Give Your Speech, Change the World. Nick Morgan

half of the twentieth century.

       Through the Victorian era, public speaking drew inspiration from the ancients.

      The Victorian enthusiasm for most things classical kept Greek and Roman rhetoric at the forefront of the field of public speaking throughout the period. While there was rapid change on many other fronts, from agriculture to transportation, in presentations the Victorians were tradition-bound. By 1900, for instance, little had changed in the basic understanding of public oratory since the Greeks except that a collection of conventional gestures, designed to convey emotion, had slowly evolved and become codified in self-help books for speakers and actors, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. No doubt the Greeks had gestures of their own; it’s just that we have no clear record of what they were.

      But we do have a record of some of the gestures that were thought appropriate since the mid-1700s. Indeed, some of them are still used in a modified, naturalized form today. When you see someone put his hands in front of his mouth in shock or horror, for example, that is the modern version of a gesture conveying horror that has been around since at least the Victorian era, and probably much longer.

      These gestures were important because of how speeches were delivered until the advent of radio and television in the midtwentieth century. It’s important to understand that public speaking was a form of mass entertainment. Most speeches were delivered without amplification to audiences in large halls or outdoors. As a result, a style of speaking developed that involved grand rhetoric, big, dramatic gestures, and voice projection. Most speakers followed the Greek models for how to structure a speech, and those speeches often lasted for several hours.

      Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was a now-famous exception. The speech was barely noticed in the press reports that followed. It was over so quickly that, legend has it, the photographer didn’t even have time to get a picture. He was still setting up his camera when Lincoln sat down, already finished. Most of the press focused instead on the long speech by Edward Everett that followed Lincoln’s. Everett spoke for two hours, an acceptable length for a funeral oration of the day. He used as his model Pericles’ funeral oration on the death of the Athenian soldiers who fell during the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, which had become over the years the accepted paradigm for all funeral orations.

      Like much that was excellent about the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the formal generic demands of the funeral oration were largely forgotten after World War II—until President Ronald Reagan reinvented the genre for his brilliant speech on the Challenger disaster in 1986.

      Typical of nineteenth-century oration too was William Jennings Bryan’s famous “cross of gold” speech, which he delivered more than six hundred times around the country to large, enthusiastic crowds in his failed presidential campaign of 1896. Bryan was arguing for a combined gold- and silver-based monetary system and against a gold standard—a relatively arcane economic argument that pitted the common people against the moneyed interests of the day. Bryan’s voice thundered and his arms flailed in grand style; he could ignite a crowd of two thousand, making his voice heard with careful breathing and other projection techniques honed over a lifetime of public oratory.

      But the physical techniques Bryan employed to reach such a large crowd unamplified are not the only things that are different than today. Our ideas about content have also changed. It’s worth looking briefly at the very end of Bryan’s several-hour speech to understand the differences.

      It is the issue of 1776 over again. Our ancestors, when but three millions in number, had the courage to declare their political independence of every other nation; shall we, their descendants, when we have grown to seventy millions, declare that we are less independent than our forefathers? No, my friends, that will never be the verdict of our people. Therefore, we care not upon what lines the battle is fought. If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost. Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

      Try to imagine a crowd of two thousand farmers leaping to their feet, roaring approval for several minutes, and you’ll have some idea of the effect Bryan’s speech had everywhere he went. How does the rhetoric seem to your ear and eye? Overly formal? A bit pompous? Note how it is designed to spread out the key concepts with enough words in between to get the thought out. It simply took the sound waves of Bryan’s voice a little while to travel out to two thousand people and be heard and understood. Hence, when Bryan asks a rhetorical question (“shall we, their descendants … declare that we are less independent …?”) he is careful to answer it, so that no one in the audience is in any doubt about the correct response. Nowadays, answering an obviously rhetorical question like that would sound excessively pompous.

      Note also how Bryan ends most of his sentences with strong words that can be shouted or projected on an “up” note. Today, we’re more casual, but back then, the first need was to be heard. If your voice trails off, people will lose the last few words, and then often the sense of the whole phrase. That’s why Bryan says, “we care not upon what lines the battle is fought.” To our ears, the phrasing is old-fashioned, but for Bryan, the key words (“care not,” “lines,” “battle,” “fought”) are spaced appropriately and end with a strong verb that ties the whole phrase together. It’s phrasing appropriate for shouted oratory. Moreover, it’s composed for the most part of simple, short words that have wide, powerful meanings. Bryan well understood his audience—its strengths and its limitations.

       In the twentieth century, technology changed public speaking permanently and profoundly.

      Since the advent of amplified sound and later television, the genre of public speaking has changed enormously. Oratory evolved from a shouted genre to a spoken one. Then, beginning in the 1950s, when we took to watching our public discussions on television, public speaking became an intimate genre.

      Therein lies the dilemma for most speakers today. Instead of watching a speaker address us from a distant stage, we invited Walter Cronkite and a host of imitators into our homes. With the television screen framing his head and shoulders, Cronkite appeared to be talking to us from a few feet away, within a space we usually reserve for chat about fairly personal matters with people we trust. The close personal contact (or the illusion of it, at least) made us feel connected to Cronkite and other television figures. They became implicitly trustworthy in our minds.

      In this seemingly intimate space created by television, the oldfashioned approach to the delivery of public presentations—the large gestures, the sweeping phrases, the carefully spaced concepts—was obviously out of place. What we needed instead, and what we gradually got, was the personal conversation appropriate to this cozy environment. Unfortunately, we also forgot a good deal of what remains profound about the Greeks’ understanding of public rhetoric, especially its content and structure, in our need to become modern. Slowly, the illusion of physical closeness conveyed by television created in all audiences an expectation of intimacy, both spatial and emotional, from a speaker.

      This phenomenon is why we all have the slightly eerie feeling that we know our celebrities. It’s because we have let them into our living rooms, and more important, our personal space. We watch them talk to us conversationally from a few feet away, seemingly in our kitchens, our living rooms, our family rooms, our bedrooms.

       Today we have a mismatch between public-speaking custom and audience expectations.

      Most public oratory—especially business speeches and presentations—has never entirely caught up with the audience’s changed expectations. Our speaking styles have indeed become more conversational, but speakers in public spaces haven’t learned to deliver the physical closeness that mirrors the linguistic closeness on television.

      Moreover, the candid personal disclosure that we have grown to expect when we are seemingly so close to a televised speaker hasn’t become part of public presentations for the most part—especially,