Commemorating the rhetorical nation: the Declaration of Independence and the ‘Spirit of ‘76’

Abstract

Abstract

US commemorative rhetoric about the Declaration of Independence has shifted significantly across time. This article traces changes in rhetorical practice at three pivotal moments – the founding in 1776, the centennial of 1876 and the bicentennial of 1976 – arguing that two developments moved in tandem: a contraction of temporal scope and an increasingly strained relationship between speakers and the audiences they addressed as part of a national community. Where the founders’ rhetoric combined past, present and future in a single constitutive act, calling a unified people into being, centennial rhetoric fixed the nation’s gaze on the future at the expense of inherited tradition. By 1976, commemorative rhetoric also showed a weakened purchase on the future, focusing on the present and on immediate individual experience. These shifts were not absolute and remained contested in both 1876 and 1976, but the changing rhetorical emphasis is discernible. Alongside the temporal contraction, the reciprocal bond between speakers and the people they addressed weakened, the unified audience that commemorative rhetoric had once constructed fragmented into competing constituencies, and the mediation of rhetoric through television further transformed the speaker–audience relationship. Drawing on close readings of centennial and bicentennial orations, protest rhetoric, and popular culture, the article demonstrates how, by 1976, the rhetorical work of binding past, present and future into a unifying national narrative had become a task that the nation’s speakers no longer knew how or cared to deliver.