Western Journal of Communication, 57 (Fall 1993), 464-477 Reading Public Memory in Daniel Webster's Plymouth Rock Oration STEPHEN H. BROWNE T HE RITUALS OF PUBLIC MEMORY are omnipresent. HistoricaUy tbey include tbe rites of commemoration by whicb governments ballast autbority against waves of revolt, local celebrations of local beroes, and tbose countless monuments created by tbe architects of memory to sbape our sense of a sbared past. These performances take on a powerfully rhetorical aspect because they help negotiate conditions of community and provide symbols of identity and diflFerence. This essay is about the ways people get invited to share in such a collective sense of the past. It is an inquiry into the symbolic construction of public memory, a process I argue is rhetorical to the degree that shared meaning is the product of pubhc, persuasive distxiurse. More specifically, I examine how the custodians of public memory seek to convince otbers to collaborate in strategic and stylized conceptions ofthe past. Daniel Webster's Plymouth Rock Oration (1820) serves as a provocative case study. Through it critics can discern how the imperatives of power and public memory historically inscribe each other and get articulated. T'he text thus represents an official moment in the dialectics of memory, and so illustrates how dominant culture appropriates the past for vested interests. ^ In particular, I argue that the rhetorical action of Webster's text involves the s t r a t ^ c placement of public memory. Attending to its internal dynamics, tbe reader discerns a systematic effort to control the otherwise unpredictable sweep of events by fixing them within a compelling meta-narrative. Webster's is a rhetoric of placement, identifiable as it works to locate, order, and supervise, to oversee and profit from temporal change. After establishing its performative, contested, and di«:ursive contexts, I proceed to submit Webster's oration to a detailed examination. Such an explication is then offered as a warrant for further study of Webster, ceremonial discourse, and the hermeneutics of pwwer. As a way of grounding and circumscribing this study, I foreground three interrelated concepts. Together they are designed to substantiate STEPHEN H. BROWNE (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1987) is an associate professor in the Defiartment of Speech Communication at The Pennsylvania State University. The author wishes to thank Julie Brown. Fall 1993 465 Frederick Bartlett's insight that "remembering appears to be far more decisively an affair of construction than one of reproduction. "^ Public memory is examined (1) as a type oiperformance; (2) as a site of cultural competition; and (3) as a form of social text. These three means of conceptualizing public memory help to fashion my reading. Webster's address is taken to exemplify a proprietary struggle for control of public memory, a s t r u ^ e so basic and so prevalent that it can claim a tradition of its own. And while it is quite true, as Randall Lake has written, that criticEil attention to time has been largely Eurocentric, we have not yet sufficiently identified the textual resources of even the most canonical works.^ We ought not take for granted our ability to read the discourses of the powerful—and hence to lose sight of those who would maintain the structures of authority as a basis for social relations.^ CONTEXTS OF PUBLIC MEMORY Performing Public Memory "People depend on others," David Thelan writes, "to help them decide which experiences to forget and which to remember and what interpretation to place on experience. People develop a shared identity hy identifying, exploring, and agreeing on memories."^ As Webster's speech makes clear, there is no more evident example of how this process gets performed than the epideictic oration. Historically the relationship between public memory and ceremonial speech has been intimate. From the Fast-Day sermons of seventeenthcentury New England to the battlefields of the Civil War, from speeches of inauguration to farewell addresses, leaders have availed themselves of a rhetorical form distinctively equipped to construct and promote pubhc memory. However diffuse their particular style or semantic content, such discursive forms collectively enact vested visions of time present, past, and future.^ On the basis of those visions, Webster shows us, the discourse of ceremony seems unique in its capacity to solicit rationales of identity and communities of meaning. To stress the performative features of public memory is to underscore its formal enactment. Public memory is never given, but always managed; it is constructed in ways designed to accrue to the a d v a n t ^ of the constructors. Thus Bodnar contends:' 'public memory speaks primarily about the structure of power in society because that power is always in question in a world of polarities and contradictions and because cultural understanding is always grounded in the material structure of society itself." For this reason, Bodnar concludes, "Memory adds perspective said authenticity to the views articulated in this exchange; defenders of official and vernacular interests are selectively retrieved from the p>ast to perform similar functions in the present."^ Performance so conceived gestures in two ways. Clearly there is a pronounced aesthetic quality to this discourse of commemoration which. 