Book Review : The Awkward Age of Political Oratory
Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking by Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Oxford University Press: $24.95, 320 pages)
The “stemwinder”--that is, a lengthy speech by a long-winded politician--was once a fine old Fourth of July tradition.
Today, in an age of the digital watch and the 30-second spot, the word itself is almost meaningless, and the tradition of public oratory is long dead. What has taken its place, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson in “Eloquence in an Electronic Age,” is an abbreviated, distorted and dangerously manipulative version of eloquence that owes much more to “the grammar of television” than to the wealth of Western civilization.
“The central claims of Madison Avenue, of prime-time television, and widely viewed films have replaced those of the Bible, Shakespeare, and the great speeches as the lingua franca of contemporary oratory,” Jamieson writes. “Reagan answered a press conference question with the Clint Eastwood phrase ‘Make my day.’ ”
“Eloquence in an Electronic Age” is Jamieson’s impressive study of the use and abuse of oratory, both in its classical and its contemporary sense, in the public life of the United States. She devotes a chapter to Clarence Darrow’s devastating examination of William Jennings Bryan during the Scopes trial, and pauses to note some of the enduring moments of recent public oratory--for example, the encounter between Joe McCarthy and the Army’s special counsel, Joseph Welch, during the Army-McCarthy hearings: “Have you no decency, sir, at long last?” were Welch’s memorable words of indictment. “Have you left no sense of decency?”
Her essay on women as orators is a persuasive argument that women have been silenced by society over the centuries: “To hold the speech of women in check, the clergy, the courts, and the keepers of the medical profession devised labels discrediting ‘womanly’ speech,” she explains, by condemning women who spoke in public as “heretics,” “hysterics,” “witches” and “whores.”
But Jamieson argues that television has afforded new opportunities to women as communicators: The “talent for capturing ideas and lessons in brief dramatic narratives is one cultivated by mothers telling bedtime stories to their children,” she insists, and so women are especially well-suited for television, which emphasizes “a personal, self-disclosing style that draws public discourse out of a private self and comfortably reduces the complex world to dramatic narratives.” Jamieson concludes: “Television’s bias prizes the narrative skills that once were pilloried.”
The Secret Role
She explores the secret but powerful role of the speechwriter in contemporary politics, thus demonstrating that former presidential spokesman Larry Speakes is hardly the first man to make up a quote for a President or a presidential candidate. (According to Jamieson, Alexander the Great used a ghostwriter, and Hamilton and Madison “gave the prose of George Washington a touch of rhetorical class.”)
But ghostwriters enjoy vast influence in a political system where every aspect of a politician’s public image is meticulously crafted by others: “It is now possible to elect someone whose primary qualifications are a knack for creating news McNuggets, a willingness to speak the thoughts of others, a talent for doing so with sincerity and conviction, and a tolerance for feigning enthusiasm when delivering the same stock stump speech for the seventh time in a single day.”
Ronald Reagan, the so-called Great Communicator, earns a chapter of his own in Jamieson’s book, although she points out that he is not regarded as truly eloquent, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, he is an expert in the use of the “synoptic” image or phrase to capture and project his ideas and his identity.
“Better than any modern President, Reagan translates words into memorable televisual pictures,” Jamieson points out. “His success is attributable to his grasp of the ways in which ‘reassuring rhetoric’ can be translated into the concise, dramatic, evocative stories and scenes that in an electronic age substitute for traditional argument.”
(Jamieson herself is guilty of some metaphorical excesses that are especially surprising in a book about eloquence. “Television did not single-handedly evict eloquence from the assembly and tie her to the railroad track,” she writes. “A number of accomplices polished the tracks, purchased the rope, and then condemned the train for being punctual.” Elsewhere, she observes that “Reagan is to television what corned beef is to rye.” Jamieson’s scholarship, her command of ideas, and her insights are superb, but her phrasemaking is occasionally contrived.)
Decline of Eloquence
Jamieson bemoans the decline of traditional eloquence, and the resulting distortion of the language of discourse and debate, to which many of us will say “Amen!” But Jamieson, who is clearly (and justifiably) saddened and even frightened by the phenomenon, is honest enough to concede that our culture has established its own definitions of what constitutes eloquence. The author herself cites the television coverage of the Kennedy assassination as an example of a new kind of eloquence, an eloquence of imagery rather than words: “During those four days in 1963, television delivered the contemporary equivalent of the Gettysburg Address.”
Still, I share Jamieson’s sense of despair over what has become of language in the public life of America. “As fire came from Sinai and Olympus, the word orate whispered its kinship to prayer, a kinship forged in the Latin root orare meaning ‘to pray,’ ” Jamieson explains. “Oratory was once the art of speaking; an oratory, a place of prayer. Fiery oratory now gave way to the fireside chat. . . .The sacred has slipped away.”