Last weekend I participated in a scholarly Conference at the University of Gent in Belgium, a Conference titled "Weapons of Mass Seduction," Rhetoric and Political Discourse in the United States, Historical, Contemporary and Theoretical Approaches to U.S. Rhetoric

It was a fascinating conference with a wide variety of people, Americans,  Germans, English, Dutch, Belgians, Poles and others who study and teach U.S. political philosophy, history, politics, media in universities from Poland to New Zealand.  Many knew a very great deal about contemporary American politics-- much more unfortunately than many Americans.

On the train around Brussells, a city that is the capital of the Belgian government, the European Union, and NATO, I saw scenes from the train reminiscent of a declining contemporary American city, slums, graffitti filled walls, large office buildings for corporations.  I was told that the various "bureaucrats," Belgian government, NAT0, European Union, lived in fine homes and neighborhoods surrounding the city.

But there was a great deal of public transportation, aging but well organized.  Belgian students I spoke to were shocked at the low turnouts in U.S. elections.  I explained that unlike Belgium and many other countries, where voting is both a right and a duty, where individuals can even be fined for not being on the voting rolls, in the U.S., it is the exact opposite.  Belgians also were shocked at the cost of tuition at my university, Rutgers, as against the University of Gent, about 15 times as great.   In EU countries the conservative politicians say that the welfare state cannot continue because of debt.  In the U.S., as many understood, there is a mountain of public debt related to military spending but not much of of a welfare state.

I participated in a panel titled "Contemporary Rhetoric: Twentieth Century Developments" which included an excellent presentation by Anthony Teitler of University College/London titled "U.S. Foreign Policy toward Afghanistan:  The Rhetoric and Relevance of Exceptionalism" and  a fascinating social scientific textual analysis of presidential rhetoric "The Great American Scaffold:  An Intertextual Analysis of  U.S. Presential Rhetoric"  by Frank Austermuehl of the University of Auckland(New Zealand)

My presentation compared Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, in terms of context and form in U.S. politics.  Below I am posting a draft of my presentation, which includes audio and video links to both presidents to highlight my points

History Turned  on Its Head:  Content and Form in  Rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan

“It isn’t by rhetoric alone but by their ability to recognize and help resolve the central problems of their times that one should judge presidents.”   This is a paraphrase of quote that I often use in examinations given to students of U.S. political history.  Here I will study  use of rhetoric by two hugely popular presidents regarded as masters of rhetoric using modern media, with profoundly different personalities and policies and conclude with some comments about their ability to understand and help resolve the central problems of their times

The two men, Roosevelt and Reagan.

Ronald Reagan was called “the Great Communicator,’  by media that overwhelmingly supported directly and indirectly him as they had his party for generations.  Who was he?

A radio sports commentator recreating baseball games from a teletype in Iowa in 1935, then a studio system and post studio system actor Hollywood actor  and television personality, after dinner speaker for General Electric and even very briefly Las Vegas performer from 1937 to 1964.

 The one thing that was consistent about Reagan  in my view was  that he was a quentissential B  movie actor who never had the drive to fight for parts, take chances, stand up to the studio bosses, a follower who never really got the chance to play the  the part he really wanted, the Frank Capra American hero that the A movies actors played, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda played .

 He had the look, but not the initiative and the strength of character, the virtues he extolled as a politician, to get those roles in the studio system. 

 Who was Franklin Roosevelt ?    The scion of an old money pre industrial capitalist New York family, born to privilege, a gentleman from Harvard  who saw politics as a great game, began to play it as a New York state legislator before WWI, traded on his family name  to serve as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during WWI, even Vice Presidential candidate  on a doomed ticket in 1920 after which Polio struck him down.

Like the successful A movie actors in Hollywood, Franklin Roosevelt always played himself, easy going, fun-loving

He  enjoyed the company of women as friends, and married a women of strong political beliefs and character who would privately challenge and clash with him on issues, acting first when he was governor of New York and then as president  as both his legs and as a kind of constituent for him,a voice for those he called simply in 1932 “the foregotten man at the bottom of the economic heap.” 

