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In search of our next presidential candidate
The following podcast is excellent for so many reasons. I happened to hear it on NPR this afternoon as I was driving and then lingered in my parking space until it was over.
Powerful oratory is the essential quality of political leadership.
Who, among our potential candidates, has this quality?
http://www.nprillinois.org/post/slavery-american-wonder-revisiting-frederick-douglass-remarkable-life#stream/0
From Slavery To 'American Wonder': Revisiting Frederick Douglass' Remarkable Life
...Blight's new biography of Douglass is on The New York Times list of the 10 best books of the year. It illuminates many facets of Douglass's life - his break with leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, his complicated personal life, his support for and bitter feud with leaders of the women's suffrage movement and his years as a Republican Party functionary when he took patronage jobs in the government. David Blight is a professor of history at Yale and the author or editor of a dozen books, including annotated editions of Douglass's first two autobiographies. He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies about his new book "Frederick Douglass: Prophet Of Freedom."
...Blight's new biography of Douglass is on The New York Times list of the 10 best books of the year. It illuminates many facets of Douglass's life - his break with leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, his complicated personal life, his support for and bitter feud with leaders of the women's suffrage movement and his years as a Republican Party functionary when he took patronage jobs in the government. David Blight is a professor of history at Yale and the author or editor of a dozen books, including annotated editions of Douglass's first two autobiographies. He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies about his new book "Frederick Douglass: Prophet Of Freedom."
Well, we know a lot about what he sounded like from the way people described him. He had a deep baritone, we're told. He could modulate it a lot of different ways. There are many, many written descriptions. I have lots of clippings from local newspapers around the country of people describing the first time they saw Douglass or heard Douglass, what he sounded like, what he looked like. So we know a fair amount about that. But we also know a lot about the nature of his rhetoric just from reading it.
He was terrific at this craft of starting out a speech slowly, calmly, you know, restfully, drawing an audience into some kind of situation but nothing flamboyant about it, but then slowly but surely working toward some kind of resolution, some kind of point, some kind of argument, some kind of moral message, and then sometimes in that last part of his speech reaching these exuberant crescendos that would just come out of him in shouts or in roars, people would say.
He had that ability of performance. And he gained that by the simple, you know, power of repetition. But he had a performative way of delivering his oratory that people just flocked to see. In fact, I say in the book at one point that seeing and hearing Douglass became through the course of the 19th century a kind of American wonder of the world. If you came to America, you wanted to see Douglass speak if you could. It was that kind of an event....
He was terrific at this craft of starting out a speech slowly, calmly, you know, restfully, drawing an audience into some kind of situation but nothing flamboyant about it, but then slowly but surely working toward some kind of resolution, some kind of point, some kind of argument, some kind of moral message, and then sometimes in that last part of his speech reaching these exuberant crescendos that would just come out of him in shouts or in roars, people would say.
He had that ability of performance. And he gained that by the simple, you know, power of repetition. But he had a performative way of delivering his oratory that people just flocked to see. In fact, I say in the book at one point that seeing and hearing Douglass became through the course of the 19th century a kind of American wonder of the world. If you came to America, you wanted to see Douglass speak if you could. It was that kind of an event....
http://www.nprillinois.org/post/slavery-american-wonder-revisiting-frederick-douglass-remarkable-life#stream/0