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Introduction: Recovering the Lost Art of Researching the History of Rhetoric

Figure 1. The Ancient Theatre at Rhodes. Used with permission from the private collection of Jane E. Helppie.

A Rhetorical Faux Pas

Perhaps by its very nature, rhetoric is a subject that attracts interdisciplinary interest. Departments in English, communication, philosophy, linguistics and classical studies have provided us with great scholars who have refined theories, contributed to a better understanding of our history, constructed research methodologies, and offered heuristics for sensitive criticism. As the twenty-first century unfolds, we can look back with pride at our scholarly accomplishments and at how rhetoric has been integrated back into higher education. Yet, at one moment several years ago, I realized how fragile sustaining that momentum could be. In 1985, the then Speech Communication Association (now National Communication Association) awarded Wilbur Samuel Howell its highest honor, The Distinguished Service Award, in recognition of his career-long contribution to scholarship. I had known Professor Howell for many years; we participated together on panels, corresponded frequently and spoke to each other over the phone on a regular basis. When he learned of this award, Professor Howell called me, not just to share this news but also to ask a favor. Travel had become a great burden for him in his later years, and he asked if I would attend the convention and accept the award in his honor. I, of course, was delighted to share the moment, even as a bystander, and readily agreed. My obligations at the SCA Convention were relatively simple. I was to accept the award on Sam’s behalf and say a few words of appreciation. This simple task filled me with anxiety. It is, after all, an intimidating task to speak for one of last century’s great scholars of rhetoric and all the more so since I hold him in such personal esteem. I wanted my remarks to honor Professor Howell on that important occasion.

The point of this anecdote is not what I said at that banquet but how the audience reacted to what I said. In the process of honoring Wilbur Samuel Howell I mentioned not only the word “rhetoric” but “oratory” as well. Having worked closely with and across the fields of Communication and English for many years I know that “rhetoric” is a term shared by scholars both in Communication and English. In fact, the history of scholars of rhetoric interacting across disciplines is long and fruitful. Thus, even though Howell and I had been in English Departments for several years, no one saw either of us as outsiders to NCA. The audience’s discomfort was with the words “rhetoric” and “oratory.” Evidently, I had selected the words that listeners wished to have left unspoken. Yet, as any oralist will tell you, there is no turning back in orality once the word, as Homer says, passes through the barrier of your teeth. I simply could not erase the winged word acoustically. As I look back on that moment, I realize that the issue that was revealed by the audience’s reaction was that the terms “rhetoric” and “oratory” were politically incorrect. If I had used another synonym—perhaps communication—all would have been socially acceptable or at least tolerable. The safest of all terms was probably “discourse,” but by that point in the acceptance speech the damage already had been done.

For several years I thought a great deal about that moment. Perhaps, I considered, this event was an aberration and, at the moment, I had committed an unwarranted generalization. I think not. I am convinced that this faux pas uncovered a serious problem that constrains the field today: the belief that research in rhetoric is retrospective or, at best, static. That night’s audience associated the study of the history of rhetoric as an out-of-step phase of their march toward research excellence and believed that the terms “oratory” and “rhetoric” conjured up methods and topics that the discipline had outgrown. NCA has a large and growing stake in research methods and topics associated with the social sciences. This perspective has been represented in ways that make it appear to be incompatible with the tradition of humanistic scholarship that characterizes much of the field’s history. The growing intolerance toward the humanistic study of rhetoric has serious, detrimental consequences not only to the field in question but also for the entire temperament about research and what such research contributes. This introduction is an effort to reveal those consequences and to argue for the benefits of a more inclusive attitude than the one exhibited by listeners on that night.

It is important to emphasize that while I am convinced that this attitude existed with many in the audience on that day, such a perspective is not shared by scholars in other disciplines. Let me demonstrate a different perspective on rhetoric and oratory, one that comes from outside Communication. Classicists such as Eric Havelock, anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, sociologists such as Jack Goody and Ian Watt, and rhetoricians from English such as Walter Ong rushed to use such shared terms as “orality” and “oral” unabashedly (Havelock, Muse 24–29). Father Ong even dared to give it marquee status in his book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Since Father Ong’s book has just recently been translated into its seventh language I felt that saying “oratory” would have been tolerated with that night’s NCA elite, but it is clear that I had been the little boy who matter-of-factly told the Emperor that he was wearing no clothes. I had reminded my immediate audience of a past that some apparently did not wish to recognize. An anachronism that some no longer wished to associate with as a part of their present discipline had been exhumed for all.