466 Westem Journal of Communication if seldom stylish, is stylized in ways that set its conventions apart from other forms of rhetorical practice. At the same time, public memory ^ t s performed within contexts of power and aspiration so routinely that its political character cannot be missed. This art of public commemoration requires a careful balance of the recognizably aesthetic and the rhetorically compelling; when successful, such balance resolves the historic disjunction between art and persuasion and secures an optimal mode of address.^ Performance embeds within itself a political imperative, a will to jK>wer tbat seeks its most forceful expression among the available means of persuasion. It is this political imperative, moreover, which deeply marks the symbolic construction of public memory. Like all forms of political expression, public memorializing is expHcable only as it is located within the space of the contested.® Contesting Memory Puhlic memory is contestahle because it does not belong naturally to £iny category of citizenship. Representatives will, of course, assert proprietary claims on the past and hence on its celebration; they will impose, if only through sheer repetition, narratives of identity which bracket out certain memories and privilege others. This rhetoric of power, jocke3dng for ownership, is based in a "struggle for possession and interpretation of memory," a struggle, according to Thelan, "rooted in the conflict and interplay among social, political, and cultural interests and values in the present."^** This stress on the contested character of public memory entails certain prescriptions. Among other imphcations, it warns agsdnst viewing public memory as hegemonic, however prominent a given expression of it may seem. It involves an interplay of infiuences, an ongoing dialectic in which official and vernacular cultures appropriate narratives for their own ends. Public memories, as events in eastern Europe make dramatically clear, are never safe, never monologic, never allowed to remain stable for long. Veterans Day parades are attended by anti-war rallies, party conventions by dissent in the street. Memorial Day hy apathy. And if, as Bodnar demonstrates, "commemorative activities .. . almost always stress the desirability of maintaining the social order £ind existing institutions, the need to avoid disorder or dramatic changes, and the dominance of citizen duties over citizen rights," history demonstrates as well that such purposes seldom go unchallenged.^^ Neither, of course, do they go unprotected. Textuaiizing Memory In addition to these performative and contested features, public memory is textual. It can be inscribed and is therefore readable as a type of cultural production. Indeed, writes Edward Casey, "remembering is intensified by taking place through the interposed agency of a text (the Fall 1993 467 eulogy, the liturgy proper) and in the setting of a social ritual (delivering the eulogy, participating in the service)." Such forms of memorializing, Casey concludes, are "intensified still further hy the fact that hoth ritual and text hecome efficacious only in the presence of others, with whom we commemorate together in a public ceremony."^^ To claim that puhlic memory is textual is therefore to stress that its constructed quality can he made evident and its modes of inducement observahle. Of all the forms by which puhlic memory is given expression— monuments and parades, quilts and concerts, prayers and protests— surely the popular oration is among the most explicit. Its appeals move neither ahove nor below the surface of its own presentation; it is entirely readahle, at once immanent and unabashed. This is not to imply that ceremonial addresses are for that reason easily exhausted. In fact, Wehster's Plymouth Rock Oration rewards direct access to the process hy which public memory gets textually configured and put on display. Webster's oration is strategic in a more complicated sense. As he gave voice to the aspirations of his class and culture, he may be said to have fashioned a "proper" context in which those aspirations could he interpreted. This pursuit of the proper represents an instance of the more generai. meaning detailed hy Michel de Certeau. For de Certeau, "the 'proper' is a triumph of space over time. It allows one to capitalize acquired advantages, to prepare future expansion, and thus to give oneself a certain independence with respect to the variahility of circumstances. It is a raastery of time through the foundation of an autonomous place." Now, it is precisely this protean encroachment of space upon time which marks Wehster's panegyric to the American experience. The strategic force of Webster's address, then, rests on the speaker's ahility to sponsor an official version of puhlic memory hy inscribing temporal events into spatial categories. De Certeau speaks to the point: "The division of space makes possible a panoptic practice proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can he ohserved and measured, and thus control and 'include' them within its scope and vision. To he able to see (far into the distance) is also to he able to predict, to run ahead of time by reading a READING THE PLYMOUTH ROCK ORATION Webster and the Whig Tradition For all its fame, Wehster's address was neither the first nor last such celebration of the Pilgrim arrival. Its themes resonated against a long tradition of similar orations, and its language, more crafted to be