Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement.

• Author: Beard, David
• Position: Critical essay

Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement. By William M. Keith. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007; pp. xiii + 360. $80.00 cloth; $39.95 paper.

Democracy as Discussion succeeds on at least three levels. It functions as a model of archival research into the history of communication studies as a discipline. It connects this disciplinary history to political movements and philosophical innovations. Finally, it demonstrates the ways that communication studies, as a disciplinary matrix that includes both research and pedagogy, was central to democratic theory in twentieth-century America. As such, it points the way for communication's active participation in contemporary civic life. Democracy as Discussion should be considered a key text not only for courses in the history of rhetoric but also for courses in the history and politics of teaching in rhetorical disciplines, including both composition and communication.

Keith's book is divided into three sections. The first is a disciplinary history of immediate interest to scholars in rhetorical studies. The second is a history of the discussion movement within this discipline. The third is a history of the forum movement as a force for reconsidering the role of communication and deliberation in American democracy. The result is a deeply intellectual history that not only sees connections among the three but also grounds them in the archival record.

Keith's disciplinary history alone would be worth the cost of admission. He enumerates details of the history of communication studies that are effaced in most disciplinary histories of rhetoric. Keith's story is new, in part, because most histories of turn-of-the-century rhetoric are written by compositionists (e.g., Nan Johnson's Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America and Sharon Crowley's The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric). Those histories that are written from the perspective of communication studies can tend toward celebration, expressing a kind of reverence for the heroic figures who broke from the NCTE to form what would become the NCA. Keith rolls up his sleeves and digs into the archives.

Taking a page from Bruce Kimball's Orators and Philosophers, Keith lays out changes in the university and their influences on nineteenth-century rhetorical pedagogy: Blair, Delsarte, and the evolving culture of the U.S. But political forces acting upon the practitioners of speech education also were formative: there was tension between those devoted to the academic...