The American rhetorical tradition is a dynamic tradition marked by a series of transformative “moments”—moments when the “rules” of public discourse changed. Those moments begin, of course, with the American Revolution itself, when America’s founders created a government “of the people,” despite strong fears of the power of demagogues to manipulate public opinion. A half century later, the democratization of American politics brought about a more “populist” style of political speech, yet even the so-called golden age of American oratory ultimately degenerated into demagoguery and war. After a prolonged period of political and cultural malaise, the Progressive Era brought another renaissance of rhetoric and public address, along with a revolution in the science and technologies of mass persuasion. Yet that era too ended in war and cultural decline. Through the remainder of the 20th century, political developments, new technologies, and cultural trends continued to change the character and rules of civic persuasion in America. Today, however, we still face the same rhetorical challenge that democracies have always faced: how to promote democratic deliberations that lead to sound collective decisions.
The Founders’ Vision of Deliberative Democracy
The central paradox of America’s constitutional tradition lies in a persistent tension between our commitment to popular sovereignty and fears that “the people” might be too easily distracted or manipulated to govern themselves. America’s founders infused the concept of popular sovereignty with extraordinary meaning, creating the first government in history that derived all of its power “directly or indirectly from the great body of the people” (Rossiter, 1961, p. 241). At the same time, however, they worried that the people might too easily be led astray by “the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, [or] the desperate” (Rossiter, 1961, p. 432). This tension was evident in what Rossiter (1961) described as the “split personality” of the Federalist papers (p. xv): the seemingly mixed feelings about a government “of the people” in that famous series of articles advocating ratification of the new Constitution.
This split personality is also evident in the Constitution itself, most notably in its provisions for a bicameral legislative branch. On the one hand, the House of Representatives was to have “a common interest,” a “dependence on,” even an “intimate sympathy” with “the people.” It was to provide a “true picture of the people, possess a knowledge of their circumstances and their wants, sympathize in all their distresses, and [be] disposed to seek their true interest” (Wood, 1969, p. 515). The Senate, on the other hand, was to be more insulated from the people—a “defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions” (Rossiter, 1961, p. 384). Especially in foreign affairs, Alexander Hamilton (1974) argued, it was important to protect policy-making from the “prejudices,” the “intemperate passions,” and the “fluctuations” of the popular will (Vol. 2, p. 301). As James Madison explained in Federalist 63, there were “particular moments in public affairs” when the people, “stimulated by some irregular passion,” would demand measures which they themselves would “afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.” At such times, the Senate (a “temperate and respectable body”) was “to suspend the blow mediated by the people against themselves,” until “reason, justice, and truth” could “regain their authority over the public mind” (Rossiter, 1961, p. 384).
The founders’ attitudes toward persuasion and demagoguery reflected their neoclassical rhetorical training. As Kraig (2003) has observed, the founders lived in a “rhetorical world” where a classical rhetorical education was considered necessary for civic leadership and where “statesmen were expected to be orators” (p. 3). At the time of the Revolution, historian Wood (1974) has noted, classical rhetoric “lay at the heart of [a] … liberal education,” and the ability to deliver an eloquent and persuasive speech was “regarded as a necessary mark of a gentleman and an indispensible skill for a statesman, especially for a statesman in a republic” (p. 70). At the same time, the founders shared the ancients’ fear of deceptive or manipulative speech, and they regarded demagoguery—speech that flattered or aroused the masses—as “the peculiar vice to which democracies were susceptible” (Tulis, 1987, p. 28). Thus, they built buffers against demagoguery and public passion into the Constitution itself. Still, they still worried that, without leaders of the highest moral character, their great experiment in democracy would fail.
