[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Some authors suggest that Kennedy might not have deliveredhis celebrated moral appeal had the University of Alabama desegregation notpassed peacefully: in other words, Kennedy responded diVerently to a diVerentsituation.Still, the situation during the spring of 1963 was diVerent in anotherway: JFK himself had changed, as his personal understanding of civil rightshad recently matured.Exigencies, audiences, and constraints inXuence presi-dents’ civil rights rhetoric, but also important are a president’s personal andpublic convictions regarding civil rights and his conception of the oYce of thepresidency.Harry Truman’s experience is instructive here.Truman did not facea rhetorical situation substantially diVerent from those that confronted hispredecessors, nor did he have strong personal convictions on race.But his publicconvictions and his belief that the U.S.president should provide civil rightsleadership moved him to speak out.The remainder of this chapter will explore the commonalities and diVer-ences—for reasons including rhetorical situation, personality, and duty—in thepresidential speeches on civil rights that I have examined in the previous chap-ters.I will analyze the vocabularies presidents used to discuss civil rights, thecommon themes and rhetorical strategies in presidents’ civil rights rhetoric.Inaddition, I will discuss how presidents used rhetoric to manage civil rights crises,the timing of presidential discourse, the complex nature of presidents’ rhetori-cal leadership on civil rights, and the relationship between presidential rheto-ric and broader social discourses on race.My aim is to make conclusions basedon the four case studies and to discuss the implications of modern presidents’use of discourse to address one of the United States’ most pressing, persistentsocial problems.The most common vocabulary that modern presidents used to address civilrights is a constitutional one.Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson eachappealed to the U.S.Constitution as a document that could transcend nationaldiVerences of opinion about racial equality.A constitutional vocabulary involvestwo types of implicit value appeals—an appeal to the value of the Constitutionin and of itself and an appeal to the value of the principles that the Constitu-tion expresses.Both appeals can be activated at the same moment (indeed aYrm-ing constitutional values can help aYrm the Constitution as a value), but rhetorsoften emphasize one over the other.President Eisenhower used a vocabularythat treated the Constitution—as interpreted by the U.S.Supreme Court—asa value in itself.The Constitution was an especially important value for Ike, ofp r e s i d e n t i a l r h e t o r i c a n d t h e c i v i l r i g h t s e r a■209course, because he had sworn a presidential oath to uphold it.Yet Eisenhowerrefused to discuss the value of the desegregationist principles that the SupremeCourt had interpreted the Constitution to embody.Presidents Kennedy andJohnson, in contrast, appealed to principles they presumed the Constitutionto embody.JFK and LBJ claimed to support civil rights measures because theywere rooted in “color blind” constitutional values like equal rights and equaltreatment.President Truman supported the principles underlying the Consti-tution, like Kennedy and Johnson, but he also advocated moving beyond thoseprinciples to develop new concepts of civil rights.The diVerences between these constitutional vocabularies is signiWcant.Kenneth Burke argues that the chief problem of positive law—whichEisenhower’s civil rights discourse implicitly endorses—is that it looks only tothe Constitution itself, not to any doctrine specifying the nature of its under-lying doctrines, the “Constitution-Behind-the-Constitution.”14 Eisenhower’scivil rights rhetoric did not articulate underlying constitutional doctrines thatform the grounds by which the public evaluates the judiciousness of a policy.Ike’s rhetoric could uphold order, understood as obedience to the Constitu-tion itself, but could not bring about the acceptance of civil rights rulings.Truman focused primarily on the underlying reasons for supporting civil rights,but his advocacy of moving beyond constitutional principles might have seemedtoo liberal—or “unconstitutional,” in an extralegal sense—to some listeners.Kennedy and Johnson articulated the doctrines underlying civil rights as theyaYrmed the Constitution as a value.Their vocabulary made progress on racialissues seem safe by allying pro-civil rights values with the nation’s fundamen-tal political instrument.The vocabulary used by JFK and LBJ appealed to prin-ciples of natural law in which the Constitution was rooted, and therebyprovided doctrines that might encourage the acceptance of civil rights—or, atleast, demonstrate clearly where the president stood on civil rights, therebyhelping to maintain order.Moreover, this kind of constitutional vocabularyaVorded the rhetorical advantage that it could be connected to a shared moralvocabulary.As presidents came to understand that they needed to articulate a moralargument to satisfy African Americans’ demands and to defeat the forces ofresistance, they also came to understand the diYcultly of locating a moral vo-cabulary with widespread rhetorical force.How could the president urge moralaction without pontiWcating? On what ethical grounds could the presidentindict segregationists, who had their own moral vocabulary? How could thepresident make morality, often considered private, a public issue? What moral210■The Modern Presidency and Civil Rightsgrounding might have nearly universal appeal to a nation of diverse people?For Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the discourse of American civil religionserved as a shared moral vocabulary.Civil religion, which pairs political prin-ciples with Christian morality, is a familiar part of the American ideology; itslanguage permeates canonical texts such as Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, thepledge of allegiance, and “America the Beautiful.” As such, Kennedy’s andJohnson’s language of civic-sacred purpose, promise, and duty stirred manyAmerican citizens—especially many African Americans, who had long urgedthe nation to live up to its divine purpose and to enact its consecrated values.15The vocabulary of American civil religion can provide a shared moral codeand reinforce citizens’ commitment to pro-civil rights abstractions like free-dom and equality [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]