Tonsor: Intellectual History: Is a "Liberal Conservative" an Oxymoron?

Winslow Homer, "The Fog Warning" (1885)

After the trip to Washington, DC, where I thrilled at seeing the U.S. Constitution in a bicentennial celebration at the National Archives, I returned to Ann Arbor intellectually stimulated by the experience and eager to resume my history apprenticeship. There was snap in the morning air when I set out to meet Tonsor during office hours. I spied him crossing the Diag in front of the Undergraduate Library (aptly called "the UGLI" because it looked like an IBM punch card). It was the first time I saw him wearing a hat. It looked reminiscent of a boater's hat from a Winslow Homer painting -- or the hat worn by the Paddington Bear. Yes, that student I'd met the first day of class had spoken perceptively: there was something ursine about Tonsor.

As our paths converged, I hailed my professor. He said hello in that expectant way of his, and then caught me up about the latest Trollope novel he was reading. When we reached the fourth floor of Haven Hall, there was a young man waiting outside his office; he was wearing a Red Wings cap. Tonsor greeted the undergraduate, showed him into the office, and put his hat down on the table. I remained standing outside the office, and what I saw next was unlike any interaction I'd ever witnessed between a professor and his student -- or between any two people. The student sat down but did not remove his cap. Tonsor also sat down and, annoyed that the student did not have the manners to remove his cap, put his hat back on his head. It was a ridiculous scene: The professor sitting stock still with his boater's hat on, staring down a hapless student whose felony was to keep his Red Wings cap on. Finally the chastised student got the hint and took his cap off, at which point Tonsor took his hat back off, and the two began conversing as if nothing had happened. It was very strange. If my professor had lived in the Middle Ages, he no doubt would have been called Stephen the Irascible. When my turn came to go into his office, I made sure to remove my ivy cap before crossing the threshold!

Rendering of the Undergraduate Library (UGLI)

"Come in, Mr. Whitney. You have not yet told me about your trip to Washington."

"The organizers kept us busy," I said, taking a seat where Red Wing boy had just been dressed down. "The highlight was seeing the Constitution on its 200th birthday, and the Declaration of Independence, too. Your lecture on liberalism was in my head as I walked around Washington, DC, taking in the sights of the 'Imperial City.' I also thought about something you said after the first class, when you referred to yourself as a 'liberal conservative.'[1] I need help understanding what that means because it seems like an oxymoron."

"This is true," said Tonsor. "It's an important question, and we don't have time to do it justice before class starts. But consistent with the sound practice of intellectual history, we can at least start with definitions in their historical context. There is not one liberalism but many, and its American permutations differ in significant respects from the liberalisms found elsewhere, or that developed previously. So one has to qualify what one means by 'liberal' and 'liberalism.'

"The same must be said of 'conservative.' There are many hyphenated conservatives nowadays -- traditionalist, economic, anti-communist, evangelical, neocon. Moreover, the American permutations differ in significant particulars from conservative thought elsewhere, or that developed previously. One has to specify what one means by 'conservative.'

"To define the term, 'liberal conservative,' I start with the observation that modern man lives with tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions -- oppositions that arise from our civilization's conflicting sources of intellectual and moral authority. In our shorthand way, we call those conflicting sources Christendom, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. As you know from class, they have a complex and overlapping relationship to one another, something like that of a child to a parent. They are continually clashing, continually generating conflicting ideas and discourse in our public affairs. As a result, the liberal conservative must be discerning. For he believes in freedom as well as in order. He believes in individualism as well as in community. He believes in the equality of all men as well as in hierarchy, natural aristocracy, and excellence. He believes in private enterprise, competition, and the market mechanism as well as in those human, moral, and cultural values that cannot be defined by the competition of interests in the marketplace.[2] These contradictions bring to mind the Walt Whitman verse which I recited to your class: 'Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large. I contain multitudes).'[3] No thriving society has ever existed that has not embraced the dynamic tensions that exist among opposing sets of values. Personally speaking, I will even say this: My behavior would be less honorable and my world more impoverished were I to abandon any one of these contradictory ideals."[4]

