The Fate of Eloquence in the
Age of The Osbournes

Phi Beta Kappa Oration, Harvard University, 3 June 2002

The extraordinary honour of being asked to deliver the oration to the Phi Beta Kappa chapter, and so become part of a tradition that runs from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Anthony Appiah, was only slightly qualified by being misinformed by the Dean of Undergraduate Education that her own Phi Beta Kappa orator had been Kermit the Frog. Now since I manifestly lack both the philosophical depth of Kermit and the wisecracking irreverence of Appiah, I wondered what could have possessed whichever guardians of the chapter to imagine that I could do the job? To another Harvard graduate I wondered out loud, in fact, and he gave me the answer, which I’m still not sure is a compliment. ‘You do,’ he said, ‘have a certain way with the spoken word.’

Quite what that way might be remains to be seen, or heard, but I’m prepared to concede that this might be so, since I was told this at a very early age by my father who thought that, however I’d come by it, I’d got what in Britain was called the ‘gift of the gab’. He had it himself in abundant measure, having done his time as a soapbox orator in Hyde Park and the East End of London in the 1930s, where he carried on talking and talking as Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts pelted him with rotten eggs and the occasional rock. ‘A Jew’s ultimate weapon is his mouth,’ he insisted, even though my mother added that the ultimate weapon was, just occasionally and of course temporarily, disarmed by its collision with a large hairy fascist fist.

I was about ten when I began to be drilled in the bootcamp of public rhetoric, beginning with a trip to the theatre to see Richard Burton play Henry V. Though there were no Harfleurs in our neck of London to attack, a few weeks later there I was, in grey flannel short trousers, perched perilously on a chair in our living room waving a broom handle around, and lustily urging the troops to hurl themselves against the breach ‘or fill the walls up with our English dead’. When this was recited at our elementary-school concert, between items understandably thought more suitable, or at least less bloodthirsty, for ten-year-olds, the reaction, when I finished, was one of stunned silence broken by furious applause from my actor-manager father. Some years earlier I had responded to all this voice-work by hitting him where I knew it would hurt most. I went on speech strike, going Trappist – for about five months, I seem to recall, remaining defiantly taciturn through a procession of speech therapists and psychotherapists, verbalising only to the gardener and swearing him to silence.

There are those who will tell you I’ve not shut up since. But this precocious sense of being afflicted with a pretty much incurable case of logorrhoea has actually left me with mixed feelings about the condition. On the one hand, it’s hard not to relish the exhilaration of doing one’s thing as a language animal. ‘Nothing is so akin to our natural feelings as the rhythms and sounds of voices,’ says Cicero in De Oratore, ‘they rouse and inflame us, calm us and soothe us and often lead us to joy and sadness.’ ‘SPEECH! Speech!’ wrote one of the greatest of all its American practitioners, Frederick Douglass, reflecting how he himself had been virtually reborn and certainly emancipated through his own dawning self-consciousness of being a natural orator, and how he had gone on to revolutionise public diction: ‘the live, calm, grave, clear, pointed, warm, sweet, melodious human voice . . . humanity, justice, liberty demand the service of the living voice.’ But it’s precisely those for whom eloquence at the service of truth is an indispensable condition of a free society who are also most likely to fret at its apparent atrophy. The eloquent, of course, have been complaining about this at least since Quintilian (in the second century ad). Rhetoric that was both beautiful and virtuous, they lamented, was degenerating into either self-serving demagoguery, florid ornamentalism or the stumblings and mumblings of the inarticulate – Osbournes in togas – all of which heralded, in the most pessimistic view, the onset of a kind of slavery; the captivity of the powers of speech and the freedom of audience by the forces of diction-management. Listen to a culture flooded by platitude or vastly amused by grunts of dopey incoherence, they would say, and you will hear the bleating of the doomed.

Are we ourselves in that peril? Are we a culture washed in cacophonic fury, but signifying not a whole lot? Can Eminem or a gangsta rapper get away with what they get away with because the barked and shouted violence mocks and deafens any kind of response? Are we (as distinct from the licensed manufacturers of presidential rhetoric) even capable – especially in a moment of danger – of articulating to ourselves, to the nation, to the world, just what it is that’s worth arguing over, fighting for or defending? Is the designed discontinuity of contemporary life – the indispensability of programmed obsolescence; fashion-turnover; the machinery of the market; the obsession with speed (faster, computer, faster); with instant drive-through gratification (I want that cheeseburger and I want it NOW); with the disposable over the durable; the strobe-lit subliminally registered broken-faceted reception of sensation – hopelessly incompatible with the voiced thoughtfulness we need if we are to figure out what it is exactly that holds us together against terror? If we can only articulate the meaning of calamity through the waving of flags and choruses of ‘America the Beautiful’, does this mean that tragedy has a short shelf-life? Would it have been better for all of you – made even better citizens of you – if you had been required to take not Expository Writing, but Expository Speaking?