sure than the average run, drew from a set of commonplaces dating to the founding itself. Wesley Craven cites 1769 as the first ceremony devoted exclusively to the event, and notes that although organized commemorations lapsed during the Revolution, they returned hy the early years of 468 Western Joumal of Communication the nineteenth century, i* Their epideictic form, moreover, assured listeners and readers that they could expect a familiar rendering of images and ideas, a hearty retelling of courage, hardship, faith, victory, and reward. The Plsmnouth commemorations accordingly helped secure a highly particularized conception of America's "errand into the wilderness"; hy the time of Webster's 1820 bicentennial address, that conception was firmly, if not irrevocably, in place. Webster's legacy is hased largely on the fact that he helped articulate that vision with such lasting force. He was able to do so in part by drawing on a Whig interpretation of history, and by speaking its vocabulary of commitments. The spieaker's veneration for Whig values, Craig Smith concludes, "comprises one ofthe most fjersistently mentioned tenets of Webster's philosophy. It is without doubt his firm belief that history, tradition, and generational loyalty are the mystical cords that bind a people into a nation. "^^ Citizens of the early republic, according to Daniel Walker Howe's analysis, had available to them two such vocabularies, roughly distinguishahle along party lines. Both functioned in important ways to interpret the meaning of the past and consequently the meaning of American politicaJ life. Whereas Democrats clung to a contractual language of govemment, Whig leaders advanced a highly developed discourse of inheritance, a language of tradition by which commitments were secured, values transmitted, and precedents respected. Expierience, they stressed, was to be their guide into and through the successive stages of growth and prosperity that were sure to mark the American story. The institutions of culture, which helped instill responsibility £ind ensure public appreciation of the past, were thus vital to the construction of an official public memory. Ai>ove all, Webster and the Whigs thought that to "make a proper use ofthe past," as Howe writes, "it was necessary to recognize that history constituted the gradual unfolding of a pattern. To divine the secret of this pattern would be to possess the key to understanding the destiny of America and all mankind."^* The occasion and Webster's name were together enough to draw some 1,500 admirers to Plymouth's First Parish Church. Among the visiting worthies were Harvard President John Kirkland, Edward Everett, and George Ticknor. Accounts of the speech invariably note Tickor's fear that, upon hearing it, "blood might gush from my temples," and even the staid John .Adams, upon reading it, thought the address "ought to be read at the end of every century, and read at the end of every year, for ever and ever."!' Beyond its immediate reception, Webster's speech continued to command an unfiagging reputation, as if the speaker had somehow inserted the text into the very public memory it sought to construct and sustain. In its account of the pubhshed text, for example, the North American Review noted: "We may cite the occasion, upon which, and the place wherein this discourse was delivered, no less than the discourse Fall 1993 469 itself, to hear us out in maintaining, that Americans regard the scenes of their national glory with sentiments, as honorable to their character, as they are worthy of the cause of liherty and patriotism, "i^ Henry Cabot Lodge picks up the story again by noting that Wehster's "theme was a splendid one, both in the intrinsic interest ofthe speech itself, and in the character of the Pilgrims, in the vast results which had grown up from their humble heginnings, and in the principles of free government, which had spread from the cabin of the exiles over the face of a continent."!® To this day the oration can he found memorialized by the historian Merrill Peterson as "a literary classic, long celehrated for its soul-stirring passages, recited by generations of schoolhoys, and cherished as a primer of New England principle."^" Like Wehster's own discourse, lore has a way of ohscuring the more volatile contexts within which the speech ought to be placed. Webster's celebration of American unity came hut five years after the Massachusetts' constitutioneil crisis, a year after the financial panic of 1819, and was delivered in the portentous year of 1820, when compromise proved a far cry from resolution of the slavery issue. At the same time, there is Webster's own deeply vested interests in the commercial, legal, and political concerns of the New England elite. Thus Webster's stress on family and community throughout the oration may be read as a symbolic bulwark against cultural change. In this, to be sure, he would be consistent with the Boston elite of his day, a group which, Paul Goodman explains, "utilized an elaborate web of kinship ties which made the family a potent institution that gave them cohesion, continuity, and stahility so they might perpetuate their power, prominence, and way of Ufe. In addition to ties of blood," Goodman continues, "the elites shared a common set of values which defined proper behavior, transmitted goals to the young and provided a measure by which to judge and punish deviance. "2^ At times like this, the need for proper memory takes on a poignant quality, an urgency about which Wehster was deeply impressed. Textual Analysis: Public Memory and the Space of Power Wehster's opening lines provide, in Edward Said's apt phrase, an "inaugural logic" where "the creation of authority is paramount."