My synapses were lighting up like the Las Vegas Strip. If I understood him correctly, then Tonsor was blowing up all my preconceived notions. Not only was he stretching my understanding of what a liberal and a conservative were; but he was also, unexpectedly, grafting the one onto the other the way a gardener creates a new subspecies. Often the result is a new plant that is stronger than the originals. Before I started reading his work and listening to his lectures, I had little idea that Tonsor's liberal-conservative pairing could be so fresh, so undoctrinaire, so creative in approach -- and I wondered how widely known this remarkable teaching was. I would later learn that Russell Kirk, in his influential The Conservative Mind (1953), would devote a section of his book to a prominent group of thinkers he called "liberal conservatives" -- foremost among them Tocqueville -- and the type would prove highly influential in Tonsor's intellectual development.[5]

Stephen Tonsor (left) and Russell Kirk in 1977, courtesy of Annette Kirk

But to extend the biological metaphor, it seemed that Tonsor lived in an estuary of ambiguity; he was anchored neither to land nor to sea, but inhabited the richness that is found where salt water mixes with fresh, feasting in an ecosystem where nature most flourishes. It struck me how this strain of thought repositioned conservatism. It had nothing to do with the popular conception of of stalwarts fighting a rearguard action to defend the status quo, or promoting a politics of nostalgia that would return Americans to some golden age. Not at all. Rather, at the true heart of the conservative body of thought was the willingness to embrace the tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions of the human experience -- life as it really is experienced -- and subject it to critical analysis in light of abiding principles.

Tonsor continued speaking and my neurons continued lighting up. "Going all the way back to Aristotle," he said, "you see the development, in free societies, of the liberal-conservative pattern of thought. It was passed on, generation after generation, within a remnant. Then in the modern age, the liberal conservative emerged out of a powerful genealogy that includes Burke, John Adams, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, and Jacob Burckhardt.

When George H. Nash's classic treatment of
postwar conservatism came out in 1976,
Tonsor earned a spot on the dust jacket
as one of the nation's top 25
conservative thought leaders.
His photograph is in the lower left corner.

"Now, you may ask yourself: What is peculiarly conservative about the liberal conservative? Well, much of conservative thought is derived from the West's religion, from Christendom. The conservative is a tough-minded realist who understands that human beings are imperfect and imperfectible; that they are usually self-interested and often irrational. He thus values the historic reality of those statesmen, charters, and institutions that act as a check on man's libido dominandi which --"

Tonsor saw my brow furrow. "Libido dominandi comes from St. Augustine. It refers to man's disordered love of overreaching power. The liberal conservative is conservative in his belief that freedom is not enough. Freedom is only viable if it is ordered -- ordered by virtue. Virtue promotes order in the soul and order in the society. Although freedom and virtue are in inner tension, they complement each other. The more a man can govern himself by an interior law, the less he needs the government to impose an exterior law. Thus freedom thrives, paradoxically, when it grows out of a tolerable order. Let me be clear on this point: freedom is not freedom if separated from order.

"You may also ask yourself: What is peculiarly liberal about the liberal conservative? Well, the liberal -- at any rate, the classical nineteenth-century liberal -- derives much of his thought from both the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Think of the French physiocrats, Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, and Milton Friedman. This type, the classical liberal, appreciates the spirit of freedom in man's nature, the restlessness to throw off oppression and improve his estate. Historically the classical liberal often had to struggle against the ancien regime and thus was a bit more eager for social, economic, and political reform than is his conservative friend. As John Cardinal Newman acknowledged, 'In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to aim for perfection is to have changed often.'[6]

"Newman's words suggest that the liberal believes freedom itself is as much a part of human nature as it is of the divine economy. Said his sometime friend, Lord Acton, 'Liberty is so holy a thing that God was forced to permit evil that it might exist.'[7] He understands that liberty is a worthy civilizational goal that has been hard won and easily lost. That's why he celebrates the organic growth of ordered liberty through time-tested constitutions, institutions, and laws. And it is why he frowns on revolutionary fixes and the do-your-own-thing behavior that soon results in anarchy or licentiousness. It is a faux freedom that cannot last.