The image he conveyed was that that of the  compassionate morally upright father in the  midst of  the depression, analogous to Lewis Stone’s Judge Hardy in the Andy Hardy movies, and the Andy Hardy movies followed his first administration.

Politics was a game  for Roosevelt but leadership was about stewardship, service;  on that basis he looked at  what the central problems of his times and his country were, and used rhetoric to project a vision of socially responsible leadership in changed world , shifting policies in response to changing conditions, experimental, looking to the future.

 And he would listen to many people and like successful politicians had the knack of making them believe  that he agreed with them without formally committing himself to anything.  Some would argue that he was shallow, ready to repeat the the last person said.  But I don’t think so.  He was always looking for new answers, new ways to address issues   

 He also loved  to perform and had a keen  eye  and ear for what is probably the most successful American social science, at least the best funded advertising.  He once told Orson Welles that he was a greater actor than Welles.     

Roosevelt   broadened but never really changed  his view as the times changed.  He used the slippery term liberal, not progressive, and gave it a new meaning—identifying it with policies that Europeans would call social democratic and his enemies of socialist, even fascist in the very  early days, but most of all communist

Roosevelt saw the immediate problem that the nation faced as one of general economic collapse, which no one could deny.  He saw the longterm problem as one of adjustment to a changed economy, one in which the “rugged individualism” that the man he defeated, Herbert Hoover, had spoken about was now counterproductive.  How though in a nation where individualism had been associated with popular democracy, where the man on the make was a universal folk hero, could  the people rally behind policies of change.

First there were the advertising slogans.  The New Deal itself, an answer to Mark Hanna’s Stand Pat of the McKinley era.  Then the appeal, rooted within the individualist tradition to “action and action now,” repeated over and over again in the first hundred days.  Then the brilliant catch-phrase in the first inaugural, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself,” an understanding that fear of change is in human relations often the biggest obstacle to change, that fear freezes people who have lost a great deal, for fear of losing everything. 

Roosevelt used radio to convey this vision, connecting it from the beginning of his administration to its end with a “friends and neighbors” approach to policy.  The people could as citizens understand the banking system, the stock market, the agricultural crisis, even though the “experts” claimed this was all above them,  The radio addresses were called “fireside chats.  “My friends” was the standard opening.  Sometimes the weather in Washington was mentioned.  And then the issues were presented. 

Roosevelt’s  vision and commitment to both saving and reforming capitalism never changed. But his attempt to essentially bail out everyone in an “all class alliance” had  failed by the end of 1934.

 Unions had run with his statement that he personally would join a union , making it  into the slogan “The president wants you to join a union”  But employers undermined the NRA with company unions and crude forms of non compliance. Corporate and financial leaders  also demanded that he do what all other presidents of both parties had done since Hayes, suppress a growing wave of strikes, many led by Communist party activists.

 Instead his administration moved sharply to the left in 1935, in a social democratic direction in European terms,  became the center of a center left coalition reminiscient of  the pre civil war period, when abolitionists and other radicals  formed a broad center left anti-slavery expansion coalition

The New Deal government  adopted  in a  watered down way programs associated with and advocated primarily by Communists and socialists—old age pensions, unemployment insurance, a national collective bargaining law  outlawing all of the traditional methods used by employers to suppress unions since the mid 19^th century, aid to families with dependent children, and a major public employment program,minimum wage legislation, the forty hour week, and the outlawing of child labor, all within a three year period.

The response from large capital its media and reactionaries generally  was predictable. 

