CAMPAIGN ORATORY

...They can make a fool even of a man like Eisenhower...

...Being in office, however, they had to take the defensive and refer now and again to a few facts— which always weakens propaganda...

...He played the conspiracy note for all it was worth —plotters undermining our liberties both inside and outside the nation...

...You give them an inch, he said, and they take an ell...

...It was all part of a deliberate conspiracy, he said, plotted by a group he called the "welfare revolutionaries," years ago...

...In the democracies politics is a game, though often a costly one...

...You never had it so good...

...Seven—The issue of the definition of loyalty, and how Anglo-Saxon justice can be upheld against the kangaroo courts of Congressional committees...

...The TV viewers continually spoke of someone called "they"—as though the government belonged to other people...

...then they do what they want...

...Perhaps, at this particular period in history, it is time to talk sense and face real issues...

...He leaned heavily on those well-worn phrases, "history proves," "you can't change human nature," "the thin entering wedge," and "America must choose...

...Listening to both the Republican and the Democratic National Conventions in Chicago in 1952, one had the feeling that the speakers had all attended the same school of oratory and graduated well before 1900...

...They were: One—The issue of atomic energy, especially the H-bomb, how we could neutralize it, and if worse came to worse, how we could defend our cities against it...

...What he said made no more sense than what Pravda said, literally interpreted, but the inner meaning was equally obvious...

...The speeches, the parades up the aisles, the banners, the singsong of the balloting—"Oklahoma casts three votes for Governor Stevenson"—the demonstrations measured in minutes, fused into a kind of formal ballet, where nobody seemed to be thinking, and everybody was following an automatic pattern generations old...

...but what it had to do with the selection of leaders competent to face the mounting problems of 1952-1956 remained obscure...

...He has written and lectured widely on the uses and abuses of lan' guage in American culture...

...Time and again he said he did not know the answer, which stunnned citizens accustomed to candidates who knew all the answers to everything...

...It's all bull to attract the voter...

...An anthropologist would have no difficulty in comparing it to a Polynesian tribal dance...

...He was a tall, bald man with heavy tortoise shell glasses and a deep, resonant voice which he knew how to use...

...and to associate pleasant terms with Republicans, such as "economy," "tax reduction," "freedom," "home," "the flag...

...During the campaign it was my privilege—in the clinical sense— to listen attentively to a local speaker who was a master of extreme Tory dialectic...

...a Communist plot and unconstitutional as well...

...What were the real issues in 1952 as against the phony ones...

...We're still loused up...

...If he had not been obliged to make so many speeches (more than 200), he might have talked sense all of the time...

...I shut the damn thing off...

...There was, however, an extraordinary exception to the standard run of campaign oratory in the speeches of Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson...

...The dictatorships have no monopoly on political doubletalk, but in the democracies, when the verbal barrage is over, the loser sends the winner a telegram of congratulations...

...but that he tried to consider the event under discussion in a civilized, grown-up way, with proper qualifications...

...America must choose and that soon—his voice became sepulchral— between Constitutional Government and the Slave State...

...Nobody knows—not even the Messrs...

...Like Macy's monsters, too, they were filled with gas...

...Ill Democratic as well as Republican speakers seemed to agree on the following categories of good and evil words...

...It always happens...

...Speakers for the Democratic Party operated on substantially the same formula...

...He did not hesitate to work both sides of the street by declaring that American capitalism was all powerful, and at the same time almost as badly undermined as claimed by Moscow...

...He talked about Democrats something the way Russians talked about profiteers...

...It is on its way to collapse because of unbalanced budgets, staggering debts, the crushing burden of taxation, runaway inflation, the destruction of incentives, government interferences, tinkering with the currency, handouts to foreigners, and Reds in the State Department...

...Six—The baffling problem of the aging population of America, as applied science prolongs the life span...

...These terms dilated like the swaying monsters in Macy's Thanksgiving parade up Fifth Avenue, until they blocked the sky...

...Midnight has struck, he said, and more...

...Among his other books are "The Proper Study of Mankind," "Roads to Agreement," and "An Economy of Abundance...

...Five—What economic steps to take to halt depression when defense orders slackened...

...The politicians brushed these off by saying that grown-ups were "egg heads," and they, the politicians, were talking to Joe and Mac who had the votes...

...He was saying he did not like Democrats...

...To spend so much energy and money arguing questions of little or no importance is bad enough...

...Political campaigners," observed a woman voter writing in the New York Herald Tribune, "had better climb out of their cocoon and look around...

...The customers these days want to do the talking and the thinking . . . that old-fashioned-preacher method of political oratory is interesting to no one except the preacher...

...He began by saying that the United States was balancing on the knife edge of ruin...

...And free, though the paper omitted to say so, from any reason for voting...

...The Russians staged an election in 1950 in Berlin, and gave the world a magnificent example of not talking sense...

...Yet through some intervention, conceivably miraculous, two competent leaders ultimately emerged...

...Your Great State," "the Great Party of Abraham Lincoln," "the Great Party of Thomas Jefferson," kept reappearing like wooden horses on a merry-go-round...

...The point is not that he was right...

...Bad words: Unbalanced Budgets, Big Government, Taxes, Monopoly, Bureau, Aggression, Appeasement,, Lobbyists, Gangsters, etc...

...just as in the field of economics it is time to abandon the meaningless debate between "socialism'' and "capitalism" and get on with the job of production...