"To tie these definitions together with your recent visit to Washington, DC, I would say that the liberal conservative today climbs onto the shoulders of giants -- of Aristotle, Burke, John Adams, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, Jacob Burckhardt, Jacques Maritain, and John Courtney Murray -- thinkers who were alive to politics as a form of conversation, of rational deliberation. Our American constitutions -- both written and unwritten, and at the state and federal levels -- seek to maintain a political order in which citizens can agree to disagree in a community of civil discourse, arguing and deliberating over the questions of how we shall order our lives together -- without resorting to civil war.[8]

"The liberal conservative thus values the virtue of prudence. He supports the prudent statesmen who can keep our state and federal constitutions balanced on a tightrope. On the one side is a government strong enough to enforce the rule of law as well as smother any incitement to mob rule; on the other side is a government weak enough that it cannot become its own self-interested, devouring tyrant -- because the governors will surely devour a people's freedom if given opportunity to do so. This perennial challenge in the human condition is what the framers of the U.S. Constitution debated. Their success is without parallel in world history. Indeed, at risk of oversimplifying because they possessed an extraordinary range of views, the founders turned out to be a great generation of liberal conservatives."

Tonsor slapped his knees to indicate that office hours were up -- we had to walk across the Diag to our class in East Engineering. But I was dazzled by my professor's lambent intellect. He had just given me the rudiments of an interpretive method by which to order a conservative political philosophy and the practice of intellectual history. I would eventually coin a term for Tonsor's method: "the hermeneutic of dynamic tension." He was teaching me about the unresolved opposites (in ideas, values, beliefs, institutions) that were nevertheless held together in the force fields of culture.

When we got settled in class, I noticed three words still on the blackboard: "Learn or die."

____________________

Notes

[1] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 2; letter in GW's private possession, courtesy of Alfred S. Regnery.

[2] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Why I Am a Republican and a Conservative," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 235.

[3] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Conservative Search for Identity," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 247.

[4] Tonsor, "Why I Am a Republican and a Conservative," in Equality, p. 235.

[5] Tonsor began adulthood as a war veteran and Truman Democrat. (See "Why I Am a Republican and a Conservative, in Equality, pp. 231-32; also my first of two interviews with his brother, Bernard Tonsor, July 1, 2014, in Jerseyville, IL.) So when did he begin defining himself as a "liberal conservative"? The seed was likely planted in high school when, thinking he was bound for the seminary, he was introduced to Aristotle's Golden Mean through the synthesizing works of Thomas Aquinas. When he resumed undergraduate study after World War II, he took philosophy courses that confirmed him as an Aristotelian thinker for the rest of his life. (GW correspondence with Ann Tonsor Zeddies, January 26, 2015.) The seed was watered when his dissertation advisor, Joseph Ward Swain, encouraged Tonsor to read Lord Acton in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Acton was "at the center of [his] world." ("Joseph Ward Swain," Equality, p. 316.) The seed was no doubt fertilized when Gertrude Himmelfarb's seminal study, Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics, was published in 1952 by the University of Chicago Press. But germination seems to have occurred when Tonsor encountered the work of Russell Kirk in 1953. He was employed by the U.S. Forest Service as a fire lookout in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, and he describes the remarkable experience of discovering The Conservative Mind on a mountaintop. (See "Joseph Ward Swain," Equality, p. 316; "Why I Too Am Not a Neoconservative," Equality, p. 303; "Russell Kirk," Equality, pp. 317-20; and "Conservative Pluralism: The Foundation and the Academy," pp. 1-2, no date, typed lecture in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery). Tonsor describes the effect The Conservative Mind had on him using a powerful figure of speech: "I dipped my hand in the holy-water fount of Russell Kirk and said, 'Home at last!'" Tonsor tells us that it was when reading Kirk's important book in 1953 that he discovered he was already a conservative: "The event," he later reported, "was not a conversion experience, but a moment of self-revelation" ("Why I Too Am Not a Neoconservative," Equality, p. 303). It is not a stretch to think that he already was defining himself as a "liberal conservative" around this same time. Further evidence is that in graduate school he was a great admirer of Tocqueville, who is explicitly treated by Kirk, in The Conservative Mind, as a liberal conservative. So the process of changing from a Truman Democrat to a liberal conservative probably occurred due to numerous influences between about 1949 and 1954. His later letters to Henry Regnery reveal that he continued to refer to himself as a liberal conservative as late as 1987 (Tonsor to Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 2; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery).