This curious dissociation from the past preoccupies my thoughts. I wonder what those audience members back in 1985 would think about what I learned at our recent 1995 NCA Convention in San Antonio when the eminent classicist, Professor Michael Gagarin, told me over lunch that he recently had become the general editor of a multiple-volume series on the Attic Orators for The University of Texas Press. I learned that The University of Texas Press was delighted to acquire this project, and that it was also heavily sought after by at least one other prestigious press. What a fascinating condition! “Oratory” was embraced by distinguished presses, but I was at a conference composed of some members who wished the term to go away. On a personal level, I can tell you that there is no topic more engaging to graduate students in my English Department at TCU than orality and literacy, and in that respect, they mirror the interest emanating from both CCCC and MLA. In fact, some years ago, I reviewed a manuscript for PMLA on orality and literacy in St. Augustine’s work and was delighted that John D. Schaeffer’s fine essay was published in the October 1996 issue of PMLA. Oratory is alive and well everywhere . . . but in its home discipline. It is now widely accepted in the field of English that one route to studying literature historically is to understand the relationship between oratorical practices and literary habits.

What does all this related interest in orality tell me about that audience’s reaction twenty-five years ago? I believe that the explanation is quite simple: a lack of education and understanding. In little more than one generation of scholars we have almost lost the knowledge of our discipline and the lessons our predecessors taught us. To paraphrase the words of Sir Kenneth Clarke, we are hanging on to our “civilization” by the skin of our teeth. I believe, however, that the discomfort felt by those audience members on that night was grounded in ignorance, that a recognition of the fine research for which scholars such as Wilbur Samuel Howell have been justly honored was lost to some members of that audience due to a lack of understanding. I feel that this lack of understanding led to a lack of appreciation that, in turn, prompted many to seek other academic communities. Some historians of rhetoric and oratory have responded with a conservative and even reactionary approach. Many have walked away from their critics by voting with their feet, establishing their own journals and associations. The Rhetoric Society of America and The International Society for the History of Rhetoric are two examples of associations that came into existence because of the need for an arena and a voice for research in rhetoric and oratory.

Those who anticipate that I will now launch into a tirade vilifying any sort of research that is non-humanistic will be disappointed. No reactionary musings. No gloom and doom laments for pristine days now gone with the wind . . . quite the opposite! I wish to engage in the most fundamental benefits of history: to learn lessons from the past. The saving grace in NCA’s history of scholarship has been its multimodality, the willing disposition to make topics and methods inclusive. There was a time in the history of American universities when the opposite was true in other disciplines. Robert Scholes argues in his brilliant book, The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline, that one of the chief reasons leading to bitter arguments in literature over the last two decades can be traced back to the problem of having a canon based on authors rather than a canon based on methods. Unlike literature, Scholes argues, rhetoric’s canon is grounded in invention and based on methods. Scholes believes that one reason that rhetoric has risen in this century is because modifications to its canon have sought to increase the sensitivity of understanding discourse rather than to replace one set of favored authors with another. Despite Scholes’s praise for rhetoric, even a canon based on methods can have its own share of problems. In an effort to search for a disciplinary identity some rhetoricians have sought to define themselves by methods rather than problems. Like cancer, these educators sought to make all cells in the organism look like themselves and destroyed those that did not match. Following a German model of universities, departments became specialized and isolated. In that milieu of purity disciplines sought respect. Some in NCA are advocating such a path, and I suspect that the reaction I experienced in 1985 was a manifestation of that “sweep under the rug” mentality. Today, the idea of a university is changing, moving away from Balkanized, autonomous departments, moving toward interacting and even collaborating. Universities are again becoming interdisciplinary in action and mentality. It is not that they are returning to interdisciplinarity but that they are becoming so in a new and different way. I believe that the route to understanding the reaction of that night’s audience and the internal problems that led up to it can best be found by examining the research methods and topics most currently practiced.

