The Decline and Fall of Oratory

By LANCE MORROW

Tennessee's Governor Frank Clement, the most distinguished graduate of Mrs. Dockie Shipp Weems' School of Expression in Nashville, rose up before the 1956 Democratic Convention and demonstrated a dying art. His keynote address that night beside the Chicago stock yards was a symphony of rhetorical excess, a masterpiece of alliteration and allusion, an epic of the smite-'em style of oratorical Americana.

"How long, O how long, America!" cried Clement, in a grandiloquent filch from Cicero's First Catiline Oration. "How long, O America, shall these things endure?" In Dwight Eisenhower's foreign policy, Clement declaimed, "Foster [Dulles] fiddles, frets, fritters and flits." Richard Nixon was "the vice-hatchet man slinging slander and spreading half-truths while the top man peers down the green fairways of indifference." To farmers, the gusty Tennessean pleaded: "Come on home . . . Your lands are studded with the white skulls and crossbones of broken Republican promises."

The Republican Party in those days was not entirely speechless either. Connoisseurs of the genre remember the sublimely fogbound organ tones of Illinois' Everett McKinley Dirksen. In his early career, writes Biographer Neil MacNeil, Dirksen "bellowed his speeches in a mongrel mix of grand opera and hog calling." Over the years, he developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr. Would he criticize an erring colleague? someone would ask. "I shall invoke upon him every condign imprecation," Dirksen would intone, with a quiver of his basset's jowls and the gold-gray ringlets of his hair.

Dirksen's oratory succeeded in part because it functioned simultaneously as a satire upon oratory, in somewhat the way that Mae West has always been a walking satire upon sex. But all of and splendor, with his rapscallion rhapsodies and hints of the mountebank, could not conceal a small truth about what that ahead for the ancient discipline of rhetoric: an art that wanes into self-mockery is dying.

Today, oratory seems in serious, possibly terminal, decline. Americans rummaging in their memories for the last great speech they heard--great in content and delivery--often find that they must fetch back at least to 1963, to Martin Luther King Jr.'s soaring, preacherly performance during the March on Washington. Some think of John Kennedy's Inaugural Address; yet as the '60s wore on, the go-anywhere-pay-any-price rhetoric of that bright January day on the New Frontier began to seem not only suspect but even a symptom of the emptiness of eloquence and the woes that fancy talk can lead a country into. Some, with even longer memories, mention Churchill in Fulton, Mo., in 1946 ("An iron curtain has descended . . .") or F.D.R.'s first Inaugural ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself).

Eloquence, of course, is a matter of political taste. Conservatives may rank Ronald Reagan's acceptance speech last month only a little short of Edmund Burke. Liberals might poignantly remember Edward Kennedy's speech to the 1972 Democratic Convention the night that George McGovern was nominated. Neoconservatives with a taste for the mystagogic might wheel out Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "decline of the West'" speech at Harvard two years ago. But of course that was delivered in Russian, and therefore flowed a little outside the American rhetorical mainstream.

Heroic eloquence has made more difference in the world than Westerners are now comfortable in admitting. That eloquence, like science, can do great evil is a truth this century acquired the hard way. Hitler's ranting persuasions worked enough disastrous black magic to send his audience pouring out of the stadium to conquer the world; Churchill's answering eloquence quite literally, physically, pushed back the Reich. In each case, the spoken words alone, the voice, worked with an eerie, preternatural force. Perhaps in some instinctive recoil from its demonstrated, primitive powers, Westerners today have learned to treat eloquence as either an amiable curio or a mild embarrassment. American TV audiences this summer see eloquence perfectly domesticated and trivialized in an A.1 Steak Sauce commercial in which a bowler, feigning slightly lunatic oratorical inspiration, demands: "My friends, what is hamburger?" In a culture that increasingly demands technical or bureaucratic solutions, passionate oratory seems a kind of gaudy irrelevance. It also, rather curiously, makes people uncomfortable. Lord Shinwell, a former British Labor Minister, remarks: "If Churchill came down to the Commons today to call for blood, sweat and tears, many of his listeners would probably titter or look plain embarrassed."

What has happened to eloquence, to the art of speechmaking? The greatest single factor in its decline has been television. The intrusion of TV cameras into almost every significant public meeting in the U.S. has vastly extended the range of speakers' voices, but also changed the nature of what they are doing. A play performed on the legitimate stage but carried by TV somehow always seems dislocated and obscurely fraudulent. The politician addressing a large rally in a speech that is being televised has two audiences, the one in the hall and the one at home. He works simultaneously in two media, an extraordinarily difficult trick. TV has an intimate and pitiless eye that can make any exuberantly talented stump speaker look like a sweating and psychotic blowhard.

Before his G.O.P. keynote speech in Detroit last month, Congressman Guy Vander Jagt thought that the dual-medium problem was like "having one bullet and having to shoot north and south at the same time." During his long campaign this year, Ted Kennedy often seemed on television to be bulging and strident, too angry, radiating heat; the same performance in the hall usually seemed to come off rather well. Eventually, Kennedy began injecting into his thundering utterances a little of the self-satirizing gaiety that Dirksen used.

Ronald Reagan, of all the candidates this year, best understands TV's intimate eye; he neither shouts nor gesticulates. Reagan owes his entire career to his talent for persuasion; his long years on television gave him just the right media reflexes for the age. Jimmy Carter also possesses a shrewdly understated television style. A Carter speech that seems pale and weak in person comes through coaxial cables giving off just the right small personal glow.

