| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rhetoric as Currency: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Great Depression. By Davis W. Houck. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001. xii, 226 pp. $39.95, ISBN 1-58544-109-0.)

Relatively new to scholarship is rhetorical historiography, a methodology that brings forward the past through analysis of leaders' spoken and written words. Established in the late 1960s by rhetoricians such as Kenneth Burke, the concept has advanced in Cold War and presidential studies by Jeffrey Tulis, Amos Kiewe, and Martin J. Medhurst. Here, Davis W. Houck joins this group with a stimulating if confined probe of leadership rhetoric during the first four years of the Great Depression. 1

At issue is how depression-era rhetoric rose as a confidence-building tool. Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt are Houck's main subjects, but a third key figure is John Maynard Keynes, whose 1935 The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money prescribed the arousal of "animal spirits" in facilitating economic gain. Houck paints Hoover more positively than FDR. Hoover was an accomplished and focused rhetorician who reached the rhetorical pinnacles of precision and consistency. The more persuasive Roosevelt was complex and contradictory and thus not as skillful with his wording. . . .

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