Basic Research and Primary Scholarship: Treading Up a Slippery Slope

One of the biggest problems in recovering the lost art of researching the history of rhetoric is an obvious one: so few of us are doing historical research in rhetoric. On the surface, this statement appears ludicrous. Our journals regularly publish a number of essays where the most appropriate descriptive adjective is “historical.” In addition to articles, one could argue, a number of important books dealing with historical studies have been published. Finally, organizations such as the International Society for the History of Rhetoric and the American Society for the History of Rhetoric are thriving; in fact, at the 1997 NCA Convention in Chicago there were approximately twenty panels from ASHR appearing on the convention program. Yet, much of what is done in our discipline is not basic research, that is, new primary scholarship. Rather, what are presented as historical studies are critiques on secondary scholarship, speculative essays on meta-theory and point/counter-point debates over characterizations of ideologies. As I will discuss later, these approaches have value and deserve to be heard. They do not, however, equate with basic historical research. Specific illustrations will anchor my point. Over the last several years I have been involved in projects that require a re-examination of pioneering work in rhetoric and oratory. I contributed to the classical sections of Winifred Bryan Horner’s Historical Rhetoric and both of her editions of The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric (along with a minor contribution in the forthcoming edition) as well as Speech Communication in the 20th Century. A few years later, I was asked to write a commentary on the emergence of rhetoric journals over the last thirty years for Philosophy and Rhetoric. These projects obligated me to re-examine research that is now decades old. The reviews that I did over a sixteen-year period highlighted some demonstrable trends. One of the most dominant trends of earlier scholarship was that the typical research study done in rhetoric and oratory was primary; scholars would do archival work, field work, translate important primary material and make theoretical interpretations directed at explicating primary material not, as is often now the case, eliciting a reaction to secondary sources.

I noted this trend in contrast with the occasional opposite—the Guru paper. In the early years of my graduate education—which I characterize here as the twilight period after these pioneering studies—I noticed that much of the work published in journals was not research but rather commentary. At the time, I had little tolerance for published work based upon (what I thought was) idiosyncratic opinion. I had thought that all research should be basic research—work that provides new evidence that directly contributes to the scholarship of our field. At the time, I yearned to know the “facts,” and those essays that did not measure up to this standard seemed to me only to have the outward form of scholarly research but not the substance. My fellow graduate students and I even developed a condescending term for such pieces. We called them “Guru papers,” published essays written by (usually) prominent leaders of the field. These commentaries seemed to contain not a hint of research but a load of speculative, subjective critical remarks . . . or so I thought!

I also was bothered by assumptions that (I thought) went unchallenged. For example, when I was a student, we were led to think that Sophists were inferior thinkers about rhetoric when contrasted with Plato and Aristotle. We were also encouraged to believe that rhetoric thrived only in democracies such as Athens or republics such as Rome’s as well as believe that Athenian rhetoric equaled all Greek rhetoric and that Roman rhetoric was only a modified adaptation of Athenian rhetoric. In such a frame of mind we went from Greek to Roman rhetoric without questioning or understanding how Greek rhetoric came to influence Roman rhetoric—we just somehow knew that it did! Looking back now I see that I should have asked more basic questions and challenged more assumptions, although I am sure that my former professors will readily say that I did more than my share of “resisting” as a student. Perhaps a kinder and fairer answer would be for me to admit that these professors did not know the answer to such questions because we, as a profession, had not sought to find them out and supply them with such information. We had not directed our efforts at finding out answers as our founding fathers and mothers had done. Now that my beard is grayer and my hair is shorter and thinner, I see the constraints my former teachers had much more clearly, and I even see those Guru papers differently. I appreciate great scholars sharing the wisdom they acquired over a lifetime of research and teaching, the type of knowledge that is the consequence of talent, practice and experience over years. Yet, I also see that, as a profession, we fell short in giving our teachers the information they needed to enrich the knowledge of our discipline for our future students.

I still feel the need and importance of basic research that I first sensed as a graduate student is present. While my views about the worth of critical commentaries has modified, the concerns are still present, principally because there is a dark side to this brilliant coin. I am concerned because I see a genre emerging which is a variant of the sort of “Guru papers” that I once chided but now admire—particularly in the area of historical research—and I feel that it is a problem that affects the training and preparation of our students to do primary historical scholarship. Over the last decade I have seen basic research in the history of rhetoric replaced by critical posturing, speculative theory and meta-historiography. These enterprises, although varying from criticism to theory to method, all share a trait—interpretation—often without advancing basic knowledge. In short, these are “Guru papers” but not advanced as the consequence of a career of careful historical research or years of classroom experience. Rather, such statements stand in as replacements for (and become) the research itself.

