The Summer 2007 issue of the Claremont Review of Books contains an excellent review of American Speeches, a two-volume collection of American political rhetoric from the Library of America. The review was penned by Diana Schaub, chairman of the department of political science at Loyola College in Maryland, and it is most illuminating.

As a speechwriter, I was particularly pleased by Professor Shaub’s contention that bullet points have undermined the quality of American rhetoric. As proof, she cites the following passage from President Lyndon Johnson’s Special Message to Congress of March 15, 1965:

I want to be the President who educated young children to the wonders of their world. I want to be the President who helped to feed the hungry and to prepare them to be taxpayers instead of taxeaters.

I want to be the President who helped to end war among the brothers of this earth.

To which Professor Schaub comments, acidly: “You could play pick-up-sticks with that collection of indistinguishable banalities.”

Indeed you could, and that’s the whole problem. But Professor Schaub is just warming to her theme. She continues:

“Hierarchy may be antithetical to democracy, but it is essential to logic. The replacement of paragraphs with bullet-points indicates the democratization or leveling or atomization of logic. The equality of all sentences destroys the connectedness of thought. This scattershot technique of contemporary speechmaking can bowl you over, if the speaker has sufficient force of personality, but it can't pierce your mind or heart, and it certainly can't do it as written rather than spoken. Like Shakespeare's plays, Lincoln's speeches are as powerful in the study as on the stage.”

Professor Schaub cites Lincoln’s first inaugural address as an example of rhetoric driven by logic. It’s a good choice. In particular, the penultimate paragraph of Lincoln’s first inaugural shows the power of Lincoln’s logic.

“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen,” says Lincoln, “and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.”

This is the language of a lawyer framing a case. It’s like a syllogism.

A syllogism, you may recall, is a statement of logical relationship. It has three parts: a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion –- which is the logical consequence of the major and minor premise.

For example:
Major premise: All men are mortal.
Minor premise: Socrates is a man
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

Notice, that if you accept the premises of a syllogism, you have to accept the conclusion. So lawyers like to cast their arguments in the form of a syllogism. That way, the only way opposing counsel can attack their argument is by attacking their premises.

Lincoln is not making a formal syllogism, but he’s making a syllogistic type of argument:
Major premise: The government will not make war on the secessionists.
Minor premise: Only the secessionists can start a war.
Conclusion: If war breaks out, the secessionists started it.

Lincoln does not state the conclusion expressly –- he’s too good a politician for that. But the conclusion is there, whether stated expressly or not. Note also that Lincoln refers to the secessionists as “fellow countrymen.” He’s refusing to recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate government. What Lincoln is doing here is fixing the blame for the war on the secessionists. And he succeeded: Remember who fired the first shot.

Notice also that if you were a lawyer for the South, you couldn’t attack Lincoln’s conclusion. You’d have to attack his premises. You’d have to say, “The government did assail us. Lincoln tried to supply the garrison at Ft. Sumter. He committed the first overt act of war.”

But in the end, Lincoln’s conclusion won the verdict before the bar of history. That’s because his rhetoric was driven by logic and not cobbled together out of bullet points.