With the potential of either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump winning the White House, one cannot help fearing that a four year famine will ensue — a scarcity of memorable political oratory.
Though they could produce speeches that soar and unite, the record of their rhetoric reveals words that sore and untie our cords.
While reading and evaluating this year’s campaign speeches, I came upon “The Great American Speech: Words and Monuments,” a recently published book by Stephen Fender, Professor of English at University College in London.
On first glance, I took this volume to be an anthology, an assembled and annotated collection of the texts of famous speeches. But Fender did not anthologize great American speeches; he wrote a philosophy of “The Great American Speech.” And, Fender’s thesis sets out to show that American speeches are cultural glue that unites the ideals of “the American dream” (individualistic in nature) with the wider communitarian impulses.
Fender writes:
…“And while it’s true that only a minority of Americans would recognize a quote from Shakespeare or Wordsworth, or even Herman Melville, Mark Twain or Philip Roth, the highly diverse population really does share a culture – not in great literature, or in cathedrals, country houses and traditional social practices, but in public speeches about the values that bind the country together. The Great American Speech is the national culture.
…And here is the unexpected thing, when you consider that the overriding American ideology is supposed to be all about free enterprise and ever man for himself: in the Great American Speech ‘better’ has meant more communitarian, more sharing, more tolerant, not more competitive, richer or more prosperous.
…This is what makes the moral orientation of the Great American Speech so unexpected: that it runs directly counter to the ‘American Dream’, that promise held out to the world’s poor and downtrodden that if they were willing to risk the disruptive move to America, work hard when they got there, save their money and put off satisfying their immediate whims, they could become as rich and successful in the New World as their former masters in the Old.
Over time this promise hardened into a set of values to be prized above all other human qualities. The virtues of self-reliance, individual risk, private enterprise, energized by relative freedom from government control, grew into the chief constituents of American national self-identity. This is what historians and populists alike have called the American Dream.
Yet fewer have noticed that all this time Americans have also identified in themselves another quite opposite, set of ideals, going just as far back into the country’s past as the dream of personal success. According to this tradition, the principles distinguishing the nation from the rest of the world are community and equality, in spite of social and economic status.
More often spoken than written – that is, personally presented and live and tested by the responses of a live audience – this opposing claim on American identity has always held mass appeal. In popular culture, from sermons and speeches (whether for presidential inaugurations, or just to celebrate the nation), right down to present-day films, the Great American Speech has functioned as a correcting focus on communal themes and values.
From this starting point, Fender analyzes a number of the most well-known speeches in U.S. history: Jefferson, Adams, Lincoln, JFK, and MLK. Fender even devotes two chapters of analysis to speeches from American films.
Will the remainder of the 2016 election begin to set the rhetorical bar higher than it has up to now? More important perhaps, will the electorate desire for them to do so? Or even, to reward them for doing so?
According to Fender, we’re all better served when mouths and ears desire for more than just an individualized form of the American dream.
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