At this point, I would like to nip some possible inferences in the bud. I am not against criticism; I am not opposed to advancing warranted interpretation; I am not opposed to self-reflection on our methods. These enterprises are valuable and deserve their place in our field. What I am concerned about is these enterprises operating independently from basic research and existing as ends in themselves. Our first and necessary obligation is to provide new information, new material evidence, new data. Then we can use the tools of criticism and interpretation to understand this evidence and, if needed, to develop new methods to refine our theories and analyses. When we understand this important perspective, the agenda for educating students to engage in historical scholarship will become clearer.

In the April 1977 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Barnett Baskerville wrote an important essay, “Must We All Be ‘Rhetorical Critics’?” The essay was important because it was itself a telling criticism about rhetorical criticism. Baskerville’s concern was that the interest in critical work was so fashionable that it lured students away from the more laborious work of historical scholarship. Quoting Donald C. Bryant, Baskerville asserted, “rhetorical criticism must depend almost entirely upon historical knowledge for its effectiveness” (112). In his own words, Baskerville concluded his argument by stating: “In our field, as in most fields, there is a need for scholars who can record accurately and artistically the history of our art as it relates to more general history, to delineate its place in and contributions to the cultural history of the nation” (116).

Baskerville expressed his concern in 1977, and I believe that his voice responds to a problem we have today. In the May 1995 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, the editor, Robert L. Ivie, prefaced the issue with his introduction, “The Social Relevance of Rhetorical Scholarship” (138). Ivie expressed his concern over the current separation between rhetorical theory and social criticism. In much the same way that Baskerville argued for historical scholarship as a grounding for criticism, Ivie expressed his belief “that the language of rhetorical theory, which academic criticism subscribes to and attempts to refine, should prove of heuristic value to those who would engage in significant social criticism and that theory would benefit from its increased accountability as a social heuristic” (138). The point is clear in both arguments. Sensitive criticism—whether it concerns historical or contemporary issues—must be grounded in basic research. Understanding what we criticize is as essential as how we analyze. This point is particularly evident in historical studies. Our students are being trained in the history of rhetoric as critics at the expense of, and not complementary with, training in historiography. Certainly the problem I pose is not a new one. In the past century alone I can think of three such related situations. In the early decades of the twentieth century literary scholars expressed concern that literary history was being replaced by literary criticism. In the middle of that century Communication scholars expressed concern that the history and criticism of public address was becoming less history and exclusively criticism. Lastly, our present condition in the history of rhetoric is such that the actual chronicling of rhetoric’s history is being replaced by criticism content to comment upon and refine what has already been recorded rather than advancing any new historical information.

Baskerville’s concerns remind me of the voice of another even earlier scholar, the seventeenth century father of archaeology, Jacob Spön. Spön believed that the monopoly of classical philology as the sole route to understanding Antiquity unnecessarily constrained advancements toward understanding Ancient Greece. Spön believed that non-literary sources were also material evidence that should no longer be ignored. He recommended expanding the research domain of philology to areas such as archaeology and epigraphy. Spön also recommended that scholars arise from their arm chairs, actually go to Greece and engage in field work. He saw ancient remains as “books whose stone and marble pages have been written on with iron points and chisels” (Etienne 38). We too must expand our domain beyond the established canon of literary texts of rhetoric, for texts—including theoretical treatises—are only one form of material evidence. And that form, at best, is a transmitted one, corrupted necessarily by generations of well-intentioned scribes and the unsympathetic ravages of time.

The contributions made by the past century’s historians are remarkable, and they must be acknowledged, but there are concerns with the present direction. We have many critics who have not demonstrated the talents or skills that they see lacking in others. This type of posturing and orientation—often done in the classroom—indirectly encourages students to passively respond to research rather than to actively produce it. The quality of such responses, moreover, is often judged by how telling the criticism is; that is, the quality of a student’s performance is adjudicated by how well he or she can deconstruct the work of another rather than an orientation that encourages students to advance their own findings and make their own contributions.

A second concern about current work in the history of rhetoric is an over-emphasis in historiography as an abstract topic of discussion without the development of new, sensitive methods of historical research. In other words, a great deal of emphasis is spent not on the actual activity of doing history but abstract discussion about the notions and presuppositions about doing history. Certainly, both before and throughout the time that one engages in historical work serious concerns about method and analysis must always be asked. This process, however, is inextricably bound with the activity of research in the history of rhetoric; the epistemology of writing history is a process that is done during the act. Engaging in questions of historiography without eventually performing historical research, however, leaves historiography on the level of the speculative—work done that may possibly be effective but never performed. That determination of effectiveness, however, is only consequenced by actually writing history.