[6] John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), chapter 1, section 1, part 7.

[7] Acton quoted in Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” in Equality, p. 256.

[8] Matthew Rose, "The Liberalism of Richard John Neuhaus," National Affairs, issue no. 28 (summer 2016); at URL http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-liberalism-of-richard-john-neuhaus, accessed October 24, 2016.

The Language of Leaders: Washington, Jefferson, Webster, Lincoln

This talk was originally delivered at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, on December 10, 1999. The idea that caught most historians' attention was that the Declaration of Independence was every bit as much a rhetorical document as a political document, meant to be read aloud to rally Americans to revolution.

Forging Politics, Rhetoric, and "the Permanent Things" into Messages that Inspire a Nation

... Russell Kirk challenged us to look beyond tomorrow's headlines and see the meaning of our work in the "Permanent Things." This term, suggested to Kirk by his friend T. S. Eliot, is fundamental to my remarks this afternoon. As Kirk explained it:

There is an order which holds all things in their places: ...it is made for us, and we are made for it. The thinking conservative, far from denying the existence of this eternal order, endeavors to ascertain its nature and to conform to that order, which is the source of the Permanent Things. [2]

The Permanent Things are identified, in other words, with truth, goodness, beauty, and all the transcendent norms that give life meaning. In due course I'll be saying more about the relationship between the Permanent Things and political discourse.

But first, permit me to meet head-on a perception that is frequently encountered--even in well-meaning people, not just cynics. It's the sense that the Permanent Things no longer stand tall in the political arena, but have been overmatched by brute Machiavellians. It's the feeling that truth, goodness, and beauty have been muscled out by their postmodern counterfeits--PR, celebrity, and glitz. It's the apprehension that pollsters and focus groups are no longer handmaids but masters of policy. People actually come up to me and ask: How can you stand working in government? Is there any honor left in politics?

The honor is to be found wherever there are men and women who champion the Permanent Things.

Conservatives in the Western tradition like to say, after Richard Weaver, that ideas have consequences. But before there can be ideas, there must be words. It is on the wings of words that ideas are born. It is on the strength of words that ideas either take flight or fall flat. That is why words, language, and rhetoric are so important in a constitutional republic where the people are sovereign and so must sort out how they shall live. As Kirk explained, "we cannot dissociate political principles and the methods of persuasion.... Some genuine connection subsists between the order of rhetoric and the order of society; false phrases open the way for false measures."[3]

What Kirk is saying, in essence, is that behind every abuse of language, there's potentially an abuse of power, and behind every abuse of power, there's probably an abuse of language.

Because our republic has such a rich history, I'd like to take a long view this afternoon and discuss a few key moments in America's past, when a gifted leader forged politics, rhetoric, and the Permanent Things into a powerful unity. The illustrations are, I believe, sufficiently vivid to suggest numerous applications today.

