This Is the Voice

by John Colapinto

  The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much in the same way as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.23

  Surprisingly, Edwards’s delivery of this sermon (first to his congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts, and later to a parish in Connecticut) was oratorically subdued: he read from his prepared text in a near monotone, eyes glued to the page.24 This was unusual, since fiery vocal pyrotechnics, dramatic physical gestures, and blistering extemporaneous deviations from written texts became hallmarks of the evangelical preaching style, especially during a later wave, known as the Second Great Awakening, which occurred at the dawn of the nineteenth century in America. The fire-and-brimstone Baptist and Methodist preachers of the Second Great Awakening were especially prized for their ability to go off-text, in rhetorical and oratorical flights grounded in the most minute knowledge of scripture. Their highly emotional delivery—shouting, quavering, whispering, sobbing—were elements that demagogic politicians would borrow.

  YouTube abounds in examples of today’s evangelical preaching style, which, all evidence suggests, differs little from that of the early nineteenth century. In a video posted on January 11, 2011,25 Pastor Charles Lawson of Temple Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, can be seen and heard offering a softly drawled greeting to his congregation, before introducing the topic of that day’s sermon: Christ’s Sermon on the Mount—although not, Pastor Lawson stresses, the part beloved of “liberals,” about turning the other cheek. Instead, the pastor says, he will speak on Jesus’s little-noted mention, near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, of “hellfire.” Pastor Lawson then launches into a sustained, twenty-five-minute harangue on the absolute, real, true, undeniable existence of hell, and the certitude that everyone will end up there unless they repent. What the sermon lacks in Father Arnall’s exquisite descriptiveness in A Portrait of the Artist, it makes up for in oratorical passion. By the ten-minute mark, Pastor Lawson has worked himself into an arm-flinging tirade, bellowing in a timber-rattling voice that swells in volume with each new utterance of the word hell—or Hay-Yull, in the pastor’s Southern pronunciation. Some Ciceronian rhetorical moves are featured—especially the rhythmic use of repetition to build an emotional crescendo—but it is secondary to the sheer volume and fire of the pastor’s voice: “There is no salvation in Hay-Yull! There is no savior in Hay-Yull! There is no Bible in Hay-ullll! There is no blood in Hayyy-yull! There is no forgiveness in Hayyy-yulll!” Then, in a rattling bellow identical to the throat-ripping vocals of a death metal singer, he shrieks: “Whatever GOES to Hayy-yulll STAYS in Hayyyy-Yull!” Easy to mock and parody, the effect is genuinely frightening and leaves little doubt about how the evangelical Baptist and Methodist preachers of the First and Second Great Awakenings made their churches the most popular across the Southern United States. They remain so to this day.

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  Enslaved Blacks were among those that the traveling Baptist preachers of the Second Great Awakening especially targeted for conversion, promising leadership roles in the church (roles denied to them in Anglican and Episcopal denominations). Baptist slave preachers found particular salience (and solace) in Bible stories of survival under oppression and deliverance from servitude (like the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt). Indeed, the slave-turned-preacher Nat Turner was sufficiently inspired by such stories that he mounted in 1831 an armed rebellion of enslaved and free Blacks in Virginia. He was captured and executed. This, and other slave rebellions, ultimately led to legislation outlawing Black congregations without a white minister present. Underground all-Black churches duly sprang up, in which a uniquely African American style of preaching and worship flourished.26

  Mixing highly emotional evangelical preaching with African ideas and rhythms, Black churches created a tradition of lively shouting, singing, clapping, and call-and-response interaction with the pulpit that remain a staple of Black churches today. Geneva Smitherman, an English professor at Michigan State University, documents in her book Talkin and Testifyin (1997) the highly specific style of vocal delivery typical of Black evangelical preachers—a melodic, rhythmic style in which “the voice is employed like a musical instrument with improvisations, riffs, and all kinds of playing between the notes.”27 Smitherman calls this “tonal semantics” and says that it has influenced Black speech well beyond the pulpit. The voice is heard “in the speech-music of James Brown and Aretha Franklin, in the preaching-lecturing of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesse Jackson, in the political raps of Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, in the comedy routines of Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor.”28 And it would be heard, as we will see, in the oratory of the man who would become the first Black president of the United States.

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  Political speech raises the stakes on rhetoric and oratory precisely because its tools are put in the service, not of “mere” delight (as in literature), or worship (as in religion), but of moving people to decisive action and sacrifice. Few are the instances when a single act of political oratory has changed the course of human history, but Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s address, on June 4, 1940, to the British House of Commons was arguably such a speech. Coming in the wake of Britain’s retreat at Dunkirk and with Nazi forces poised to invade England, the address was expressly designed not only to steel Britons’ resolve and to warn Hitler of their fighting spirit but also to signal to a recalcitrant United States that it was time to enter the war and help beat back Germany’s plans for world domination. In short, an important address—one in which the fate of the free world hung in the balance. In the 2017 movie Darkest Hour, Churchill is shown preparing to compose the speech by pulling from the bookshelf his translation of Cicero’s On Oratory. Whether that is a Hollywood embellishment or not, Churchill clearly knew that, in the coming battle between democracy and dictatorship, he had to summon the greatest possible eloquence, and he did so in a speech replete with ancient rhetorical devices, particularly in the peroration—or peroratorio, Cicero’s term for the final rousing appeal to listeners’ reason and emotion.