^^ In addition to the familiar terms of henediction Wehster invokes a vocahulary that determines the oration's range of acceptable meaning. This vocahulary is conspicuously temporal—hut only for the moment. We miss the key rhetorical action ofthe text unless we note a characteristic shift within the introduction from temporal to spatial frames. This transformation prefigures the governing movement of the text as a whole, and is basic to its formal production of meaning. Here we can locate an "inaugural logic" wherein temporal referents give way to the morefixedand circumscribed spaces of authority. The introduction thus represents a first entry into the calculus of puhlic memory, and contains 470 Western Joumal of Communication within itself a set of anticipations resolvable only sis the speech progresses to its predetermined end. It is, declares Webster, an "auspicious morn."^ Gathered at the Rock two hundred years after the POgrims' landing, speaker and audience together remember as they should, for "full of present joy, and gilding with bright beams the prospect of futurity, is the dawn that awakens us to the commemoration of the landing of the Pilgrims." Even as Webster's language expands to meet the ornate standards of nineteenthcentury oratory, it compresses and deepens a common stock of meanings. Hence the terms "day," "morn," "present," "futurity," and "dawn" £ire quickly integrated into a greater narrative structure. Wehster's second paragraph displays this process: it reinscribes the temporal referents ofthe first into a myth of national expansion that will come to envelop the speech as a whole: Living at an epoch which naturally marks the progress ofthe history of our native land, we have come hither to celehrate the great event with which that history commenced. Forever honored be this, the place of oiir fathers' refuge! Forever rememhered the day which saw them, weary and distressed, broken in everything but spirit, poor in all but faith and courage, at last secure from the dangers of wintry seas and impressing this shore with the first footsteps of civilized man!" Webster's grand sweep through the ages makes dramatic an unstated hut hasic premise: that everyone is similarly equipped to appreciate and therefore to act according to the dictates of human community. The third paragraph, at first glance an abrupt departure, in effect gives pointed expression to this premise, and stands as one ofthe key passages in the address. Its thesis is clear—we are bound in memory to the past and future by collective duty—and its implications equally so. This is an address about the forces which hold people together through space and time; it is therefore a discovtrse of commitments, of obligations assumed in order to sustain and strengthen the binding ties. Webster knew that the ground for these commitments had to he more sure than the shifting attachments of party alliance or personal fealty. If pieople—if nations—are to be held together in memory, such forces had to transcend the vagaries of history. Webster finds his source in nature itself, and from there he traces the chords of public memory: "It is a noble faculty of our nature which enable us to connect our thoughts, our sjrmpathies, and our happiness, with what is distant, in place or time; and looking before and after, to hold communion at once with our ancestors and our posterity." The "noble faculty," in tum provides for a kind of vantage point from which the audience can see not only the past but the future as well: by running along the Une of future time, by contemplating the probable fortunes of those who are coming after us; 1^ attempting something which may promote their happiness, and leave some not dishonorable memorial of ourselves for their regard, when we shall sleep with the fathers, we protract our own earthly being, and seem to crowd whatever is future, as well as all that is past, into the narrow compass of our earthly existence. Fall 1993 471 Public memory is in this sense an expression of transcendent imagination, a universal ability privatized as a cognitive trait which still serves the imperatives of community, Webster's admixture of Enlightenment psychology and Romantic sentiment was not especially novel, but here it functions in important ways.^* It highlights the possibility that those who would exercise such a faculty assume a superior vantage point, an elevated status which enables the perceiving subject to feel and to see the receding past and approaching future, to know, indeed, the rhythms of divinity itself: so neither is it false or vain to consider ourselves as interested and connected with our whole race, through all time; allied to our ancestors; allied to our posterity; closely compacted on all sides with others; ourselves being but links in the great chain of being, which begins with the origin of our race, runs onward througb its successive generations, binding together the past, the present, and the future, and terminating at last, with the consummation of all things earthly, at the throne of God, Webster's own assumption, his own command of this vantage point, here initiates the first in a series