Roosevelt was now widely portrayed a “Communist dictator,” not merely a “Kerensky” opening the door to revolution.  In the country clubs and some of the bar-rooms  also, he began among the cruder sections of the right, to be denounced as “Rosenfeld,” a secret Jewish tyrant

His response rhetorically was interesting, very different than his successors  He did not retreat but hit back hard,  Here he envoked the rhetoric of the American revolution, calling his enemies “economic royalists,” portraying them essentially as enemies of the people, and himself as a peoples tribune who welcomed their hatred.  Here from the 1936 presidential campaign is the best example of this approach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=D9yoZHs6PsU

The policies changed, from the all class alliance of the  first New Deal to the social welfare and labor orientation of the second New Deal, to the return to national planning in alliance with and concessions to large capital to win the war, to the outline of a third New Deal, the one that never was, in this most powerful and complete vision of an American future after WWII, the second bill of rights address

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=czvHtOh_Xew

       In most ways as a person Reagan was the opposite of Roosevelt.  The part Reagan played in politics   on camera and on radio  and television was the A movie Capra American hero, Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,earnest, informal, with bursts of selfless anger against conventional targets.

 It is hard to say what his vision was  beyond the scripts and the takes, the world of movie truth, in which fiction and fact are both means to an end and can be constantly rewritten to conform to the formulas of a studio system movie.  Before 1950 it was saving the New Deal, its labor and social legislation.  After 1950, it was destroying it, making real the famous 1946 Chamber of Commerce pamphlet calling for a war against two enemies, labor at home and Communism abroad.

Reagan off camera, to those who spoke  with him after speeches, television appearances, press conferences, was fairly passive, as if he spent much of his life waiting for his cue.

Perhaps if Reagan had really faced a personal crisis like Roosevelt did with Polio, he might have been more like the part he played, but he but never really took serious chances in his life, and followed others, from his father, a minor official of the WPA in Illinois, to his days at Warner Brothers, the pro New Deal Hollywood studio in the 1930s and 1940s.

 Even then, as it was later discovered, he gave information during the war to the FBI about Communists in Hollywood at a time when CPUSA activists were committed to win the war policies that were largely indistinguishable from the administration.  Recent revelations have made that episode far worse.

It seems that Reagan, when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild opened the Guild’s files to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and thus made a huge direct contribution to the Blacklisting that followed, and this when he was still in his mind a New Deal Democrat. Reagan always had convictions but not that much courage to hold unto them in reality. And the convictions were always scripted and directed. 

 How did the script change for Ronald Reagan.   After divorcing his first wife, Jane Wyman, whose success as an actress eclipsed his as an actor, Reagan married Nancy Davis, a starlet who deferred to him for the rest of their lives, was more than willing to play a female tonto to his lone ranger.  He also began to fall under the influence of his step father, Loyal Davis, Dr. and Professor at the University of Chicago Medical School, famous for his political and social elitism, his hatred of  New Deal politics, and his racism and anti-Semitism.

After the FBI and Loyal Davis, there was GE and Lemuel Boulware, the GE executive whose name graced a policy, Boulwarism, which meant a policy of underming trade unions, going over the heads of their their leaders to the workers directly, violating labor laws and stringing things out in the Courts.  But  it took time for the script to change

  Reagan was still reading from the New Deal script in  1948, the script was saving the New Deal, stopping the Republicans from “taking it way” as the Democratic party song went. 

In this excerpt from 1948, Reagan, speaking for President Harry Truman and Senate candidate Hubert Humphrey, in effect expresses the Center-Left New Deal vision for a postwar America much better than either Truman or Humphrey.  His style is that of the earnest Hollywood  American hero  standing up to the vested interests. 

   Given subsequent events, most listeners today who hear this will burst out laughing, but listen for the rhetorical style.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=uJDhS4oUm0M

It was less I would argue the larger changes represented by the cold war than his changing situation  which led Ronald Reagan to become a follower of the anti-New Deal right wing Republicans who he attacked so forcefully in 1948.  Reagan stuck to the basic character but the directions changed.   

 By 1952, Reagan the outsider had become active in “Democrats for Eisenhower.”  Then came General Electric.  GE Theater was not a memorable program.  Reagan was its host and sometimes starred in the formula melodramas which were a number of cuts below his B movies. In the end he actually was fired by GE because of the bad ratings.  But  he retained his friendship with Boulware.

