Content area
Full Text
Scholars of the presidency often begin research or examination of the institution with the "modern" presidential era that is said to begin with Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This kind of approach, as well as the "traditional/ modern" paradigm in general, is problematic because it tends to summarily dismiss a large percentage of the executive officeholders due to their seeming lack of contribution to our understanding of the contemporary presidency. Instead, when the presidents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are closely examined alongside all of their peers, they are remarkable not for the ways in which they fail to resemble today's executive, but for the ways in which they are similar. As such, we, as scholars who are looking for the most complete examination of the presidency, its evolution, and its changes, must move past the adoption of easy handles and evaluate the entirety of presidential history to ensure each era be recognized for its important contributions to the twenty-first century presidency.
Almost six years ago, as a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, I was first introduced to a division that exists in the classification of presidential rhetoric and, indeed, of presidents themselves. The "modern" rhetorical presidency, a term largely coined by James Ceasar, Glen Thurow, Jeffrey Tulis, and Joseph Bessette in their article "The Rise of the Rhetorical Presidency" (1981) and more fully developed by Tulis in his book The Rhetorical Presidency (1987), has come to dominate presidential study, as well as the rhetoric of presidential scholarship itself. Indeed, because the modern presidency is presented in these works as the true origin of the rhetoric and the power of the contemporary presidency that we observe today, this demarcation is often used as a jumping-off point for much of the research in the field (Campbell 1996; Greenstein, Berman, and Felzenberg 1977; Landy 1985; liebovich 2001; McConnell 1967; Medhurst 1996a, 1996b; Pfiffner 2000; Polsby 1973; Rozell and Pederson 1997; Shaw 1987; Stuckey 1997). Additionally, if studies do not begin their analysis with a modern president, then they most likely busy themselves with attempting to determine the exact point of the origination of the modern (Gamm and Smith 1998; Greenstein 1978, 1982, 1988, 2000, 2006; Greenstein, Herman, and Felzenberg 1977; Kernell 1997; Milkis 1998;...