Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking 9780199879106, 0199879109

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‘Eloquence in an ‘Electronic Ave

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ELOQUENCE IN AN LECT RONIC AGE The Transformation of Tolitical Speechmaking

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta) Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong ‘Tokyo Nairobi Dares Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in

Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1988 by Oxford University Press, Inc. First published in 1988 by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 19g0 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford Untversity Press Alf rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pubhcation Data Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. Eloquence in an electronic age/Kathleen Hall Jamuicson. p. com. Bibliography: p. Includes index.

1. Public speaking. 2. Eloquence. I. ‘Vitle. PN4121.J327 1988

808.5 1—dc1g 8'7-23057 CIP ISBN 0-19-503826-6 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-19-506317-1 (pbk.)

4 6 8 10 9 7 5 8 Printed in the United States of America

To K. B.

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‘Preface

On October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt’s life was saved by a scripted

speech when the folded text in his coat pocket slowed the bullet of a would-be assassin. Had the former president been more concise or had the advent of TelePrompTers eliminated the need for his typed version, he might not have lived to declare to the stunned audience, “I will make this speech or die!” This book is not about speakers who outlived their speeches but about speeches whose power gives them a life of their own. So, for example,

FDR’s words transformed December 7 into a day that will live in infamy, and Lincoln’s words continue to commit us to the belief that ours is a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” The statements that shaped history include: “Go ye therefore and teach all nations,” “Land, Peace and Bread,” “entangling alliances with none,” “war to make the world safe for democracy,” “we have nothing to fear but fear itself,” “we shall fight them on the beaches,” and “I have a dream.” From Rome’s Cicero to New York’s Mario Cuomo, speechmaking Is powerful. Cicero’s orations drove the tyrant Cataline from Rome; a single speech at the 1984 Democratic convention by Cuomo catapulted him into contention for a nomination he repeatedly disclaimed. My interest in eloquence is prompted by a desire to understand how we elect and whom we elect. Penetrating public speech ts increasingly important in a time when voters are searching behind promises for

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be teld that, pupeodaliy dn «CPPEl the tooistion ot the suprens Gaunt. thore sunt het be any hing | For more than a millennium, students of public address have speculated about the effects of speeches and the criteria that properly determine whether a speech is noteworthy. This speech text gained prominence for slowing a bullet shot at

Theodore Roosevelt on October 14, 1912, by an anti-third term fanatic. Its significance resides as well in TRs insistence that he was willing to die to deliver it. Although the bullet had lodged in his chest, TR declared, “I will make this speech or die. It is one thing or the other.” (Courtesy Political History Division, Smithsonian)

clues about whether or not a candidate is honest, knowledgeable, high principled, and temperamentally suited to lead the nation. In voter decisions, the candidate’s character is now more central than his or her stands on issues and party identification. In the interstices of sentences and the intersections between speech and behavior, voters find data

PREFACE IX they consider decisive. In spring 1987, these data discredited presidential hopeful Gary Hart. Hart had countered rumors about womanizing by challenging reporters to “go ahead” and “put a tail on me,” prophesying that “They’d be very bored.”' His words established a test of his personal credibility that reporters for the Mzam: Herald accepted. The married candidate’s subsequent weekend with attractive, young Donna Rice and his protestations about the innocence of the encounter undid his presidential aspirations. The contradiction between his words and

his actions called into doubt his honesty and at the same time raised questions about whether he was disposed to take risks and to believe that he was not bound by conventional moral codes. Here was.a candidacy dramatically unhinged not by a position on foreign or domestic policy but by concerns about the person who would be president. The news stories confirmed two dramatic changes in the political climate. Where reporters’ observations of President John Kennedy’s trysts went unreported, Hart was “staked out.” The barrier that once shielded

the private lives of politicians from public view has crumbled. At the same time, a photo of Donna Rice on Hart’s lap provided a form of evidence more damning than any words. The relationships between public speech and private self, self-disclosure, and visual cues are the subjects of later chapters. What we traditionally knew as eloquence cannot survive this new environment intact. This book searches out eloquence’s new incarnations and ultimately asks whether they can and should mesh with the ancient art. At a time in which the word rhetoric more often than not is said with a sneer and meant as a slur, eloquence retains its respectability. Yet, if not used promiscuously, the word at least is employed with an enervating casualness. Any political speech by a prominent person that elicits the enthusiasm of a large audience is quickly peppered by commenta-

