African American Rhetoric of Greeting During McKinley's 1896 Front Porch Campaign

Abstract

African American speakers who participated in William McKinley's 1896 Front Porch campaign events used epideictic rhetoric to address the issues of racial equality. They praised McKinley but presented few arguments on policy matters. This rhetorical strategy helped them to advocate policies in a manner that would superficially appear to be ceremonial more than deliberative. Paradoxically, in doing so, the speakers advocated their views to ameliorate the injustices of the Jim Crow era, while adapting to the campaign's rituals.

KEYTERMS:

• African American rhetoric
• epideictic rhetoric

Notes

In no way should it be inferred from this citation that McKinley himself contributed to the authorship of this or other speech texts, other than his own speeches. The collections of McKinley speeches (McKinley as a Candidate, McKinley's Speeches in September) appear to be campaign documents compiled from newspaper and wire service stories, compiled and sometimes edited by McKinley's advisor, Joseph P. Smith. The speech texts are presumably founded on shorthand records (see Kissed, 1896). These collections are occasionally more complete, especially in their reporting of the speeches of greeting, than were the newspaper stories. However, when complete texts are available from newspapers, they are preferred because they are presumably less extensively edited. McKinley's staff frequently screened advance copies of speeches of greeting to ensure that they contained no divisive content (Manning, 1896).

It seems likely that McKinley could have known some of these speakers, especially those from Ohio, but I have discovered no relevant evidence to that effect.