[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.These racial code words functioned as what Celeste Condit and John Lucaitescall ideographs: culturally-biased, abstract words or phrases that serve a con-stitutional value for a group of people and serve as motivations or justiWca-tions for public action.4 Part of the rhetorical eVectiveness of such code wordsresides in their Xexibility as cultural signiWers; that is, they can take on multiplecultural meanings, depending on the context.When opponents attack a termlike “neighborhood schools” as a code word for segregation, users of the termmay reply that the phrase merely emphasizes the positive value of children at-tending school in the areas in which they live.Yet before a racist audience, theterm is understood clearly to mean segregated education.Code words aretroublesome because they make political discussion slippery by shifting the veryterminology of public argument: conversations marked by code words developa subtext that is diYcult to bring to the surface.Indeed, symbols like “law andorder” draw their intensity from the associations they repress.5 In addition, codewords are troublesome because for some listeners, the positive denotative as-sociations of a cultural value like “neighborhood schools” may cross over andreinforce the validity of a racist value like segregated schools.That is, if veiledverbal cues can eVectively express unseemly messages without social penalty,they can endow an oVensive subtext with political and cultural legitimacy.Code-word civil rights rhetoric did not end with the presidential campaignbut rather extended into Richard Nixon’s presidency: terms like “forced inte-gration” and “bloc vote” were mainstays of his presidential rhetoric.However,White House and Justice Department rhetoric held that racial discriminationwas morally and socially wrong and must be eliminated.6 Yet the admin-istration’s rhetoric seemed intended to deceive, as Nixon did not have a con-sistent civil rights program congruent with this discourse.7 Furthermore, VicePresident Agnew’s speeches were a heavy counterweight to any pro-civil rightsdiscourse by the administration: in the South, Agnew lambasted civil rightsleaders and engaged in self-consciously divisive rhetoric on race, saying thingsthe president could not for political gain.In calmer rhetoric, Nixon articulatedhis own opposition to busing as a means of ending de facto school segregation,most notably in his written statement on school desegregation of March 24,1970.In this document, the president articulated support for the Brown deci-sion but opposition to busing, claiming that the Supreme Court had not settledthe issue of de facto segregation; he also called the drive to achieve multiracialschools “a tragically futile eVort” and posed “mobility” as an alternate, supe-rior value to “racial balance.”8 In his public speeches on desegregation, Nixon202■The Modern Presidency and Civil Rightssubsequently used the code word “quality education” to mean de facto segre-gated education.9Above all, Nixon believed that positive, inspiring civil rights rhetoric wouldbring him little beneWt.Viewing rhetoric on race from a narrowly political pointof view, he used public statements to gain political power or electoral votesrather than to urge the nation to move toward what Martin Luther King, Jr.,called a “beloved community.” The president’s narrowly instrumental view ofcivil rights rhetoric is revealed in a private comment to a White House aide:“The NAACP would say my rhetoric was poor even if I gave the Sermon onthe Mount.”10 This comment captures part of Nixon’s attitude toward civilrights rhetoric—that articulating a positive racial message was futile since Af-rican Americans still would oppose him.Nixon’s personal feelings did notarouse in him a strong desire to speak out about civil rights either: presiden-tial aide John Ehrlichman claims that the president believed blacks’ geneticinferiority kept them down, and historian Stephen Ambrose argues that Nixonhad a “meanness of spirit” on issues of race.11 Neither did the counsel of hisadvisers move Nixon to words.Speechwriter Patrick Buchanan urged the presi-dent to use the race issue to wedge apart the Democratic coalition and to ce-ment a “New Majority.” And in his January 16, 1970, memorandum to PresidentNixon, Moynihan called for a period of “benign neglect” on civil rights, argu-ing that too much racial rhetoric had stirred racial anxieties.Perhaps Nixonworried that discourse on race might exacerbate racial problems, but prima-rily he tried to avoid being associated with an explosive issue that his staVmanipulated in order to weaken American liberalism.By the end of his tenure in the White House, drawn short by Watergate,Richard Nixon had said very little to encourage the nation to overcome its racistattitudes and practices.In a few radio addresses, Nixon brieXy suggested thatthe nation should strive for racial justice and that future generations shouldsee equal opportunity as a birthright.Yet he usually overstated the progressthe nation had made, provided little justiWcation for moving forward on civilrights, and failed to sketch what an unprejudiced America might look like.Forexample, in a speech broadcast on February 2, 1973, Nixon simply stated, “Weare closer today than ever before to the realization of a truly just society.”12Viewing civil rights discourse merely as “hokey rhetoric about equality,” Presi-dent Nixon refused to provide rhetorical leadership on the nation’s most press-ing social problem.13 As such, he brought the era of modern presidentialleadership on civil rights through words to an end.That era had been slow indeveloping, but the nation had moved from Franklin Roosevelt’s trepidationp r e s i d e n t i a l r h e t o r i c a n d t h e c i v i l r i g h t s e r a■203and overall silence to Lyndon Johnson’s vigorous advocacy.Even the middle-man of this era, Dwight Eisenhower, saw the value of rhetorical leadership oncivil rights, though he usually did not provide it.Transformations in the civilrights movement, blacks’ demands, political culture, attitudes on race, andpresidential rhetoric (which now often polarized the races) changed the na-ture of political discourse on race for the worse.Moreover, Americans no longerlooked to the president for rhetorical leadership on race.Significant Episodes in Civil Rights RhetoricI began this book by discussing the overture to leadership established byFranklin D.Roosevelt and have suggested that Richard M [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]