of six transformations; in each phase, as I have indicated, temporal referents give way to morally-charged categories of space, Webster thus offers the willing citizen a way out of the uncertainties of time to the better guarded spaces of cultural authority. This space, at once grounded and elevated, is constructed in Webster's discourse as the realm in which the "noble faculty" is given its greatest latitude. It is, in short, the space of public memory, the Archimedean point from which lines of descent and ascent can be drawn. The piervasive spatial and optical imagery that now infuses Wehster's description dramatically testifies to this triumph: There is a local feeling, connected with this occasion, too strong to be resisted; a sort of genius of the place, which inspires and awes us. We feel that we are on the spot, where the first scene of our history was laid; where the hearths and altars of New England were first placed, wbere Christianity, and civilization, and letters made their first lodgment, in a vast extent of country, covered with a wUdemess, and peopled by roving barbarians, "A sort of genius of the place": within Webster's discourse the site of landing becomes a Rock of Ages, at once the symbol of arrival and of hojie. It is, moreover, the ground upon which the spieaker can reflect on the origins and growth of the American errand. I have treated the introduction at such length because within it we find a synecdochic representation of the address as a whole. As Webster undertakes to examine (1) the motives of the Pilgrims; (2) their unique character; (3) the progress of America since the arrival; and (4) the legacy of American achievement, the audience can witness what is in effect a four part variation on the same theme. In each section, the narratives of arrival are completed by giving to historical events their terminal point in the morally sanctified space that is America,^^ There is no doubt that the journey, no matter how perilous and unsure at the time, is always to some place, itself invested with moral significance hy the very fact of their arrival, "The sea was rough," 472 Western Journal of Communication Webster recalls, "and the women and children already sick .. . the men and women and children shaking with fear eind with cold, as many as the small vessels could bear, venture oflF on a dangerous sea." Hardship notwithstanding, the Pilgrims were strengthened by their will to liberty. In the economy of Webster's narrative, place vindicates past, America its history: the PUgrims surmounted all difficulties, and braved a thousand dangers, to find here a place of refuge and of rest. Thanks be to God, that this spot was honored as the asylum of religious liberty. May its standard, reared here, remain forever!—May it rise up as high as heaven, till its banner shall fan the air of both continents, and wave as a glorious ensign of peace and security to all nations! As Webster reflects now on the distinctive character of the Pilgrims, this movement from journey to salvation to celehration gets repeated under a different guise. The pattern is basic to Webster's construction of public memory. It allows the speaker to control the direction and coherence of events by imix)sing upon the past a type of narrative logic; with it, he folds into history a telos always and already present in memory. With it, too, Webster is able to drive events to their moral consummation, there glorified in the image of America, a land, in the words of Frederick Somkin, where "space and divine purpose were bound in a conjoint destiny."^® To "place" memory is to control it; it is to make the past local and one's own. Such placement is proprietary to the extent that history is thereby owned, made the exclusive property of a people by virtue of' its being properly remembered. Webster is anxious to distinguish that memory from others, from memories, indeed, which compete with an idealized American peist. Neither the Greek expeditions nor Roman imp>erialism, Asian expansion nor Caribbean settlement proved ultimately successful; it was left to the Pilgrims to fully realize their potential on American shores. "A new existence awaited them here," Webster declares, "and when they saw these shores, rough, cold, barbarous, and barren as then they were, they beheld their country. That mixed and strong feeling, which we call love of country, and which is, in general, never extinguished in the heart of man, grasped and embraced its propier object here." Webster's amor patria thus signals a feeling at once universal and peculiar to the American. It betokens love not only of sacred ground, but a collective reverence for the past. His narrative of that past functions thereby to describe the process by which patriotism and memory become localized as distinctively American. Webster was adamant that this trait be recognized and passed down through the generations: "Whoever would write our history," he says, should recall this "feeling, which more and more encroached upon the old, till an undivided sentiment, that this was their country, oanipied the heart; and patriotism, shutting out from its embraces the parent realm, became local to America." Fall 1993 473 Webster of course knew himself to be writing that history; it is no small part of his legacy that he chose through the ceremonial oration a mode of address ideally suited to Whig interpretations ofthe past. In the process, Wehster held that experience