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Abstract
In this essay, I examine the definition and invocation of rhetorical history, a concept central to the work done in this journal. The essay briefly discusses the uses of history by rhetorical critics, turns to President Barack Obama's theory of (rhetorical) history and social change, examines his deployment of argument from history as a means to manage varied rhetorical problems, and concludes with some thoughts on his rhetorical history and ours.
Notes
[1] Stephen Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (New York, 1970), 126–37.
[2] H. W. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997), 675–77
[3] Theodore Roosevelt, “From the Archives: President Teddy Roosevelt's New Nationalism Speech,” www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/06, 2.
[4] Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Economy in Osawatomie, Kansas,” December 6, 2011, 2. Unless otherwise noted, all Obama texts are from www.whitehouse.gov and will be cited only by date and page.
[5] Michael Leff, “Hermeneutical Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader, eds. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997): 196–214. Kirt Wilson insightfully argues that imitation has not always been an unmitigated blessing for African Americans. See Kirt H.Wilson, “The Racial Politics of Imitation in the Nineteenth Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 1 (2003): 89, 104.
[6] Hoyt H. Hudson, “The Field of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 9, no. 2 (1923): 167–80; W. Norwood Brigance, “Whither Research?” Quarterly Journal of Speech 19, no. 4 (1933): 552–61; Herbert A. Wichelns, “The Literary Criticism of Oratory,” in Studies in Rhetoric and Public Speaking in Honor of James Albert Winans, ed. A. M. Drummond (New York, NY: Century Co., 1925), 181–216; Donald C. Bryant, “Some Problems of Scope and Method in Rhetorical Scholarship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 23, no. 2 (1937): 184.
[7] For early criticism of this emphasis, see Loren D. Reid, “The Perils of Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 30, no. 4 (1944): 416–22; Ernest J. Wrage, “Public Address: A Study in Social and Intellectual History,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 33, no. 4 (1947): 451–57; Thomas R. Nilsen, “Criticism and Social Consequences,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 42, no. 2 (1956): 173–78.
[8] Barnet Baskerville, “Must We All Be ‘Rhetorical Critics’?” Quarterly Journal of Speech 63, no. 2 (1977): 107–16; Kathleen J. Turner, “Rhetorical History as Social Construction: The Challenge and the Promise,” in Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, ed. Kathleen J. Turner (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 2.
[9] James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 69–70.
[10] Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 85.
[11] Kloppenberg, Reading Obama, 152.
[12] He also acknowledges the temptations of the “relativist, the rule breaker … the freedom of the apostate” (the poststructuralist?), but declines to pursue them.
[13] Obama, Audacity, 92.
[14] Obama, Audacity, 92.
[15] Abraham Lincoln, “House Divided,” in American Rhetorical Discourse, Third Edition, eds. Ronald F. Reid and James F. Klumpp (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2005), 403.
[16] Obama, Audacity, 92.
[17] This view of pragmatism as a kind of liberal social criticism is most clearly and persuasively presented by Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1995).
[18] Barack Obama, “Obama on ‘Renewing the American Economy,’” March 27, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/us/politics/27text-obama.html?pagewanted=all.
[19] Barack Obama, “Remarks of President Barack Obama—Address to Joint Session of Congress,” http://www.whitehouse.gov.,/February, February 24, 2009.
[20] Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Economy,” April 14, 2009.
[21] Chain Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver, trans. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 117.
[22] For a complementary analysis of his efforts to establish legitimacy, see Cara A. Finnegan, “Picturing Presidents: Visual Politics Inside the Obama White House,” in The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations: Establishing the Obama Presidency, eds. Jennifer Mercieca and Justin Vaughn (College Station, TX: Texas A& M University Press, 2014): 209–34.
[23] Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 20.
[24] Quoted in Glaude, In a Shade, 15.
[25] Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 1995, 2004).
[26] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York, NY: HarperOne, 1986), 35–36. A superb account of Niebuhr's thought is: Langdon Gilkey, On Niebuhr: A Theological Study (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
[27] David Brooks, “Obama, Gospel and Verse,” New York Times, April 26, 2007, A25. See also R. Ward Holder and Peter B. Josephson, The Irony of Barack Obama: Barack Obama, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Problem of Christian Statecraft (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2012).
[28] Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in Commencement Address at the University of Notre Dame,” May 17, 2009, 1. For an account of the context, see: Ronald C. Arnett, “Civic Rhetoric–Meeting the Communal Interplay of the Provincial and Cosmopolitan: Barack Obama's Notre Dame Speech, May 17, 2009,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 4 (2011): 631–71.
[29] Obama, “Notre Dame,” 2.
[30] Diarmaid MacCullough, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York, NY: Viking, 2009), 303.
[31] Obama, “Notre Dame,” 2.
[32] Obama, “Notre Dame,” 3–4.
[33] Obama, “Notre Dame,” 3, 4.
[34] Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1985), 81. See also, John M. Murphy, “Barack Obama, the Exodus Tradition, and the Joshua Generation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 4 (2011): 387–410.
[35] For instance, note how ferociously Niebuhr attacks divine election and the Puritans in his most famous work: Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1952, 2008).
[36] Ronald Reagan, “Ronald Reagan's Address to Members of the British Parliament, June 8, 1982,” in Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, Reagan at Westminster: Foreshadowing the End of the Cold War (College Station, TX: Texas A& M University Press, 2010), 4, 6, 9, 4.
[37] Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President to Parliament in London, United Kingdom, Westminster Hall,” May 25, 2011.
[38] Obama, “Westminster,” 4.
[39] Leff, “Hermenutical Rhetoric”
[40] Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1941, 1967, 1973), 110–11. See also Burke's brilliant and succinct review of George Herbert Mead's philosophy, 379–82.
[41] J. Robert Cox, “Memory, Critical Theory, and the Argument from History,” Argumentation and Advocacy 27, no. 1 (1990): 1–13; Thomas B. Farrell, “Rhetoric in History as Theory and Praxis: A Blast from the Past,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 41, no. 4 (2008): 323–36. The quotations are from Farrell, 329.
[42] Bradford Vivian, Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). For instance, Obama's tendency to rehearse the history of the Israeli–Arab conflict each time he speaks of it reminds one and all of all of their grievances.