Whenever I listen to a minute or two of one of his rallies (which is as long as I can tolerate), I admire Donald Trump’s speaking ability. This is not the speechifying of many public figures. It is not like the famous speeches we may remember. It is different from JFK’s pronouncing that the U.S. was going to the moon; different from MLK’s I Have a Dream speech; or Ronald Reagan’s, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The oratory of those other figures was carefully scripted, and we knew that this was a performance for a massed audience. On occasion, Trump tries something similar, but we can always tell that he is reading words written by someone else.
Instead what I admire in Trump’s rallies is his “conversational” style. He does not seem to be talking to the massed audience all at once, but to an individual. (I say “conversational” because, of course, we don’t really think he would ever have a real conversation with anyone at his rallies or perhaps anywhere.) He has the ability to make it seem as if he is talking only to you, not just to a faceless crowd.
This makes me think about something I read decades ago about the development of popular music. Before microphones, singers sometimes used a megaphone to reach their audiences, but mostly they just projected their voice so that it could be widely heard. They were singing for a massed audience without any individuals being singled out. Think opera today. I may feel thrilled to hear the soprano, but I don’t feel that she is singing just to me. I am just one of many who is hearing her at the same time.
When amplification started, the popular culture historian I read said that at first singing styles did not change. The music was still for a massed audience. Then, according to that writer, Bing Crosby changed everything. He used the microphone in a new way that felt not that he was singing to a group, but was singing to every individual in that group. Close your eyes and listen to Crosby singing about that white Christmas. He is singing to you. It is a personal experience, not a mass one.
Trump’s strength in his rallies is that he does not talk to a crowd. He makes it seem as if he is talking to everyone personally, and that has turned out to be a powerful ability to attract and keep followers.
Trump has benefited from speaking to large public assemblages in this way. He reads the room seeking laughter and outrage from his listeners, and this serves to acknowledge them. It gives them an identity when they feel overlooked and some sort of hope that he can make their lives better.
In these rallies he is an heir to a much older America where people got education and entertainment by hearing speakers and lecturers. America’s golden age of oratory was from roughly 1870 to 1925, a time before the mass media of radio and television had permeated the nation. What there was instead was an extensive railroad network. Able to appear in towns of all sizes, speakers utilized this network to entertain and inform. People like Frederick Douglass, Emma Goldman, William Jennings Bryan, and Clarence Darrow may have had other careers, but they all were on the lecture circuit. For example, Frederick Douglass edited a newspaper and wrote much, but he was perhaps most widely known for his oratory, which not only spread his views but earned him sizeable sums.
These speaking tours must have been exhausting because the speakers were almost constantly on the move. Emma Goldman, for example, made 321 speeches in a year. In breaks from the Scopes trial in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, Darrow road the rails to Chattanooga and elsewhere to speak, and Bryan also appeared at auditoriums whenever the trial was in recess. Wherever such speakers appeared, they gave audiences their money’s worth, speaking for more than an hour, eliciting laughter and outrage as they tried to get the audiences to adopt their views. Trump may not know who these people were (When president Trump said, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”), and he certainly does not espouse the racial views of Douglass or the pro-labor, anti-capitalist views of Goldman, the true populism or religious faith of Bryan, nor the populism or agnosticism of Darrow. Even so, at his rallies he in essence shares a legacy with these and similar people. I can’t imagine he knows who they are, but if he did, he would not see them as kindred spirits; He would only despise them.