The neoclassical tradition remained dominant in American politics and education throughout the early republic. As the first Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, for example, John Quincy Adams (1810) fashioned himself an “American Cicero” (Portolano, 2009, pp. 13–51), teaching a brand of neoclassical rhetoric specifically designed for the American political context. With a heavy emphasis on the ethical responsibilities of the orator-statesman, Adams approached rhetoric as a “system of deliberative invention and social engagement,” and he had a distinctively republican “vision for the use of the art of rhetoric in moral leadership” (Portolano, 2009, pp. x–xi). Adams was familiar with Blair and other modern rhetoricians, yet he drew his teachings almost entirely from the ancients, transplanting Cicero’s ideal of “statecraft and leadership, the orator perfectus, to American soil” (Portolano, 2009, p. 5). Drawing upon “Christian ethical touchstones,” Adams’ rhetoric had a certain “religious quality” that distinguished it from the classical tradition (Portolono, 2009, pp. 26–27), but he emphasized the same rhetorical and civic virtues: broad liberal learning, a commitment to reason, and a devotion to service and the public good.
Over the first half of the 19th century, political and cultural developments began to chip away at the neoclassical tradition in American politics and culture. Raising new challenges to the founders’ vision, uprisings like the Whiskey Rebellion resurrected fears of demagoguery, and the rise of Jacksonian democracy in the 1830s brought populist “rabble-rousing” to the mainstream of American politics. The “rules” of civic discourse would continue to evolve through the 1840s and the 1850s, but the question of slavery would ultimately test the limits of democratic persuasion. For a time, the nation managed to defer the issue through a series of historic compromises, but Lincoln ultimately proved right: the nation could not endure “permanently half slave and half free” (Reid & Klumpp, 2005, p. 399). By 1860, the debate over slavery had degenerated into a toxic rhetorical mixture of conspiracy theories and ultimatums, and the issue would finally have to be settled not through persuasion but by force of arms.
The Golden Age of Oratory and the Limits of Persuasion
Between ratification of the Constitution and the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, new styles of public address gained favor, reflecting changing political circumstances and an expanding democratic public. Jacksonian democracy brought a more populist style to American politics, while the years leading up to the Civil War—the so-called golden age of American oratory—produced a series of great speeches and debates on the two most intractable issues in U.S. history: slavery and union. The golden age is remembered for high eloquence, dramatic debates on the floor of Congress, and universal admiration for the great orators of the day (especially the Great Triumvarite of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun). At the same time, however, it was marred by propaganda and demagoguery on both sides of the slavery issue. For some, the golden age remains a nostalgic memory, a time of “grandiloquence” when “virtuosos” like Webster demonstrated their “prudence and erudition” from the public platform and people flocked to hear serious oratory on the Chautauqua and Lyceum circuits (Duffy & Leeman, 2005, pp. xi–xxv). Yet culminating in the bloodiest war in U.S. history, the golden age also might be seen as a case study in the limits of persuasion.
Slavery was not the first issue to threaten the founders’ “great experiment” in democracy. In 1798, the Federalist Party of Washington and Adams passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which (among other things) made it a crime to make “false, scandalous, and malicious” sta
tements about the government. In effect, the new legislation criminalized political opposition, creating a political backlash that helped elect Thomas Jefferson president in 1800. Some doubted that the Federalists would peacefully relinquish power, while others urged Jefferson to turn the Sedition law against its authors. Instead, Jefferson delivered perhaps the most magnanimous inaugural address in history, labeling the bitter election a mere “contest of opinion” and announcing that all Americans would, of course, now “unite in common efforts for the common good.” “We are all republicans—we are all federalists,” Jefferson intoned. “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it” (Reid & Klumpp, 2005, p. 205).
Other threats to the founders’ vision were more subtle but even more far-reaching in their implications and effects. When a trend toward presidential candidates appealing directly to the people culminated in the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, some worried that the founders’ worst fears had been realized; demagoguery and mob rule would now be the order of the day. Criticizing President Jackson’s bank veto message in 1832, for example, Daniel Webster complained of the president’s “reprehensible means for influencing public opinion,” and he accused him of appealing to “every prejudice” and “every passion” to persuade the public to a “mistaken view of their own interests” (Kraig, 2003, p. 11). However, it was Webster’s own party, the Whigs, who pioneered the use of slogans, songs, parades, and rabble-rousing stump speeches in presidential campaigns. Ten years earlier, Webster had delivered what many still regard as “the most eloquent speech ever delivered in Congress” (Nevins, 1947, p. 288): his first reply to Hayne during the Webster-Hayne debate. By 1840, however, Webster found himself defending the populist hoopla of William Henry Harrison’s Log Cabin campaign: “It is our duty to spare no pains to circulate information, and to spread the truth far and wide” (Kraig, 2003, p. 12).
