The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America

James Darsey

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780814744154
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

This expansive volume traces the rhetoric of reform across American history, examining such pivotal periods as the American Revolution, slavery, McCarthyism, and today's gay liberation movement. At a time when social movements led by religious leaders, from Louis Farrakhan to Pat Buchanan, are playing a central role in American politics, James Darsey connects this radical tradition with its prophetic roots.

Public discourse in the West is derived from the Greek principles of civility, diplomacy, compromise, and negotiation. On this model, radical speech is often taken to be a sympton of social disorder. Not so, contends Darsey, who argues that the rhetoric of reform in America represents the continuation of a tradition separate from the commonly accepted principles of the Greeks. Though the links have gone unrecognized, the American radical tradition stems not from Aristotle, he maintains, but from the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

1
Radical Rhetoric and American Community
Threnody for Sophrosyne

People always think well of speeches adapted to, and reflecting, their own character: and we can now see how to compose our speeches so as to adapt both them and ourselves to our audiences.

—Aristotle, Rhetorica

Now nothing in oratory, Catulus, is more important than to win for the orator the favour of his hearer, and to have the latter so affected as to be swayed by something resembling a mental impulse or emotion, rather than by judgment or deliberation.

—Cicero, De Oratore

The orator indeed is obliged to adapt himself to his audience if he wishes to have any effect on it and we can easily understand that the discourse which is most efficacious on an incompetent audience is not necessarily that which would win the assent of a philosopher.

—Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric

On May 2, 1996, Billy and Ruth Graham were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. In remarks entitled “The Hope for America,” the Reverend Graham looked backward to George Washington, the first recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal, and forward to the “Third Millennium.” Though a message of hope, Graham’s short speech was full of the darkness of the moment:

racial and ethnic tensions that threaten to rip apart our cities and neighborhoods; crime and violence of epidemic proportions in most of our cities; children taking weapons to school; broken families; poverty; drugs; teenage pregnancy; corruption; the list is almost endless. Would the first recipients of this award even recognize the society they sacrificed to establish? I fear not. We have confused liberty with license—and we are paying the awful price. We are a society poised on the brink of self destruction.¹

Dire as the warning is and prominent as the platform from which it was given, what is most notable about Graham’s jeremiad is its lack of notability, receiving not even so much as a remark in the New York Times. The complaints suffer the contempt of familiarity; the phrasing, in the current climate, is pedestrian; and perhaps, coming from this source, it is all simply too predictable. The news here lies in the fact that such an ominous portent, delivered by a man who has occupied a significant place on the public stage for as long as any American now living, should be so commonplace.

Such pronouncements have long been the steady fare of the so-called religious right, enjoying greater and lesser degrees of credibility as the fortunes of the country—and the fortunes of individual Americans with it—have waxed and waned. Today, however, these topoi have become rhetorical staples of the left as well, the lamentation over, in Todd Gitlin’s phrase, The Twilight of Common Dreams. ² Treatments range from the esoteric and rarefied—Gertrude Himmelfarbs On Looking into the Abyss,³ which makes contemporary literary theory its bete noire—to the decidedly practical—Miss Manners Rescues Civilization from Sexual Harassment, Frivolous Lawsuits, Dissing and Other Lapses in Civility.⁴ The common issue in these various productions is the perceived erosion of any ethical basis for “civil society,” or “civic virtue,” the “common good,” the usurpation of the life of the citizen by privatized, selfish interests. As Gitlin describes it,

In the land of the free market, civil society, the fine mesh of self-organized groups and initiatives is embattled. The public square, formally open, is usurped by private concessions. Meanwhile, among the general population, it becomes harder to see citizens motivated by obligations beyond their immediate circles. Institutions of public discourse—the press, political parties, vital trade unions, serious books—have become the concern of minorities.⁵

“Little by little,” Gitlin warns, “our cultural infrastructure seems to be coming apart along with the bridges and roads.” ⁶