Truth

Let's begin by looking at an American leader whose best speeches are considered literary masterpieces, and that is Abraham Lincoln. He knew one of the greatest sources of persuasion--the radical idea that people are moved by truth. Lincoln wove the truth and other Permanent Things into his speeches as few other leaders have. One of his favorite ways to argue for the truth was by using logic. He was especially masterful at using the law of the excluded middle. He no doubt perfected his use of the excluded middle in the courtroom, where unambiguous guilt or innocence had to be established before a defendant could be judged. But what I want to look at is how he used the excluded middle in his bid for a U.S. Senate seat in 1858. Lincoln's argument was that if the United States was born in freedom, if it defined itself in terms of freedom, if its destiny was freedom's very destiny, then it inevitably followed that--here come the famous words--"A house divided against itself cannot stand.... This government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.... It will become all one thing, or all the other."[4]

Lincoln explained why this must be so, with a series of powerful rhetorical questions and imagery: "When ... you have succeeded in dehumanizing the Negro [sic]; when you have put him down and made it impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul in this world and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out as in the darkness of the damned," what is the effect on a freedom-loving people?

Furthermore, Lincoln asked:

What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, our army and our navy.... Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. [5]

There's an interesting story behind the "house divided" line, which, as you know, is an allusion from the Bible.[6] Lincoln had actually tried the line out in 1856, two years before the contest with [Stephen A.] Douglas, but had been severely criticized. Advisers said he had put the issue of union too bluntly, and they actually got him to agree never to say it again. But two years later, faced with a formidable opponent in Douglas, he just could not resist. He first rehearsed the House Divided speech before an audience of one, his partner William Herndon, who liked most of it, but questioned whether the "house divided" passage was politic. Lincoln responded: "I would rather be defeated with this expression in my speech, and uphold it and discuss it before the people, than be victorious without it."[7] How many politicians can you imagine talking like that today?

Next, Lincoln tried the speech out on a dozen of his closest supporters and asked what they thought. All but one condemned the "house divided" line, one going so far as to call it a "damned fool utterance."[8]

Lincoln this time stood resolutely in disagreement with his advisers. He said the people needed to hear the stark choice before them--in other words, the law of the excluded middle. "The time has come when these sentiments should be uttered; and if it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truth--let me die in the advocacy of what is just and right." As one of Lincoln's biographers noted, this was "Rather a memorable pronouncement of a candidate to his committee"--especially on the eve of the nominating convention. [9]

Now, a minute ago I said that people respond to the truth. And you are thinking, "Yeah, and Lincoln lost to Douglas." Technically, that's true. What is forgotten nowadays is that Lincoln actually won a majority of the popular vote in 1858. This, despite running against a very well-liked, charming candidate. It was a majority of the new Illinois legislature that sent Douglas back to the U.S. Senate.

And yet, in the long run, who lost to whom?

The "house divided" allusion would go on to win the heart of the Republican Party, then only four years old, and after Lincoln's death, it would win the heart of the American people. The fact that these words are studied and memorized to this day shows that human beings do indeed respond to truth.

Goodness

Let's now turn to another American leader whose speeches merit the accolades given to literature, and that's Daniel Webster. Like Lincoln, the Massachusetts Senator knew all the sources of persuasion. But for him the essential thing was that people are moved by goodness--another radical idea. Psychological research confirms scientifically what Webster knew intuitively, that our brain is wired to enjoy listening to a bard recount the great and heroic deeds of others. That's why historical narrative is such a satisfying way to communicate.

A student of Webster's oratory writes that "True eloquence is not an ordinary occurrence; it demands the right person, the right subject, and the right occasion--but when it breaks out it is godlike."[10] That was precisely the effect the 38-year-old Webster had on Americans with a speech that captured the nation's imagination. The occasion was the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims. The date was December 22, 1820, and the site was the First Church in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It's difficult to imagine a more historic occasion or more historic site for Americans in the new republic. To a packed audience that included former President John Adams, Webster began:

We have come to this Rock, to record here our homage to our Pilgrim Fathers; our sympathy in their sufferings; our gratitude for their labors; our admiration of their virtues; our veneration for their piety; and our attachments to those principles of civil and religious liberty, which they encountered the dangers of the ocean, the storms of heaven, the violence of savages, disease, exile, and famine....

