Throughout the entirety of human experience, no tool naturally available to us has more prestige attached to it than the powers of speech. With nothing more than the ability to persuade the spoken word has been able to oust conspirators in broad daylight, and to repackage the terror of two nations inching closer to the brink of war as a noble pursuit worthy of the best and brightest of humanity. Oratory has enabled generals to push their soldiers on well past the breaking point, beyond what most would consider possible; it has also enabled diabolical leaders of men to compel the masses to commit terrible acts in the name of twisted ideals borne of those same minds. It is a great and terrible tool; one that has only become more potent as humanity has progressed.
What makes a speech so powerful? Something beyond a particularly well-formatted collection of topics, phrases and frequent pauses to tie it all together? Take Franklin D. Roosevelt and Donald J. Trump, and a quote from each. Compare the following quote from FDR’s first inaugural address, “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” with an excerpt from one of Trump’s 2016 rallies, “With their control over our government at stake, with trillions of dollars on the line, the Clinton machine is determined to achieve the destruction of our campaign. Not going to happen. Which has now become a great, great movement, the likes of which our country has never seen before, never ever.”; the two speeches aren’t even remotely close in eloquence, quality or in some cases basic delivery. Yet, as evidenced by the stadiums that Trump is able to fill in his ever-popular rallies, he manages to find as passionate an audience as FDR.
Perhaps the secret to a successful speech is in the goal of it; the best speeches tend to be the ones about lofty ideals and incredible challenges that must be met, after all. In 63 BCE, during the twilight years of the Roman Republic Marcus Tullius Cicero gave a series of speeches known as the Catiline Orations during his tenure as consul. He publicly denounced Catiline, at the time the head of a plot to overthrow Rome in the presence of the entire Senate. By the end of the first speech, Catiline had fled from the city. “When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?” The core of what Cicero said was not anything particularly impressive, and yet it is seen as one of the most enduring examples of great oratory. Earlier you saw that it is not necessarily the eloquence of delivery or the breadth of vocabulary that makes a great speech alone; perhaps it’s the purpose?
General George S. Patton, then commander of the U.S. Third Army delivered a speech in 1944 to a segment of his troops. The soldiers were relatively inexperienced in combat, and his goal was to inspire his men; nothing more, nothing less. This was not a speech given to patrician members of a storied society; nor was it meant to be taken in by a wary public so that they might in turn support your campaign to lead their nation. It was a veteran soldier speaking to a collection of green young men in the hopes of giving them enough courage to succeed in their task, and his speech reflected its simplicity. “Americans play to win all the time. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. Battle is the most significant competition in which a man can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base. “ along with perhaps his most iconic quote from the same speech, “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” There was no great conspiracy; no shrouded enemy that must be thrown out of your city to save the nation. It was a general speaking to his men before one of many battles in the war; so why did this speech bring Patton into his status as a modern-day folk hero, with lasting myths of how his speeches were so powerful that they propelled his men to feats of inhuman endurance and valor?
One thing does bind all these speakers together, however. Cicero and his artful delivery to the Senate, Trump’s populist rambling to hordes of ‘salt-of-the-earth’ voters feeling the pangs of disenfranchisement and Patton’s frank bluntness to weary, anxious soldiers; they all knew their audiences. If oratory is a tool, then knowing one’s audience is the knowledge of how to wield that tool. Clearly you’ve seen that educated, informed vocabulary is not the key, nor is the goal of the speech. Based on what you’ve seen here the way to a successful speech is clear: if you know who you’re going to be speaking to, the key to resounding applause is to say exactly what the audience wants to hear.
It’d be easy to become disillusioned with this apparent truth; that all the great orators of humanity were just people stringing us along while they masterminded how to ensure we kept supporting them. However, there’s room for distinction: a good speech is one where the speaker tells the audience what they want to hear. A great speech is one where the speaker makes the audience believe they were told what they want to hear. Consider John F. Kennedy’s 1962 speech about the space race, and the following quote from it: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
The total cost for the Apollo program—a mere subset of the overall space race—was 25.4 billion dollars; in today’s terms that equates to 116.5 billion dollars. Proverbial blood has been shed over lesser amounts in the House and Senate for causes arguably as noble, and while there were some benefits foreseen at the time such as military satellite advancements and analysis of the validity of using outer space as a vector for missile strikes, the public doesn’t truly care about that. It could be packaged as ‘we’re boosting the military’ but that wouldn’t have gotten nearly the same level of exultation from the masses. JFK’s speech was that key turning point for winning over the public. He managed to convince an entire nation that was in the shadow of the Cold War that there was room for optimism, for competition that needn’t end in nuclear fire for the loser but instead a shared victory of our frontier spirit, brought beyond the very horizon as we did in a time, to use a quote from a fictional orator, “…in a time when our eyes looked towards the Heavens, and with outstretched fingers, we touched the face of God.”
That is the true power of oratory; to use what evolved from raw screeches and hooting on par with the basest of primates to convince the descendants of those beasts to champion ideas that otherwise would seem so far and away that even attempting them would be folly.
