Overview
"The President is at Liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can." Woodrow Wilson, 1907
This curriculum unit will enable students to understand the importance of Presidential rhetoric in the modern era. Civics, American History or Communication courses may benefit from the activities in this unit. Students will have the opportunity to apply the knowledge gained from rhetorical analysis to American History, the Presidency and the language of the Chief Executive. Activities in the unit may be adapted for eighth grade U.S. History or English Language Learners.
The role of the President will be reviewed, and then rhetorical tools will be applied to Presidential speeches which will offer the opportunity for students to write and speak. The ability of the President to persuade in a democracy will be a key focus in the lesson, giving students a chance to build their analytical skills. Students will examine formal and informal Presidential speeches to ascertain the power of the President in a historical context. To complete this task students will first identify the rhetorical techniques developed by Cicero: invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. Aristotle's framework from his Art of Rhetoric will allow for analysis. Finally, Jay Heinrichs' Thank You for Arguing revises traditional arguments but adds a modern twist that will interest a younger audience. For Heinrichs, rhetoric is more than the dictionary definition of using speech to persuade; he encourages arguing for argument sake and engaging in social discourse. Students ought to follow the practice of our Founding Fathers, he says, to keep democracy alive. For the purpose of this unit, rhetoric will be defined as speech used to persuade. Speeches from Presidents Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton and G.W. Bush will be the foundation from which students will derive a specific rhetorical style for their own speeches.
The goal is to guide students through the writing process while encouraging critical thinking. Through an examination of Presidential language, style and tone, the importance of rhetoric will be stressed. Although rhetoric may appear a dead practice of Aristotle and Cicero, learning basic communication skills is a necessity for high school students. As students become aware of how an argument is constructed they are able to break it apart and make significant counter claims effectively. By deconstructing Presidential speeches students will learn words, style and historical context to evaluate leadership characteristics. Exposure to traditional practices used by modern presidents will allow students to draw conclusions about the impact of rhetoric on the executive's power to persuade and still maintain a balance in our representative democracy.
As this unit is going to press, there is talk that the current President, Barack Obama, overstepped his bounds in the field of rhetoric. Some have suggested that what he did was so outrageous as to warrant impeachment: He went where no president has gone before — on the television show "The View"! Though my tone is sardonic, the conservative talk-radio circuit truly is mad. Never before has a sitting president joined a daytime talk show to connect so directly with the American people. It is seen by some as beneath the office. This controversy echoes one that occurred in the mid-nineteenth century when President Andrew Johnson tried to gain popular support for his policies by giving spirited speeches to large crowds. Jeffery K. Tulis explains, "President Andrew Johnson's popular rhetoric violated virtually all of the nineteenth-century norms..." 1 People thought Johnson was often drunk since his words and actions were far from the norm. His intent in his "Swing around the Circle" tour was to amass pubic opinion (not Congress) in support of his legislation, a presidential strategy that is commonplace today but was new and controversial then. 2 The question remains, should the president end or modify his interaction with the public once he stops campaigning and moves to the White House? What is appropriate contact once the president has taken the oath of office? What the current president can or cannot do will be checked by popularity polls and measured, not by the U.S. Constitution but with the next election.
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