Over the years, the phrase ""southern oratory"" has become laden
with myth; its mere invocation conjures up powerful images of
grandiloquent antebellum patriarchs, enthusiastic New South
hucksters, and raving wild-eyed demagogue politicians. In these
essays, Waldo Braden strips away the myths to expose how the
South's orators achieved their rhetorical effects and manipulated
their audiences. The Oral Tradition in the South begins with two
essays that trace the roots of the South's particular
identification with oratory. In The Emergence of the Concept of
Southern Oratory, 1850- 1950, Braden suggests that it was through
the influence of southern scholars that southern oratory gained its
renown. The second essay, The Oral Tradition in the Old South,
focuses on antebellum times to reveal the several factors that
combined to make the region a fertile ground for oratory. Braden
further explores the antebellum oratorical tradition in The 1860
Election Campaign in Western Tennessee, analyzing speeches made in
Memphis by such national figures as William L. Yancey, Andrew
Johnson, and Stephen A. Douglas, and revealing the nature of
political canvassing in that era. Shifting his discussion to the
years that followed the Civil War, Braden examines, in Myths in a
Rhetorical Context, how such speakers as General John B. Gordon and
Henry Grady worked to restore the shattered self-esteem of the
region by spinning myths of the Old South and the Lost Cause and by
proclaiming the hopeful era of the New South. The fifth essay, The
Rhetoric of Exploitation, probes the rhetorical strategies of the
demagogue politicians of the twentieth century-strategies such as
""plain folks"" appeals and race-baiting. In the final essay, The
Rhetoric of a Closed Society Braden analyzes the movement opposing
racial integration in Mississippi. Showing how the White Citizens'
Council, Governor Ross Barnett, and other leaders manipulated the
public to make the state a closed society from 1954 to 1964.
Although he takes pains to establish the historical context in each
of these essays, Braden's emphasis as a rhetorical critic is always
on the speeches themselves. He pays close attention to the kinds of
appeals found in the words of the speeches and to the individual
speaker's use of images and phrases to evoke particular myths. But
Braden looks beyond the texts of the speeches to take into account
the full context of the event. ""What the reader finds in the
printed version of the text,"" he explains, ""might be only a small
part of the myth, a tiny hint of what grinds inside frustrated
listeners. Sometimes the trigger for the myth does not even appear
in the printed version, because face-to-face the listeners and the
speaker, feeling a oneness, evoke the myth without verbal
expression."" To account for this nonverbal dimension of oratory,
these essays assess the impact of the location and atmosphere of
the gathering, the audience's expectations, and the speaker's use
of ritual, symbolic gestures, and props. During the nearly forty
years of his career, Waldo Braden has been a pioneer in the serious
study of oratory. A landmark work, The Oral Tradition in the South
is the capstone to a distinguished career, a comprehensive and
authoritative study of the subject Braden has so innovatively
researched.
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