January 8 is the anniversary of the very first State of the Union Address in the US, delivered by George Washington in 1790. It was called "the President's Annual Message" at the time (or at least fairly soon afterward). Although the phrase "State of the Union" is in the Constitution, it wasn't until Franklin Roosevelt used it in 1934 that the report itself was called the "State of the Union Address". Today being that anniversary, it might be worth thinking about the impact of messages from leaders, and the responsibility that puts on the leader to be very careful what they say and how they say it. As Charles Kingsley put it in his 1856 novel Plays and Puritans, there is always "A mob of fools and knaves, led by the nose in each generation by a few arch-fools and arch-knaves."
Once a person is in a position of leadership, whatever they say is more likely to be listened to or read, and people are more likely to take action. Followers take action both on what the leader said, and (sometimes more importantly) on what they think the leader said. This, I think, is the point Kingsley was making. We'd be more likely today to refer to something like "bullies," "bad actors," or a few other choice adjectives than "knaves," but the idea stands. A leader's messages are probably going to be misinterpreted by some because they don't understand, and some because they do understand, but see an opportunity to twist the meaning to their own ends. A leader either too foolish to see that (an "arch fool"), or having their own nefarious purposes (an "arch-knave"), can take advantage of those kinds of followers.
George Washington knew the power of a leader's messages because he had lived his entire life, up to 1776, as a subject of a dictatorial leader: the King of England. He was also a leader himself. On January 8, 1790, it was his responsibility to deliver a message to Congress. The Constitution says so: “[The President] shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient."
Portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart Williamstown
It sounds like a simple report that could be, nowadays at least, just a bulleted list. But a bulleted list coming from a leader can be much more than an ordinary accounting, even when that's all the leader intended. Thomas Jefferson, who had also lived as a subject of the king, knew this, too. That's why when he became President, he didn't give a speech to Congress about the state of the union. He just delivered a letter that was read aloud by a clerk. Jefferson thought the idea of the President orating to Congress was a little too close to a "Speech from the Throne" delivered by the King to Parliament. It was too "monarchical," in Jefferson's view, and made the President look too much like a king — a dictator. His view held sway for a long time, until Woodrow Wilson again delivered the address in person in 1913. And even then not everybody agreed that it was a good idea.
Jackson and his followers formed a new political party in 1828.
Jefferson, like Washington, was very wary about wielding the power of the leader's speech. The US Presidency was very different in those days than it is today. Maybe because all of the first few Presidents had lived as subjects, they were very careful not to use the power of leadership to try to accrue more power to the office. In the early days of the US, Congress had more authority than the executive branch. Then Andrew Jackson, who was born in 1767 and had little if any personal experience of life as a subject, became the seventh President in 1829, and set about trying to expand the powers of the Presidency. He used messaging to do it. Although he himself was a wealthy plantation owner in Tennessee (the plantation was worked by slaves), his speeches often rhetorically pitted the "common man" against the "aristocracy," which he implied was corrupt and self-serving (even if he himself was clearly part of it).
Jackson and his followers formed a new political party in 1828. They called it the Democratic Party, which you may have heard of. By now it's the oldest political party in the US, and depending on how you define "political party," it might be the oldest one in the world. But never mind that; when Jackson won the 1828 election he did a couple of odd things. He got rid of the Second Bank of the United States, which was in effect the nation's national bank, and on January 8, 1835 he hosted a dinner party to celebrate what he saw (or at least claimed) as a great accomplishment: he had paid off the National Debt.
National Debts are strange and complicated things, and that's the one and only time in history that the US National Debt was zero. Arguably, the US had a national debt before it was even a nation, because the cost of waging the Revolutionary War had been financed through debt. A pretty good case could be made — and has been — that "national" debt is a completely different thing from "personal" debt. After all, most people are aware that they can get into serious difficulty if they owe too much, because a person only has a fixed amount of money. Sovereign nations with their own currency work completely differently; they create money and can't run out. But not everybody understands this. And a leader who is either an arch-fool or an arch-knave can use a common misunderstanding like that to great effect in their messaging to followers. This is true even if the leader is in the arch-fool category and shares in the misunderstanding.