tors with the label eloquent. This is true even if the speech produced only applause where it sought action and even when applause was prompted by predispositions, not freshly forged conviction. Ironically, these same pundits pine for those halcyon days beyond recall when audiences were interested and candidates eloquent. The lament is a long-lived one. In 80 a.p., Tacitus attributed the decline of oratory to inattentive parents, incompetent teachers, dissolute young men and neglect of the “ancient discipline.”* In the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Dickens complained that newspapers were groaning “heavily under a pressure of orations, each vying with the other. . . in having little or nothing to do with the matter at hand.”° “Today,” wrote Lance Morrow in Time in August 1980, “oratory seems in serious,

x PREFACE possibly terminal decline.”* In Tacitus’ time, a politically sterile environment repressed free speech and, with it, public eloquence. But the nineteenth century produced Disraeli and Gladstone, Lincoln, Webster and Calhoun, Douglass, Stanton, and the Grimke sisters. In our own century, the speeches of Gandhi, Churchill, and FDR stand out. And Ronald Reagan’s speech at Normandy holds up well as do speeches dehvered on a number of occasions by Mario Cuomo. This book is about political eloquence—what it is and isn’t, how our concept of it has changed and how it has remained the same,.the talents and techniques that differentiate those who are eloquent from those who wish they were but aren’t, the ways and means of speakers from Demosthenes to Reagan, and the work and wiles of speechwriters, Re-

publican and Democrat, ancient and modern. Throughout, the book asks: “Has television changed our concept of eloquence, altered its audience’s receptivity to eloquence, or functioned as the scapegoat blamed for destroying something it never laid electrons on?” In pursuit of this illusive yet alluring phenomenon, I will argue that the old eloquence of fire and sword has given way to an intimate disclosive art bent on conciliation, not conquest; that the eloquent person

whose ideas are refined by the process of writing and rethinking 1s increasingly not the speaker but the speechwriter; that speakers’ successes can sow the seeds of their failures: that those factors accounting for the eloquence of speakers from Cicero to Churchill are now largely

missing from education; and that, in the age of television, dramatic, digestive, visual moments are replacing memorable words, making Carter’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue the rhetorical equivalent of FDR’s “nothing to fear but fear itself.” Accordingly, televised scenes of

death in Vietnam were more potent than any antiwar speech. More eloquent than any rhetoric advocating civil rights were the televised images of police setting guard dogs and fire hoses against peacefully protesting black citizens.

This work hinges on its ability to explain why for so long Ronald Reagan remained more popular than his policies and why he was considered a “Great Communicator.” Specifically, I will demonstrate that Ronald Reagan’s success as a communicator was at least partially attributable to his embrace of a style once condemned as effeminate, that his use of self-disclosive stories immunized him from political assaults to which he otherwise was vulnerable, and that his knack for visual assertion enabled him to make claims that defied traditional logic and our usual tests of evidence. Reagan’s performance also displayed the dangers in divorcing thought from the act of speaking it. Finally, I will argue for a concept of eloquence that unites pictures and verbal prop-

PREFACE x1 ositions, argumentative substance, illustrative stories, and the conception and delivery of ideas.

I wish to thank Herb Simons, Jane Blankenship, Robert Hopper, George Kennedy, Steve Lucas, Gerry Hauser, Curtis Church, and Karlyn Campbell for their midwivery of early chapters; Seamus Neary for research and photographic assistance; Kevin Dean for tracking elusive bibliographic material; Maura Clancey for research support; Roger Mudd for asking the questions this book tries to answer; and the staff of the East-West Center for providing an ocean, mountains, and a collegial environment in which to write. The book would not have gotten from

prospectus to completed project were it not for the support of Mimi Melek who saw the work into production, Rosemary Wellner who again

