{"id":942,"date":"2020-09-16T21:10:54","date_gmt":"2020-09-16T21:10:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-publicspeaking\/?post_type=chapter&p=942"},"modified":"2020-12-02T19:53:49","modified_gmt":"2020-12-02T19:53:49","slug":"from-the-industrial-revolution-to-the-information-age","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-publicspeaking\/chapter\/from-the-industrial-revolution-to-the-information-age\/","title":{"raw":"Public Speaking and Social Movements in the United States 1730\u20131900","rendered":"Public Speaking and Social Movements in the United States 1730\u20131900"},"content":{"raw":"
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Learning Objectives<\/h3>\r\nExplain how social movements in the U.S. have used public speaking to advance their causes.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nOne of the most powerful uses of public speech is to bring people together around a common cause. Throughout the history of the United States, leaders, preachers, activists, and politicians have used the spoken word to inspire and motivate, challenging their listeners to imagine a better, holier, or more just world.\r\n\r\nThe following case studies represent only a small sample of the social movements we could consider. These were chosen largely to highlight the speaking traditions that have had the most influence on the way contemporary speakers approach their craft.<\/span>\r\n

Great Awakenings: The Evangelical Movements in the 18th and 19th centuries<\/h3>\r\nWithin the development of an American public speaking tradition, the role of evangelical preaching, especially traveling revivalist preachers, cannot be overstated. The\u00a0Great Awakening <\/strong>is the name given to\u00a0a series of Christian revivals that began in England and the North American colonies in the 1730s and continued into the mid-1800s.\u00a0Building on the foundations of older traditions\u2014Puritanism, pietism, and Presbyterianism\u2014major leaders of the revival such as George Whitefield<\/strong>, John Wesley<\/strong>, and Jonathan Edwards<\/strong> articulated a theology of revival and salvation that transcended denominational boundaries and helped forge a common evangelical identity.\r\n\r\nRevivalist preachers were known for their fiery rhetoric and emotional delivery. Services became more emotional and some people had visions and mystical experiences. The passionate style of delivery favored by evangelical preachers had a strong influence on the American oratory tradition and has echoes to this day.\r\n\r\nThe worship style of the revivals appealed to many Africans, and African leaders started to emerge from the revivals soon after they converted in substantial numbers. These figures paved the way for the establishment of the first black congregations and churches in the American colonies.[footnote]Butler, Jon, et al. Religion in American Life: a Short History<\/i>. Oxford University Press, 2011.[\/footnote] Before the American Revolution, the first black Baptist churches were founded in the South in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia; two black Baptist churches were founded in Petersburg, Virginia.\r\n\r\nEarly black preachers combined the powerful rhetoric of revivalist preaching with a variety of traditions specific to the African diaspora\u2014perhaps most influentially, a call-and-response pattern that was a continuation of earlier African oral traditions. In the call-and-response style, the preacher speaks and the congregation responds with support and affirmation.[footnote]Loeb, L. \u201cCall and Response: An Anatomy of Religious Practice.\u201d Discourse Studies<\/i>, vol. 16, no. 4, 2014, pp. 514\u2013533.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_954\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]\"A<\/a> The Ordination of Bishop Francis Asbury by Bishop Thomas Coke<\/em> (1784). Thomas Coke Ruckle, painter; A. Gilchrist Campbell, engraver, 1882. If you click to enlarge the image, you can see Harry Hosier in the upper left.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nHarry Hosier<\/strong>, an illiterate freedman who drove the preacher Francis Asbury on his circuits, was able to memorize large passages of the Bible verbatim and became a crossover success, as popular among white audiences as the black ones Asbury had originally intended for him to minister to.[footnote]Morgan, Philip. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry<\/em>, UNC Press, 1998, p. 655.[\/footnote] His sermon at Thomas Chapel in Chapeltown, Delaware, in 1784, was the first to be delivered by a black preacher directly to a white congregation.[footnote]Smith, Jessie C.,\u00a0\"Methodists: 1781.\"\u00a0Black Firsts: 4,000 Ground-Breaking and Pioneering Historical Events<\/em> (3rd ed.), pp. 1820\u201321. Visible Ink Press, 2013.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nDespite being called the \"greatest orator in America\" by Benjamin Rush[footnote]Webb, Stephen H. \"Webb, Stephen H. \"Introducing Black Harry Hoosier: The History Behind Indiana's Namesake.\" The Indiana Magazine of History<\/em> (2002): 30-41.\r\n[\/footnote] and one of the best in the world by Bishop Thomas Coke,[footnote]Smith[\/footnote] Hosier was repeatedly passed over for ordination and permitted no vote during his attendance at the Christmas Conference that formally established American Methodism. Richard Allen, the other black attendee, was ordained by the Methodists in 1799, but his congregation of free African Americans in Philadelphia left the church there because of its discrimination. They founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Philadelphia. After first submitting to oversight by the established Methodist bishops, several AME congregations finally left to form the first independent African-American denomination in the United States in 1816.\r\n

Abolitionism<\/h3>\r\nThe historian James M. McPherson defines an abolitionist \"as one who before the Civil War had agitated for the immediate, unconditional, and total abolition of slavery in the United States\".[footnote]McPherson, James M. The Abolitionist Legacy: from Reconstruction to the NAACP<\/i>. Princeton University Press, 1975, p. 4[\/footnote] He does not include antislavery activists such as Abraham Lincoln or the Republican Party, which called for the gradual ending of slavery. Throughout the period leading up to the Civil War, the cause of abolition was advanced through pamphlets, books, and\u2014especially\u2014traveling speakers. One of the most powerful of these speakers was Frederick Douglass<\/strong> (1818\u20131895), who had escaped slavery in Maryland and became a leader of the abolitionist movement in the Northeast. On\u00a0July 5, 1852, Douglass gave a speech to the ladies of the\u00a0Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society. This speech, which is often called \"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?\", is often cited as the \"greatest anti-slavery oration ever given.\"[footnote]William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass,\u00a0<\/em>W. W. Norton, 1991, p. 173.[\/footnote] In the speech, Douglass calls out the hypocrisy of the nation's egalitarian rhetoric:\r\n

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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To watch<\/h3>\r\nIn this clip, Danny Glover reads Frederick Douglass's \"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?\" Glover is introduced by the historian Howard Zinn.\r\n\r\n