PAUL BARCLAY:
I'd like to introduce our third guest now, Dr Julian Murphet from the Department of English at Sydney University. Julian is a specialist in American literature and popular culture. Hi, Julian.
JULIAN MURPHET:
It's a pleasure to be here.
PAUL BARCLAY:
Julian, I know you've been in Australia for a long time, but, as your accent indicates, you were born in North America, so tell us just how important is rhetoric and public speechmaking to the American tradition.
JULIAN MURPHET:
Well, I think as it was to the ancient republican tradition, public oratory, speechmaking, is absolutely vital to the American Republican tradition. In fact, the founding fathers deliberately modelled themselves on the ancient Roman Republic. The art of persuasion, of reasonable debate, proving a point through argumentation in a public forum was critical to overturning European 'ancien regime' ideas of tradition and custom. So forging a republic on the anvil of revolution meant using words as weapons. And that's what they did. I think all of the founding fathers were remarkable orators, great speechmakers, who forged their arguments on foot, as it were, in the heat of public debate and forged an idea of Republicanism in a modern context against British tyranny. I'm thinking of people like Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Madison, Adams and so on. But you have to remember the American oral tradition is deeply indebted, too, to a different tradition, which is the puritan sermon, which blends apocalyptic visions of hellfire with an assumption of being the elect people amongst the world. And I think most of the American spoken oral speechmaking tradition fuses elements from both of these. So you get reasonableness, commonsense, mixed in with apocalyptic visions of being the chosen people. The very best American speeches, if we put Lincoln at the very pinnacle of this, in the first and second inaugural addresses and the Gettysburg Address, you get the most extraordinary canny blending of commonsense, everyman, Republican argumentation, along with spirited evangelical Christian visionary oration.
PAUL BARCLAY:
Would you say that's equally the case with Martin Luther King, particularly his 'I have a dream' speech?
JULIAN MURPHET:
Absolutely. In fact, the one, I guess, sector, of the 20th-century American speechmaking that I think has been less corrupted by whatever media revolutions have gone on in the 20th century that is the African-American sermon tradition, out of which Martin Luther King, a reverend in the church, came out of where most of the great black orators in America have stemmed.
PAUL BARCLAY:
And how well do you think that traditional, Julian, has continued right now? Can you still feel the influence of the Gettysburg Address of Lincoln's in modern politics?
JULIAN MURPHET:
It's fair to say I'm less sanguine than John on this matter. My estimation would be is there has been a considerable diminishment in the art of the spoken word in America. As you were saying earlier, as the culture of the sound bite and of the image really took hold in American 20th-century culture, the art of making a speech has notably reduced in intensity. And I think the venues for making speeches have vanished. I think Kathryn's point about the ancient 'agora' and the forum is also important. You need a public venue in which to have prolonged argumentative debates. Those 'fora' are gone, so in every event it seems we have to be reduced to a one-liner or a slogan or a tagline. All I remember Clinton saying, for instance, is 'It's the economy, stupid' — a one-line note posted up in the campaign office by a democratic campaigner.
PAUL BARCLAY:
So where and when did it change, Julian? Is there a point at which you can pinpoint where the media and speechmaking collided?
JULIAN MURPHET:
One turning point that occurs to me was during the Depression, of Roosevelt's famous fireside chats that were disseminated over a radio. He rethought and recrafted the art of public speech away from the arousal of public sentiment on a mass basis and towards a more intimate encounter with the individual. And I think that is a real turning point because it redirects the art of speech away from the public and into the private. And I think from that point on, and as the various media began to take hold, we've seen a progressive lessening of the art of oratory in America.