suffered through my Latinate constructions to edit with good humor and precision, and Susan Rabiner, an astute critic, talented editor, and good friend. At the University of Texas, Deanna Matthews and Charlotte Richards translated my cryptic handwriting into typed pages and Margaret Surratt and Robert Risher made it possible to chair a department and retain a semblance of sanity. Dean Bob Jeffrey protected my writing time from assault by memo and administrative detail and Vice President Gerry Fonken made me glad that I lost his $1.00 bet that he could lure me to UT. Without the generous research and travel support provided by the G. B. Dealey professorship this book would still be an outline. Through it all, Roderick P. Hart, in his Puritan Irish way, made my world safe for absurdity and Robert Hopper, recreating a role pioneered in grad school, made my world safe from bureaucracy. Beth Macom (bless her) “proofread.”

I am grateful as well to the three men who add laundry and love to my life: Robert, Jr., and Patrick, who supplied hugs and the insistence that more people would read the book if it were called Elephants in an Electronic Age, and my husband Robert, who gave up the Navy to be landlocked with us in Austin. Finally, 1 am indebted to Kenneth Burke, to whom this book is gratefully dedicated, for enriching the academic scene and my life with puns, poetry, and perspective by incongruity.

Austin, Texas K. H. J. September, 1987

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(Sontents

1. Educating the Eloquent Speaker 8

2. Incapacitating the Eloquent Speaker 31

3. The Flame of Oratory, The Fireside Chat 43,

4. The “Effeminate” Style 67

5. The Memorable Phrase, The Memorable Picture go

6. Dramatizng and Storytelling 118 7. Conversation and Self-Revelation 165

8. The Divorce Between Speech and Thought 201

Notes 257 Bibliography 269 Index 293

g. Mating the Best of the Old and the New 238

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‘Eloquence in an

Electronic Age

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‘L.ducating the ‘Eloquent Speaker

The early efforts of the classical world’s greatest orator were derided for their “strange and uncouth style, which was cumbered with long sentences and tortured with formal arguments to a most harsh and disagreeable excess.” To complicate his problems, he had “a weakness in his voice, a perplexed and indistinct utterance and a shortness of breath, which, by breaking and disjointing his sentences much obscured the sense and meaning of what he spoke.” So, “in the end, being quite disheartened, he forsook the assembly.” When Demosthenes complained to Satyrus that “drunken sots, mariners, and illiterate fellows were heard, and had the hustings for their own, while he himself was despised,” the actor encouraged him to prac-

tice his delivery. “Hereupon,” Plutarch continues, “he built himself a place to study under ground. . . and hither he would come constantly every day to form his action and to exercise his voice; and here he would continue, oftentimes without intermission, two or three months together, shaving one half of his head, that so for shame he might not go abroad, though he desired it ever so much.” In the privacy of his study, he also formulated arguments for and against the matters that had crossed his path that day and reworked the speeches he had heard others deliver. “Hence, it was that he was looked upon as a person of no great natural genius, but one who owed all the power and ability he had in speaking to labour and industry.” ! Those who doubt that eloquence can be learmed need only guess 3

4 ELOQUENCE IN AN ELECTRONIC AGE which more recent but sull revered speaker delivered this passage in his youth: I know the great volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that reigns there, 1s belching forth the lava of political corruption in a current, broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful velocity over the whole length and breadth of the land, bidding fair to leave unscathed no green spot of living thing; while on its bosom are riding, like demons on the waves of Hell, the imps of that evil spirit, and fiendishly taunting all those who dare resist its destroying course with the hopelessness of their effort; and, knowing this, I cannot deny that all may be swept away. Broken by it, I, too, may be; bow to it I never will... . If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and alone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, before High Heaven, and in face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty, and my love.*

Less than two and a half decades later, that speaker would deliver the Gettysburg Address. The transformation is not as astonishing as it at first may seem—few are eloquent from childhood. Early in his career, another orator “found himself on his feet, with his mind a complete blank, while the awful silence was broken only by friendly, encouraging noises; he stood his ground until at last he could bear it no longer; back in his seat, he could only bury his head in his

hands. After his breakdown in the House of Commons he dreaded getting up to speak more than ever. Sometimes he would persuade himself that what he was about to say had already been said, or that the time to say it was past. Any excuse served to keep him in his seat.”° In 1953, that speaker received the Nobel Prize in literature in part for

his “scintillating oratory.” In the dark years of World War II he had rallied his country with ringing speeches. In the most often quoted, he said:

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, 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, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond

the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the

EDUCATING THE ELOQUENT SPEAKER 5 struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.’