It’s a fair bet your forebears of Phi Beta Kappa thought so. For the chapter/fraternity was established as a community of spoken thought and debate; for the express purpose of sustaining classical scholarly values inside and, more urgently, outside the academy. An American scholar, it optimistically presupposed, was someone for whom the pursuit of knowledge was conditional not on escape from the contamination of the public world, but active engagement with it. Browse the forbidding pages of the published Phi Beta Kappa orations – not just at Harvard, but at Chicago, Columbia, Cornell – and you’ll step into an ongoing Platonic symposium on civic virtue. Now this kind of wisdom does not, of course, come in soundbites. A roughly calculated average running time for those orations was, I would say, an hour and a half (so those of you nodding off at the back, count yourself lucky that my masters today shackled me to twenty-five minutes). On the other hand, those nineteenth-century brethren of yours were treated, quite often, to really scintillating, opening exordia. Try this zinger from Harvard’s best – President Charles Eliot in 1888: ‘I purpose to examine some parts of the experience of the American Democracy with the intention of suggesting the answers to certain theoretical objections which have been urged against democracy in general and of showing, in part, what makes the strength of the democratic form of government . . .’

Eliot’s turgid earnestness was actually out of character with Harvard’s traditions – especially Phi Beta Kappa traditions – which perhaps more than anywhere else in the young Republic personified the truism that, as the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory from 1806 to 1809, John Quincy Adams, put it, ‘eloquence is power’. Adams believed that the young Republic was in an historical state of political grace – something he could dream about in post-revolutionary eastern Massachusetts – akin to fifth-century Athens or the halcyon years of the Roman Republic; where voices which allied rhetoric to virtue could prevail over faction and brute force. ‘Where prejudice [has] not acquired an uncontrolled ascendancy,’ he wrote, ‘the voice of eloquence will not be heard in vain.’ Though, like most of his generation of Harvard graduates, Adams had been trained in rhetoric through the works of Hugh Blair and the eighteenth-century Scot Lord Kames, his own manual for modern orators turned away from the belletristic manner back to what he thought of as a neo-Ciceronian flinty vernacular; designed to plead before the courts or sway a crowd. The tragedy of his life was that although he was nicknamed ‘Old Man Eloquent’ and although he looked as though you could set his bust alongside Demosthenes and Cato the Elder, and although his speaking style was with ‘kindled eyes and tremulous frame’, the organ itself was apparently shrill and piercing. In an age of the honey-smooth oratory of the young Daniel Webster and John Calhoun, Adams’s presidential speeches, which sounded fine when he rehearsed them before the Cabinet – his Farewell to Lafayette or the panegyric to the Erie Canal – seemed barked at, rather than voiced to, the public. And as a President who stood accused of getting the office by a back-door Electoral College manoeuvre, John Quincy was a perfect target for the oncoming Andrew Jackson, who made an issue precisely of Adams’s high-pitched classical diction, targeting it with his own populist anti-highfalutin Hickory-Military vernacular. A century and more before the equally glistening dome of Adlai Stevenson (the spiritual descendant of Adams) was attacked as eggheadedly un-American by another no-nonsense ex-general, Dwight Eisenhower, Adams too suffered from seeing what he’d always imagined to be the virtues of the detached, incorruptible proconsul stood on their head as symptoms of effete loftiness.

Now Adams got his faith in the persuasive power of eloquence directly from his father John, the second President, who would drill him in Cicero and Pericles whether walking the farm tracks at Quincy or the canal footpaths in revolutionary Amsterdam. And John Adams, as lawyer, schoolmaster and politician, felt himself to be the guardian of a long tradition of inspirational rhetoric which went all the way back to the Calvinist sermons of Thomas Hooker and the Great Awakening performances of Jonathan Edwards. The power of that charismatic preaching came from the faith that eloquence was saved from egotism, in so far as the mouth that was its instrument was merely a sounding board for the word of God. Moses, of course, had been a stammerer before that word had touched him. Likewise the Great Awakeners were no more than the organ of some higher natural truth. For John Adams’s generation coming of age in the Boston of the 1760s, prophecy and politics became fused. It was not so much injustice that they saw in British policy as iniquity. In the unlikely figure of James Otis and the even unlikelier cause of writs of assistance – the legal warrants used by the British to search for contraband – Adams thought he heard and saw a vision of reborn civic virtue. Otis was then thirty-six, his style of speech as he argued against the writs before the heavily wigged and robed justices ‘quick and elastic’, ‘his apprehension as quick as his temper’. For Adams, his was the voice of the natural American; the lost voice of Ciceronian virtue. The fact that Otis’s ‘passions were painted in his face’ seemed to correspond precisely to Quintilian’s doctrine that the speaker must feel, emotively, the truth of what he utters if he is to persuade his listeners. Had Otis worn a virtuously dishevelled toga, he could not have won Adams more completely.