One manifestation of this trend in historiography is lap-top research that encourages students only to look at the exegesis of the text. Many would argue that “new criticism” or the analysis of the text as an entity unto itself is no longer practiced. Yet, much of our current work in the history of rhetoric is based on the idea of “close readings” of works, confusing this act with the philological labor of textual criticism or the painstaking scholarship required to provide a careful translation. Analysis as “close readings” that presuppose the text to be the only source of knowledge has attractions. The work is facile; one does not need to go across the world seeking evidence but only to slide one’s chair over to the book case and reach for a volume. Most scholars agree, however, that works are best understood when viewed not as isolated and autonomous events but as intertextual, that even discrete texts are part of a diachronic chain-of-being. That is, there is a sense of intertextuality, of texts building upon or departing from one another, but interactive nonetheless. I am encouraging us to elaborate the notion of intertextuality to include not only the positioning of texts but also contextual methods that will help us to position them.

The orientation toward speculative historiography and passive criticism affects students in other ways. By default, such an orientation reduces the time and emphasis of basic research so that students do not have adequate exposure to the activity of historical work in progress during their education. There is a danger that we could unwittingly be encouraging our students to be dilettantes; that is, to dabble in historical study and commentary without method and without basic knowledge (Etienne 146). What methods will avoid these concerns in the preparation for historical research? Studying the social and political history of the period will provide knowledge of the context of the rhetoric. Attention to the nature and general orthography of the primary language will further inform our contextual knowledge since language habits are often influenced by social and political forces as well as linguistic phenomena. Studying the material evidence of a culture by expanding our notion of “texts” to archaeological and epigraphical sources will further specify our understanding of the rhetoric and oratory that operated. Such an effort, however, will require students to learn techniques to assimilate data and procedures for fieldwork. Since all such evidence must be interpreted, it is essential that we emphasize and learn how to argue for interpretations of evidence that account for verifiable explanations and provide the source from which to advance theories.

Winning the Right to Research Rhetoric

Historians of rhetoric exist in a tacit community. The community participates in a dialectic in which research is offered and responded to primarily through journal essays, books and reviews. Not enough attention, however, is paid to the categories of evidence brought under analysis or to the creation of new methodologies. Some of us equate historical research with antiquated methods of scholarship. The two—topic and method—are not the same and do not have to co-exist. For the sake of the pristine and the venerable, a conservative orientation to what constitutes valid evidence in historiography has promoted a closed system that risks limited acquisition of evidence, and ultimately an imprecise understanding that fails to account adequately for forces shaping the subject under study. Here is an analogy that applies to research in the history of rhetoric. Heinrich Schliemann, the father of modern archaeology, was vilified because others believed that dirtying one’s hands through actually going to see what was at Troy was something scholars should not do. Rather, the accepted mode of scholarly operation was to make armchair explanations based solely upon the Iliad and the Odyssey. Schliemann had many faults, but one of them was not a lack of zeal for knowing. Dissatisfied with the wrangling and speculations of scholars whose weight of interpretation was often grounded more on personal authority than evidence, Schliemann literally went right to the source, and his innovative methods of archaeological research established new methods and insights into the Homeric world. Unfortunately, many researchers in the history of rhetoric and oratory have taken the prevailing disposition of our scholarly community with tacit acceptance. Our students are tempted to think that an argument is right based on the persona of the author and not the weight of the evidence. At the same time, non-experts outside our immediate community (but within the academy) are not swept away by ethos-posturing but await insights based on new discoveries that make sense to them. Many of us, however, have not learned from Schliemann and have been reluctant to “dirty our hands” in such a manner of research, but rather perpetuate and even glorify the armchair, venerated methods of analysis.

