THE NEW WAY:
LEADERSHIP AS INTERPRETATION
Policy—where there is no absolute and arbitrary ruler to do the choosing for a whole people—means massed opinion, and the forming of the mass is the whole art and mastery of politics.1
—Woodrow Wilson
The early years of the twentieth century were a period of ferment in the presidency. The extensive use of popular rhetoric made in Teddy Roosevelt’s “swings around the circle” marked the beginning of a new form of leadership. But Roosevelt had intended that his rhetoric revive and perpetuate founding principles, and he justified his extraordinary behavior with “old” arguments. Inspirational rhetoric, thought Roosevelt, was appropriate to crisis politics, to the reestablishment of “normal” politics, and to the resuscitation of the The Federalist’s understanding of the problems and prospects for democratic governance.
President Taft abandoned Roosevelt’s popular practice, but began one of his own. Remarkably for a renowned legal scholar and future chief justice of the Supreme Court, Taft abandoned constitutional argument completely in his messages to Congress. These messages also lacked the more rudimentary discipline of any sort of structured argument. Instead, Taft became the first president to regularly build his messages around “laundry lists” of legislative initiatives.
Woodrow Wilson settled modern practice for all presidents that were to follow him, uniting the inspirational form of Teddy Roosevelt with the policy specificity of Taft. More importantly, Wilson legitimized these practices by justifying his behavior with an ambitious reinterpretation of the constitutional order. In this chapter, I describe these new practices and this new constitutional understanding to show how Wilson transformed the presidency and American politics.
REINTERPRETING THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLES: WOODROW WILSON’S STATECRAFT
Woodrow Wilson’s comprehensive reinterpretation of the constitutional order appears, on first glance, to be internally inconsistent. Between the writing of his classic dissertation Congressional Government in 1884, and the publication of his well-known series of lectures, Constitutional Government in the United States, in 1908, Wilson shifted his position on important structural features of the constitutional system.
Early in his career Wilson depicted the House of Representatives as the potential motive force in American politics, and he urged reforms to make it more unified and energetic. He paid little attention to the presidency or the judiciary. In later years he focused his attention on the presidency. In his early writings Wilson urged a plethora of constitutional amendments that were designed to emulate the British parliamentary system, including proposals to synchronize the terms of representatives and senators with that of the president and to require presidents to choose leaders of the majority party as cabinet secretaries. Later Wilson abandoned formal amendment as a strategy, urging instead that the existing Constitution be reinterpreted to encompass his parliamentary views.
The last shift reveals that Wilson had also altered his views at a deeper theoretical level. Christopher Wolfe has shown that while the “early” Wilson held a traditional view of the Constitution as a document whose meaning persists over time, the “later” Wilson adopted an historicist understanding, claiming that the meaning of the Constitution changed as a reflection of the prevailing thought of successive generations.2
As interesting as these shifts in Wilson’s thought are, they all rest upon an underlying critique of the American polity that he maintained consistently throughout his career. Wilson’s altered constitutional proposals, indeed his altered understanding of constitutionalism itself, ought to be viewed as a series of strategic moves designed to remedy the same alleged systemic defects. Our task here is to review Wilson’s understanding of those defects and to outline the doctrine he developed to contend with them—a doctrine whose centerpiece would ultimately be the rhetorical presidency.
Wilson’s doctrine can be nicely counterpoised to the founders’ understanding of demagoguery, representation, independence of the executive, and separation of powers. For clarity, these issues will be examined here in a slightly different order than before: separation of powers, representation, independence of the executive, and demagoguery.
Separation of Powers
For Wilson, separation of powers was the central defect of American politics. He was the first and most sophisticated proponent of the now conventional argument that separation of powers is a synonym for “checks and balances,” the negation of power by one branch over another. Yet Wilson’s view was more sophisticated than its progeny because his ultimate indictment of the founders’ conception was a functionalist one. Wilson claimed that under the auspices of the founders’ view, formal and informal political institutions failed to promote true deliberation in the legislature and impeded energy in the executive.
Wilson characterized the founders’ understanding as “Newtonian,” a yearning for equipoise and balance in a machine-like system:
The makers of our federal Constitution followed the scheme as they found it expounded in Montesquieu, followed it with genuine scientific enthusiasm. The admirable expositions of the Federalist read like thoughtful applications of Montesquieu to the political needs and circumstances of America. They are full of the theory of checks and balances. The President is balanced off against Congress, Congress against the President, and each against the courts.… Politics is turned into mechanics under [Montesquieu’s] touch. The theory of gravitation is supreme.3
The accuracy of Wilson’s portrayal of the founders may be questioned. He reasoned backward from the malfunctioning system as he found it to how they must have intended it. Wilson’s depiction of the system rather than his interpretation of the founders’ intentions is of present concern.
