Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century America.

• Author: Halloran, S. Michael

By Thomas W. Benson. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1997; pp. 199. Price $31.95.

This volume is a nicely-edited selection of papers presented at the 1992 University of Minnesota conference on Public Address. As such it constitutes a significant entry in the ongoing debate over methods of rhetorical criticism and the theoretical status of the texts of individual speeches. But the book does not live up to the promise of its title.

The volume begins with a conference keynote in which Edwin Black postulates an aesthetic opposition between a "rhetoric of power," illustrated by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and a "rhetoric of character," illustrated by Abraham Lincoln and "much of the public discourse of African Americans." Black's essay is characteristically opinionated and in parts frustratingly schematic, yet deeply provocative. He claims that the publication of Albert Winans 1915 public speaking textbook, with its brief for "the conversational style," signaled the triumph of the rhetoric of power over the rhetoric of character. He thus suggests a new organizing principle for the history of American public discourse, one that would be worth exploring at length. None of the essays that follow takes up this idea, and Black's "keynote" hence seems oddly placed, even somewhat misleading as a prelude to the other essays, though it is well worth reading on its own terms.

The bulk of the volume is constituted by four pairs of critical essays on well-known moments in nineteenth-century American public address: James M. Farrell and Stephen H. Browne on Daniel Webster's eulogy of Adams and Jefferson; John Louis Lucaites and James Jasinski on Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July;" Martha Solomon Watson and David Henry on the declarations of sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention; and Michael C. Left and Maurice Charland on appropriations of Lincoln by Henry Grady, Frederick Douglass, and Jane Addams. All give some attention to the reconstruction of the past in rhetorical discourse. The volume is thus valuable for its contribution to discussions of the "temporality" of rhetoric.

In addition to addressing particular moments in nineteenth-century public address, the paired essays take up some key issues in the theory of rhetorical criticism, most importantly the debate between proponents of the "close reading" and "critical rhetoric" schools. Not...