Webster proceeded to build up the speech with powerful images of the Pilgrims' first years. The audience was visibly moved. A young Harvard professor made a remarkable confession after leaving the church. "I was never so excited by public speaking before in my life," he said. "Three or four times I thought my temples would burst with the pulse of blood.... When I came out, I was almost afraid to stand near him. It seemed to me he was like the mount that might not be touched and that burned with fire. I was beside myself and am so still."[11]

John Adams was not given to being easily impressed by thirty-somethings. Yet even he was so moved by Webster that he urged Americans to read the address "every year forever and ever."[12]

The key to understanding the power of this speech is in part Webster's charisma; he was an extremely impressive individual to be around. But it is also the stories he told, stories of good men and women whose example showed what Americans were made of. We are reading the stories still.

Beauty

Let's now turn to the Founder responsible for the most famous political statement in American history, and that's Thomas Jefferson, the lead author of the Declaration of Independence. If Lincoln was the rhetorical master of truth, and Webster the rhetorical master of goodness, then our nation's third president could claim rhetorical mastery of another source of persuasion--beauty. He knew that people are moved by beauty.

In rhetorical terms, beauty involves using apt words effectively arranged. The task, as Richard Weaver put it, is to use the gift of imagination "to make words even in prose take on wings."[13]

In the English language, there are many ways to achieve beauty in the spoken word--through parallelism, alliteration, simile, metaphor, and so forth. For our present purposes, I want to focus on Jefferson's use of parallelism. In American political discourse, arguably the greatest example of the repeated beginning (what is technically called "anaphora") occurred at the beginning of our nation, in the Declaration.

Now, I'm going to say two things that surprise most people. First, to the Continental Congress that adopted the Declaration, it was not the beginning that was regarded as most important. ("When in the course of human events.... We hold these truths to be self-evident....") I know it's heretical to say nowadays, but political philosophy was not the main thing on the minds of the signers; that's our modern reading of it. To the delegates assembled in Congress, it was rather the middle of the document that was most important. That's the part which justified independence by listing the myriad of ways in which the king had violated their ancient rights as Englishmen.[14] It's the most conservative part of the Declaration, and it consists of 18 well-crafted statements, each attacking George III, and each beginning with the words, "He has...." To cite a few examples:

"He has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither swarms of new Officers, to harass our People, and eat out their Substance."

"He has plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People."

"He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection, and waging War against us."

Without a doubt, the parallelism is one of the most striking rhetorical features of the document. Which leads to the second thing that surprises people, which is that the Declaration was written to be read aloud. It's as much a part of our oral as our written culture. To prove this, I'd draw your attention to the formatting in Jefferson's original draft. It is preserved in the Library of Congress. If you ever have the opportunity to see the original or a facsimile, look at how he wrote out the eighteen "He has" statements. They don't all run together in a single paragraph. Rather, they are broken out in clauses, each having the same left-margin and indent pattern. This makes them visually as well as rhetorically parallel. Not accidentally, the first printing of the document was typographically true to Jefferson's layout.

After examining the original draft, what strikes me as a speechwriter is this: the left-margin and indent pattern is precisely the format I've long used in Governor Engler's texts. I give each sentence its own paragraph, and I line up parallelisms for ease in reading aloud. The Declaration looks to me like the scripted text of a speech.

