Book Review

Speaking of Progress: the Rhetoric
of Reform in the Progressive Era

Malcolm Magee
Michigan State University

Marston, Ward  and Kessler, Scott, producers. In Their Own Voices, The U.S. Presidential Elections of 1908 and 1912. The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Marston Records, USA, 2000. 2 CDs, 43 pp. Photos and text, $35.98.

Public language is a window into the thought of a society. Two sources, recently available, Rhetoric and Reform in the Progressive Era and In Their Own Voices, provide just such a window for historians of the Progressive Era. Fueled by a moral rhetoric that was founded on faith in the common man and optimism about the possibilities for human progress, the Progressive Era introduced a new vocabulary along with its new view of society and politics. J. Michael Hogan, editor of A Rhetorical History of the United States, argues that the era "clearly broke from the rhetoric of Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and even the Populist Era" by introducing robust democratic speech and public deliberation (x). According to Hogan, the leading political orators of the day outlined contradictory reform programs but drew from a common faith in the power of words to change the world for the better, and the language they used reflected their identification with American civil religion. In its collection of thirteen essays focusing on political and reformist language, Rhetoric and Reform in the Progressive Era captures the shared energy and the competing philosophies of the period. This volume is planned as the sixth of ten volumes in the series, Rhetorical History of the United States, but it is the first volume in the series to be published.

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The opening chapter by Robert Kraig explores a central theme of the era, the use of appeals to morality to motivate popular opinion and justify the public interest in previously private matters. Kraig links this "the second great oratorical renaissance" to the first, in the antebellum period, which derived its own impulse from the rhetoric surrounding the founding of the republic (1). Kraig finds, in his examination of Wilson, LaFollette, Bryan, and Roosevelt, that all employed moralistic terminology derived from the past to make the case for reforms such as Prohibition, factory regulation, and woman suffrage. This point is illustrated in subsequent chapters about Roosevelt who "constantly preached about the sins of both individuals and nations" (76) and conservationists, one of whom remarked that the first duty "of every man is to help in bringing the Kingdom of God on earth"(99). At some level, then, most of the essays in the volume deal with how the progressives wrestled with a rhetoric of morality.

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