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Essay on Franklin D. Roosevelt
To conceive of Roosevelt as a rhetorical president is to affirm certain axioms of the art of rhetoric. These axioms are particularly important to the study of his speaking. First, he practiced the art to get a response from his audiences. Second, his application of the art's techniques contributed to the effects of his speeches. Just as the techniques of carpentry enable the carpenter to craft a comfortable chair, so do the techniques of rhetoric enable the speaker to fashion a functional persuasive message. Third, the effects of his speeches can be ascertained. Although FDR practiced the art of rhetoric for success, he sometimes failed to obtain the desired responses from his audiences. In order to gauge the outcome of FDR's speeches, the critic may rely upon other critics' opinions, upon contemporary commentators' evaluations, upon polls, and upon his own close and careful reading of the speech.
But there is also a corollary that flows from the confluence of these three axioms. Given that the art of rhetoric is purposeful, the critic must not only explain successes but also explicate failures. If he described only the successes, then very few original findings would be claimed as additions to the scholarship on FDR and his speaking. If, however, the rhetorical critic takes the next logical step, as admonished by the art, and evaluates the failures of its practice, then he can claim new insights into Roosevelt and his rhetoric. Nor is it sufficient for the critic to note that a speech failed for such and such reasons; rather, the critic completes the evaluation by offering some reasonable revision of how the art might have been better or more effectively practiced.
The application of oratorical revisionism is critical to the claims advanced in this study. Rhetorical revisionism is not an exercise in "what if": what if Abraham Lincoln had not been assassinated....
