James Darsey - The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America

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title	:	The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America
author	:	Darsey, James Francis.
publisher	:	New York University Press
isbn10 | asin	:	0814718760
print isbn13	:	9780814718766
ebook isbn13	:	9780585239804
language	:	English
subject	Political oratory--Social aspects--United States, Rhetoric--Social aspects--United States, Radicalism--United States, Prophecy--Social aspects--United States, United States--Social conditions--1980- , Social problems--United States.
publication date	:	1997
lcc	:	PN4055.U53D37 1997eb
ddc	:	808.5/1/088329
subject	:	Political oratory--Social aspects--United States, Rhetoric--Social aspects--United States, Radicalism--United States, Prophecy--Social aspects--United States, United States--Social conditions--1980- , Social problems--United States.

Page iii The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America James Darsey NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London

Page iv NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London 1997 by New York University All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Darsey, James Francis. The prophetic tradition and radical rhetoric in America/James Darsey p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8147-1876-0 (alk. paper) 1. Political oratorySocial aspectsUnited States. 2. Rhetoric Social aspectsUnited States. 3. RadicalismUnited States. 4. ProphecySocial aspectsUnited States. 5. United States Social conditions-1980- 6. Social problemsUnited States. I. Title PN4055.U53D37 1977 808.5'1'08835dc21 97-4772 CIP New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Page v To Edwin Black

Page vii CONTENTS Preface ix 1 Radical Rhetoric and American Community: Threnody for Sophrosyne 1 Part I 2 Old Testament Prophecy as Radical Ursprach 15 3 Prophecy as Sacred Truth: Self-Evidence and Ri ghteousness in the American Revolution 35 4 Prophecy as Krisis: Wendell Phillips and the Sin of Slavery 61 5 The Prophet's Call and His Burden: The Passion of Eugene V. Debs 85 Part II 6 The Word in Darkness 111 7 A Vision of the Apocalypse: Joe McCarthy's Rhetoric of the Fantastic 128 8 Prophecy as Poetry: The Romantic Vision of Robert Welch 151 9 Secular Argument and the Language of Commodity: Gay Liberation and Merely Civil Rights 175 10 The Seraph and the Snake 199 Notes 211 Index 269

Page ix PREFACE I did not begin this book with the idea of engaging the current crop of polemics on the disintegration of American society here at the turn of the millennium. Rather, this study has its origins in my own history, coming of age surrounded by the radical rhetorics of the 1960s, and my later professional dissatisfaction as a student of rhetoric with attempts to explain the behavior of the radicals. It was widely held then that the strident, often violent discourse of blacks, students, feminists, and other disaffected groups would not only hinder their various causes, but threatened to rend the very fabric of society. Today's complaints bear a remarkable similarity to those voiced thirty years ago, with this important difference: there is no longer a strong sense of a source of the societal decay. It is now precisely the absence of radical discourse that signals the cultural root rot bemoaned by contemporary critics on the left and right. The disintegration they decry indicates something missing at the core, something held as fundamental by a sufficient number of us to be worth engaging over, worth exercising ourselves for. There were portents of our current rootlessness on the horizon ten years ago when this project began its present incarnation. Robert Bellah and his colleagues claimed the entire book review section of an issue of the New Republic with Habits of the Heart, an analysis of the degeneration of community and its associated moral discourse in America. Today, Bellah's lament is the cause de jour. Not only do the choirs on the political right continue to sing the old refrains, but quondam radicals who were once the objects of this approbation have joined in. Yet, while the general diagnosis has been confirmed and amplified by sages more estimable than I, my specific reading and my prognosis have not been. My reading of the history of American rhetoric (and most of the current assessments are remarkably ahistorical) draws me to the conclusion that it is not an absence of what some writers term "civility," "civil discourse," "reasonable debate," what Matthew Arnold called "sweetness

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