"I Am a Vegetarian!" (Cheers)

BY CHARLES W. MORTON

Of all the great changes noted in the election campaign of 1964 the revisions in political oratory were probably the most remarkable. Everything was different suddenly — the words, the speakers, the ideas, and their effect on the audience. One even got the impression at times that the audience itself was something new, and that the new kind of oratory was especially prepared for it. “Oratory” is not really the right term for what was said from the rear platforms and over the airwaves; and neither were the men who were saying it by any stretch of the imagination orators. They sounded more like schoolboys reading aloud in the third grade, or the same schoolboys declaiming their “memory work,” with an occasional peek at the copy. It was in this respect like no previous campaign.

Most conspicuous among the revisions in what was said was the stark, stripped-down style of the utterance. The words were short; so were the sentences; while the ideas were ultrasimplified to all but the vanishing point. Thin-lipped Calvin Coolidge by comparison, reading to the station platform crowd the encyclopedia description of whatever whistle-stop he happened to be in, would have sounded like the Boy Orator from the Platte.

One line in particular, delivered on an outdoor occasion in the South, typified the quality of the whole performance. It went, in somewhat schoolteacherish tones: “ This election [pregnant pause] will be decided [another pause] by the American people.” I am sure the candidate was as startled as I was by the delirious cheers that greeted this statement of self-evident fact. The entire audience burst into screams, handclapping, ecstatic gestures, and roars of approval. Could they have thought, instead, that the decision would be made by a plebiscite in Abyssinia or by Neapolitans, viva voce?

It became apparent that the audiences were hungering for a chance to applaud, regardless of whether the speakers gave them anything to warrant it. There were times when the simple delaration “I am a Republican” or “I am a Democrat” touched off the wildest approval, as if an on-the-spot conversion from some wholly opposed group had just been announced. So lightly leashed was the eagerness to cheer that equal response would probably have been made to “I am a FarmerLaborite,” or even “I am a Prohibitionist.” The highest decibel counts of the whole campaign acclaimed the statement “I am an American,” even though it is reasonably well known that the noncitizen cannot hold the presidential office: the candidate has to be an American.

One recalls the style of James M. Curley, always elegant, looking as if the top hat had been invented for him to model, raising and lowering the tones of his pipe-organ voice with such majesty and assurance as to enthrall his audience by sound alone. I once saw him exact from a convention of the Grange — rural Republicans, if you please — a standing ovation for reciting, in full oratorical splendor, the tributaries of the Mississippi River, with a few well-worn adjectives for each as he took his listeners, stream by stream, from its headwaters to the gulf. It is perhaps just as well for the nation that he never had a chance to show his best stuff on TV.