  There, Churchill used several rhetorical devices from On Oratory, including anaphora (deliberate repetition of words), geminatio (repetition of particular grammatical structures), and lots of artfully deployed assonance and alliteration. “We shall not flag or fail,” he said as he launched into the famous peroration. Though the original speech to the House of Commons was not recorded, Churchill reenacted it, for posterity, in a 1949 home recording in which he delivers the address in a voice of surprisingly quiet resignation, rather than the hortatory declamatory style the words might imply. Whether he spoke in this manner during his address in the House is not known but, on the recording, it is an oratorical choice that, paradoxically, serves to heighten the words’ power, underlining a deadly earnestness and resolve. “We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air [the only word on which his voice stabs upward in pitch and volume, before returning to its steady, resigned, implacable tread]. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender…” According to historian Jill Lepore, in her book These Truths,29 Churchill’s speech was broadcast live by radio stations “across America,” and it seems to have had the desired effect on Roosevelt’s thinking. Six days later, the president, delivering the commencement address at the University of Virginia, spoke passionately about the horrors of a nation under foreign dictatorship, which he described as “the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through
the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.”30 Three months later, he initiated the country’s first peacetime draft.

  Roosevelt was as effective as Churchill in the use of his voice to rouse the nation he led but his power as a public speaker derived, for the most part, not from Churchill’s rolling, orotund, rhetorically rich delivery, but from a speech more reminiscent of Lincoln’s American plain-style. Roosevelt first marshalled this, as an inspirational tonic for the nation, eight days after his inauguration in March 1933. With the country sunk in the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt had the revolutionary idea of using the new medium of radio to directly address the country. This would initiate a series of addresses that became known as “fireside chats,” which he used throughout his presidency to quell panic and stiffen spines during crises that included the near-collapse of the banking system, record unemployment, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and the war against Hitler and Nazism. A single reference to the “phantom of fear” was his only alliterative sally in his debut fireside chat on the banking crisis, and the famous phrase “a date which will live in infamy” (to describe the attack on Pearl Harbor in a speech in Congress) was about as fancy as he ever got—which doesn’t mean he was without rhetorical mastery. It is not easy to explain banking and finance to laypeople, but FDR did so with a clarity and precision that allayed public panic over his decision to close the banks and that imbued depositors with sufficient confidence in the financial system to prevent a run on the banks when he re-opened them. The phrase “it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress” might not sound like deathless rhetoric but such straight talk was key to the remarkable success of those radio addresses. For the first time in history, a world leader put himself on a conversational par with ordinary people, speaking ordinary language—albeit in a steely tone of unshakable confidence that derived, no doubt, from FDR’s patrician background, his “ruling-class” upbringing. But even his aristocratically dropped r’s (“phantom of feah”) and lock-jawed pronunciation of long ee did not alienate the masses; it was as if his willingness to speak in his actual voice, without any patronizing (or inadequate) code-switching, contributed to the sense of directness and honesty he conveyed. Thousands of letters poured into the White House after his debut fireside chat, including one from a listener who wrote, “It almost seemed the other night, sitting in my easy chair in the library, that you were across the room from me.”31

  This intimacy of connection with the American people was also crucial to FDR’s garnering the public support that allowed him, in the face of unimaginably fierce political and corporate resistance, to initiate the most comprehensive economic reforms since America’s founding—a redistribution of money from the hands of the few to the many (through the advent of Social Security, bank regulations, tax reform, and other measures) that brought the true ideals of democracy to America, by introducing greater economic opportunity for every citizen, in the form of the New Deal—a deal FDR sold directly to everyday Americans through the radio with his own voice.

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  Classic rules of rhetoric and oratory continued to play a decisive role in postwar geopolitics, especially in a series of dramatic showdowns between democracy and totalitarianism. In June 1963, at the height of the Cold War, President John F. Kennedy delivered, in West Berlin, one of his most famous addresses, second only perhaps to his inaugural speech when he invited Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country”—a nice example of Ciceronian parallelism of sentence construction that made the phrase not only as forceful as possible, but unforgettable.

  Kennedy’s West Berlin speech came just eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union had brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.32 Delivered in the shadow of the newly constructed Berlin Wall, which divided capitalist West Berlin from communist East Berlin, the speech was meant to defuse tensions along a border that threatened to be the next flashpoint for nuclear Armageddon. But Kennedy was horrified by his first in-person look at the looming concrete barrier that the communists had built to keep their people from fleeing dictatorship, and he decided that, with the eyes and ears of the world upon him, he would seize the opportunity to express his genuine outrage at Soviet authoritarianism. He scrapped the anodyne address prepared by his speechwriters and slashed down, in his own handwriting, an idea that derived from his knowledge of classical history. “Two thousand years ago,” he scribbled, “the proudest boast was ‘Civis Romanus sum’ ”—I am a Roman—“Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner!” The power and passion with which Kennedy declaimed those words from the stage in front of West Berlin’s city hall made the speech justifiably famous as a denunciation of dictatorship, but it is a longer passage of pure Ciceronian oratory that distinguishes this as one of the great speeches of history, made all the greater by the fire of Kennedy’s delivery, his Boston vowels elongated so that they carry like musical cadences, his voice tuned to a steely timbre that left no doubt of his genuine disgust at the spectacle of misery he had glimpsed when peering over the top of the wall into a grim and barren Soviet-occupied East Berlin, and a populace imprisoned:

  There are many people in the world who really don’t understand—or say they don’t—what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin! And there are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin! And there are even a few who say that it’s true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen—let them come to Berlin!

  A historical, and oratorical, bookend to Kennedy’s Ich bin ein Berliner speech came with an address, also delivered in West Berlin, by President Ronald Reagan, on June 12, 1987, when he aimed at Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev a Ciceronian series of escalating admonitions (“If you seek peace… if you seek prosperity… if you seek liberalization…”) culminating in the shouted line: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Some historians argue that the speech had little impact at the time and was only retroactively enshrined as a moment of epoch-making oratory two years later, when the Wall actually came down (and not because Reagan demanded it). Whatever the case, there is a larger argument to be made that both Kennedy’s and Reagan’s Berlin speeches are, for all their adherence to Cicero’s rules, a sign of the decline of classic oratory, given that both speeches are best known for one quotable four-word message (ich bin ein Berliner; tear down this wall): sound bites; short pithy phrases easily digested by a public not only disinclined to listen to long, involved, rhetorically complex speeches, but who are incapable of it.

  This argument hinges on the notion that our species’ cognitive apparatus has been refashioned by electronic mass media, fast-edited movies, and TV shows—and now clickbait YouTube videos and TikToks—that have reduced our attention spans to the point where it is impossible for us to follow the spoken arguments in, for instance, Kennedy’s Berliner speech—to say nothing of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which were a minimum of three hours long each: one hour for an “opening address” by a candidate, an hour and a half for the opponent’s reply, and then a half hour for “rejoinders.” And people were riveted!

  Compare this to our televised campaign debates where presidential candidates “discuss” the most momentous issues of the day in rapid-fire one- or two-minute verbal sprints. This might suggest that we have indeed suffered a species-wide cognitive decline that would make it impossible for us to attend to Lincoln’s and Douglas’s voices delineating complex ideas and arguments over several hours of granular verbal disputation. Except that it is not true. We have suffered no such cognitive deterioration and no related decline in our fascination with, and interest in, listening to the human voice, sin
gly or in conversation, as it articulates exceedingly complex ideas over hours of discussion. What has happened is that the exigencies of commercial television broadcasting, which demands regular pauses for a word from our sponsor, and which has evolved a Scheherazade-style of breathless this-just-in narrative intent on keeping viewers from changing the channel, has whittled down the time that politicians are allowed to speak, for fear (once again) that a bored or restive viewer will reach for the remote. Recent events have shown that we not only can listen to complex spoken argument for hours at a time, we love to do so.

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  Less than a decade ago, prognosticators about the “wonders” of the digital revolution predicted the widespread use of 3-D “virtual reality” headsets—a brave new world where even the thirty-second sound bite would be obsolete, “reality” itself replaced by a stereopticon of flashing CGI images and surround sound, a simulacrum of life, our own reality bubble geared mostly to sensation-driven entertainment (purveyors of pornography were over the moon). Today, these same prognosticators have to contend with the awkward fact that the most momentous outcome of the “Digital Renaissance” has been (as reformed digital evangelist and now leader of a movement called “Team Human,” Douglas Rushkoff, has gleefully pointed out)… the rebirth of radio. Virtual reality headsets have gone the way of Google glasses. By far the most popular use to which people put their iPhones, Rushkoff points out, is the downloading of three-hour podcasts by the likes of Joe Rogan or Sam Harris—podcasts that often feature knotty and complex discussion of politics, science, philosophy (punctuated, in Rogan’s case, by extended musings on Mixed Martial Arts). When not listening to podcasts, we are bingeing TED talks on equally complicated subjects on YouTube. Both forms are distinguished by their singular focus on one of the oldest technologies on Earth: the human voice, isolated, talking.