The Anti-Intellectual Presidency

John McWhorter reviews The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush, by Elvin T. Lim (Oxford University Press, 2008) --

Lim pays some lip service to larger trends but focuses on a narrower analysis, carefully posing that the increasing anti-intellectualism in presidential rhetoric resulted from a “tyranny of small decisions” effected by speechwriters and presidents taking their cue from the linguistic tone of the administrations preceding them. This analysis, however, can explain only so much. Truman may well have despaired of equaling Franklin Roosevelt’s eloquence and instead emphasized his own flinty straight-talking persona, while Lyndon Johnson was linguistically insecure and simply did not seek eloquence at all. This kind of analysis, however, fails to explain why in the nineteenth century even a plain-spoken ex-general such as Ulysses S. Grant pitched his official statements at the grand level, while a plain-spoken ex-general such as Dwight Eisenhower did not—or why Richard Nixon’s oratory was even more conversational than Lyndon Johnson’s.

The overarching explanation is the cultural context of an American culture that embraced informality in the 1920s and kept at it ever since. Clinton, for example, was not simply possessed with an animus toward flowery speech, and he certainly did not consciously decide to sound less formal than his notoriously inarticulate predecessor, George H.W. Bush. He was, instead, someone who had smoked pot in dormitories while listening to the kind of music that the parents in Bye Bye Birdie reviled—and that was the source of his rhetoric.

The review: John McWhorter, "A Rhetorical Question," First Things (October 2008).

The book: Elvin T. Lim, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush, (Oxford University Press, 2008).

More reviews: Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed; David Broder, Washington Post;