  But he also became a pitchman for General Electric, and for Boulwarism,extolling the virtues of a “free enterprise” that was the foundation of all things American, a free enterprise most nobly represented by corporations like GE,(whose most famous commercial went “Progress is our most important  product”) companies who were the embodiment of all of the aspirations, hopes, and dreams of the people.  Bad government and bad unions  by threatening companies like GE were threatening the people themselves.  But Reagan wasn’t against government, but only big and bad government.

 And he wasn’t against unions, only those unions that restricted the freedom of honest working people and honest working businesses.  And there was something more; the force of evil that the U.S. was fighting in the world, Communism, or at least a less virulent expression of it, was masquerading in the U.S. as liberalism, not as Joe McCarthy put it in the service of espionage, but to undermine American freedom.

Here we have an excerpt from the New Reagan, misquoting Norman Thomas, and using the right AMA ‘s “creeping socialism” campaign against the 1948 health care program to attack the the Forand Bill, the  legislation which later became Medicare

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iShCXx_xZDQ

Reagan put it all together in 1964 on television, the medium in which he had failed as the host of GE Playhouse and Death Valley Days, when he spoke for Barry Goldwater at the Republican National Convention.  This was the great audition, in which the earnest fighting progressive became the earnest fighting reactionary completely, and he  pulled it off  and in  effect outGoldwatered Goldwater.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=lvg7lRsCVJ8

 After Goldwater’s crushing defeat, Southern California businessmen convinced a reluctant Reagan to be their candidate for governor and sell the Goldwater product the way he had sold GE in the 1950s, offering to put his money in a “blind trust” in effect to assure that he would be very well off whatever happened.

 At first he was hesitant, still hopeful that his career as an actor-entertainer would rebound; he even told them that he didn’t know if he would make a good governor because he had never played a governor in the movies, but he agreed and as they say in Hollywood, a “star was born.”

When he ran, the joke was “Ronald Reagan for governor.  No.  Jimmy Stewart for Governor, Ronald Reagan for Best friend.” But  he finally had the Jimmy Stewart  A movie part and would run and rerun it for the rest of his political life; “ Ronald Reagan for President and George H W Bush for best friend;” “ Ronald Reagan for World leader and Mikhail Gorbachev for Best Friend.”

The Comparison

Unlike Roosevelt, who innovated, from the first to the second to the attempted( I would say third New Deal), from the forgotten man of 1932 to a third of a national ill-housed, ill clothed, ill fed,of 1937, to the Second Bill of Rights of 1944, Reagan operated in a world of “movie truth” where the the facts might change from  take to take, but what really mattered was the happy ending of  a restored America, where it was always morning, the people looked like they had come alive from Kellogg’s cornflakes boxes, and the revival of  mass homelessness in the 1980s, not seen since the great depression, the decline in real incomes for the majority, the specular rise in military spending and federal deficits, were not part of the script and so did not exist. Right to work laws that would undermine unions, huge tax cuts that would liberate business, large increases in military spending that would save the free world from the Red Menace, and a balanced budget constitutional amendment which would  pay down the deficit were his solutions to the central problems of his times, solutions that would restore the past in the future

Interestingly enough, Reagan the movie actor used radio more extensively than any postwar president, as Roosevelt had.  After his term as governor, he had a syndicated radio program developing his themes of  domestic moral stagnation and a growing Soviet military threat.

It was here on radio in the Carter years  that he really stood New Deal policy on its head Whereas Roosevelt spoke of economic and social rights that would enable the United States to develop as a healthy harmonious society, Reagan spoke of “entitlements” that were destroying initiative, reducing  wealth generally and shifting wealth to the welfare welfare queens, the undeserving poor of the Victorian world, who had babies to increase their welfare checks.

Reagan and his successors undermined much of the New Deal’s regulatory legislation of Wall Street and banking primarily, ushering in the greatest financial scandals in U.S. history, as the Enrons as the Boesky’s, Enrons, Madoffs et al, made Jay Gould look like a petty thief.