Rather than equipoise and balance, Wilson found a system dominated by Congress, with several attendant functional infirmities: major legislation frustrated by narrow-minded committees, lack of coordination and direction of policies, a general breakdown of deliberation, and an absence of leadership. Extra-Constitutional institutions—“boss”-led political parties chief among them—had sprung up to assume the functions not performed by Congress or the president, but they had not performed them well. Wilson also acknowledged that the formal institutions had not always performed badly, that some prior Congresses (those of Webster and Clay) and some presidencies (those of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and surprisingly, Madison) had been examples of forceful leadership.4
These two strands of thought—the growth of extra-constitutional institutions and the periodic excellence of the constitutional structures—led Wilson to conclude that the founders had mischaracterized their own system. The founders’ rhetoric was “Newtonian,” but their constitutional structure, like all government, was actually “Darwinian.” Wilson explains:
The trouble with the [Newtonian] theory is that government is not a machine but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt … but with a common task.… Their cooperation is indispensable.… This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact, whatever may be thrown across its track. Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and practice.5
The founders’ doctrine had affected the working of the structure to the extent that the power of the political branches was interpreted mechanically and many of the structural features reflected the Newtonian yearning. A tension arose between the “organic” core of the system and the politicians’ and citizens’ “mechanical” understanding of it. Thus, “the constitutional structure of the government has hampered and limited [the president’s] actions but it has not prevented [them].” Wilson tried to resolve the tension between the understanding of American politics as Newtonian and its actual Darwinian character to make the evolution self-conscious and thereby more rational and effective.6
Wilson attacked the founders for relying on mere “parchment barriers” to effectuate a separation of powers. This claim is an obvious distortion of founding views. In The Federalist, nos. 47 and 48, the argument is precisely that the federal constitution, unlike earlier state constitutions, would not rely primarily upon parchment distinctions of power but upon differentiation of institutional structures.7 However, Wilson’s discussion of parchment barriers reveals an important difference between his and the founders’ view of the same problem. Both worried over the tendency of legislatures to dominate in republican systems.
To mitigate the danger posed by legislatures, the founders had relied primarily upon an independent president with an office structured to give its occupant the personal incentive and means to stand up to Congress when it exceeded its authority. These structural features included a nonlegislative mode of election, constitutionally fixed salary, qualified veto, four-year term, and indefinite reeligibility. Although the parchment powers of Congress and the president overlapped (contrary to Wilson’s depiction of them), the demarcation of powers proper to each branch would result primarily from political interplay and conflict between the political branches rather than from a theoretical drawing of lines by the judiciary.8
Wilson offered a quite different view. First, he claimed that because of the inadequacy of mere parchment barriers, Congress, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, had encroached uncontested upon the executive sphere. Second, he contended that when the president’s institutional check was employed, it took the form of a “negative”—prevention of a bad outcome rather than provision for a good one. In this view, separation of powers hindered efficient, coordinated, well-led policy.
[The president] may, no doubt, stand in the way of measures with a veto very hard to overleap; and we think oftentimes with deep comfort of the laws he can kill when we are afraid of the majority in Congress. Congressional majorities are doubtless swayed, too, by what they know the President will do with the bills they send him. But they are swayed sometimes one way and sometimes the other, according to the temper of the times and state of parties. They as often make his assured veto a pretext for recklessness as a reason for self-restraint. They take a sort of irresponsible and defiant pleasure in “giving him the dare.” … It is a game in which he has no means of attack and few effective weapons of defense.9
Wilson did not wish to bolster structures to thwart the legislature. He preferred that the president and Congress be fully integrated into, and implicated in, each others’ activities. Rather than merely assail Congress, Wilson would tame, or as it were, domesticate it. Separation would be replaced by institutionally structured cooperation. Cooperation was especially necessary because the president lacked the energy he needed, energy that could be provided only by policy backed by Congress and its majority. Although Congress had failed as a deliberative body, it could now be restored to its true function by presidential leadership that raised and defended key policies.
These latter two claims actually represent the major purposes of the Wilsonian theory: leadership and deliberation. Unlike the founders, who saw these two functions in conflict, Wilson regarded them as dependent upon each other. In “Leaderless Government” he stated:
I take it for granted that when one is speaking of a representative legislature he means by an “efficient organization” an organization which provides for deliberate, and deliberative, action and which enables the nation to affix responsibility for what is done and not done. The Senate is deliberate enough; but it is hardly deliberative after its ancient and better manner.… The House of Representatives is neither deliberate nor deliberative. We have not forgotten that one of the most energetic of its recent Speakers thanked God, in his frankness, that the House was not a deliberative body. It has not the time for the leadership of argument.… For debate and leadership of that sort the House must have a party organization and discipline such as it has never had.10
At this point, it appears that the founders and Wilson differed on the means to common ends. Both wanted “deliberation” and an “energetic” executive, but each proposed different constitutional arrangements to secure those objectives. In fact, their differences went much deeper, for each theory defined deliberation and energy to mean different things. These differences, hinted at in the above quotation, will become clearer as we examine Wilson’s reinterpretations of representation and of independence of the executive.
Representation
In the discussion of the founding perspective, the competing requirements of popular consent and insulation from public opinion as a requisite of impartial judgment were canvassed. Woodrow Wilson gave much greater weight to the role of public opinion as the ordinary conduct of representative government than did the founders. Some scholars have suggested that Wilson’s rhetoric and the institutional practices he established (especially regarding the nomination of presidential candidates) are the major sources of contemporary efforts toward a more “participatory” democracy. However, Wilson’s understanding of representation, like his view on separation of powers, is more sophisticated than his followers’.11
Wilson categorically rejected the Burkean view of the legislator who is elected for his quality of judgment and position on a few issues and then left free to exercise that judgment:
It used to be thought that legislation was an affair to be conducted by the few who were instructed for the benefit of the many who were uninstructed: that statesmanship was a function of origination for which only trained and instructed men were fit. Those who actually conducted legislation and undertook affairs were rather whimsically chosen by Fortune to illustrate this theory, but such was the ruling thought in politics. The Sovereignty of the People, however, that great modern principle of politics, has created a different conception—or, if so be it, in the slowness of our thought we hang on to the old conception, has created a very different practice. When we are angry with public men nowadays we charge them with subserving instead of forming and directing public opinion … [but] we [now] know the principle that public opinion must be truckled to (if you will use a disagreeable word) in the conduct of government.… And it is a dignified proposition with us—is it not?—that as is the majority, so ought the government to be.12
Wilson did not think that his view was equivalent to “direct democracy” or to subservience to public opinion (understood, as it often is today, as response to public opinion polls). He favored an interplay between representative and constituent that would, in fact, educate the constituent. This process differed, at least in theory, from the older attempts to “form” public opinion: it did not begin in the minds of the elite but in the hearts of the mass. Wilson called the process of fathoming the people’s desires (often only vaguely known to the people until instructed) “interpretation.” Interpretation was the core of leadership for him.13 Before exploring its meaning further, it will be useful to dwell upon Wilson’s notion of the desired interplay between the “leader-interpreter” and the people so that we may see how Wilson’s understanding of deliberation differed from the founders’.