This thesis is further buttressed when you recall how news spread in the eighteenth century. It was not just by reading newspapers. It was not just by posting documents for passersby. It was also by reading aloud to people gathered in the town squares. It was a form of entertainment. And sure enough, during that hot summer of 1776, the Declaration was proclaimed--read as a speech--in hundreds of town squares up and down the 13 states. The Pennsylvania Gazette reported that when it was read aloud in New York, the crowd became so excited that they pulled down a statue of George III, recovered the lead, and turned it into bullets!* When the Declaration was read aloud in Boston on July 19, Abigail Adams observed in a letter to her husband that the crowd grew quite excited when the reader went through the series of charges against George III. As Jefferson had intended, the parallelism created an irresistible drumbeat, inspiring resolve to fight the War of Independence to the finish.

Love

So where does this bring us, this awareness that such Permanent Things as truth, goodness, and beauty can powerfully shape public discourse, even to the point of changing the course of human events? That may sound as if I am about to launch into my peroration--but not quite yet. I beg your forbearance. For there is one source of persuasion that I've yet to mention but that crowns all the others--and that is love. Every great rhetorician knows that people are moved--moved deeply, inevitably, and finally--by love.

To illustrate I wish to turn to the man, the 200th anniversary of whose passing we shall be celebrating within the week, and that is George Washington. We don't usually think of Washington this way, but the historical record bears out that the father of our country was a master rhetorician when it came to expressing love to, and eliciting love from, an audience.

The most famous example of this is the speech he delivered at Newburgh, New York, on the Ides of March in 1783. This was literally the speech that kept his army from marching against Congress. (Which shows you how little things change; people were even mad at Congress in those days.) The officers were understandably upset that Congress had not given them back pay for their many years of service to their country. They had willingly left their families and farms to aid the cause of freedom, and they simply wanted to be able to pay off their debts. As frustration mounted, someone high up the chain of command circulated a memo through the officer corps, urging insurrection. The malcontents planned a secret meeting.

Washington caught wind of the caucus and intervened swiftly. He denounced the treasonous plot and postponed the gathering by three days. This gave him critically needed time to think about how to give perhaps the most important speech of his life.

Now Washington, as you know, was crafty. He kept his own counsel and didn't alert the officers that he would be confronting them personally. So when they met on the Ides of March, they wondered whether their commander in chief would exert his authority through a surrogate. If this is what they assumed, they miscalculated badly. Remember, Washington had a keen sense of drama. All his adult life he had been a devotee of the theater.

Imagine the officers' surprise when, after the start of their meeting, their commander strode in and made straight for the lectern. There was a tense silence. The General spoke from a prepared text for approximately five minutes. The remarks were built around a series of parallel constructions that emphasized the men's common sacrifice. They had become like family, and he only wanted what was just and right for them. But they must not be imprudent or disloyal, not after having gone through so much together, and not when so much was at stake. The men were moved by his appeals--in fact, it was the best speech they had ever heard him deliver.

But all this, powerful as it was, was a prelude contrived to set the stage for the final act. After Washington finished his prepared remarks, he removed a letter from his coat pocket that he said he wished to read aloud. He began to read, then all of a sudden fell silent. Not a word came from his mouth as he fumbled awkwardly with the letter. Then he pulled a new pair of eyeglasses out of his pocket and remarked, "Gentlemen, you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind."

The high drama had its intended impact. The men stood in stunned silence. The gesture and words did more than any armed force could have to dissolve the insurrection, for it dissolved the rebellion in their hearts. As one officer later recorded, Washington's action was so disarming that it brought tears to the eyes of every man present. They suddenly felt inexpressible shame mixed with a renewed love for their leader. He had sacrificed more than anyone, yet never complained. They pledged their abiding support to Washington and to the new republic.

A narrow escape for the new nation, this, and it was pulled off by love--the love that Washington expressed for his men, and the love that they returned to him.[15]

Mirror or Lamp?

Truth, goodness, beauty, love--these are the Permanent Things, the wellsprings of persuasion that are never out of season. The good rhetorician instinctively knows that they move people more deeply than anything else.