  Whereas Roosevelt had stressed in his fireside chats that questions of economic and social development were national questions and that the national government had to both coordinate and absorb the costs of development, if it were to be balanced and successful,

 Reagan sought through tax cuts and federal social spending cuts to devolve responsibilities unto the states and the cities and counties, which relied heavily on regressive property taxes to fund their activities.  Planning was often explicit and always implicit in Roosevelt rhetoric.  It was never part of Reagan’s script, at least in the takes on domestic policy.

Of course, the context in which both men made their contributions was very different.  Roosevelt allied himself to and brought new forces, independents, progressive Republicans, reformers, into government where they developed an uneasy co-existence with traditional democratic party political machines.  And outside of course there was a new left, a real new left represented by the Communist party and its allies, building industrial unions, leading mass demonstrations of the unemployed, educating, organizing and coordinating mass struggles, however demonized they were by the mass media which was overwhelmingly anti-Roosevelt and anti-New Deal

Reagan after nearly two generations of cold war politics in which the political capital created in the U.S. by the New Deal had been largely squandered, had a far easier task. And Reagan had the bipartisan cold war consensus, in economic policy was merely a matter of quantity economic growth and the Military Industrial Complex was to fed at higher and higher levels, whatever the consequences.

 The only elements of his Republican party that would oppose his leadership were those who believed that he would lead them down to devastating defeat, as had Goldwater.

 They had no real ideological differences with him and what he represented, but only feared its negative political consequences.  The generations old conservative attacks on liberal media only hid the fact that U.S. commercial media was the most compliant and conservative in those developed countries with representative governments.  Reagan could play that media very effectively, but he never had to worry about it asking him serious questions that would disrupt the script.

In conclusion, both men used the “weapons of mass seduction,” one to explain the present in simple terms to masses of people, friends and neighbors, as the way to understand help create the future, the other to  offer a trip in time to “a better yesterday,” where, if deregulation, detaxation, privatization were carried forward in the U.S. and the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union were defeated, along with assorted international outlaws, Ghadaffi, Khomeini, were hunted down as they would be in a B movie Western, it would be a perpetual morning in America.”

And both presidents were successful in terms of  connecting rhetoric with policy.  Using the quote that I began with, Roosevelt in terms of recognizing and resolving the central problems of his times, both as he understood them, and  also as they  were, was an enormous success for his nation and the world, however those achievements would be squandered in the postwar era.

Ronald Reagan, could have been easily re-elected in 1988 had not the conservative coalition pushed through an anti-Roosevelt constitutional amendment barring a President from serving more than two terms, something he commented on sheepishly since it meant the loss of his starring role in the greatest and most expensive A Movie in History.  In 2008, as the economic crisis accelerated, there were even those  who lamented that Reagan was not around to lead the nation out of an economic catastrophe that his policies in the 1980s had helped over time to bring about. 

But in terms of recognizing and contributing to a resolution of the central problems of his times, economic, social, political, ecological, Reagan of course was a complete failure, even though none of that did real damage to his image, since in the world of Movie Truth, Ketchup can be a vegetable, a glorious military victory can be won over the island of Grenada, industrial workers who lost their jobs in factories can go West and find new ones, in MacDonald’s, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and  stepping stones to the ownership of small business, which the aforementioned businesses drive out of business, as they sell goods made abroad on the installment plan to debt ridden Americans. Or finally, that the star of the B movie Bedtime for Bonzo, was responsible for its world historic sequel, Bedtime for Gorby, where the Soviet Union ceased to exist, ushering in a happy ending to history,period of unparalleled peace and prosperity for the people of the U.S. its NAT0 bloc allies and the world

 And this production could with a little help from the directors, not Frank Capra or Ernst Lubitsch  here but Milton Friedman,  could go on indefinitely as they said it would in the silent screen days the new “business of America is business era” of Harding and Coolidge   until of course the money stopped, which was where Franklin Roosevelt began