before the world, and found in its sheer expanse proof of American virtue. Here he played a leading role in that tradition wherehy, in Somkin's words, "the American messianic dream of converting the world to republicanism hy the power of example came to be interpreted in terms of the physical extension of American territory. "2' The third section of Wehster's oration, in which he describes this progress into prosperity, hrilliantly reproduces the basic terms of that tradition. To depict progress in spatial terms is to render it graphic; it fixes historical events vrithin an image and exhibits the physical correlates of American enterprise. Within the Whig idiom, however, rapid growth is never arbitrary or unchecked, hut rather grounded in the stabilizing forces of culture. For this the spatial ims^e is utterly appropriate, for, in Maurice Halhwachs' words, "it is the spatial image alone that, by reason of its stability, gives us an illusion of not having changed through time and of retrieving the past in the present.^^ Progress is always directed, its bounty the ordered and predetermined result of puhlic virtue. Wehster locates the origins of American progress, accordingly, in the ideological and institutional achievements of the Pilgrim forehears. Turning back again, he points out that a "broad and lasting foundation had heen laid: excellent institutions had been established; much of the prejudices of former times had hecome removed; a more liberal and catholic spirit on suhjects of religious concern had hegun to exert itself, and many things conspired to give promise of increasing future prosperity." The fourth and final phase of Webster's encomium is not so much a separate category as a terminal point arrived at through the preceding depictions. Addressing as he does' 'the nature and constitution of society and government," Wehster invokes in relatively ahstract terms the key topoi of Whig history, including the "people," military, and education. The most pointed discussion, however, regards property, and in its image can be discerned the governing term of the speech as a whole. In property Wehster had found the basis for (literally) grounding the fundamental values of the repuhlic; in its compression of values £ind commitments history itself could he made explicahle and ordered. Property was "the true hasis most certainly of a popular government," and it provided for "that natural elevation of character which the consciousness of property inspires." Property, Wehster continued, could he that "common sentiment" that would "unite us all." Property may thus be understood in Webster's address as a material analogue to public memory, the instrument by which values are held cxiUectively and in perpetuity. It was the very means hy which the repuhlic was made possible. This is why, Webster reasons, it was "to be the part of political 474 Western Joumal of Communication wisdom, to found govemment on property; and to establish such distributions of property, by the laws which regulate its transmission and alienation, as to interest the great majority of society in the support of the government.'' Prof»erty, considered in Webster's address as a "strategy," is thus a type of placement. It fixes past and future in a direct line of inheritance, and gives to its present owners both rewards and the ohligation to sustain its imperatives. But property and place are above all vantage points, strategic locations privileged by ownership and the authority that comes with possession. What Webster would have his puhlic remember are the values which propierty itself celebrates: discovery, growth, prosperity, and ultimately the duty to pass on those values. Space, place, property, ground, the Rock: the rhetorical force of these categories and the images they display are mnemonic devices of a sort, useful as a way of controlling and benefitting from the more transient realities of time and history. In de Certeau's langueige, such strategies of placement "reduce temporal relations to spatial ones through the analj^ical attrihution of a proper place to each particular element and through the combinatory organization of the movements specific to units or groups of units. " ^ Perhaps, then, no other lines so completely capture the full range of Webster's meaning as this concluding passage: The hours of this day are rapidly flying, and this occasion will soon be passed. Neither we nor our children can expect to hehold its retum. They are in the distant regions of futurity, they exist only in the all-creating power of God, who shall stand here, a hundred years hence, to trace, through us, their descent from the Pilgrims, and to survey, eis we have now surveyed, the progress of their country, during the lapse of a century. We would anticipate their concurrence witb us in our sentiments of deep regard for our common ancestors. We would anticipate and partake the pleasure with which they will then recount the steps of New England's advancement. On the morning of that day, although it will not disturb us in our repose, the voice of acclamation and gratitude, commencing on the Rock of Plymouth, shall he transmitted through millions of the sons of the Pilgrims, till it lose itself in the murmurs ofthe Pacific seas. In this, the climactic moment of the address, Webster celebrates the l(^c wherein power is sanctified in and by space. Its force is the effect of strategy, a series of discursive re-placements that the past assimulate into a dominant present, itself spatialized as a site of authority and privileged perspective. Webster's speech is a textualized expression of de Certeau's principle: "strategies are actions which, thanks to the establishment of a place of power (the property of a proper), elaborate theoretical places (^stems and totalizing discourses) capable of articulating an ensemble of physical places in which forces are ^stributed."