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Back to Our Roots: The Library of Presidential Rhetoric
- Rhetoric & Public Affairs
- Michigan State University Press
- Volume 7, Number 3, Fall 2004
- pp. 407-419
- 10.1353/rap.2005.0017
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7.3 (2004) 407-419
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Back to our Roots:
The Library of Presidential Rhetoric
Charles J. Stewart
When a small group of English professors rebelled against their literary-minded counterparts in 1914 to found the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking with its own journal entitled The Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking, they intended to do something no other group in the academy was either interested in or capable of doing: study speeches or pieces of "persuasive discourse, persuasively presented."1 Unfortunately, none of these revolutionaries seemed to have a method in mind for studying speeches.
A decade later, in 1925, Herbert A. Wichelns wrote his seminal essay entitled "The Literary Criticism of Oratory" that would have a profound influence on rhetorical studies for the next 40 years. Although "oratory is intimately associated with statecraft," he claimed, most criticism had dealt with the minutiae of style and with whether a speech was "literature." Rhetorical criticism, lying "at the boundary of politics," was not to be concerned with permanence or beauty but with effect on the immediate audience and the times.2 The rhetorical scholar was to determine the [End Page 407] effect of a speech through assessment of the situation, the audience, the speaker's personality and public character, speech preparation, arrangement, style, ideas, motives, topics, proofs, judgment of human nature, and delivery. Scholars soon discovered that resources in archives and libraries essential for covering these topics were available only for a relatively small number of great American political speakers of the past and that space limitations in journals and anthologies precluded in-depth analyses. The result was a focus on political speakers rather than speeches and on biography (some would say gossip), history, and politics rather than rhetorical criticism.3
A rare exception was Marie Hochmuth Nichols's 1954 study of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address.4 She included the text of the address and analyzed the rhetorical situation, newspaper coverage, Lincoln's images in the North and South, preparation of the speech, delivery, reactions of the press and leaders of both North and South, Lincoln's purpose, and his use of language, argument, and style. The address, rather than Lincoln, was the focus of this study. Many envied but few followed her example.
Scholars in the 1960s and 1970s challenged the Wichelns approach to rhetorical criticism as it had been interpreted and practiced for decades. The emphasis changed from speaker-centered to message-centered studies and from concern with effect to how persuasive messages were created and functioned to meet situational exigencies and audience expectations. While some turned their attention to social protest, the pulpit, and corporation, the majority of rhetorical scholars continued to be fascinated with political rhetoric in general and the "rhetorical presidency" in particular. The Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations and the crises they encountered or precipitated led to book-length studies and the possibility of in-depth analyses. Books such as The Sound of Leadership: Presidential Communication in the Modern Age by Roderick P. Hart, In a Perilous Hour: The Rhetoric of John F. Kennedy by Steven R. Goldzwig and George N. Dionisopoulos, The Presidency and the Rhetoric of Foreign Crisis by Denise M. Bostdorff, and The Modern Presidency and Civil Rights: Rhetoric on Race from Roosevelt to Nixon by Garth E. Pauley, to name only a...