Andrew Jackson's "great accomplishment," by the way, was a disaster. When he got rid of the national bank, which had (like today) kept inflation in check, local banks particularly in the west offered easy credit and lent more money than they should have. Without any debt, the budget of the US was constrained and the government couldn't do much to respond. One thing Jackson thought they could do, and he did, was to issue an executive order that land (especially in the west) could only be purchased with "hard money" -- gold or silver. Very few people had any, so the real estate market collapsed, and everyone who had mortgaged their property expecting values to rise (in other words, everybody) was bankrupted. Thus we got the Panic of 1837 that resulted in a major depression, starvation, and years of stagnation.
“…it will simply add one more scrap to the diplomatic waste paper basket."
It was another January 8, in 1918, that President Woodrow Wilson announced his "Fourteen Points," a set of guidelines for negotiating the end of the World War. Wilson was something of an idealist, and his proposal — which included the formation of the League of Nations, the predecessor to the United Nations — was criticized by other would-be leaders. Theodore Roosevelt, who would become President after Wilson, was one. His assessment: "If the League of Nations is built on a document as high-sounding and as meaningless as the speech in which Mr. Wilson laid down his fourteen points, it will simply add one more scrap to the diplomatic waste paper basket."
All leaders (probably) know how to use messaging to inflame passions and, perhaps, spur the "fools and knaves" into actions they wouldn't undertake by themselves, but which might serve the leader's purpose. Roosevelt's message seems to qualify as an over-the-top emotional harangue. Nevertheless, a negotiated end to World War I was completed later that year. Wilson had a different audience in mind than did Roosevelt, after all: other heads of state and their governments.
It's more common, though, for a head of state's intended audience to be their own population. That was the idea on January 8, 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson announced a "War on Poverty." One of the most powerful ideas a leader can express is a call for war. It can hit all the right notes, urging patriotic action and commitment, and identifying an enemy as a target for all the emotion the message unleashes. Announcing a "war" on an economic status seems to be an attempt to wield the emotional power of the message to stimulate things like policies and priorities. It works, as far as creating new initiatives and the like.
But if we look at the wars declared on inanimate or ephemeral entities by US leaders, the messages seem like they might not result in the desired outcomes. Various US leaders have declared war on poverty, drugs, and terrorism, and none of those have yet surrendered. Maybe leaders need to be more careful to match their motivational messaging, which always has outcomes, to the objectives. After all, a "war on poverty" might not really mean elimination of poverty. Remember, we've also waged war against Germany, Japan, Vietnam, and North Korea, and all of them still exist too. Or a more cynical view might be that the real objectives of these wars had little or nothing to do with the stated objectives. But that’s a bit too cynical for me. Besides, many leaders are quite intelligent and skilled, but I’m not convinced that any of them are intelligent or skilled enough to pull off that kind of super-strategic planning.
Maybe the problem is that zealous followers are all too willing to act on a leader's words, without being able to consider the consequences — which, after all, is a leader's responsibility. It was January 8, 1973 when a trial began for seven men who were zealous followers of President Richard Nixon. They had burglarized the headquarters of the party opposing Nixon in the election. The headquarters were at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., and thanks to that, we've been saddled with the suffix "-gate" for every blasted scandal or would-be scandal that’s come along since. Did Nixon himself actually say "go break into Democratic headquarters and steal their files?" I have no idea, but I would guess he probably didn't. He didn’t have to. A leader with zealous followers doesn't have to resort to specific, detailed messages like that. All he has to say, even as an offhand comment, is "boy, I'd love to have a look at that file." Zealous followers are self-motivated to do what they think their leader wants. And that's the danger, and responsibility, that leaders have to cope with. Some leaders are more able and willing than others to shoulder that responsibility.
Oh, and apropos of nothing, today is International Typing Day. Its goal is to encourage people to express themselves in written communication. I'm trying to hold up my end -- so break out your keyboard and write something! Maybe, he suggested, looking in the other direction, a comment or two?
The title quote is from Shakespeare’s Henry IV.