...The "good" received attention which could only be called a ceremonial obeisance...

...and for the first time in my long and painful recollection of campaign speeches, he actually did talk sense, at least a good part of the time...

...One can only hope that Mr...

...IV Live and pressing issues either were not discussed at all, or were talked about disingenuously as the personal guilt of the opposing party and its leaders...

...The Soviet Army newspaper Taegliche Rundschau went on to say: "These elections will be the most free Germany has ever had...

...They did their best, building up an idyllic picture of life in America under the Democrats...

...The New Deal, he said, was the embodiment of the Welfare State, which was "Creeping Socialism," and in the last analysis Communism...

...There is no STUART CHASE, one of America's foremost social analysts, has served as special consultant to industry (Standard Oil of New Jersey), labor (Amalgamated Clothing Workers), and government (TVA...

...His technique was to associate unpleasant terms with Democrats, "bankruptcy," "debt," "spending," and especially "Communism...

...Eight—The urgent problem of how to change the political structure in Washington so that Congress and the White House, instead of being continually embroiled, can cooperate to permit a government to govern...

...Big business" and "the interests" were given a thorough going over, the Taft-Hartley Act was called the "slave labor law," while the protective tariff was taken out of moth balls and given a vigorous airing reminiscent of the days of William Jennings Bryan...

...Gallup and Roper...

...You can't change human nature, he said, especially labor union human nature, and that of bureaucrats...

...In the dictatorships it is warfare without quarter...

...Perhaps the sovereign voter is not so bemused by campaign oratory as the politicians believe...

...They began by defining a "free election," as "voting which is free from contest...

...middle ground...

...Perhaps if not an orator had opened his mouth from June to November of 1952, General Eisenhower would have been elected by the same comfortable margin...

...those who are not with us are against us...

...A fundamental rule with politicians is that the voters above all else want their taxes reduced...

...The British Labor Government was a Communist government in disguise, with not a pin to choose between it and the New Deal...

...Their voices were forced to the same theatrical rasping pitch, in which the stock phrases...

...The speech proceeded in a series of high abstractions, omitting any facts which might be subject to verification...

...The billions of words assaulting the airwaves and filling the papers in the fall of 1952 contained almost nothing to nourish the mind of a mature citizen—Mr...

...Perhaps it is time to gaze outward at what is really happening in a world of unprecedented change rather than inward at ideas which have not changed for fifty years...

...Value judgments dominated the discourse...

...Ten—But perhaps the greatest issue of all was how to break the deadlock of Cold War, especially an exploration of ways and means for possible negotiation...

...Stevenson's words again excepted...

...The Reporter, however, gathered some straws in the wind by interviewing television owners and watchers in New York during the campaign...

...Perhaps Joe and Mac and their wives in their perplexity were primarily looking for a leader and were not much interested in a mess of stale words...

...Stevenson's unique performance marks the beginning of a trend in American political talk...

...The article in this issue is a chapter from his forthcoming book, "The Power of Words," a sequel to his celebrated "The Tyranny of Words...

...He repeatedly used guilt by association, as in equating the "New Deal" with "Communism...

...He said when nominated at Chicago, that he was going to try to "talk sense...

...Said a bartender: "You can't go by what they say in the speeches...

...History proves, he said, that all welfare states began as idealistic movements—the red plotters seemed to have momentarily disappeared— and end as brutal dictatorships...

...A great spectacle, yes...

...Two—The issue of the growing pressure of population on food supply over much of the world, as modern science drives down the death rate, leaving the birth rate practically unchanged...

...Apart from Stevenson, the real issues before the country and the world might be mentioned but were seldom dealt with in the American campaign...

...At a period when national unity is badly needed, an artificial battle of words disrupts it...

...Free from anti-Soviet agitation, free from demagoguery of opposition parties, from all bribery by monopolistic capital from all pressures and terror of foreign taskmasters...

...Yet Elmo Roper found a substantial majority of the American people (June 1953) against cutting taxes "at the expense of external or internal security...

...The graduated income tax, he said, is...

...Said a fat man in a candy store: "They're all a bunch of crooks, makes no difference who gets in...

...When you have to work for a living, nothing can change anything...

...the evil were subject to a ceremonial curse...

...What makes it worse is that so many citizens get so angry at one another over questions of no importance...

...II From my notes, I reconstructed some of the patterns in this standard campaign oratory of the Upper Mississippi, or Early Devonian, school...

...What did Joe and Mac think about the Niagara of words...

...American capitalism, he said, is the wonder of the world, but at the same time it stands in hideous danger...

...Nine—The crisis in American schools was a real issue, and so was the future of sixty million cars on the roads, now almost ready to congeal into one solid and unmoving mass...

...Said a war veteran: "That stuff drives me mad, to hear our troubles over and over again, as if we haven't got enough...

...Four—What to do about Japan's economic future, and about Formosa when Chiang's political and military weakness was admitted...

...Good words...

...The Constitution, the American Way of Life, Free Speech, Free Enterprise, Little Business, the Founding Fathers, etc...

...Three—The issue of the future of Korea, as a tongue of land encircled by three great powers— China, Russia, and Japan...

...Their prophecies of what would happen in the event that the Republicans came to power were just as gruesome as the statements of the Republicans about what had happened while the Democrats were in power...