For the founders, deliberation simply meant reasoning on the merits of policy. The character and content of deliberation thus would vary with the character of the policy at issue. In “normal” times, there would be extensive squabbles by competing interests. Deliberation would occur to the extent that such interests were compelled to offer a response to arguments made by the others. The arguments might be relatively crude, specialized, and technical, or they might involve matters of legal or constitutional propriety. But in none of these instances would they resemble the great debates over fundamental principles—for example, over the question whether to promote interests in the first place. Great questions were the stuff of crisis politics, and the founders placed much hope in securing the distinction between crisis and normal political life.
Wilson effaced the distinction between “crisis” and “normal” political argument.
Crises give birth and a new growth to statesmanship because they are peculiarly periods of action … [and] also of unusual opportunity for gaining leadership and a controlling and guiding influence.… And we thus come upon the principle … that governmental forms will call to the work of administration able minds and strong hearts constantly or infrequently, according as they do or do not afford them at all times an opportunity of gaining and retaining a commanding authority and an undisputed leadership in the nation’s councils.14
Woodrow Wilson’s lament that little deliberation took place in Congress was not that the merits of policies were left unexplored, but rather that because the discussions were not elevated to the level of major contests of principle, the public generally did not interest itself. True deliberation, he urged, would rivet the attention of press and public, while what substituted for it in his day were virtually secret contests of interest-based factions. Wilson rested this view on three observations. First, the congressional workload was parceled among specialized standing committees, whose decisions usually were ratified by the respective houses without any general debate. Second, the arguments that did take place in committee were technical and structured by the “special pleadings” of interest groups, whose advocates adopted the model of legal litigation as their mode of discussion. As Wilson characterized committee debates:
They have about them none of the searching, critical, illuminating character of the higher order of parliamentary debate, in which men are pitted against each other as equals, and urged to sharp contest and masterful strife by the inspiration of political principle and personal ambition, through the rivalry of parties and the competition of policies. They represent a joust between antagonistic interests, not a contest of principles.15
Finally, because debates were hidden away in committee, technical, and interest-based, the public cared little about them. “The ordinary citizen cannot be induced to pay much heed to the details, or even the main principles of lawmaking,” Wilson wrote, “unless something else more interesting than the law itself be involved in the pending decision of the lawmakers.”16 For the founders this would not have been disturbing, but for Wilson the very heart of representative government was the principle of publicity: “The informing function of Congress should be preferred even to its legislative function.”17 The informing function was to be preferred both as an end in itself and because the accountability of public officials required policies that were connected with one another and explained to the people. Argument from “principle” would connect policy and present constellations of policies as coherent wholes to be approved or disapproved by the people. “Principles, as statesmen conceive them, are threads to the labyrinth of circumstances.”18
Wilson attacked separation of powers in an effort to improve leadership for the purpose of fostering deliberation. “Congress cannot, under our present system … be effective for the instruction of public opinion, or the cleansing of political action.” As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, Wilson first looked to Congress itself, specifically to its speaker, for such leadership. Several years after the publication of Congressional Government, Wilson turned his attention to the president. “There is no trouble now about getting the president’s speeches printed and read, every word,” he wrote at the turn of the century.19
Independence of the Executive
The attempt to bring the president into more intimate contact with Congress and the people raises the question of the president’s “independence.” Wilson altered the meaning of this notion, which originally had been that the president’s special authority came independently from a Constitution, not from Congress or the people. The president’s station thus afforded him the possibility and responsibility of taking a perspective on policy different from either Congress or the people. Wilson urged us to consider the president as receiving his authority independently through a mandate from the people. For Wilson, the president remained “special,” but now because he was the only governmental officer with a national mandate.20
Political scientists today have difficulty in finding mandates in election years, let alone between them, because of the great number of issues and the lack of public consensus on them. Wilson understood this problem and urged the leaders to sift through the multifarious currents of opinion to find a core of issues that he believed reflected majority will even if the majority was not fully aware of it. The leader’s rhetoric could translate the people’s felt desires into public policy. Wilson cited Daniel Webster as an example of such an interpreter of the public will:
The nation lay as it were unconscious of its unity and purpose, and he called it into full consciousness. It could never again be anything less than what he had said it was. It is at such moments and in the mouths of such interpreters that nations spring from age to age in their development.21
“Interpretation” involves two skills. First, the leader must understand the true majority sentiment underneath the contradictory positions of factions and the discordant views of the mass. Second, the leader must explain the people’s true desires to them in a way that is easily comprehended and convincing.