In 1950, Winston Churchill confided to his physician, “Speaking to

five thousand people through a microphone is no more tiring than talking to a hundred. It doesn’t bother me. I’m not overawed by them. I’ve got used to it.”° In the lessons left us by our eloquent ancestors, there is good news and bad. The good news is that, by engaging in certain activities, our innate oratorical talents can be refined. The bad news is that these activities have been lost, stolen, or have strayed from our schools. When speaking held the central role in the conduct of public affairs, the disposition toward eloquence was cultivated. It no longer is.

Eloquence Flourishes Where Public Speaking Is an Honored Art

Ancient oratory was considered “a fine art, an art regarded by its cul-

tivators, and by the public, as analogous to sculpture, to poetry, to painting, to music and to acting. This character is common to Greek and Roman oratory.”® So, for example, Isocrates notes that listeners broke into loud applause when antitheses, symmetrical clauses, or other striking rhetorical figures were skillfully presented.’ Because it was the only way to reach a mass public, speech was not a means of influence but the means. Accordingly, as Whately noted, “the character of Orator, Author, and Politician, almost entirely coincided; he who would communicate his ideas to the world, or would gain political power, and carry his legislative schemes into effect, was necessarily

a Speaker; since, as Pericles is made to remark by Thucydides, ‘one who forms a judgment on any point, but cannot explain himself clearly to the people, might as well have never thought at all on the subject.’ ”® Evidence of the importance of speech can be seen in its choice as the form in which significant ideas would be preserved. A number of Isocrates’ undelivered works take the form of speeches as do the Second Philippic of Cicero? and Milton’s stirring defense of freedom of the

press. :

When the world of entertainment, persuasion, and politics was in the

main an oral one, listeners were drawn together in large numbers to experience a piece of communication. The speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero drew large audiences. So too in the nineteenth century did the speeches of Webster, Sumner, and Clay.

Not so today. Nearly four out of ten viewers will watch reruns or alternative programming rather than a speech by Ronald Reagan. In-

6 ELOQUENCE IN AN ELECTRONIC AGE deed, the Nielsen numbers reveal a decade-long decline in the share of

the audience attracted to a presidential speech and a corresponding decline in the total number of viewers. While few would deny that Reagan is a better speaker than either of his two immediate predecessors, more Americans watched Gerald Ford’s speeches than Jimmy Carter’s

and more tuned in to hear Carter than Reagan. Where televised presidential speeches once drew a larger audience than the programming they replaced, the prospect of listening to the president now drives viewers away. By contrast, in the nineteenth century, families would walk for miles to spend two hours standing in a field listening to a speech on national affairs. “Charles Sumner was an aristocrat,” recalled James Burton Pond a century ago. “He was my father’s ideal. After I had got back from Kansas and visited my father’s home in Wisconsin, father said to me: ‘James, the Honorable Charles Sumner is going to speak at R-——-. We must

hear him.’ So we arranged to go. We walked nine miles to hear him speak. My father never spoke of him without giving him his title. He had enjoyed that speech intensely. I do not know whether I did or not. Father occupied a front seat with the intention of rushing up to the platform and greeting him by the hand when he was finished, but the Honorable Charles was too quick for him. He disappeared, got to his hotel, and nobody saw him.”'® In the nineteenth century Charles Sumner was accorded. the sort of attention now reserved for Charles Kuralt or Charley Pride. Some symptomatic evidence of the lowly position that public address holds in our society comes in the lack of seriousness accorded it by the mass media. There are no major newspaper or TV critics of oratory as