The procedures of television news reporting have very nearly dismantled what is left of oratorical integrity. TV news producers have in effect become the editors of American speeches. The ancient disciplines of rhetoric suffer disastrously as they are trimmed to the electronic purpose. A politician's handlers try to schedule an event for some time around 2 or 3 p.m. to sluice neatly into Cronkite. Instead of constructing a speech on the old Ciceronian blueprint (exordium, argument, refutation, peroration and so on) or even on a less classical pattern (beginning, middle and end would do) the politician contrives a speaking performance that contains a few key and newsy sentences in oratorical neon to make the networks. As J.F.K. Aide William Haddad says, "A lot of writers figure out how they are going to get the part they want onto TV. They think of a news lead and write around it. And if the TV lights don't go on as the speaker is approaching that news lead, he skips a few paragraphs and waits until they are lit to read the key part. This does not make for a coherent, flowing speech." During the 1976 campaign, says Political Scientist James David Barber, Jimmy Carter made a useful discovery: "He put all his pauses in the middle of his sentences, and as he neared the period, he would speed up and pass it until the middle of the next sentence. He got more TV time because it was pretty hard for TV editors to chop him in mid-sentence."

Because of television's fragmenting procedures, it is hardly worth a politician's time to treat his speeches as works of art. Mark Twain said it took him three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech, but few speakers rehearse their lines any more; Vander Jagt, who polished his keynote speech by orating at the squirrels and pine trees near his Luther, Mich., home, is an exception in his zeal.

Speeches simply no longer pulse as they once did at the center of political and cultural life. Once they were prized as entertainment. Today armies of business leaders, writers, politicians, actors and other celebrities are riding the lecture circuit, and yet they remain peripheral. Movies, then radio and television over the past several generations, have reduced oratory to the status almost of quaintness.

By beaming important speeches to the whole nation, TV has also ensured that most politicians and their committees of advisers will orchestrate all oratory to offend the least number of voters. William Jennings Bryan, whose 1896 "cross of gold" speech was one of the last to get Americans out of a chair and make them do something (they gave him the Democratic nomination on the spot), once described eloquence as "thought on fire." Today, in an age of single-issue politics, the ambitious are careful to see that they do not get burned. Says NBC-TV's Edwin Newman: "Advertising, public relations and polling techniques create attitudes that are designed to appeal to a large number of people. These attitudes tend to flatten out a speech." Political speeches may soon be written by computers: pretested paragraphs are tried out on people for reactions, then fed into a computer along with the speaker's philosophy, and out comes a speech. Audiences now wince wearily at the cute and canned self-deprecatory jokes that federal bureaucrats invariably tell when they go out of town to give a speech. Sample: "You know, the three lies most often told are 'I'll still love you in the morning,' 'The check is in the mail,' and I'm from Washington and I'm here to help you.' " Bureaucrats today invariably fall short of Gladstone, who once kept the House of Commons enthralled for more than three hours with a speech on the 1853 budget.

In America at least, a tradition of high rhetoric has always competed with a sentimental worship of the inarticulate. In 1939's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the sleekly senatorial Claude Rains attempts to conceal his corruption behind an impressive tapestry of rhetoric. But Jimmy Stewart, barely able to complete a sentence, engagingly stumbling over his words, wins out because his sheer radiant American virtue shines through the manipulative deceits inherent in language. It is possible that Adlai Stevenson lost the presidency twice in part because he spoke a little too well. This theme returned passionately in the countercultural '60s, when inarticulate sincerity seemed the answer to the state's mendacities. Some preached that imperialism, racism and sexism are deeply embedded in the language--a fact that, if true, would tend to discredit eloquence, to make it futile and wrong from the start.

Somehow, few speakers today make oratory seem the urgent and necessary approach to the world that it once was. Eloquence implies certitude. "Hear, O Israel," said Moses, his voice reverberating with authority well beyond his own. It is not a posture much adopted now when such previously safe topics as the family, progress and the future become problematic. (Reagan's acceptance speech rejected doubts about progress, the family and the future, which may explain why the speech worked as oratory.) Eloquence implies premeditation in an age that has made a virtue of spontaneity. It implies (at its historical best) a public consciousness of serious issues in an age that in a profound way prefers gossip. "The personality of the orator outweighs the issues," observes John Leopold, professor of classical rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. A psychologically intimate age does not trust issues, but rather impulses; a man would say anything, after all, to get elected, but what is his mental weather? What makes the finger near the button twitch?

Rhetoric--"Mere rhetoric"; "Oh, that's just rhetoric!"--is not taught widely any more. In its Greco-Roman golden age, rhetoric was the key to civilized persuasion, and therefore to society itself. The Greek apparatus of rhetoric is a brilliantly elaborate armamentarium of speechmakers' devices--synecdoche, syllepsis, symploce and so on. Almost from the beginning, the power of rhetoric troubled even those who were best at wielding it. Wrote Cicero: "I have thought long and often over the problem of whether the power of speaking and the study of eloquence have brought more good or harm to cities."

As Cicero knew, it depends. Rhetoric has started wars and stopped them. The eloquence of Bernard of Clairvaux dispatched tens of thousands on the catastrophic Second Crusade. Mindless oratory has also caused untold brain damage to audiences over the centuries. The outpouring of verbiage continues. As the political season ramshackles through the summer, the landscape is dense with BOMFOG (an acronym used by political reporters to designate one of the late Nelson Rockefeller's favorite oratorical cliches: Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God). Americans may sometimes wistfully miss a better quality of oratory. They might grow even more wistful if they reflected on the Japanese, who regard eloquence as a potential threat to their stability-through-consensus. Haragei, their ultimate form of communication, can only be envied in the week of a convention. It consists of making oneself understood with silence. --By Lance Morrow

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