^" CONCLUSION As it is performed, public memory is created and sustained through a series of sjonbolic acts. These acts, recognizable as public gestures, take on their meaning and rhetorical force through a combination of custom Fall 1993 475 and vested interest. Thus Webster's address: it is marked by the ritualized display of official values and functions, in the words of Bruce James Smith, as "the process of giving a name to a way of life—the articulation ofthe familiar. "^^ For this purpose, the epideictic form is ideal; situated within a complex of festivity and convention, the commemorative oration is designed to be seen as well as heard; it is a consummately public act, self-consciously performative, without existence until brought into being by an audience. As a genre, it is defined by its capacity to project back onto the audience values it believes to possess already. But for all of its apparent benignity, the epideictic oration can be a powerful instrument of reproduction, and those who control the space of public discourse can wield its resources in exceedingly effective ways. Webster's oration exhibits this process of reproducing cultural verities; it is a perfonnance marked not by the improvisation ofthe powerless but by the strategic rehearsal of a stylized past. It is, to extend Hobsbawm's insight, "essentially a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing rejjetition.' '^^ As contested, public memory represents a site of competition, of voices strategically or tactically claiming access to the past. When Webster exercised epideictic form as a means of inducement, he £tsked his audience to identify with and gain from am officially sponsored version of the past. The Plymouth Rock Oration is thus the surest kind of evidence for the contested character of public memory, precisely because it defaces its own politics—even as it promotes the basic tenets of the Whig tradition. Webster's is a discourse of control, an attempt to stabilize the meta-narratives of his culture to such a degree that its contestable terms are thoroughly elided. The speech may thus be understood as a ritual enactment, a performance which rehearses a set of momentarily stabilized commonplaces and depends for its success on the suppression of competing possibilities. As it is textuaUzed, public memory is reflected in and projected by discursive convention. It is, I hope to have shown, readable, and may be examined for its strategic presentation. I have argued on the basis ofthe foregoing that the key strategy in Webster's address may be read in its spatial transformations. The action ofthe text is represented by a series of placements, a systematic ordering of events by reference to a symbolic ground. The process is recognizable as a subsumption of history under the sign of nationhood. The Plymouth Rock Oration may then be read through its strategies of transformation, whereby the past starts as an object of commemoration and ends as a rationale for government by property. In this way the celebrated accomplishments of the past are fixed within a complex of distinctively American values. These are values, ultimately, of place, made perpetual as citizens fulfill their duty to pass them forever on. As a result, government by property remains at once a matter of ancestral pride and of hope for future prosperity. Within the terms of Wehster's address, public memory does not function 476 Western Journal of Communication as a resource for cultural transformation. Quite the contrary: as an exemplar of dominant culture, it functions as a kind of collective insurance pwlicy, a gu£U"antor of security for all those would remember properly. ENDNOTES 1. This theme is treated more fuUy in J. Robert Cox, "Memory, Critical Theory, and the Argument From History," Argumeratoijon and Aduocacy, 27, (1990): 1-13. 2. Quoted in David Thelan, "Memory and American History," Journal of American History, 75, (1989) 1120. 3. See Randall A. Lake, "Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest Rhetoric," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 77, (1991) 124; Lake's essay is an exemplary altemative to the analysis of dominant culture. George N. Dionisopoulos and Steven R. Goldzwig, " 'The Meaning of Vietnam': Political Rhetoric as Revisionist Cultural History," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 78, (1992): 61-79, is an illuminating examination of the discursive strategies of the powerful. My general approach is akin to the Dionisopoulos and Gioldzwig essay; however, I am concerned less to detail the strategies of revision than to examine the discursive moves by which official narratives are sustained and strengthened. 