there are of films, television shows, art, music, and theatrical performances. Few reporters would pretend to be critics of any of these arts without special training, yet they routinely categorize a speech as good,

effective, memorable, or eloquent. The impulse to assume the role of critic of oratory is a natural one. While few of us act, draw, or play an instrument without special training, most of us speak. That ability prompts the inference I speak therefore I critique. Knowledgeable critics of film, plays, and television educate the public

in their respective arts and in the standards by which these arts should be assessed. The absence of such evaluation of public speech denies the mass audience comparable assistance in evaluating an art that plays a direct role in the affairs of state. News coverage also devalues the speech. Newspapers once routinely reprinted the texts of important speeches; now, with the exception of The New York Times, few regularly do. Newspapers justified the change

EDUCATING THE ELOQUENT SPEAKER "7 on the same grounds used by politicians to explain why hour-long radio speeches gave way to thirty- and sixty-second spot ads: the public wasn't paying attention to the full-length speech. In 1913, the Earl of Roseberg voiced the relief with which speakers and newspaper readers greeted a paper filled with “matters of greater interest.” “No conscientious speaker ever rose in the morning and read his morning newspaper without having a feeling of pain, to see in it, reported verbatim, with agonizing conscientiousness, things which he would rather not have

said, and things which he thought ought not to bear repetition.” As for readers, “I never could find anybody who read my speeches. It was quite different in the time when IL was young, when practically the whole

family sat down after breakfast and read the whole debate through. But the present age is in too great a hurry for that.. . . [NJot one man in a hundred ever read the speeches which were so largely reported in the Press. Their removal from the Press gave space to other matters of greater interest, and is one of the greatest reliefs the newspaper reader ever experienced.”

The low regard in which the network news organizations hold the speech is evident in their coverage of the Democratic and Republican national conventions. With the exception of the keynote address, the addresses of major contenders, and the party’s nominees, other speeches

are routinely intercut with interviews from the floor or commentary from the booth. So, for example, speeches by likely 1988 candidates Robert Dole and Howard Baker were not heard in their entirety on CBS. Former President Ford’s speech to the Republican convention was picked up midway through by NBC; Dole’s speech also was given ab-

breviated coverage. NBC excerpted Andrew Young’s speech to the Democrats; CBS ignored it. CBS cut in and out of 1984 contender and 1972 nominee George McGovern’s speech and ignored the speech by Democratic House leader Tip O'Neill. Shirley Chisholm’s speech did

not appear on NBC; Marion Barry and Tom Bradley’s nominating speeches were heard there but not on CBS. If past is prophet, abbreviated coverage of the 1984 conventions meant

that the networks denied the public the privilege of assessing the sub-

stance and political potential of some important speakers. Hubert Humphrey first caught national attention with his stirring speech on civil rights at the 1948 Democratic convention. John Kennedy gained public notice by narrating the convention film in 1956, visibility that preceded his dash for the vice presidency when Stevenson threw selection of that nominee open to the floor. One of the most eloquent convention speeches given in modern history was the speech with which Eugene McCarthy nominated Adlai Stevenson in 1960. Had _ these

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Prior to the advent of the broadcast media, speakers could alter their speeches to accommodate feedback from their audiences. Here William Jennings Bryan addresses a group of loggers. (Courtesy Political History Division, Smithsonian)

cally mediated. William Jennings Bryan could inflame an audience only by direct contact with it. Ronald Reagan electrifies his audience with the cooperation of NBC, CBS, ABC, and the local power company. In the old universe of fire, the orator was inflamed. In the new uni-

verse of electricity, the audience, not the speaker, is electrified. The shift in metaphors marked a shift in the locus of energy from the orator to the idea. “Condense some daily experience into a glowing sym-

...9+.

bol,” wrote Emerson, “and an audience is electrified.”°* This shift was accompanied by a move away from impassioned delivery and strong direct pathetic appeals. As discourse was cast 1n electrical metaphors, theories premised on conservation of energy took hold. So, for example, nineteenth-century

THE FLAME OF ORATORY, THE FIRESIDE CHAT 53

British philosopher Herbert Spencer argued that audiences have a finite amount of energy to expend on grasping a speech. Predicating “economy of attention” as a principle, he claimed that a speaker should do all possible to interest the audience because energy spent on holding one’s attention on a dull speech could not be used to reflect on its content.