Wilson’s desire to raise politics to the level of rational disputation and his professed aim to have leaders educate the mass are contradictory. Candidly, he acknowledges that the power to command would require simplification of the arguments to accommodate the mass: “The arguments which induce popular action must always be broad and obvious arguments; only a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses.”22 Not only is argument simplified, but disseminating “information,” a common concern of contemporary democratic theory, is not the function of a deliberative leader in Wilson’s view:
Men are not led by being told what they don’t know. Persuasion is a force, but not information; and persuasion is accomplished by creeping into the confidence of those you would lead. Their confidence is gained by arguments which they can assimilate: by the things which find easy entrance into their minds and are easily transmitted to the palms of their hands or the ends of their walking sticks in the shape of applause.… Mark the simplicity and directness of the arguments and ideas of [true leaders.] The motives which they urge are elemental; the morality which they seek to enforce is large and obvious; the policy they emphasize, purged of all subtlety.23
Demagoguery
Wilson’s understanding of leadership raises again the problem of demagoguery. What distinguishes a leader-interpreter from a demagogue? Who is to make this distinction? The founders feared that there was no institutionally effective way to exclude the demagogue if popular oratory during “normal” times was encouraged. Indeed, the term “leader,” which appears a dozen times in The Federalist, is used disparagingly in all but one instance, and that one is a reference to leaders of the Revolution.24
Wilson was sensitive to this problem. “The most despotic of governments under the control of wise statesmen is preferable to the freest ruled by demagogues,” he wrote. Wilson relied upon two criteria to distinguish the demagogue from the leader, one based upon the nature of the appeal, the other upon the character of the leader. The demagogue appeals to “the momentary and whimsical popular mood, the transitory or popular passion,” whereas the leader appeals to “true” and durable majority sentiment. The demagogue is motivated by the desire to augment personal power, whereas the leader is more interested in fostering the permanent interests of the community. “The one [trims] to the inclinations of the moment, the other [is] obedient to the permanent purposes of the public mind.”25
Theoretically, there are a number of difficulties with these distinctions. If popular opinion is the source of the leader’s rhetoric, what basis apart from popular opinion itself is there to distinguish the “permanent” from the “transient”? If popular opinion is constantly evolving, what sense is there to the notion of “the permanent purposes of the public mind”? Yet the most serious difficulties are practical ones. Assuming it is theoretically possible to distinguish the leader from the demagogue, how is that distinction to be incorporated into the daily operation of political institutions? Wilson offered a threefold response to this query.
First, he claimed that his doctrine contained an ethic that could be passed on to future leaders. Wilson hoped that politicians’ altered understanding of what constituted success and fame could provide some security. He constantly pointed to British parliamentary practice, urging that long training in debate had produced generations of leaders and few demagogues. Wilson had taught at Johns Hopkins, Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton, and at each of those institutions he had established debating societies modeled on the Oxford Union.26
Second, Wilson placed some reliance upon the public’s ability to judge character:
Men may be clever and engaging speakers, such as are to be found, doubtless, at half the bars of the country, without being equipped even tolerably for any of the high duties of the statesman; but men can scarcely be orators without the force of character, that readiness of resource, that clearness of vision, that grasp of intellect, that courage of conviction, that earnestness of purpose and that instinct and capacity for leadership which are the eight horses that draw the triumphal chariot of every leader and ruler of free men. We could not object to being ruled by such men.27
According to Wilson, the public need not appeal to a complex standard or theory to distinguish demagoguery from leadership, but could easily recognize “courage,” “intelligence,” and “correctness of purpose”—signs that the leader is not a demagogue. Wilson does not tell us why prior publics have fallen prey to enterprising demagogues, but the major difficulty with this second source of restraint is that public understanding of the leader’s character would come from his oratory rather than from a history of his political activity or from direct contact with him. The public’s understanding of character might be based solely on words.
Finally, Wilson suggests that the natural conservatism of public opinion, its resistance to innovation that is not consonant with the speed and direction of its own movement, will afford still more safety:
Practical leadership may not beckon to the slow masses of men from beyond some dim, unexplored space or some intervening chasm: it must daily feel the road to the goal proposed, knowing that it is a slow, very slow, evolution to the wings, and that for the present, and for a very long future also, Society must walk, dependent upon practicable paths, incapable of scaling sudden heights.…28
These assurances of security against demagogues are all unsatisfactory. They do not adequately distinguish the polity in which Wilson worked from others in which demagogues have prevailed, including some southern states in this country. However, his arguments should be considered as much for the theoretical direction and emphases that they imply as for the particular weaknesses they reveal. Wilson’s doctrine stands on the premise that the need for more energy in the political system is greater than the risk incurred through the possibility of demagoguery.29 This represents a major shift, indeed a reversal, of the founding perspective. If Wilson’s argument regarding demagoguery was strained or inadequate, it was a price he was willing to pay to remedy what he regarded as the founders’ inadequate provision for an energetic executive.
NEW STANDARDS, NEW FORMS
The development of the practices of presidential rhetoric in the twentieth century reflects the force of Woodrow Wilson’s constitutional reasoning and amplifies its meaning. Wilson wrote and spoke about speaking often enough to articulate and justify new standards and new forms of address embodying his larger views of leadership. Wilson altered the two principle nineteenth-century prescriptions for presidential speech.
First, policy rhetoric, which had formerly been written and addressed principally to Congress, would now be spoken and addressed principally to the people at large. Of course, special messages, proclamations, executive orders, and other documents would continue their nineteenth-century forms (at least with respect to being written), but their importance in the conspectus of executive communications would greatly diminish. Truly important speeches would be delivered orally, where the visible and audible performance would become as important as the prepared text. For example, Wilson revived the practice (abandoned by Jefferson) of appearing in person before Congress to deliver the State of the Union Address. Although it was spoken in Congress (and was therefore more constrained than the speech would be if given in the open air to the people at large), Wilson made it clear in his first Address that his principal audience was the people at large, that he would approach Congress through the people. For this reason, he did not revive the whole pre-Jeffersonian practice; he saw no need for a “reply” to the Address from Congress or for the interbranch deliberation that would attend a president’s reply to the reply.30
Wilson self-consciously changed nearly 150 years of practice because he thought that the Constitution’s provisions, though arguably intended to promote leadership through rhetoric, had not in fact enhanced energy in the executive.