If there is a trace of reason left in the universe, someone, somewhere must be smiling, even amidst the overwhelming dolor, to hear Professor Gitlin sounding so like the Reverend Billy Graham. Thirty years ago, Gitlin and his associates on the New Left would have been, as they were for many, the object of Grahams criticism, the engine of the cultural doom. In a 1968 review of Abbie Hoffman’s book Revolution for the Hell of It, Jack Newfield contrasted the traditional liberal values of “reason, democracy, tolerance, and truth,” to Hoffman’s “distortion, violence, chaos, and mindless action.”⁷ Justice Abe Fortas expressed the view that what was at stake was no less than the formal processes which make society possible.⁸ In his first inaugural address, Richard Nixon, who had run on a law and order campaign, characterized the “difficult years” of the 1960s as ones in which America had “suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading,” and he urged us to “stop shouting” and to “speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”⁹

In these assessments, admonitions, and pleas from both the Sixties and the Nineties, radical speech, unmannerly rhetoric, is a symptom, a harbinger of a more extensive disorder. It strikes, explicitly in Fortas’s caveat, at something essential to our social organization. The failure of communication, recognized by both critics and defenders of the radical stance, is taken as signaling a failure of community. The phrase “civil society” itself, expressing our preference for the mannerly, the courteous, the amenable, the proper, is contrasted to the decay of process we sense around us. There is a widely held belief that the ties that bind us are eroding. We are alarmed by what we see as the rise of force over reasoned discourse as “the chief means whereby social borders, hierarchies, institutional formations, and habituated patterns of behavior are both maintained and modified.”¹⁰ Robert Bellah and his colleagues have framed the problem as one where the language of individualism has run amuck, mutated, and become anarchic, obliterating the moral language of duty and commitment that makes the polis possible,¹¹ and Lee C. Bollinger questions the benefits of a free speech principle so broad that it allows “extremist speech” to strike “more and more deeply at the personal and social values we cherish and hold fundamental to the society.”¹² The production of eulogies for civil discourse in America has become a minor industry.¹³

The parallels notwithstanding, there are important and potentially informative differences between Franklyn Haiman’s “Farewell to Rational Discourse” (1968)¹⁴ and Mary Ann Glendon’s diagnosis that our political discourse has been “impoverished” by a faulty and undisciplined conception of rights.¹⁵ Haiman and other observers of the Sixties mourned a society apparently being torn apart at the seams, an act of violent division, perhaps an excess of definition.¹⁶ Glendon and her colleagues, on the other hand, address a diffusion of responsibility, a loss of definition. Billy Graham’s talk of ripping, and weapons, and breakage, and destruction, for all its incipient violence, is peculiarly unfocused. There is no clear defendant in his indictment. He merely points to an “almost endless” list of symptoms. The story lacks a compelling villain. Even the recent bombings in the United States confirm this reading in their lack of attachment to a cause, their seeming senselessness and lack of meaning.

The real lesson is the lesson of license conceived as licentiousness—things fall apart—it is the unraveling of Gitlin’s “fine mesh,” each thread establishing its independent claims. This theme weaves it way through Jean Bethke Elshtain’s analysis in which she refers to “corrosive forms of isolation, boredom, and despair; the weakening, in other words, of that world known as democratic civil society, a world of groups and associations and ties that bind,” the “disintegration” of “social webs,” the “thinning out” of the “skein of obligation,” and “the unraveling of democratic civil society.”¹⁷ Fraying is not violent rending.

The persistent confusion lies in the common disregard by both forms of destruction of the social fabric for “civility.” Elshtain reveals something of the root of this confusion in her celebration of the rhetorical legacy of ancient Athens. Rhetoric is the discourse of the public being, of the citizen, and Elshtain observes that the achievement of the common good depended, not only on the deliberative outcomes in the assembly, but also on the “day-to-day relations of Athenians with each other,¹⁸ related to what Thomas Cole refers to as “the rhetoric of tact and etiquette.¹⁹ Robert Hariman articulates the relationship of rhetoric and manners through the classical notion of “decorum,” which he defines as consisting in “(a) the rules of conduct guiding the alignment of signs and situations, or texts and acts, or behavior and place; (b) embodied in practices of communication and display according to a symbolic system; and (c) providing social cohesion and distributing power.”²⁰ From the time of Aristotle forward, the tradition of public discourse in the West has been one of civility, diplomacy, compromise, and negotiation. In the United States, the connection between rhetoric as a mode of persuasion and rhetoric as civil behavior is most evident in those public speaking texts published circa 1900, which often represented themselves as guides to both public speaking and etiquette. In 1902, the author of The American Star Speaker and Model Elocutionist wrote,

It is a duty imposed at birth to make the best use of every talent of which we are possessed; it is equally a duty to make ourselves as agreeable in our intercourse with our fellow creatures as our opportunities may permit. Politeness, coupled with an attractiveness of manner, is the passport which admits us to the favorable attention of our fellow men.²¹

The etymological propinquity of “manners” and “manipulation” suggests something of the relationship between the preferred nature of rhetorical discourse and its goals.

