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Freedom is the most familiar symbol in American political culture, but little is known about how presidents have employed this symbol in their discourse. This study uses quantitative and qualitative analysis to examine the language of freedom in more than seventy years worth of presidential speeches. The findings reveal a presidential narrative of freedom that has been remarkably constant over time. However, within this broad narrative, presidents' political ideology and the context in which they spoke led to significant differences in the way they defined freedom and in the way they used the term to define the nation.
There is perhaps no value that Americans cling to more tightly than freedom. Freedom has been the rallying cry of revolutions and the foundation of great social movements, from the founding of the nation to the Civil Rights movement and beyond. Symbolic images of freedom such as the Liberty Bell and the Statue of Liberty dominate the idealized stories of America's past, even as new images are crafted to carry on the tradition; the largest building being constructed on the site where the World Trade Center once stood, for instance, is called the Freedom Tower. Following the 2004 election, citizens in key battleground states were asked for a one-word answer to the question "What does America mean to you?" For roughly half of those asked, the answer was freedom (Cillizza 2006). Clearly, the idea of freedom has been, and continues to be, a tremendously important part of the American imagination. As Foner( 1994, 436) puts it, "What . . . could be more American than adevotion to freedom?" (see also Foner 2006; Lakoff 2006).1
Given the cultural resonance of the concept of freedom, it is unsurprising that the language of freedom (and liberty, freedom's rhetorical counterpart) is a staple of political discourse. Schochet (2003, 91) has noted that "liberty is one of the most important and . . . persistent notions in the political vocabulary of the West." In particular, American presidents have made use of the language of freedom (Coe and Domke 2006; Domke 2004; Ivie 1987). Take, for instance, President George W. Bush's second inaugural address. In a speech that was only 2,083 words long, the president managed to use some form of the...