Of course [the president] can send a message to Congress whenever he likes—the Constitution bids him do so “from time to time,” in order to “give the Congress information of the state of the union and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall deem necessary and expedient”; and we know that if he be a man of real power and statesmanlike initiative he may often hit the wish and purpose of the nation so in the quick in what he urges upon Congress that the House will heed him promptly and seriously enough. But there is a stubborn and very natural pride in the House with respect to this matter.… It is easy to stir their resentment by too much suggestion.… In all ordinary times the President … preserves a sort of modesty, a tone as if chronicler merely, and setter forth of things administrative, when he addresses Congress. He makes it his study to use only a private influence and never seem a maker of resolutions. And even when the occasion is extraordinary and his own mind made up, he argues and urges—he cannot command.31
Wilson goes on in this text to contrast the modern president’s powerlessness with the forceful leadership of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Monroe, and Jackson. Since those presidents did follow nineteenth-century rhetorical prescriptions, the crucial factor accounting for their success, thought Wilson, was their “stature and eminence.” While Wilson’s argument is ambiguous on this point, it appears that he either understood eminence as popularity or, more probably, believed that a doctrinally prescribed routine appeal to the people was a good substitute for “reputation” (the founders’ preferred term). Just as early leaders drew upon their reputations to lead Congress, so could modern leaders draw upon public opinion.
In addition to the argument for executive energy, Wilson made his case for speech on grounds of accountability.
Correspondence between [president and Congress] is carried on by means of written communications, which, like all formal writings, are vague, or by means of private examinations of officials in committee rooms to which the whole House cannot be audience. No one who has read official documents needs to be told how easy it is to conceal the essential truth under the apparently candid and all-disclosing phrases of a voluminous and particularizing report; how different those answers are which are given with the pen from a private office from those with the tongue when the Speaker is looking an assembly in the face.32
The second kind of standard that governed nineteenth-century practice affected the form of argument of those speeches that were given. Nineteenth-century speeches were often constrained by a constitutional tradition of argument and by other customs consistent with the general doctrine. One could say that the tone and character of popular speeches was set, or at least strongly influenced, by that of written messages to Congress. After Wilson, a reverse trend prevailed: the character of important messages to Congress would be shaped by the development of standards for popular speech.
Wilson sought to establish two ideal types of popular address. First, he pressed for more “visionary” speech, which would articulate a picture of the future and impel a populace toward it. Rather than appealing to, and reinvigorating established principles, this forward-looking speech taps the public’s feelings and articulates its wishes. At its best it creates, rather than explains, principles.
A nation is led by a man who … speaks, not the rumors of the street, but a new principle for a new age; a man in whose ears the voices of the nation do not sound like the accidental and discordant notes that come from the voice of a mob, but concurrent and concordant like the united voices of a chorus, whose many meanings, spoken by melodious tongues, unite in his understanding in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice.33
In his first inaugural, Wilson tried to craft just this sort of visionary speech. This address is remarkable because we are not left to infer that visionary speech was intended. Wilson tells us so in the speech.
At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and vital. With this vision we approach new affairs.…
This is the high enterprise of the new day; To lift everything that concerns our life as a nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man’s conscience and vision of the right.…
We know our task to be no mere task of politics but a task which shall search us through and through, whether we be able to understand our time and the need of our people, whether we be indeed their spokesmen and interpreters, whether we have the pure heart to comprehend and the rectified will to choose our high course of action.34
Inspirational speech is often moral, even moralistic, as well. Later Franklin Roosevelt was to call the president the nation’s only “moral trumpet,” and he would be credited by many scholars with founding the “modern” presidency; but the practice began with Theodore Roosevelt, and the legitimating doctrine was uttered by Wilson.
The second sort of speech Wilson encouraged was what I label the “policy-stand” speech. This sort of rhetoric aims at specificity. It need not convey much information (and Wilson believed not much could be conveyed), but it should indicate where the president stood or what he would do regarding the issues of the day. Wilson often referred to these stands as “definite policies,” and his insistence upon them grew out of his concern for greater accountability. Wilson did not question the compatibility of his inspirational principle-creating speech with the policy-stand type. “And with leaders whose leadership was earned in an open war of principle against principle, by the triumph of one opinion over all opposing opinions, parties must from the necessities of the case have definite policies.”35
Yet it is difficult in practice for a single speech to be inspirational and highly specific at the same time. Consider, for example, President Carter’s “moral malaise” speech. Beginning with an analysis that pointed to a deep sickness in the American soul, it ends with a call to conserve energy and tax oil companies. Perhaps to avoid this sort of difficulty, Wilson generally did not mix his modes of address. (A partial exception to this generalization is his League of Nations campaign, discussed here in the next chapter.) Wilson’s problem and his adopted solution are still with us. Recall that President Carter’s first two State of the Union messages attempted, with predictable difficulty, to be both inspirational and exhaustive as to specific legislative initiatives. In his third year, however, he adopted the practice of sending two State of the Union messages, a short televised inspirational effort, and a voluminous “laundry list” the following day.