Still, Webster continued to draw the line between such mainstream populism and the propaganda and demagoguery on both sides of the slavery debate. With radical abolitionists and pro-slavery zealots questioning the motives and character of their political opponents, Webster took to the floor of the Senate to warn metaphorically of the dangers posed by demonization, conspiracy theories, and other forms of radical speech. In both the North and the “stormy South,” he warned during debate over the Compromise of 1850, the “strong agitations” threatened to “let loose” the “imprisoned winds” of passion and throw “the whole sea into commotion,” tossing its “billows to the skies” and disclosing “its profoundest depths.” Reminding the Senate of its “own dignity and its own high responsibilities,” Webster argued that the country looked to the senators “for wise, moderate, patriotic, and healing counsels,” and he urged his colleagues to think of the “good of the whole, and the preservation of all”: “I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union. … I speak to-day, out of a solicitous and anxious heart, for the restoration … of that quiet and that harmony which make the blessings of this Union so rich, and so dear to us all” (Reid & Klumpp, 2005, pp. 387–388).
Webster’s plea went unheeded, of course, and so “the war came”—as Lincoln passively recalled in his Second Inaugural Address (Reid & Klumpp, 2005, p. 461). Everyone knew that slavery was “somehow the cause of the war” (p. 460), as Lincoln noted, but the more direct and proximate cause was the widening rhetorical divide between extremists on both sides of the slavery issue. While abolitionists in the North warned of a Great Slave Power Conspiracy, Fire-Eaters in the South pledged to fight to the death to defend their way of life. Thus, the debate over slavery breached the limits of reason, compromise, and democratic persuasion. Both sides had grown intransigent; there was nothing left to debate.
During the Civil War, Lincoln refrained from the sort of populist rabble-rousing that fueled the hostilities in both the North and the South. Lincoln reflected the populist impulses of the day, but his was a backwoods populism—a “middling style” that was “at times refined but at other times crude” (Cmiel, 1990, pp. 12–13). Lincoln used words like “howdy” and “hornswoggled,” but he also reasoned with his audiences, engaging them on complex issues and employing archaic language, biblical imagery, and rhythmic cadences in service of lofty ideals. Eschewing the angry, vengeful populism of many of his contemporaries, Lincoln’s wartime speeches soared with the eloquence of great literary works, and today we still celebrate them as examples of “the democratic sublime” (Cmiel, 1990, p. 118). Lincoln’s speeches often fell on deaf ears, but they live on today as our touchstones of democratic eloquence.
As mass democracy took hold in the Antebellum Era, populist rhetoric thus appeared “in various guises,” from the “rank demagoguery” of radicals on both sides of the slavery debate to the “kind of humble nobility” modeled by Lincoln (Cmiel, 1990, p. 12). During the war, of course, rhetoric gave way to the force of arms, and that eclipse of the deliberative public sphere left a rhetorical legacy of degraded and impoverished public talk. Through the trials of Reconstruction and the excesses of the Gilded Age, little of rhetorical note took place, save for the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, a president known as an “obstinate demagogue” inclined toward drunken harangues (Browne, 2008, p. 209). With the dawn of the Progressive Era, however, came another rhetorical renaissance, along with a revolution in the science and technology of mass persuasion.
The Rhetorical Renaissance of the Progressive Era
The Progressive Era is, in a sense, a political fiction. Sparked by the spread of agrarian populism in the 1890s, this era of supposedly “progressive” reform actually produced even more virulent forms of racial apartheid in the South, as well as foreign policies that were neither forward-looking nor liberal-minded. Rhetorically, however, the Progressive Era ushered in new ways of talking about politics and social reform, and it eventually gave rise to a new “science” of mass persuasion that revolutionized American politics. Progressives often disagreed over specific policies, and they had very different ideas about what “progress” meant. Yet by inventing new ways of speaking and new forums for democratic deliberation, they revitalized the public sphere and returned ethics and civic responsibility to the core of the nation’s rhetorical tradition.
