern political life and not one that is likely to change. A second subject of controversy—one that has received less attention in the scholarly literature up to this point—concerns the historical development of the rhetorical presidency. According to Tulis, the rhetorical presidency is a twentieth-century phenomenon that began to emerge under Theodore Roosevelt, crystallized during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, and was institutionalized by Franklin D. Roosevelt.1 In contrast, Mel Laracey stephen฀e.฀lucas  argues that the practice of “going public” is hardly unique to twentiethcentury presidents. Whereas Tulis identified only one nineteenth-century president—Andrew Johnson—who openly took to the hustings in a fashion that would later become commonplace, Laracey holds that eleven of the nation ’s chief executives during the nineteenth century went public in the sense that they appealed directly to the people for support or understanding of their policies—three through speechmaking and eight through handpicked, subsidized newspapers that disseminated and defended administration policies . All told, Laracey says, half of the nation’s nineteenth-century presidents made “their policy positions known to the public directly, rather than going through Congress.”2 Laracey’s findings suggest a vastly different rhetorical world for nineteenth -century presidents than the world described by Tulis. But it is also a vastly different rhetorical world from that inhabited by twentieth-century presidents. Tulis may be incorrect about the rhetorical practices of 50 percent of the country’s nineteenth-century presidents, but according to Laracey’s analysis, he is correct about the other 50 percent. To some extent, the issue is akin to the age-old conundrum of whether the glass is half empty or half full. Do we say that only half of the nineteenth-century presidents engaged in going public, or do we say that fully half of them did so? However one answers this question, the figures tell only part of the story. What I find telling in Laracey’s analysis is not just the number of nineteenthcentury presidents who went public, but the manner in which they did so. Of the eleven he identifies, eight (73 percent) went public surreptitiously through the surrogate medium of the press, which, in Laracey’s words, allowed them to “present their positions and arguments to the American people in a way that still insulated them from any claim that they should not be meddling in the public policy process.” Rhetorical as these eleven nineteenth-century presidents may have been, they were hardly rhetorical in the same manner as their twentieth-century counterparts. Even though some early twentiethcentury presidents such as Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge were not fully comfortable with the activist rhetorical role assumed by the likes of Wilson and FDR, they certainly could have assumed such a role, had they been so inclined, without arousing concern over whether they were exceeding the constitutional bounds of their office. By the 1920s, there was no longer any need to maintain the fiction that the role of the president was merely to execute the laws of the land rather than to play an active role in creating those laws and securing public backing for them. The decline of this fiction marked a profound change in U.S. politics, a change that simultaneously present฀at฀the฀founding  reflected and made possible the new patterns of presidential communication that came to prevail during the twentieth century. In a sense, then, Tulis and Laracey are both correct. Presidents were more active rhetorically during the nineteenth century...