This confluence of factors produced three of the changes in public speechmaking on which later chapters will focus; conversational delivery and natural gesture replaced impassioned speech. With the advent of television, words functioned more readily to caption pictures than to create them and the speaker emerged autobiographically in the speech. The Advent of Conversational Delivery

For well over a century before electricity entered our homes, a more controlled notion of the human communication process, one centered on reason not emotion, had been on the horizon. In 1783, Hugh Blair noted in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres** that “the Greeks and

Romans aspired to a more sublime species of Eloquence, than is aimed

at by the Moderns. Theirs was of the vehement and passionate kind, by which they endeavored to inflame the minds of their hearers, and hurry their imaginations away.” By contrast, he concluded, “Modern Eloquence 1s much more cool and temperate.” Whatever the cause, audience members report much more emotive responses to the oratory of early days than to our own. So, for example, Sir Gilbert reported that “there was not a dry eye in the assembly

during Sheridan’s great Begum Speech, {and] that he himself never cried so on a public occasion.” ** Earlier audiences clearly had reactions that we would now find aberrant. Professor Ticknor’s reaction to Daniel Webster’s Plymouth Address might have caused his physician con-

sternation: “Three or four times I thought my temples would burst with the gush of blood. . . . When I came out, I was almost afraid to come near to him. It seemed to me that he was hke the mount that might not be touched, and that burned with fire.”*° As Wilham Jennings Bryan gave way to Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, the emergence of cooler, more controlled communication required a changed metaphor. The rise of radio in the United States accelerated the trend away from impassioned oratory and toward public conversation between speaker and audience.

The electric metaphor captured the changed practices it had helped produce. By the second decade of the twentieth century the subtle, plain style

54 ELOQUENCE IN AN ELECTRONIC AGE had become the norm. “We read,” wrote James Winans in 1917, “that the ancients would endure the most direct assaults upon their feelings. Pleaders in court might dramatically bare their scars; and the young

children of a defendant might be exhibited with the open intent of winning sympathy. These methods have not entirely lost vogue, but they can rarely be used so openly with good effect. The modern man, and especially the American and Englishman, though emotional enough, dislikes direct appeals to his feelings. He may hang his head or he may jeer; but he is in all cases likely to resist when he ts conscious that an assault upon his feelings is being made.” °° With the changed style came a changed mode of delivery. The slapping of the thigh and the foot stamping that in the Roman forum accentuated strong appeals now survived only on the stage. Sull, until the advent of amplified sound, speakers needed to project their voices great distances. “Many public speakers have not the advantage of enjoying lungs and other organs of speech always adequate to the constant emission of that volume of sound, which is necessary to fill those buildings, commonly devoted to the purposes of oratory,” noted John Quincy Adams.*’ “To them the soundest advice perhaps would be to devote themselves to some occupation more compatible with their tenderness of constitution.” Having a voice like a pipe organ, as Daniel Webster did, carried an advantage as long as the unamplified human voice was required to reach each member of the audience. So Macaulay was praising Pitt when he wrote of his delivery, “the sound rose like the swell of the organ of a cathedral, shook the House with its peal, and was heard through lobbies and down the staircases, to the Court of Requests and the precincts of Westminster Hall.”°® Before the broadcast media, when you said a person spoke “forcefully,” you were probably referring to delivery; in the broadcast age such statements usually describe content, not delivery.