For many progressives, the essential problem of the age was not poverty, nor government corruption, nor even the industrial monopolies, but rather what John Dewey (1991) would later call “the problem of the public”: the need for improvements in “the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion” (p. 208). In an increasingly complex world, Progressives feared that powerful special interests had supplanted the voice of the people, and they embraced a variety of “practical measures to increase the quantity, quality, and inclusiveness of public deliberation” (Levine, 2000, p. xiii). Progressives launched a “social centers” movement that opened school buildings to town meetings and debates, and they founded many of the civic and voluntary associations that still exist today. Progressives staged community forums in settlement houses, and they revived the Chautauqua Movement to educate farmers and other rural folk. In small Midwestern cities, they appointed Civic Secretaries to organize public meetings and debates, and they invented school newspapers and student governments to teach young people about politics. Meanwhile, debate and forensics clubs flourished in colleges and universities, and the University of Wisconsin even established a Department of Debating and Public Discussion to promote off-campus public debates on the income tax, woman suffrage, and other issues (Hogan, 2010, p. 439).
The result was what Robert Kraig (2003) has dubbed the “second oratorical renaissance”—an era in which oratory “that advanced issues and ideas became a more important part of the political landscape than it had been for a generation” (p. 99). In political campaigns, on the lecture circuit, and in a variety of crusades led by reform-minded politicia
ns, oratory and debate once again became central to American political and social life. Again there were great debates in Congress, and during this time, the presidency became “a mighty platform for oratorical leadership” (Kraig, 2003, p. 1). Most important, ordinary citizens once again became involved in civic life, in the process learning “the necessary skills of a democratic public: how to listen, how to argue, and how to deliberate” (Mattson, 1998, p. 45). The Progressive Era, in short, was most rhetorical of times.
Yet some of the central terms of the Progressive Era—organization, efficiency, rationality, expertise, and science—also contained the seeds of a very different view of persuasion in a democracy. This view, rarely expressed early in the era but clearly manifested after World War I, was more distrustful of ordinary citizens—and of democracy itself. Convinced that many citizens lacked sufficient virtue and knowledge to discern the “public good,” some even pushed for literacy tests and tougher voter registration rules in the name of “good government”—that is, as “progressive” reforms. This view of democracy—the view that an enlightened public opinion had to be directed or even manufactured from above—did not emerge out of some reactionary backlash against progressive reform. Rather, it was implicit in the writings of some of the leading progressive thinkers, including the young Walter Lippmann. In his 1914 book Drift and Mastery, for example, Lippmann (1961) proclaimed the “scientific spirit” the “discipline of democracy” (p. 151), and he argued for government guided by experts rather than public opinion—an anti-democratic sentiment that would reach full flower during World War I.
President Wilson’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), of course, was the most obvious manifestation of this anti-democratic impulse. Headed by progressive journalist George Creel, the CPI saturated the popular media with pro-war rhetoric, in the process pioneering many of the modern techniques for manipulating mass opinion. With its “calculated appeal to emotion,” the CPI aroused public opinion to “white hot” intensity (Vaughn, 1980, pp. 235–236), and in the process, it radically changed prevailing understandings of mass persuasion and public opinion. Instead of a rational and freely deliberating body, the CPI encouraged a new view of the public as “a passive object to be manipulated by mass propaganda” (Mattson, 1998, p. 115). After the war, Edward Bernays and other veterans of the CPI would carry that view into civilian life, arguing that “efforts comparable to those applied by the CPI … could be applied with equal facility to peacetime pursuits” (Cutlip, 1994, p. 168). The result was a whole new industry of “scientific” propaganda, advertising, and public relations. The rhetorical renaissance of the Progressive Era had given way to a new age of “scientific” persuasion and “opinion management.”
The SAGE Handbook of Persuasion Page 3