Would it be, for us, a question of “dirty hands,” for example, to actually go to Sicily and examine artifacts that may tell us more about Corax, Tisias, and Gorgias, than what literary fragments alone would yield? Would it be unthinkable to immerse oneself in the study of Greek archaeology and history in order to learn about cultural forces shaping Greek rhetoric and oratory? Why would we not, for example, wish to journey to the Clements Library at The University of Michigan and examine first-hand the arguments of the British side of the Revolutionary War? And lastly, would it be unthinkable for us, like our colleagues who have done such a good job in the social sciences, to develop new methodologies and new theories to try to account for the evidence that they present in the formulation of their theories? The truth is that the reaction to the words “rhetoric” and “oratory” on the part of those members of that SCA audience was the response of closed minds that had made a knee-jerk reaction. They were inappropriate. From our side, the type of primary scholarship that earned Professor Howell such praise had lost its growth and trajectory. We are lacking on that count. Excellent research will make not only the merits of the observation obvious but will underscore the worth of the subject itself. Recovering the lost art of researching the history of rhetoric means not going back but progressing forward by providing new basic research and sensitive methods for acquiring and assessing that information.

The development of new methods is of obvious importance if we hope to continue making sensitive explanations, but of shared, if not equally obvious, importance is the discipline’s openness to receiving new methods. The benefits of developing new methods for research apply to rhetoric that is both written and oral. Seeing relationships between orality and literacy, however, can come at great personal cost, especially if a community is resistant. The importance of seeing the relationship between orality and literacy is no better illustrated than in Kevin Robb’s Literacy & Paideia in Ancient Greece. Robb, often a critic of Eric Havelock’s pioneering work, is nonetheless convinced of the relationship of oral and written discourse. It may sound odd to say this, but arguing for the relationship of orality and literacy has taken considerable personal courage. We know the opposition that Eric Havelock received when he made the study of oral literature “scholarly.” Robb, however, shows how the initial scorn that Havelock received for his Preface to Plato is mild by comparison with another scholar who addressed similar claims a century earlier, Frank Byron Jevons.

According to Robb, Frank Byron Jevons, a little-known Greek historian, published A History of Greek Literature from the Earliest Period to the Death of Demosthenes in 1886. Jevons committed academic suicide when he argued, from inscriptional evidence and not conventional literary sources, that the development of Greek literacy was closely related with oralism. To his Victorian readership, who judged eloquence by the standards of what has been called white essayist prose and poetics, Jevons challenged the questionable dates inferred from “proper” literary sources, opting to examine the archaeological evidence of epigraphy or writing that came directly from such primary sources as marble inscriptions and pottery engravings. From the evidence, Jevons claimed that orality and literacy had a long and sustained relationship. In fact, Jevons asserted that Greek literature remained “classical” as long as it remained oral. That is, the Greek literature of the fifth century BCE was oral. Unwilling to tolerate his politically incorrect claims, and waving away the primary evidence Jevons presented, Victorian scholars snubbed Jevons’s research. They refused to give it a fair hearing. For Jevons, the route to understanding Greek literature was through her culture, and understanding that culture meant understanding the development of writing and its relationship to orality. Blinded by their own social views, scholars of Jevons’s era categorized “literature” in either-or terms: as something written rather than spoken, aesthetic rather than functional, and (above all) never in any way related to rhetoric. Because of such resistance, Jevons died unheralded for his achievements. Almost a century lapsed before the prejudice against orality and literacy, and rhetoric itself, began to dissolve.

In 1948 a work of scholarship too stellar to be ignored argued for the centrality of rhetoric in ancient Greece: H. I. Marrou’s A History of Education in Antiquity. Through exhaustive basic research from primary material, Marrou was able to claim that not only were orality and literacy related but also that rhetoric was the dominant discipline shaping Greek education. In fact, Marrou believed that rhetoric had such a pervasive influence on Greek culture that much of our confusion over Greek culture would be clarified if we more fully understood the nature of rhetoric and its impact. Ancient Greeks never separated reading and writing from speech; even when Greece was literate that “literature” was performed orally. Ancient Greeks, Marrou argued, believed that if one could speak and write properly, one could think properly and even live properly; rhetoric helped people learn how to argue well and make cogent judgments. For ancient Greeks this quest for intellectual excellence that would improve society was called paideia, for Romans it was called humanitas, for us it is called “culture.” While such ideas sound quaint they were nonetheless firmly believed in Antiquity, and it is impossible to understand sensitively Hellenic culture without grasping that mentality. It is no wonder, as Marrou asserted, that the rhetorical culture of Isocrates actually won out over the ontological culture of Plato. Thus, it is important both to retrieve this culture and to recognize its mentality in seeing an inseparable bonding of orality and literacy, as well as recognizing that cognitive processes affect society because they are the operations by which people make judgments. The route to such understanding, and the necessary starting point for any criticism, is basic historical research and a community of scholars open to non-conventional findings.