COMPARING RHETORIC: OLD AND NEW
If the practices Wilson established took hold and replaced those of the nineteenth century, change should be evident when the bodies of “official” rhetoric for each century are compared. A comparative “content analysis” as large as this is difficult for two reasons. First, we have an official record of the entire nineteenth-century corpus of presidential messages and papers, commissioned by Congress and compiled by James D. Richardson. However, Congress only commissioned such a record for recent twentieth-century Presidents (Truman to the present, and Hoover). The rationale for Congress’s decision was that it would avoid unnecessary expense, since adequate private compilations are available for some of the other twentieth-century presidents. These private compilations, however, were constructed on such varied principles of organization and inclusion that they were inadequate for our purposes. To ensure a comparison of “official” rhetoric, our major source for the twentieth century is the set of public papers extending from Truman through the third year of Carter’s term.
Second, the sheer number of communications (approximately twenty-five thousand) precluded reading them all, especially since intelligent judgment of the effect of doctrinal change requires that one treat the whole document, rather than words, sentences, or paragraphs, as the unit of analysis. Because careful consideration of the audience, form, and content of whole speeches and messages requires considerable time, a random sample of documents from each century was selected. Yet because the primary sample could produce few examples of two important categories of rhetoric, inaugural addresses and State of the Union messages, I supplemented it with another, composed of all inaugural and State of the Union messages in both centuries. Although manageable, this stratified sample still produced a considerable number of documents to be read and coded—just over 900.36
TABLE 5.1 Principal Presidential Audiences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Percent and Number of Speeches Sampled)
Nineteenth Century |
Twentieth Century |
|||
Audience |
% |
(N) |
% |
(N) |
People |
7 |
(23) |
41 |
(138) |
Congress |
85 |
(272) |
21 |
(71) |
Bureaucracy |
6 |
(20) |
6 |
(20) |
Individuals |
1 |
(4) |
21 |
(70) |
Interest Groups |
0 |
(0) |
2 |
(6) |
Foreign Nations |
0 |
(0) |
9 |
(31) |
Total |
100 |
(319) |
100 |
(336) |
If Wilson’s doctrine had taken hold and accomplished its objectives, we would expect at least three broad twentieth-century changes: (1) Less rhetoric would be addressed principally to Congress and more to the people at large; (2) more emphasis would be placed upon oral speeches and less upon written messages; and (3) the above two changes would bring with them a change in structure of argument, with the twentieth-century sample manifesting structures more appropriate to “inspirational” and “policy-stand” rhetoric. With minor qualifications, the data presented below substantiate each of these expectations.
Documents were classified according to their principal addressee. As Table 5.1 indicates, there are obvious differences between the centuries. Only 7 percent of official rhetoric (mainly proclamations) is addressed principally to the people in the nineteenth century, as against 41 percent in the twentieth century. Confirming one of the claims made in Chapter 2 on the basis of the historical survey, most nineteenth-century rhetoric (85 percent) was principally aimed toward Congress.37 Twentieth-century doctrine has brought with it a greater variety of types of presidential rhetoric and a reallocation of emphasis placed upon the traditional types. Classification according to type required little interpretive intrusion since nearly all of the rhetoric was officially labeled.
As indicated in Table 5.2, the most noticeable twentieth-century development is the use of oral speech. Virtually all nineteenth-century communication was written. There were some nineteenth-century speeches (i.e., inaugural addresses and some Messages to Congress), but these were so few (less than 1 percent) that they were not picked up by our sample. By contrast, 42 percent of presidential rhetoric today is spoken. Not only do we have presidential “speech” today, whereas there was virtually none, officially, in the previous century, but also speech today constitutes much of presidential communication altogether. Written communications to Congress have dwindled to 19 percent of the president’s total persuasive effort. The practice of issuing “statements” was not done officially in the nineteenth century.38
TABLE 5.2 Types of Presidential Speech in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Percent and Number of Speeches Sampled)
Nineteenth Century |
Twentieth Century |
|||
Type |
% |
(N) |
% |
(N) |
Speeches (all oral) |
0 |
(0) |
42 |
(141) |
Informal remarks |
0 |
(0) |
11 |
(37) |
Press conferences |
0 |
(0) |
8 |
(26) |
Proclamations |
9 |
(30) |
2 |
(6) |
Executive orders |
7 |
(21) |
2 |
(5) |
Messages to Congress (all) |
82 |
(259) |
19 |
(63) |
Annual |
2 |
(4) |
0 |
(0) |
Special |
72 |
(228) |
16 |
(53) |
Reports |
0 |
(0) |
1 |
(3) |
Veto |
9 |
(27) |
2 |
(7) |
Bill signings |
1 |
(3) |
8 |
(26) |
Appointments and nominations |
1 |
(3) |
6 |
(20) |
Memoranda and letters |
1 |
(3) |
7 |
(25) |
Individual |
1 |
(2) |
5 |
(18) |
Executive branch |
0 |
(1) |
2 |
(7) |
Statements |
||||
Joint (with foreign governments) |
0 |
(0) |
1 |
(4) |
Policy |
0 |
(0) |
7 |
(22) |
Nonpolicy |
0 |
(0) |
2 |
(7) |
Commemorative |
0 |
(0) |
2 |
(8) |
Citations |
0 |
(0) |
2 |
(8) |
Total |
100 |
(319) |
100 |
(336) |
Table 5.2 makes clear that twentieth-century presidents have more acknowledged tools to influence public opinion and to make public policy. But it also suggests that they operate in a context in which it is more likely that policy might be made despite their wishes. Everything a president publicly says and much of what is written by him or his subordinates is “official,” and therefore “policy.” Paradoxically, more avenues for influence may mean less control of the policy process in some instances. I return to this dilemma in Chapter Six.