All the great orators of the revolutionary age – Sam Adams, Patrick Henry in Virginia, and the first great rhetorician of the post-revolutionary House of Representatives, the now-forgotten Harvard graduate Fisher Ames, said to be the most silver-tongued of all – were famous for their controlled flamboyance; the calculation of a manner that was said to be ‘natural’ or ‘easy’, but which managed to achieve often outrageous theatricality without being accused of affectation. They were hams – think of that invisible dagger Patrick Henry plunged over and again into his breast – but they were hams for liberty.

Winning ‘hearts and minds’, as Adams claimed had been the case, was not just the victory of liberty over imperial coercion; it was the vindication, as he and Jefferson believed, of classical republican rhetoric over brute military muscle. The critical role played by French military power – inconveniently the product of a self-interested Catholic despotism – was underplayed in favour of the legend of the mass mobilisation of the people through the sonorities of virtue. And the vocal Founding Fathers believed they were redeeming, among other things, the tradition of Greco-Roman eloquence itself, which in Britain had degenerated into ornamental disingenuousness. Latter-day Ciceros like Edmund Burke – significantly Irish, not English – had attempted to stop the rot. But public diction had decayed into luxury. For the austerely civic Americans it was, on the contrary, a necessity, their first line of defence. An entire generation thought of themselves as ‘Massacre’ orators, after the Boston Massacre (in which an accident was transformed by indignant oratory into an emblematic confrontation between innocence and occupation).

To that generation, American eloquence worked because it so obviously exemplified Quintilian’s definition of an orator as a good man who speaks well. They also subscribed to the Aristotelian assumption that the power of rhetoric was in inverse relationship to the self-sufficiency of brute force. Where that force was coercive, mouths and ears were shut. Sparta was taciturn; Athens eloquent. The ideal Athenian leader was the hero who spoke beautiful and impassioned truths – Pericles. But their American descendants also cherished the tradition because the power of eloquence presupposed the freedom to be persuaded; to be reasoned with; to be moved. Cicero’s natural theatre was the Senate in which those of like mind would literally stand together, and the job of the orator was, equally literally, to move them to a different position. A vote was, of course, a voice. For Cicero, for the Adamses, for Jefferson – and of course for the Lincoln of the Lincoln-Douglas debates – a republic which took the arts of persuasion seriously was not just a free state, but one which could contain difference of belief without resort to mutual extermination. The opposite to that humanely pluralist eloquence is commandment authorised by fiat or revelation and executed through coercion. Terror is, in every sense, dumb.

If the preservation of a public life tolerant of difference is one reason why we should cherish eloquence, the second reason, scarcely less important, and the logical outcome of the first, is that it reconstitutes community without sacrificing liberty. If the founding fathers of public American speech were concerned, in the first instance, to use it to differentiate a free from a tyrannised society, their heirs in the nineteenth century worried about the republic falling apart, either in fratricidal division or into a mere aggregate of mutually conflicting interests.

The great moments of nineteenth-century public eloquence were when orators believed – and made their listeners believe – that for the duration of their discourse, using all the tools that Isocrates, Demosthenes, Cicero and Quintilian had given them – they could reconstitute a mere crowd, a gathering of individuals, into a community; and that that supra-individualist cohesion would survive their dispersal. This is what converted individual abolitionists into a shoulder-to-shoulder brethren; and what Frederick Douglass, who had learned some of his rhetorical magic from them and from his own reading and practising, took on his travels, not least to Britain in 1845–7 where, in Cork, Belfast, Dundee and London, he tried to persuade his listeners that they were part of an indivisible movement to extirpate an abomination from the face of the earth. The most sublimely enduring speech which took, as its mission, the attempt to remake national community over the partially buried bodies of those who had died for it, was of course Lincoln’s Gettysburg address – its two minutes preceded by Edward Everett’s two-hour performance. (It had been Everett, not Lincoln, who had been the star attraction and for whom the event had been postponed from 23 October 1863 to 19 November in order to give the Harvard President and ex-Secretary of State adequate time to prepare.)

