The Timelessly Rhetorical Presidency: Reply to Zug

ABSTRACT

Charles U. Zug, following Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency (1987), argues that the original design of the Constitution constrained presidents from cultivating a relationship with the American public. In reality, though, presidents are opportunistic politicians who always look for new ways to reach the public in order to gain political advantage and nurture their relationship with the people. In this effort they have often made use of new communication technologies, such that what may look like radical twentieth-century departures from previous understandings of the constitutional place of the president are actually continuous with attempts by presidents from Washington forward to engage in what was—in line with contemporaneous understandings of political issues—persuasive communication designed to influence public policy.

Keywords:

• nineteenth-century presidency
• popular presidential communication
• political opportunity
• rhetorical presidency
• Jeffrey Tulis

Notes

1 Ellis 1998, Dorsey 2002, and Medhurst 2008 are edited volumes that contain contributions from many scholars.

2 In order to find instances of spoken popular presidential communication, I searched digitized historical newspapers using keyword searches. The keywords I used were “president,” the president’s last name, “speech,” “response,” “reply,” “tour,” and “trip.” These searches returned headlines with related articles that included the keywords. For the early presidents, I used the Early American Newspaper collection, the Nineteenth Century Newspaper collection, and the American Periodicals series. I also searched the Chicago Tribune beginning with 1851, the New York Times beginning with 1855, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times beginning with 1877, and the San Francisco Chronicle beginning with 1881. Once all of these newspapers were in existence (1881), I stopped searching the other collections. I compared my search results to existing compilations of presidential speeches and to accounts in numerous presidential biographies. This approach allowed me to test the completeness of my searches. Based on that comparison, it is reasonable to conclude that my search under-reports the amount of SPPC, so that it is likely that more SPPC will be uncovered as more papers are digitized. There were various reasons for under-reporting, including articles that fell outside of search criteria, lack of clarity in newspaper articles as to train stations visited (this is especially likely on presidential tours), and the fact that some speeches were published only in newspapers that did not survive physically or have not yet been digitized.

3 Includes interviews in and around the Washington, D.C. area.

4 Tulis (1987, 64) treats Cleveland’s two terms as one, supplying only one total of 51 speeches. I have divided this total in half in order to fit it into the table.

5 See n2 above.