In order to see the extent to which structural changes may have proceeded concomitantly with changes in audience and type, I constructed a set of categories that proved to be the least mechanical to employ, the most subject to dispute, but perhaps for those reasons, the most interesting as well. Documents were classified according to their structure of presentation. Those documents which manifested a discernible argument that moved logically from beginning to end whether or not the argument convinced or was substantively sound were coded “developed argument.” Both Lincoln’s laudatory first Inaugural Address and Buchanan’s odious third State of the Union Address were so classified, for example. Documents that were structured by several arguments but not by an overall argument were classified “series of arguments.” President Carter’s “moral malaise” speech is of this character. While that speech announces an overall theme, it does not reveal an argument. On the other hand, unlike many of Carter’s other speeches (and many recent presidential speeches generally), the “moral malaise” speech does not consist of a simple list of points strung together. “List of points” is the third classification. One clue to such a structure is paragraphing. Many speeches in the last two decades consist of single-sentence paragraphs, a structure that permits rearrangement almost at random without alteration of the “argument” of the speech. Single-sentence messages were coded “list of points.” Finally, there are many speeches about which it is very hard to decide whether they represent a series of arguments or a list of points since they contain both structures. Speeches that were judged as less than 75 percent one category or the other were designated “mixed.”
As indicated in Table 5.3, a greater percentage of nineteenth-century than twentieth-century messages are “developed” or “series” arguments. But also a greater percentage of nineteenth-century than twentieth-century messages are characterized as a list of points. Although statistically significant, these differences are slight. This distribution is misleading, however, because many nineteenth-century documents are one sentence “Special Messages” to Congress, letters reporting the transmittal of departmental reports. The reports themselves are not included in the presidential papers (as they often are in this century), perhaps due to a greater deference to Congress’s competing claim to authority over the bureaucracy at that time.
TABLE 5.3 Structure of Communication in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Percent and Number of Speeches Sampled)
Nineteenth Century |
Twentieth Century |
|||
Structure |
% |
(N) |
% |
(N) |
Developed argument |
6 |
(20) |
0 |
(0) |
Series of arguments |
19 |
(59) |
11 |
(37) |
List of points |
61 |
(193) |
55 |
(186) |
Mixed (series and list) |
15 |
(47) |
34 |
(113) |
Total |
100 |
(319) |
100 |
(336) |
Table 5.4 gives a clearer picture of the structure of presidential communications that actually sought to convey a message. All very short documents (less than one-half page long) were deleted from the samples of both centuries. Here the contrast is more striking than in the larger sample. Seventy-five percent of nineteenth-century speeches fall into the two “argument” categories, whereas ninety-five percent of the twentieth-century speeches sampled have a “list” or “mixed” character.
An examination of all inaugural and State of the Union addresses (hereafter referred to as “Union Data”) produces the same result. A comparison of Table 5.5 with Table 5.3 shows a greater percentage of the twentieth-century “Union Data” falling into the two argument categories combined than do twentieth-century messages generally. Yet the basic differences between the centuries persists. None of the nineteenth-century messages in Table 5.5 were characterized as “lists,” versus 28 percent in the twentieth century.
TABLE 5.4 Structure of Communication in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries—Short Documents Deleted (Percent and Number of Speeches Sampled)
Nineteenth Century |
Twentieth Century |
|||
Structure |
% |
(N) |
% |
(N) |
Developed argument |
15 |
(12) |
0 |
(0) |
Series of arguments |
60 |
(50) |
5 |
(12) |
List of points |
7 |
(6) |
50 |
(121) |
Mixed (series and list) |
18 |
(15) |
45 |
(107) |
Total |
100 |
(83) |
100 |
(240) |
TABLE 5.5 Structure of Communication in Inaugural Addresses and State of the Union Messages (Percent and Number of Speeches Sampled)
Nineteenth Century |
Twentieth Century |
|||
Structure |
% |
(N) |
% |
(N) |
Developed argument |
21 |
(30) |
9 |
(10) |
Series of arguments |
74 |
(108) |
18 |
(20) |
List of points |
0 |
(0) |
28 |
(31) |
Mixed (series and list) |
6 |
(8) |
45 |
(49) |
Total |
101 |
(146) |
100 |
(110) |
Finally, I examined one other indirect measure of the character of argument. I noted whether the documents contained any references to the Constitution (either the use of the word “Constitution” or reference to specific passages of the Constitution). I noted simply the presence or absence of mention, not number of mentions. It was thought that this classification might prove a rough measure of the presence or absence of constitutional argument. This rationale is not entirely satisfying, however, since the use of the word “Constitution” might occur without a constitutional argument, indeed might very well be a substitute for such an argument. With that caveat, note that only 4 percent of twentieth-century documents mention the Constitution, as against 11 percent in the earlier century. When very short documents are deleted from the sample, the figures are 5 percent for the twentieth century and 22 percent for the nineteenth. Looking at the “Union Data,” 44 percent of the twentieth-century speeches mention the Constitution as against 87 percent of nineteenth-century messages.
While the differences between the centuries persist over each set of data, it is interesting to note, by comparing the random sample with the “Union Data,” that developed argument, series of arguments, and mention of the Constitution are more likely to occur in current practice if the president is constrained by a traditional genre or form, such as the State of the Union Address. Thus, these twentieth-century speeches are a fitting metaphor for the larger political context in which presidents now find themselves, since they appear to be shaped by both doctrines, the old and the new.
The doctrinal prescriptions of each century and the estimates made of their persistence are simple. However, just as they rest upon theoretical complexity, as discussed earlier, they also point to complex political consequences that stem from and can be interpreted in light of the conjunction of these same systemic theories.