Public discourse in this tradition assumes the existence of a community of mores, common operating assumptions, shared values, even as it seeks to rebuild, reinforce, and redirect that community. Indeed, the orator has often been seen as a central figure in cultural life and the state of oratory a significant measure of cultural health. James Boyd White only puts into contemporary language a Ciceronian conception of the role of oratory in society when he defines rhetoric as: “the study of the ways in which character and community—and motive, value, reason, social structure, everything, in short, that makes a culture—are defined and made real in performances of language.”²²

In such a conception, the rhetor becomes “representative” of his or her public, a usage reflected in our most common appellation for public officials. And just as the rhetor becomes representative of his or her public, the rules of rhetoric become synecdochal for the rules of society. “Fair speech,” whether presented in The American Star Speaker and Model Elocutionist or elsewhere, reflects, in Kenneth Burke’s formulation, “the individual person striving to form himself in accordance with the communicative norms that match the cooperative ways of his society.”²³ The failure of this process, or worse, the rejection of it, is taken as a signal of the disintegration of society itself, the abandonment of the accepted rules of speech a portent of incipient chaos and the abandonment of the rule of order generally.²⁴

Yet, Rosa Parks’s refusal to surrender her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, is not the same as the belligerent occupation of a seat for two by a disaffected youth on a Chicago el at rush hour, and a critique of incivility that fails to recognize this distinction misses an essential difference between the threats to comity of the 1960s and those of the 1980s and 1990s. Further, I will argue, it misses the lessons that the American radical tradition holds for our current disquietude.

The recovery of a radical tradition in American public discourse, a tradition characterized by a steadfast refusal to adapt itself to the perspectives of its audience, a rhetoric in extremis, indicates something more complex than the breakdown of order; it indicates an alternative order, a rationality not accounted for in the Graeco-Roman model. A recrudescent rhetorical form entails a stable response to a recurrent historical situation, intimating the kind of discernible relationship among elements in a rhetorical situation constitutive of a genre.²⁵ Criticism of rhetorical genres, in turn, presupposes a logic underlying the shape of discourse. Such criticism is predicated on an accountability of discourse to the salient forces that have shaped it. A radical genre is not without rules, but its rules, of necessity, are shaped in large part by its significant opposition to the status quo. What we really mean when we complain about the lack of respect for process in radicalism is the lack of respect for our preferred process, a process that reinforces the situation that the radical seeks to change.

The notion of a rhetorical tradition includes and extends the idea of genre to encompass those forms that have been consciously fostered within a culture.²⁶ Consideration of the traditional aspects of genre encourages questions of development and evolution, and since they, in turn, suggest a point of origin, consideration of a rhetorical tradition proffers the possibility that the genre may be located in a nascent, primitive historical form, a form in which features and outlines were still firmly connected to the cultural features that engendered them. To speak of genres as subjects of evolution brings us close to the relationship between the generic and the genetic,²⁷ and makes perfectly reasonable the proposition that rhetorical traditions should retain vestigial elements that, unless understood in historical context, obscure the functions of the genre.

Such is the kind of explanation I have undertaken here as a perspective on some of that discourse in American history that has been characterized as “radical,” “extremist,” or “revolutionary,” because of its failure to adopt its audiences frame of reference. Because its essential form appears to be both recurrent and stable, it cannot be reduced to the vagaries of the particular situation or of individual maladjustment. Before we can disqualify such rhetoric, we must first seek its sources in our culture.

The thesis I shall argue here is that the primitive source for much of the rhetoric of reform in America has been the prophetic books of the Old Testament. It seems an obvious connection given the prominence of the Bible in American culture, and there have been some studies that have traced influences of the Bible in our national life²⁸ and on our public discourse in particular.²⁹ Many of these studies might be considered studies of allusion, appraisals of the use of the content of a key cultural document. Sacvan Bercovitch’s influential work on the American jeremiad as a genre is an exception.³⁰ Even Bercovitch’s work, however,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Radical Rhetoric and American Community: Threnody for Sophrosyne
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Index