Rhetoric and Reform in the Progressive Era (review)

Rhetoric and Reform in the Progressive Era is volume 6 of an ambitious ten-volume project that aims at the modest goal of providing a "rhetorical history of the United States" from colonial times to present. While this volume is the first of the series to appear in print, its breadth, thoroughness, and overall quality give reason to be optimistic about the as-of-yet-unpublished volumes in the series.

This volume, like the others in the series, is a collection of essays, and comprehending its virtues requires an admittedly much too brief summary of its contents. J. Michael Hogan's clipped introduction synthesizes progressive historiography, finding that the "Progressive Era" may itself be "a historical fiction" (ix). Although Hogan notes that progressives have been defined by a shared concern with the "national interest," or "public good," as well as "a commitment to robust democratic speech and public deliberation" (xiii), he suggests that the Progressive Era might best be characterized as "a rhetorical renaissance that changed how Americans talked about politics and society" (x). In this volume we find a great variety of essays that support Hogan's thesis in one respect or another. In particular, Robert Kraig's essay "The Second Oratorical Renaissance" supports Hogan's thesis by considering how the Progressive Era re-revived the tradition of oratory. According to Kraig, progressives feared that oratory had degenerated, and they yearned to revive the golden age of the oratorical tradition amidst an historical milieu of modernization and the rise of mass communication (19, 27).

Of the 11 remaining essays, four support Hogan's thesis by considering broader social movements or discourses. Christine Oravec's "Science, Public Policy, and the 'Spirit of the People': The Rhetoric of Progressive Conservation" traces the process by which the conservation movement moved beyond its original scientific and bureaucratic orientation, and constituted a conservationist public that could legitimate a public policy agenda (86–87). In "The Progressive Reform of Journalism: The Rise of Professionalism in the Press," Douglas Birkhead considers how journalism was threatened by increasing public perception of the press as a corporate oligopoly, leading journalists to commence a rhetoric of "professionalization" that aimed at rehabilitating their public status (116, 136). Brian R. McGee's "Rhetoric and Race in the Progressive Era: Imperialism, Reform, and the Klu Klux Klan" explores the status of race in progressive discourse, finding that the era tended to construct African Americans in the terms either of a rhetoric of subjugation (which posited permanent racial inferiority) or a rhetoric of development (positing that racial inferiority was only a temporary product of historical circumstances). This duality, McGee argues, shaped the racial consciousness of imperialists and the KKK, as well as progressive reformers (312–13, 332). Jennifer L. Borda's essay, "Woman Suffrage in the Progressive Era: A Coming of Age," considers the final decades of the movement, examining the progressive themes and rhetorical strategies of three of the movement's influential leaders (340).

Finally, 7 of the 12 essays concern influential progressive rhetors. Leroy G. Dorsey's "Preaching Morality in Modern America: Theodore Roosevelt's Rhetorical Progressivism" argues that Roosevelt's true progressivism was found, not in his policies, but in a sermonic reform rhetoric that aimed at countering a seeming deterioration in American culture by seeking to transform the moral character of citizens (52, 54, 76). James Arnt Aune's "Justice Holmes's Rhetoric and the Progressive Path of Law" examines the legal opinions and epideictic speeches of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., tracing the rhetorical process by which Holmes built a pragmatic, empirical, and behavioral view of law and "helped define the peculiar place of legal rhetoric in our public life" (145–47). In "William Jennings Bryan: the Jeffersonian Liberal as Progressive," Malcolm O. Sillars finds that both Bryan's beliefs and argumentative practice were characterized by a Jeffersonian variant of progressivism (215–16). James Darsey...