1 Woodrow Wilson, “Leaderless Government,” address before the Virginia Bar Association, August 4, 1897, in College and State, ed. Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925), 339.
2 Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (1884; reprint ed. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973), preface to 15th printing, introduction; idem, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908); Christopher Wolfe, “Woodrow Wilson: Interpreting the Constitution,” Review of Politics 41, no. 1 (January 1979): 131. See also Woodrow Wilson, “Cabinet Government in the United States,” in Baker and Dodd, College and State, 1:19–42; Paul Eidelberg, A Discourse on Statesmanship (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), chs. 8 and 9; Harry Clor, “Woodrow Wilson,” in American Political Thought, ed. Morton J. Frisch and Richard G. Stevens (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971); Robert Eden, Political Leadership and Nihilism (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984), ch. 1.
3 Wilson, Constitutional Government, 56, 22; idem, “Leaderless Government,” 337.
4 Wilson, Congressional Government, 141, 149, 164, 195.
5 Wilson, Constitutional Government, 56.
6 Ibid., 60; see also Wilson, Congressional Government, 28, 30, 31, 187.
7 Federalist, nos. 47 and 48, 300–313. Consider Madison’s statement in Federalist, no. 48, 308–309: “Will it be sufficient to mark with precision, the boundaries of these departments in the Constitution of the government, and to trust to these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power? This is the security which appears to have been principally relied upon by the compilers of most of the American Constitutions. But experience assures us that the efficacy of the provision has been greatly overrated; and that some more adequate defense is indispensably necessary for the more feeble against the more powerful members of the government. The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.”
8 Schmitt, “Executive Privilege.”
9 Wilson, “Leaderless Government,” 340, 357; idem, Congressional Government, 158, 201; idem, “Cabinet Government,” 24–25.
10 Wilson, “Leaderless Government,” 346; at the time he wrote this, Wilson was thinking of leadership internal to the House, but he later came to see the president performing this same role. Wilson, Constitutional Government, 69–77; see also idem, Congressional Government, 76, 97–98.
11 Eidelberg, Discourse, chs. 8 and 9; James W. Ceaser, Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), ch. 4, conclusion.
12 Woodrow Wilson, Leaders of Men, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (Princeton: N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952), 39. This is the manuscript of an oft-repeated lecture that Wilson delivered in the 1890s. See also idem, Congressional Government, 195, 214.
13 Wilson, Leaders of Men, 39; idem, Constitutional Government, 49. See also idem, Congressional Government, 78, 136–37.
14 Wilson, “Cabinet Government,” 34–35. See also idem, “Leaderless Government,” 354; idem, Congressional Government, 72, 136–37.
15 Wilson, Congressional Government, 69, 72.
16 Ibid., 82.
17 Ibid., 198.
18 Wilson, Leaders of Men, 46. See also idem, “Cabinet Government,” 20, 28–32.
19 Wilson, Congressional Government, 76; ibid., Preface to 15th printing, 22–23.
20 Ibid., 187.
21 Wilson, Constitutional Government, 49. Today, the idea of a mandate as objective assessment of the will of the people has been fused with the idea of leader as interpreter. Presidents regularly appeal to the results of elections as legitimizing those policies that they believe ought to reflect majority opinion. On the “false” claims to represent popular will, see Stanley Kelley Jr., Interpreting Elections (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).
22 Wilson, Leaders of Men, 20, 26. “[The masses] must get their ideas very absolutely put, and [they] are much readier to receive a half-truth which they can understand than a whole truth which has too many sides to be seen at once.”
23 Ibid., 29.
24 I am indebted to Robert Eden for the point about The Federalist. See also Ceaser, Presidential Selection, 192–97.
25 Wilson, “Cabinet Government,” 37; idem, Leaders of Men, 45–46.
26 See, for example, Wilson, Congressional Government, 143–47.
27 Ibid., 144.
28 Wilson, Leaders of Men, 45.
29 Wilson, Congressional Government, 144.
30 Ibid., 161.
31 Wilson, “Leaderless Government,” 341. See also Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power, 3rd ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1980), 23–25.
32 Wilson, Congressional Government, 109.
33 Woodrow Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln: A Man of the People,” in Baker and Dodd, ed., College and State, 2:94–95. See also idem, “A Memorandum on Leadership, May 5, 1902,” in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966– ), 12:365.
34 Wilson, Papers, 27:150.
35 Wilson, “Cabinet Government,” 36–37; see also idem, “Leaderless Government,” 355.
36 The material was coded by a group consisting of three graduate students and me, employing standard content analysis practices. We examined twenty-five variables, although only a few are discussed here. Intercoder reliability was very high—indeed, near-perfect agreement on all coding judgments reported here.
37 Of course, most documents have, and are intended to have, several audiences. The principal audience could often be gleaned from the text, but coders were cautioned not to assume that a certain style “went with” a particular audience in the absence of specific indications in the text. In many instances the principal audience is noted at the head of the text (e.g., “To the Congress of the United States,” or “My Fellow Americans”). Broadcast addresses were automatically coded “people,” except those which were speeches delivered in foreign nations, which were automatically coded “foreign nation.” Documents addressed to individuals or small sets of individuals and not indicating an intention of wider circulation at the time they were first communicated were coded “individual,” while those circulated were occasionally coded “people” or “bureaucracy.”
38 Actually, more statements than are estimated here have been issued by twentieth-century presidents. Until Carter, a record was kept of such statements (which includes “press releases”) in the form of a list appended to the Public Papers. Only those deemed significant or “typical” were printed in full, even though all had been issued officially. (Our summary does not take into account those lists, although this does not alter the thrust of our discussion.) With Carter, all statements are included in the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents.