Democratic Rhetoric Research Articles

Bandas de música de libertos en el ejército de San Martín. Una exploración sobre la participación de los esclavizados y sus descendientes durante las Guerras de Independencia

Through analysis of the Liberation Army’ bands of freedmen, this paper seeks to visualize the wide and varied participation of blacks, both enslaved and free sectors, during the Wars of Independence and at the same time to investigate their contribution in the gestation of a transnational republican rhetoric. Music, musicians and the corresponding bands, are a privileged window to examine what kind of possibilities war and revolution gave to the African descendent sectors to function in the republican public spheres as active political subjects. At the same time, the paper explores their contribution, either as authors and performers of patriotic music in the formation, consolidation and circulation of discourses and representations linked to the search for a new collective identity.

Party Formation through Petitions: The Whigs and the Bank War of 1832–1834

When President Andrew Jackson removed the public deposits from the Bank of the United States, he set off an economic and political crisis from which, scholars agree, the Whig Party emerged. We argue that petitioning in response to removal of the deposits shaped the emergence of the Whig Party, crystallizing a new line of Jacksonian opposition and dispensing with older lines of National Republican rhetoric and organization. Where petitioning against removal of the deposits was higher, the Whigs were more likely to emerge with organization and votes in the coming years. We test this implication empirically by using a new database of petitions sent to Congress during the banking crisis. We find that petitioning activity in 1834 is predictive of increased support for Whig Party candidates in subsequent presidential elections as well as stronger state Whig Party organization.

The Challenge of Speaking with Others: A Pragmatist Account of Democratic Rhetoric

ABSTRACT This article explores what the contours of a pragmatist theory of rhetoric would be like in its democratic instantiation. The threat of partisan thought and dogmatism in argument is examined as a threat to the sort of democratic community pragmatists such as John Dewey desired to create. Partisans fail to realize not only their own limitations in pursuing the true and the good but also the fact that solving problems through overly partisan forms of reasoning or argument only creates future obstacles to community life. This provides an extended reading of what Dewey meant by free communication: communication not only free from legal constraints and censorship but also free from the binding habits of thought and interaction that can be identified as “partisan perfect reasoning.”

The Challenge of Speaking with Others: A Pragmatist Account of Democratic Rhetoric

This article explores what the contours of a pragmatist theory of rhetoric would be like in its democratic instantiation. The threat of thought and dogma- tism in argument is examined as a threat to the sort of democratic community pragma- tists such as John Dewey desired to create. Partisans fail to realize not only their own limitations in pursuing the true and the good but also the fact that solving problems through overly forms of reasoning or argument only creates future obstacles to community life. This provides an extended reading of what Dewey meant by free communication: communication not only free from legal constraints and censorship but also free from the binding habits of thought and interaction that can be identified as partisan perfect reasoning.

The Lost Language of Democracy: Anti-rhetorical Traits in Research on Democratisation and the Interwar Crisis of Democracy

The article points out that the concept of democracy as used by people at large has been ignored in the research on democratisation and interwar democracy. It also shows some of the ways in which the rhetoric of democracy has been sidestepped, discussing some structuralist and other preconditionalist accounts in which the focus has been on the questions of modernisation and legitimacy as well as on political culture and ideological traditions. The article shows, furthermore, that studies of democratic transition have displayed some interest in the rhetorical aspect of politics, although this potential has not been fully played out. The article points out the difficulty of doing comparative research on the language of democracy, but nevertheless calls for a rhetorical perspective to the study of democracy.

Balkan Immigrant Workers as Slovenian Victimized Heroes

This article sheds light on recent discursive shifts in representations of the “Balkan” in the Slovenian press. I focus on the strategies that the media, and the left-wing press in particular, uses to construct the identities of immigrant workers in Slovenia. I use critical discourse analysis to show how the media has recently attempted to avoid Balkanism and tried to create a more inclusive, democratic rhetoric on these workers and how they become a legitimate “other” in Slovenian society only when constructed as helpless victims. I analyze the role of the victim in the Slovenian imaginary, its disillusioned hero a cogent signifier for collective national identification, and how this figure's characteristics are transposed to ex-Yugoslav immigrants to Slovenia, placing them within a rhetoric of victimization that is framed within a broader humanitarian discourse in order to interrogate what Maria Todorova has defined as Balkanism. I conclude by exploring victimization as the process of desubjectivation and point out aspects of victimization that reaffirm long-standing power relations between Europe and the Balkans.

Balkan Immigrant Workers as Slovenian Victimized Heroes

This article sheds light on recent discursive shifts in representations of the “Balkan” in the Slovenian press. I focus on the strategies that the media, and the left-wing press in particular, uses to construct the identities of immigrant workers in Slovenia. I use critical discourse analysis to show how the media has recently attempted to avoid Balkanism and tried to create a more inclusive, democratic rhetoric on these workers and how they become a legitimate “other” in Slovenian society only when constructed as helpless victims. I analyze the role of the victim in the Slovenian imaginary, its disillusioned hero a cogent signifier for collective national identification, and how this figure's characteristics are transposed to ex-Yugoslav immigrants to Slovenia, placing them within a rhetoric of victimization that is framed within a broader humanitarian discourse in order to interrogate what Maria Todorova has defined asBalkanism. I conclude by exploring victimization as the process of desubjectivation and point out aspects of victimization that reaffirm long-standing power relations between Europe and the Balkans.

(Ac)Counting (for) their dead: Responsiveness to Iraqi civilian casualties in the US House of Representatives

While the subject of wartime civilian casualties has been recognized as an important issue in International Relations (IR), foreign policy and IR scholars have not systematically examined why and how US politicians respond to civilian deaths. This article explores the ethics of and reasons for responsiveness to Iraqi civilian deaths among politicians in the US House of Representatives from 2003 to 2008. The article argues that legislative deliberative responsiveness to civilian deaths is integral to a just debate about war. It finds evidence that partisanship, ideology and sex are associated with responsiveness to civilian deaths, and reveals stark differences in the purposes and tone of Democratic and Republican rhetoric about civilian casualties. The article provides researchers with a more thorough understanding of how and why civilian costs of war emerge within debates among US politicians, and has implications for studies on discourse ethics, congressional war politics and US foreign policy.

The Post-Rose Revolution Reforms as a Case of Misguided Policy Transfer and Accidental Democratisation?

This article traces political and institutional developments in the Republic of Georgia after the Rose Revolution. Particular focus is placed on efforts by Georgian policy-makers to align Georgian political institutions with Western models. Drawing on the concept of policy transfer, the author demonstrates various pitfalls in this process. Based on the gathered evidence, it appears that Georgian policy-makers engaged in various processes of ‘incomplete transfer’, compounded by a lack of understanding or deliberately false conceptions of Western institutions. Despite democratic rhetoric and interlinkages with the West, Georgia moved to a novel form of ‘hyper-presidentialism’ and dismantled institutional checks and balances. Hence, the Rose Revolution initially served to reinforce the already existing institutions of ‘patronal presidentialism’ through a series of misguided institutional modifications. The author also discusses the outcome of the recent parliamentary and presidential elections, which may have ironically and accidentally further democratised the country.

The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance by Richard A. Sauers, Peter Tomasak (review)

Reviewed by: The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance by Richard A. Sauers, Peter Tomasak Robert Sandow (bio) The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance. By Richard A. Sauers and Peter Tomasak. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2013. Pp. 240. Cloth, $35.00.) In The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance, Richard A. Sauers and Peter Tomasak take a microhistorical approach to northern wartime dissent and its suppression. While focused on rural communities in north-central Pennsylvania, the narrative illustrates broader patterns of protest across the Union. Republican editors coined the term “Fishing Creek Confederacy” to exaggerate and vilify antiwar sentiment in northern Columbia County. The label suggested both an organized anti-government conspiracy and prosouthern sympathies—concepts associated with “Copperhead” Democrats. Previous scholarship frequently echoes Democratic rhetoric, depicting men arrested by the government as martyrs of civil liberty. Consequently, military authorities appear villainous and authoritarian. Tomasak and Sauers seek to present “the truth behind the draft resistance in Columbia County” (xiii). Scholars of the Union home front have long documented the internal discord that arose. As early as 1928, Ella Lonn lifted the veil of northern patriotism to expose widespread opposition in Desertion during the Civil War. By 1960, Frank L. Klement’s The Copperheads in the Middle West anchored an expanding genre of midwestern political studies tracing Democratic resistance to ideological and economic roots. The theme is also central to Jennifer L. Weber’s more broadly focused Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (2006). Additionally, studies published in the shadow of Vietnam link opposition to the inequities of the draft, including Eugene C. Murdock’s One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (1971) and James W. Geary’s more highly analytical We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War (1991). Most recently, Mark E. Neely Jr. has done much to frame the debate over wartime civil-military relations as well as the impact of partisan politics. His landmark The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (1991) largely absolves Lincoln’s military of partisan influence in administering flawed conscription and civil liberties policies. Yet in The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (2002), Neely argues that intense partisanship hindered the war effort and heightened fears of “treason.” In explaining Columbia County’s draft resistance, Sauers and Tomasak offer an orthodox view. They point to military failures and controversial policies of emancipation, the suspension of civil liberties, and especially conscription. They stress that political partisanship nourished discontent and resistance. The text generally sympathizes with soldiers and federal [End Page 316] officials enforcing unpopular draft laws. The authors find little evidence for abuse of power or political motivation. Republicans may have exaggerated the threat of Democratic opposition, but many believed the threat to be credible. As for opposition, the authors argue that organized resistance failed to materialize. Even the military expedition’s commanding officer declared the rumors “a grand farce” (56). Regardless, widespread grassroots dissent did exist. The book refers not just to heightened debate, confrontations, and informal meetings but to an amorphous “system of home defense” devised by local men to avoid the draft (119). As a form of material evidence, the authors conjecture that a ruined foundation atop North Mountain may have served as a “fort” for area deserters. More could be done to contextualize the nature, extent, and significance of draft resistance in Columbia County. The narrative suggests that Columbia County, while staunchly Democratic, was not a scene of widespread antidraft violence or above-average levels of draft evasion. Neither state nor federal conscription elicited significantly more than partisan condemnation. In July 1864, a veteran named James Robinson was shot leading a nighttime raid to arrest deserters and draft evaders. The authors conclude that he had no official capacity connected to the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau. His wounding (but not death, which came months later) along with “reports of widespread draft resistance” justified military operations (xii). It would be instructive to learn more about community-based politics and patterns of resistance. The Fishing Creek Confederacy has many strengths. It...

Rhetorical Traditions of Public Diplomacy and the Internet

Summary Many calls have been made since 2001 for a ‘new public diplomacy’ of the information age that utilizes the internet to reach public opinion. They have been especially forthcoming from the Obama administration, although they have been just as popular with the political classes in the United States and elsewhere. However, such recent calls form only the latest instalment of a rhetorical tradition of public diplomacy that stretches back to Woodrow Wilson and beyond to the 1790s. There is a thematic recurrence in the rhetoric of public diplomacy, as there is in the rhetoric of democracy, and for the same reason: representative democracy has always involved a complex tension between, on the one hand, the political class of politicians and diplomats and, on the other, public opinion, which needs to be appeased since it confers legitimacy on representatives. This results in a recurring pattern of language involving suspicions of the political class, declarations of a new era of diplomacy and claims to credibility. There are hence frequent bouts of anti-politics politics and anti-diplomacy politics, sometimes utilizing a discourse of technological optimism, which politicians and diplomats attempt to assuage with similar calls for new political dawns.

Antyfederaliści a republikanci

The anti federalists and republikanci (republicans). The American and Polish republican rhetoric at the end of the Eighteenth Century The purpose of the article is to compare the republican rhetoric of the American anti‑federalists and the Polish noble (the szlachta’s) republicans from the turn of the 80’s and 90’s of the Eighteenth Century (the time of the Polish Four Years Seym in 1788‑1792 and the American constitutional debates in 1787‑1790). It turns out that both such wide apart groups, representing different social backgrounds and viewpoints could use surprisingly similar methods of political argumentation. To that end the author cites the voices of numerous American and Polish pamphleteers, such as – above all – “Centinel”, “Philadeplphiensis”, “Farmer”, “Cato”, Patrick Henry and Adam Rzewuski, Wojciech Turski, Seweryn Rzewuski, Leonard Olizar and Dyzma Bończa Tomaszewski. The main resemblance of reasoning may be found in the way they warned against monarchy or despotism. Revealing a typical republican obsession of losing liberty, they were prone to identify those threats in almost every effort to strengthen a central government. Interestingly, both American and Polish critics of the reforms refused to accept that such an “energetic” or “active” government is absolutely necessary in order to avoid anarchy and resist foreign invasions. In that respect they believed (in Poland being even inspired by Rousseau) that the true republic can be only built on the virtues of fellow‑citizens – the love of liberty, civic brotherhood and patriotism. To revive those ideals, they eagerly recalled the legends of the ancient republican heroes. Whereas, to oppose the constitutional values of the reformers they were often (mainly in America) setting the example of contemporary Switzerland. Due to the proposed comparison one can easily come to the conclusion that republicanism was a doctrine of a considerably wide range of application possibilities. It is not surprising that in spite of the fact that the American authors were generally democrats, sometimes even of the most radical provenience, whereas the Polish noble republicans were frequently the opponents of the social reforms (with some exceptions), both of them were truly convinced they are almost the last defenders of the republic, liberty and – symptomatically enough – civic equality.

Melville’s Liminal Bachelor and the Making of Middle-Class Manhood in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

Melville’s Liminal Bachelor and the Making of Middle-Class Manhood in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Timothy Helwig (bio) Critical studies of Herman Melville’s short stories of the mid-1850s, the infamous period at which Melville is said to have “gone underground” out of frustration with his reading public’s lack of appreciation for the more experimental writing seen in Mardi and Moby-Dick, tend to draw generalizations between his entries in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly Magazine.1 The common line of analysis holds that Melville stories like “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” and “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” both published in Harper’s, reflect that periodical’s preference for a sentimental style of writing and a capitulation to middle-class values, while his stories like “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” published in Putnam’s, demonstrate the more politically engaged and psychologically complex writing that marks his best literary productions.2 While these latter stories are especially deserving of the robust critical attention they have received in the past thirty years, neglected stories like “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” and “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” when carefully contextualized with other bachelor stories and illustrations appearing in Harper’s, offer a unique opportunity to consider the complex ways Melville’s writing meditates on residual and emergent definitions of manhood of the antebellum period. Through the bachelor figure who narrates each story, Melville challenges key tenets of entrepreneurial manhood, expresses nostalgia for less alienated forms of masculinity associated with America’s agrarian past, and builds an alliance between the bachelor and the working classes that preserves the importance of civic virtue and thereby challenges Harper’s conventional depictions of bachelors as hapless foils to the socially disengaged middle-class married man. During the three decades leading up to the Civil War, the systematic erosion of the craft system of labor and the gradual rise of industrial capitalism had profound effects on what it meant to be a man. Pride in one’s craft and the [End Page 1] exercising of civic virtue, what David Leverenz calls the “artisan paradigm” of masculinity, were challenged by the entrepreneurial spirit of the professional middle-class man.3 Instead of more communal relationships among master artisans, journeymen, and their apprentices, alienated forms of labor and the fear of becoming dominated by other men in a public sphere separated men increasingly from the world of the home and the family and from each other. Instead of lording benevolently over the self-sustaining family farm in rural climes or the artisan’s home in the city, the new middle-class man was supposed to find solace in the rejuvenating power of the private sphere, a refuge from the sordid daily competition for capital and the abstract forms of managerial power in the public sphere. With its promise of retreat from the world’s problems into the private sphere predicated upon the heteronormative institutions of marriage and the family, laissez-faire capitalism offered professional middle-class men a sanctioned alternative to the virtues of civic engagement and community. Yet, as Sean Wilentz and other labor historians have shown, the ideology of liberal capitalism did not go unchallenged during the antebellum period. Artisan republican rhetoric, with its roots in classical republican attacks of the eighteenth century against the tyranny of the British crown, was taken up by the skilled working classes to express their anxieties about the new market economy and persisted at least into the 1850s. Artisans employed republican discourse that called upon citizens to act virtuously to protect the commonwealth and to subordinate private self interest for the public good in order to condemn merchants and industrial capitalists who could set wages and exploit others’ labor for economic gain. Wilentz locates iterations of artisan republican rhetoric in “court records, ceremonial speeches, contemporary prints and drawings, and accounts of parades and festivals” among the working classes in the first half of the nineteenth century.4 In popular expressions of this class-accented conflict over ideal manhood, the bachelor proved an especially effective touchstone, enabling nostalgia for a preindustrial commitment to civic virtue, as well as...

Sports clubs as accessible developmental assets for all? Adolescents’ assessment of egalitarianism vs. elitism in sport clubs vs. school

School and sport clubs are considered important public institutions in the nationwide scaffolding of developmental assets for adolescents. However, external assets’ impact on individuals’ internal assets is not given and developmental institutions do not necessarily function as the society would like to believe. Previous qualitative studies from Norway indicate that organized youth sport appears as competitive and exclusive and the purpose of the present study was therefore to assess a national sample of adolescents’ perceptions of their local sports clubs in terms of egalitarianism (inclusiveness) and elitism (exclusiveness). A comparison with their assessments of their local school was performed. This study offers a youth development perspective on personal experience, and a sociological sport policy perspective focusing on sports for all. A sample of Norwegian adolescents’ (N = 2055) appraisal of their local school and sports club was assessed and the results showed no significant cross-domain difference between the two institutions regarding the perception of egalitarianism/inclusiveness. However, the adolescents rated the sports club as significantly more elitist and thus more exclusive compared to schools. The perception of inclusiveness was positively related to a measure of parenting quality while the perception of sports clubs as elitist was positively related to age among girls, but not among boys. The results confirm an incongruity between the Norwegian ‘sport for all’ policy and adolescents’ assessment of their local sports club, and this article questions the use of democratic and egalitarian rhetoric in sports policy documents emphasizing the concepts as democracy, loyalty, equality, community, health, integrity and tolerance.

Managing vulnerability: South Africa's struggle for a democratic rhetoric

A detailed account of the struggle to cultivate connectedness out of the divisiveness of apartheid In Managing Vulnerability, Richard C. Marback analyses the tension surrounding the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa through a rhetorical lens. Marback studies the heart of South Africa's desire for reconciliation and contends that this goal could be achieved only through the creation of a language of vulnerability in which former enemies become open to the influence of each other, to the constraints of their respective circumstances, and to the prospects of a shared future. Through a series of informative case studies, Marback illustrates how the cultivation of openness and the management of vulnerability take shape through the circulation of artefacts, symbols, and texts that give empowering expression to virtues of connectedness over the temptations of individual autonomy. Marback discusses the construction and impact of the narrative tours of Robben Island, the silencing of Robert Sobukwe, the debates over a proposed Freedom Monument, a brief gesture of ubuntu from Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela to Eugene de Kock, and the transformation of the title character in the film adaptation of the 1980 novel Tsotsi. Ultimately, Marback contends, finding a means to manage vulnerability is both the immediate success of and the ongoing challenge to South African democracy and is indicative of the nature of rhetoric in democracies in general and in contemporary civic life.

The EU Policy of the Republican People's Party under Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu: A New Wine in an Old Wine Cellar

This article scrutinizes the determinants of the European Union (EU) policy of the Republican People's Party (CHP), the main opposition party in Turkey under the leadership of Kılıçdaroğlu. Critically discussing the role of party ideology concerning attitudes toward EU accession, the article examines whether the CHP's ideology changed after Kılıçdaroğlu and if so, how this ideological shift affected the party's euroskeptic stance. The article overall argues that the leadership change enabled the party to withdraw its nationalistic stance and embrace a social democratic rhetoric. However, the article contends that such transformation had little effect on its euroskepticism due to the persisting endogenous (the Justice and Development Party's authoritarianism) and exogenous factors (the EU's additional conditionality) that constrain the new CHP's EU-enthusiasm.

Not with Eloquent Wisdom: Democratic Ekklēsia Discourse in 1 Corinthians 1–4

For the most part, scholars have disregarded the influence of the democratic, civic ekklēsia on Paul’s discussion over speech and wisdom in 1 Cor. 1–4. Yet the notion of the civic ekklēsia served as a source of practice, identity and democratic discourse in the early Roman Empire. Moreover, speech proved to be a critical topos of democratic rhetoric, a topos structuring the nature of citizen participation and leadership in the ekklēsia context. Reading 1 Cor. 1–4 in light of ekklēsia discourse provides new insights into Paul’s rhetoric as designed to establish his authority by negotiating with a community that understood itself as a powerful, democratic assembly.

Deconstructing Security Discourse in Past National Security Strategies

In this paper, I deconstruct the the Truman, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II United States National Security Strategy documents, to reveal central key assumptions and functions of national security discourse. I infer and unveil national security as a tool for identity construction of “us” and “them,” which works through narrations and speech acts that disguise the actual goals of the discourse. Deconstructing the directives in previous NSS documents recounts a tale of otherization of differences, marginalization of ethnic minorities, women and critical human security issues, and the politicization of security. Thus, I conclude that war is not only waged on the battlefield, but also through the dominant telling of historical narratives, through discourses that conceal the use of force and relations of power. National security discourse — including the rhetoric of democracy, American values and free markets — functions as a polemical device that is employed increasingly to achieve political ends and as a result, has little to do with actual human security.

Selling the Right: Republican Rhetoric and the Shaping of Party and Nation

Selling the Right: Republican Rhetoric and the Shaping of Party and Nation Katherine Rye Jewell (bio) The Door of Hope: Republican Presidents and the First Southern Strategy, 1877–1933. By Edward O. Frantz. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. 2011. The Reagan Rhetoric: History and Memory in 1980s America. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2011. During the 1952 election, to defend his personal and political reputation, Richard Nixon took to the nation’s airwaves and gave his famous “Checkers” speech. Referring to his wife’s “respectable Republican coat,” Nixon countered charges of improper use of campaign gifts and funds by asserting his family’s modest means and history of hard work and public service. His one caveat: he would keep “Checkers,” the black-and-white pup gifted to the family, because his children adored their new pet. The speech, given in the midst of the first televised presidential campaign, marked a turning point in presidential politics and media relations. Presidential rhetoric moved from out of the shadows of radio and into full view; image and appearance rose in importance alongside policy and presidential actions. As president, Ronald Reagan—, the former actor [End Page 103] turned “Great Communicator”—mastered this new style of politics. The “party of Reagan” is as much a reflection of modern American political culture as it is the New Right grassroots movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Reagan’s ability to fuse disparate factions of conservatives—social and religious conservatives, neoconservatives, Wall Street business interests, and white southerners—into a political juggernaut owed as much to his rhetoric as to his policies. Nixon’s foray into televised politics presaged Reagan’s command of the medium but could only begin to approach the former General Electric Theater star’s finesse. Much had changed in political culture since Woodrow Wilson held the first press conference in 1913, let alone the age of whistle-stop tours. Nixon in 1952 and Reagan in 1980 not only occupied different political cultures, but also very different Republican parties. The distance between the political culture of the 1950s and that of the 1980s has received intense scholarly focus for nearly three decades. The rise of the organizational and grassroots conservative movement, the changing role of media and technology, and the demands of liberal internationalism shaped a new GOP by the time of the 1980 “Reagan Revolution.” Civil rights, the culture wars, stagflation, tax revolt, and Vietnam reshaped American politics, and during the 1960s Republicans at last broke one-party rule in Dixie. A region once lost to the party of Lincoln became crucial to Reagan’s success, with Nixon having made inroads in 1968 and 1972. Eisenhower and Hoover managed to swing the outer South, but generally speaking, before the 1970s the Deep South remained out of reach of Republican candidates. Together, Edward Frantz and Toby Bates blur the distinction between the Republican Party of post-Reconstruction and post-Reagan Revolution as well as the political culture of pre- and post-television ages. Region, the input of advisers and planners, the crafters of message, remain factors in the eras of both trains and television. Together, the books reveal that presidents’ words, their meaning, and legacy bridge technological gaps, and suggest that the political culture of the late twentieth, and perhaps twenty-first, century United States is not that far removed from post-Reconstruction style politics after all. Their two books demonstrate that presidential rhetoric has been and remains a significant factor in political culture and collective memory. The Door of Hope demonstrates the GOP’s focus on the South and the transformation in its regional approach during the post-Reconstruction era. His thesis is ambitious: through the Republican presidential tours of southern states from Hayes to Hoover, “we see how the party of Lincoln became the party of Reagan” (3). Frantz advances the idea that the GOP became the “vehicle of white resentment,” invoking Reagan’s Neshoba speech in 1980, but he looks to the post-Reconstruction years to understand how southern presidential tours shaped the Republican Party strategy towards the region. Deemphasizing Nixon as the southern strategy’s master, Frantz shows that the GOP experienced myriad internal divisions and “centrifugal forces” (2) between 1877...

Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange (review)

Reviewed by: Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange John David Smith Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange. Edited by Larry A. Greene and Anke Ortlepp. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Pp. xxi + 244. Cloth $55.00. ISBN 978-1604737844. This eclectic collection focuses on the nexus between African Americans and Germans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Editors Larry A. Greene and Anke Ortlepp underscore the rich cultural, demographic, and intellectual elements that have long connected Africans, African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Germans. Their book suggests how the linkages between black Americans and Germans “shaped the African American freedom quest and both their attempts at ethnic self-definition” (vii). Scholars identify the exchange between African Americans and Germans on several levels. The most obvious results from the presence of almost 3,000,000 black American GIs stationed in Germany in the half-century following the end of World War II. The syncretism of African Americans and Germans took and continues to take many forms—from personal and familial relationships to the merging of language, music, art, dance, and history. But even before World War II, German scholars expressed fascination with and conducted research in African American agriculture, folklore, literature, and social science, an interest that continues to manifest itself regularly in the meetings and publications of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien and the Collegium on African American Research. As Eva Boesenberg notes, African American studies comprises “an esteemed, even prominent segment of U.S.-American Studies in contemporary Germany” (227). Though German-speaking peoples played a minor role in the transatlantic slave trade, they nevertheless engaged with Africans and African Americans in British colonial and US national contexts. Greene and Ortlepp observe that “Germany . . . served as a source of both support and opposition to that historic quest of African Americans for freedom and independence in the modern age” (ix). The essays in their compilation complicate, contextualize, and add nuance to that assertion. Victor Grossman, for example, touches autobiographically on the experiences of black GIs who sought refuge or asylum in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), raising the important question of the degree of racial tolerance in the post-Nazi Germanys in comparison to the segregated American South and, later, an increasingly multiethnic and multicultural United States. Aribert Schroeder’s article on the life of Oliver Wendell Harrington, the prominent black cartoonist and journalist who took asylum in East Berlin in 1961, adds detail and context to understanding this complex expatriate community. From East Germany Harrington championed equality for black Americans and African liberation movements. Looking at an earlier age, Mischa Honeck and Jeffrey Strickland examine the interactions of German immigrants and people of African descent, also immigrants, in antebellum Cincinnati, Ohio and Charleston, South Carolina, respectively. Honeck [End Page 656] details what he terms the “unexpected alliance” between two radicals—the black educator Peter H. Clark and the German socialist editor August Willich—in challenging class and racial bias and championing abolition. Strickland examines how Charleston’s German immigrants became “southern” following the Civil War, identifying with conservative Democrats who, as W. E. B. Du Bois explained in Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935), worked to return the freed people to a metaphorical “slavery.” Leroy Hopkins charts the ambiguous German responses to the brilliant African American performer Louis W. Douglas, whose work in radio, musical reviews, and film transformed him into an iconic figure in the Weimar Republic from 1925 to 1931. In bringing “Harlemania” to Weimar, Douglas both reinforced German and white American racist caricatures of blacks and served “as an agent of conciliation between nations” (67). The rise of the Third Reich and Germany as a racist totalitarian state, Larry A. Greene explains in his essay, led African Americans to draw a parallel between the Nuremberg Laws and the de jure segregation of the Jim Crow South. America’s entry into World War II, Greene observes, “heightened the already existing contradictions between America’s democratic rhetoric and the reality of America’s segregated society,” a “contradiction that initiated the modern African American civil rights movement led by an African American press . . .” (70). In his fascinating analysis of Julius Lips, the German Africanist, one...