But these days there are two competing schools of thought about speechwriting, especially as it applies to political discourse. One school of thought says that a speech should hold a mirror up to the public. It should reflect the fashions of the day. You study focus groups and polling data to get a sense for who's up and who's down, who's in and who's out. The speechwriter, merely one "consultant" among many, is typically brought in at the end of the process. He is a clever fellow, a merchant of sophistry who knows how to package flattery for mass consumption.

Another school of thought says that a speech should be more than a mirror; it should be a lamp lighting the way for the better angels of our nature. It understands that the act of speaking is one of the most ethical things we do, and thus that "language is sermonic," as Richard Weaver so memorably put it. It apprehends that rhetoric, at its best, seeks union with the Permanent Things. "The rhetorician," observes Weaver, "is a preacher to us, noble if he tries to direct our passion toward noble ends and base if he uses our passion to confuse and degrade us."[16] At the very least, such a rhetoric should issue some challenge to be stronger, truer, and worthier of our blessings. It should remind us to keep the roots of our American order embedded in the Permanent Things.

There's no doubt in my mind which school of thought orators like Washington, Jefferson, Webster, and Lincoln subscribed to. As in much else, we would do well to follow in their footsteps.

References:

[2]Russell Kirk, Prospects for Conservatives, revised ed. (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1989), pp. 36-37. Examination of earlier editions reveals that Kirk originally wrote the statement in a slightly differently form. See, for example, Russell Kirk, A Program for Conservatives, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962), p. 50.

[3]Russell Kirk, "Rhetoricians and Politicians," Kenyon Review, Fall 1964, p. 768.

[4]Abraham Lincoln, speech to Republican State Convention, Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858.

[5]Abraham Lincoln, speech, Edwardsville, Illinois, September 11, 1858.

[6]Mark 3:25.

[7]Quoted in Lord Charnworth, Abraham Lincoln: A Biography, Introduction by Peter W. Schramm (Lanham, Md: Madison Books, 1996; originally published 1916), p. 110.

[8]Charnworth, Lincoln, p. 110.

[9]Charnworth, Lincoln, pp. 110-111.

[10]Irving H. Bartlett, "Daniel Webster: The Orator and Writer," in Daniel Webster: The Completest Man, edited by Kenneth E. Shewmaker, foreword by William H. Rehnquist (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College/University Press of New England, 1990), p. 80.

[11]George Ticknor quoted in George Ticknor Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster, vol. 1 (New York, 1870), p. 194. See also Bartlett, "Daniel Webster," p. 83.

[12]Adams quoted in Bartlett, "Daniel Webster," p. 83.

[13]Richard M. Weaver, "Language Is Sermonic," Language Is Sermonic: Richard M. Weaver on the Nature of Rhetoric, ed. Richard J. Johannesen, Rennard Strickland, and Ralph T. Eubanks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), p. 202.

[14]To say that the conservative heart of the Declaration was the most important part to the Founders is hardly an unorthodox historical interpretation. It has even made its way into common reference works. See, for example, Jack P. Greene, "Declaration of Independence, United States," in Encyclopedia Americana, 1986 ed., vol. 8, p. 592.

[15]Virtually every competent biography of Washington recounts this pivotal event. One of the most detailed accounts, based on a primary source, is found in Josiah Quincy, Memoir of Major Samuel Shaw, p. 104. See also Washington Irving, George Washington: A Biography, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), pp. 603-607, which draws from Shaw's observations; and Richard Norton Smith, Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), which takes a less idolizing view of Washington's thespian talents.

[16]Weaver, "Language Is Sermonic," p. 201.

Additional source:

*For the July 17, 1776, story in the Pennsylvania Gazette about the statue of George III being turned into bullets after the Declaration was read, see Peter C. Mancall, Origins and Ideologies of the American Revolution, vol. 3 (Chantilly, VA: Teaching Company, 2006), p. 28.