Leland M. Griffin--"The Rhetoric of Historical Movements"

Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, 2nd ed.

(1952)

"The recommendation has been made, for example, that we pay somewhat less attention to the single speaker and more to speakers--that we turn our attention from the individual 'great orator' and undertake research into such selected acts and atmospheres of public address as would permit the study of a multiplicity of speakers, speeches, audiences, and occasions" (10).

The essay seeks to set out some questions and answers for those who want to "undertake the rhetorical study of a movement" (10).

I

What should be the point of focus in the movement study?

A movement has occurred when 1. men have become dissatisfied 2) try to alter their environments for change and 3) the efforts result in success or failure.

"The student's task is to isolate the rhetorical movement within the matrix of the historical movement: the rhetorical movement is the focus...It is to be isolated, analyzed, evaluated, and described, so that he can say, for the particular historical movement which he investigates: this was the pattern of public discussion, the configuration of discourse, the physiognomy of persuasion, peculiar to the movement" (10).

II

What kind of movement should the student select for study, and how much of the movement should he study?

"As students of persuasion, interested not so much in the accomplished change of opinion as in the attempt to effectuate change, we should find the rhetorical structure of the lost cause as meaningful as that of the cause victorious" (10).

Griffin advises scholars here to look at the micro, and as the scholarship for  movements grow, the micro can be aggregated to reflect the macro.

III

How should the student go about the business of isolating and analyzing the rhetorical movement

Griffin divides movements into pro and anti:

pro movements hope to encourage the public to adopt some change
anti movements hope to encourage the public to reject or destroy an existing institution or idea

He then further divides the rhetors within those categories:

aggressors: establish (pro) destroy (anti)
defendants: resist reform (pro) defend institutions (anti)

He then breaks movements into 3 chronological stages:

1. inception--the movement is burgeoning, acts have just begun, just now noticed by the public
2. rhetorical crisis--balance between groups of rhetors is disturbed
3. consummation--movement ends because change has been reached or is ineffectual in its continuation

"such studies may demonstrate that the group which would assure itself of victory must necessarily generate a flood of persuasive argument and appeal, and employ all, or nearly all, of the available channels of propagation" (11). Griffin argues that movements must effect change and persuasion before the public turns against them.

"He will also note the development and employment of media of discourse. Assuming the movement selected occurred during the first half of the nineteenth century for example he will find the opposing groups using some or all of such channels of propagation" (12).

IV

What rhetorical criteria should the student use in evaluating the public address of the movement?

"A first and obvious principle is that the critic must judge the effectiveness of the discourse...in terms of the ends projected by the speakers and writers...the critic must judge the discourse in terms of the theories of rhetoric and public opinion indigenous to the times" (12).

V

How should the student go about the process of synthesis involved in reporting the movement?

"we should strive for movement studies which will preserve the idiom in which the movement was actually expressed...it will be so presented as to convey the quality of dynamism, the sense of action, chronologically" (13).

VI

"essentially the study's goal is to discover, in a wide sense of the term, the rhetorical pattern inherent in the movement selected for investigation