4. The critical literature on Webster's ceremonial speaking is astonishingly thin: to date there has not been a single essay devoted to Webster's epideictic oratory published in the discipline's primary journals. Craig R. Smith, "A Reinterpretation of Aristotle's Notion of Rhetoric Form," Western Journal of Speech Communication, 43, (1979): 14-25, offers some insight into Webster's rhetorical art. For genera! studies of Webster's art, see Irving Bartlett, "Daniel Webster the Orator and Writer," in Kenneth Shewmaker, ed., Daniel Webster The Completest Man (Hanover, NH: University Presses of New England, 1990; Edwin Black, "The Sentimental Siyie as Escapism, Or, Tbe Devil With Dan'i Webster," in Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, eds. Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action (Falls Church, VA.: Speech Communication Association, 1978): 75-86; Paul D. Erickson, "Daniel Webster's Myth of the Pilgrims," New England Quarterly, 57, (1984): 44-64; Wilbur S. Howell and Hoyt H. Hudson, "Daniel Webster," in WiUiam N. Brigance, ed., A History and Criticism ofAmerican Public Address, vol. 2 (New York; Russell and Russell, 1960): 665-733; Glen E. Mills, "Daniel Webster's Principles of Rhetoric, Speech Monographs, 9, (1942): 124-40; and Craig R. Smith, Defender of the Union: The Oratory ofDaniel Webster (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989): 25-42. 5. Thelan 1122. 6. The relationship between epideictic address and issues of culture and power is best illustrated in the following studies: Black, "Sentimental Style"; Celeste M. Condit, "The Functions of Epideictic: The Boston Msissacre Orations as Exemplar," Communication Quarterly, 33, (1985): 284-299; Richard Crable and Steven L. Vibbert, "Mobil's Epideictic Advocacy: 'Observations' of Prometheus-Bound," Communication Monographs, 50, (1983): 380-394; Michael C. McGee, "In Search of the People: A Rhetorical Altemative," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 61. (1975): 235-249; and, for a trenchant analysis of ceremonial oratory in Webster's period, see Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992): 41-62. 7. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory. Commemoration, and Patriotism in tke Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-rorsity Press, 1992) 20. 8. The most successful recent effort to theorize this aesthetic-rhetoric relationship may be found in Robert Hariman, "Decorum, Power, and the Courtly Style," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 78. (1992): 149-172; its performative dimensions, especially in acts of resistance, is treated in Dwi^t Conquergood, "Ethnography, Rhetoric, and Performance," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 78, (1992): 80-97; see also James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts ofResistance: Hidden Transcripts New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 9. The contested and contestir^ properties of commemorative discourses, particularly in postmodern contexts, is examined in Carole Blair, Marsha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Fall 1993 477 Pucci, Jr,, "Public Memorializing in Postmodernity: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Prototype," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 77, (1991)- 263-288 10, Tbelanll27. 11, Bodnar 19, 12, Edward S, Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (BJoomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), 218, 13, Micbel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans, Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1984) 36. The relevant and recent work on time is provided by Lake, "Between Mytb and History," 14, Wesley Craven, Legend of the Founding Fathers (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 82-84. 15, Smith, Defender, 9. 16, Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979) 73, My characterization of Whig ideology is patterned on Howe's discussion, pp, 69-95, See also Thomas Brown, Politics and Statesmanship: Essays on the American Whig Party (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 17, The Ticknor and Adams reactions are quoted in Merrill Peterson, The Great Triumverate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) 107. 18, North American Review, 15, (1822) 22. 19, Henry Cabot Lodge, Daniel Webster (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifllin, 1911) 117-118, 20, Peterson 107, 21, Paul Goodman, "Ethics and Enterprise: Tbe Values of tbe Boston Elite, 18001860," American Quarterly, 18, (1966) 437, 22, Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975) 32, 23, Daniel Webster, Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, vol 1, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1903) 181, All citations hereafter seriatem. 24, Further treatment of what migbt be called tbe Wbig psychology of history cEin be found in Howe, 29-31, 218-219, 25, For more extensive analysis of arrival narratives, see Stephen H, Browne, "Samuel Danforth's Errand in to the Wilderness and the Discourse of Arrival in Early American Culture," Communication Quarterly, 40, (1992): 91-101, 26, Fred Somkin, Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967) 110, 27, Somkin 111. 28, Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans, Francis J. Ditter, Jr,, and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper and Row, 1980) 157, 29, de Certeau 38, 30, de Certeau 38, 31, Bruce James Smitb, Politics and Remembrance: Republican Themes in Machiavelli. Burke, and Tocqueville (Princeton, N,J.: Princeton University Press, 1985) 20, 32, Hobsbawm, Eric J,, in Eric Hobsbaum and Terence Ranger, eds,. The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 4.
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