Conclusion

I would like to end by mentioning recent incidents that I find personally uplifting because they address the needs I have outlined. First, three scholars whom I respect very much—Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford—once sent me a manuscript that they had submitted to Rhetorica and asked for my opinion. Their essay is an insightful argument for detailed basic research on women theoreticians and practitioners of rhetoric and oratory; they illustrate perspectives that would contribute to a more representative accounting of the roles women played in our history. I found very little to suggest or modify; the essay was cogent, and I am delighted that it was published in Rhetorica. Similarly, projects such as Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (ed. Andrea Lunsford) and Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance are encouraging signs of historical research. Both of these works demonstrate how the rhetorical tradition is expanding. Yet, both works share the concern presented here, that our expanded view of the rhetorical tradition also creates the need for more primary research and advances in research methods that are sensitive to the new growth. I did recommend to these scholars that in their next project, however, they branch out to include women who taught rhetoric and oratory from the 1930–1970 era. In addition to Marie Hochmuth Nichols, I mentioned Laura Crowell, principally because I was so impressed by her work on British rhetoric and oratory when I was an undergraduate. I told Lunsford, Ede and Glenn that Crowell was an especially poignant example because in 1988 the CCCC at Seattle sponsored a panel on women in the history of rhetoric. The irony was that Laura Crowell was in a rest home only a few miles away and would have been delighted to attend the event. She was not invited only because she was not known by the panel members!

When I told these three colleagues about Laura Crowell, they mutually agreed to the need and even volunteered to contact Professor Crowell in an effort to reclaim part of our living history. I agreed to call Professor Crowell (I had not spoken with her for several years) and let her know of this renewed interest. When I spoke with her in September 1995, she not only could not remember me, but also told me she could not remember what she had done as a professor of rhetoric and oratory at the University of Washington for so many years! I did not know what to say. I told this story to my former student, Barbara Warnick, who was at that time a professor at Washington, at the NCA Convention in November 1995. Barbara told me (her eyes moist with tears) that Laura had just died in the last two weeks. I can think of no better or more personal illustration of the fragility of our collective memory, and the need for recovering historical study, than that instance.

My second example illustrates that men too are sensitive to the importance of such historical work. Harold Barrett, my former and first professor of the history of rhetoric, convinced me of the value of reconstructing and preserving primary work. In this case, the project of recovery was an important address by an exemplar of The Cornell School of Rhetoric, one of our greatest scholars of this past century, Harry Caplan. In 1968 Caplan gave a public lecture called “The Classical Tradition: Rhetoric and Oratory” at the Annual Conference on Rhetorical Criticism hosted by California State University, Hayward (now East Bay). Barrett was wise enough to record the address, but Caplan did not wish to have the manuscript published at the time since (he believed) it required further polishing. Those who heard the address considered it to be invaluable, the product of wisdom acquired only after a life-time of scholarship on rhetoric and oratory. Caplan died some years later and the lecture was left unpublished. For many years, Barrett and I have spoken of the loss of this treasure. Eventually, Barrett was able to secure permission from Harry Caplan’s literary executor to publish the lecture. He went to the rare book and manuscript collection at Cornell University and copied the text. Barrett sent the tape and manuscript to me at TCU. With the aid of research associates Mark James and Lois Agnew, we were able to have the text—heavily edited with handwritten changes—computer-scanned and formatted for reconstruction. We worked for months with the audio tape, the computer scan and some good old-fashioned textual criticism and reproduced Caplan’s lost speech, which is approximately sixty typed pages in length. This work can be found in the Spring 1997 issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly. We are using this project as an argument for why our journals should consider publishing such primary evidence that does not fit into book or monograph-length format.

I believe that these two examples are positive illustrations of the importance of reclaiming the lost art of researching the history of rhetoric. The fragility of what we do should be apparent if scholars as recent as Professors Crowell and Caplan were almost lost to us, let alone those who existed centuries before, as I have been discussing for most of this introduction. Edmund Burke, the prominent eighteenth century British statesman, once wrote, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” For our purposes, we might well take the spirit of Burke’s statement and paraphrase it to say that all that is necessary for ignorance to prevail in our discipline is for historians of rhetoric to forget their primary job of doing history.