Doomed to be remembered as Lincoln’s interminable warm-up act, Everett’s speech is, in fact, in its own way – a recitation of the narrative of the battle followed by an appeal for eventual reconciliation – not half bad. But arguably, one of the great and now completely forgotten moments when eloquence was summoned to mobilise national community took place here, at the Phi Beta Kappa Alpha chapter of Harvard, almost exactly 140 years ago, when George William Curtis – Harper’s journalist and war veteran – delivered the oration on 17 July 1862, a speech which we know was repeated at least forty times around New England that grave autumn. Curtis’s aim was to insist on the indivisibility of liberty and equality; to take away from the seceding states their claim to the rhetoric of freedom, which he characterised as fraudulent since it was inseparable from the preservation of slavery, and restore that rhetoric to true American nationality: an inclusive nationality based on the assumption of common humanity. To be American was to celebrate this. If this had never before been achieved, the enterprise only grew in significance:

The achievement of all other nations should be only wings to American feet that they may hasten to heights that Greeks and Romans, that Englishmen and Frenchmen and Germans never trod. Were they wise? Let us be wiser. Were they noble? Let us be nobler. Were they just? Let us be juster. Were they free? Let our very air be freedom . . . Let those who will, despair of that perfect liberty with which God made us all free. But let us now, here, in the solemn moments which are deciding if there is to BE a distinctive America, resolve that even were the American system to fade from history, the American principle should survive immortal in our hearts . . .

Freedom, Curtis insisted, was the natural right of all, not some, men – and he came out swinging against discrimination on grounds of sex as well as race. ‘We will never again forget, God help us,’ he ended, ‘that the cause of the United States is the cause of human nature, and the permanent life of the nation is the liberty of all its children.’

Now if this speech and its orator have been relegated to the realms of the unremarkable, perhaps it’s just because for the generations when eloquence was power, rhetoric of this degree of truth and power was actually unremarkable; or at least those who could practise it were, if not exactly two a penny, then thick on the ground. Can we say this of our own time? Is the question absurd when the ‘arts of communication’ (and God knows there are abundant seminars going by that name) presupposes the shortest of attention spans? Go to Widener Library and look under ‘elocution’ or ‘oratory’ and you will be led to the Miss Havisham of the public arts: tome after tome gathering dust; relics of a time when mastery of rhetoric was not just a sign of the educated citizen, but also the ladder, as Frederick Douglass found, of true social mobility. If you want to learn the arts of persuasion now, you go not to Cicero and Quintilian, but the Business School Library where you can pick up the latest technique of negative advertising. Some of the greatest of the twentieth-century rhetoricians saw this coming. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt waxed eloquent on the need, above all, to outlaw corporate money donated to political campaigns (as well as the critical need to regulate the accounting practices of big business and use state power to conserve the environment).

It was the management of persuasion in the interests of corporations which struck Roosevelt as most ominous for the fate of democracy. Implicit in his anxieties was the prophecy of synthetic eloquence; not the mobilisation of active, participatory citizenship, but its opposite: its convenient abdication to professional opinion-formers. Of course there is nothing wicked about professional speechwriters. The Greeks had rhetores who for payment produced speeches for public orators. Andrew Jackson’s best stuff was written by Chief Justice Roger Taney. And Samuel Rosenmann turned them out for Franklin Roosevelt. But there is, I think, a difference between the collaboration of say, Seward and Lincoln, on drafts of his speeches, and the industrial fabrication of purpose-designed speeches, produced by White House Nibelungen toiling in the mines of rhetorical gold – eight full-time writers for Ronald Reagan and a complete staff of fourteen. If we were to take a contemporary check on Cicero’s famous five constituents of oratory, what would we find? An inventio – the main idea dreamed up and carefully monitored by the staff; dispositio – the arrangement, tailor-made for television and punctuated by gestures to ‘real-life’ heroes inserted into the gallery; memoria – supplied by the invisible teleprompter; actio – style, the oxymoronic down-home gravitas, studded with reassuring simplicities; and finally elocutio – delivery, finely judged to reassure that the incumbent can complete sentences, but equally finely judged to make them short. ‘I want four-letter words,’ demanded Lyndon Johnson of Richard Goodwin, ‘and paragraphs four sentences long.’

And who is to say that they are wrong? If I’m right that the survival of eloquence is the condition of both a free political society and a coherent community, we do need to cherish it. But we also need to hot-wire it to contemporary diction, without, I hasten to say, turning into the kind of political rap parodied by Warren Beatty’s last film: a public discourse that lies somewhere between Demosthenes and Ozzy Osbourne. And one of the most powerful qualities of such a discourse will be, as Lincoln knew at Gettysburg, knowing just when to stop.