Rarely did women have voices like pipe organs. Although many note-

worthy female orators in the abolition and suffrage movements overcame the obstacle, the articulatory volume required to project a message to thousands of listeners made it more difficult for women to speak

effectively in such an environment. The intimate nature of broadcast communication altered not only the volume but the tone of discourse. “Before electronic amplification, the very size of an audience could build

up the agonistic temper of discourse,” notes cultural theorist Walter Ong. “It is hard to project trenic gentleness in roaring vocalization, which lends itself readily to combative situations.” *

When the fire metaphor was extinguished, so too were the related

THE FLAME OF ORATORY, THE FIRESIDE CHAT 55

notions that the orator commanded lightning and thunder or could storm the audience. More frequently, electrical metaphors came to de-

scribe the cooler rhetoric that Hume and Blair saw as native to the modern forum. Scholars began to conceive the universe of discourse in

terms of this newly domesticated force. Writing near the turn of the century, William James introduced The Will to Believe by noting, “Let us

give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature—it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead.” *° Electricity transported communication into an intimate environment. Radio and television deliver their messages to family units of twos and

threes. By contrast, the torch parade drew hundreds and occasionally thousands to hear a speaker. In the guiet of our living rooms we are less likely to be roused to a frenzy than when we are surrounded by a swarming, sweating mass of partisans. From Cicero’s De Oratore through the nineteenth-century treatise Or-

ators and Oratory, the word orator was an honorable one. In the electronic age, that word lost currency. Just as inflaming a public became the province of the demagogue, orating came to signal speaking in “an elevated and often pompous manner.”*! Departments and professorships of oratory gave way to “public address.” FDR’s fireside chats suggested a new model of communication: one person in the private space of his living room chatting with millions of other individuals in theirs, Could such discourse properly be labelled public address? Some argued that the mass media’s small families and solitary viewers were not a public in any traditional sense. Moreover, conversing privately with families through publicly accessible channels did not seem to approximate address. Its “public” turned private and its “address” turned conversation, “public address” joined bustles in the linguistic attic.

Correspondingly, instead of being called orators, those who addressed audiences were now called speakers. Where once they orated, now they spoke. Many noticed the differences. Dale Carnegie, whose Carnegie Clubs popularized nonacademic speech training, observed: [Sjome schoolboys are still being forced to recite the ornate “oratory” of Webster and Ingersoll—a thing that is as much out of style and as far removed from the spirit of the age as the hats worn by Mrs. Ingersoll and Mrs. Webster would be if they were resurrected today.

56 ELOQUENCE IN AN ELECTRONIC AGE An entirely new school of speaking has sprung up since the Civil War. In keeping with the spirit of the times, it is as direct as a telegram. The verbal fireworks that were once the vogue would not longer be tolerated by an audience in this year of grace.

: A modern audience, regardless of whether it is fifteen people at a business conference or a thousand people under a tent, wants the speaker to talk just as directly as he would in a chat, and in the same general manner that he would employ in speaking to one of them in conversation.”

Speeches became talks. In the transition, the sacred slipped away. As hre came from Sinai ane Olympus, the word orate whispered its kinship to prayer, a kinship forged in the Latin root orare meaning “to pray.” Oratory was once the art of speaking; an oratory, a place of prayer. Fiery oratory now gave way to the fireside chat.

Televised Words Caption rather than Create Pictures

In intensity, style, tone, and even length, the new eloquence is more constrained than the old. The same tendency is reflected in the abandonment of another traditional metaphor: that of eloquence as a painting of thought. Here, the old rhetor ts to the new as the muralist is to the minimalist. For Pascal as for many of his predecessors, eloquence was a “painting of thought.” “[T]hose who, after having painted it, add something more,

make a picture instead of a portrait.”** So central was this visualizing process that in De augments Francis Bacon argued that “it is the office of Rhetoric to make pictures of virtue and goodness, so that they may be seen.” *4 Because man was the victim of original sin, argued Fenelon, he was enmeshed in “palpable things” and could not long attend to the “abstract.” Accordingly, “lively portraiture” is the “soul” of eloquence.” Theorists assumed that sight was the most powerful sense and probed

appeals to “the visual imagination.” Forms of demonstration that invited an audience to see a person or event were codified and enshrined in directories of figures of speech. The belief that rhetoric should paint a picture produced detailed descriptive passages that we now find peculiar and excessive in nineteenth-

century American public address. So, for example, in his eulogy of Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner found it necessary to describe the sixteenth president: In person he was tall and bony, with little resemblance to any historic portrait, unless he might seem in one respect to justify the epithet given to an early English king. As he stood, his form was angular, with something of

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