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.The lynching of Willie Earle was brutal, butno more brutal than earlier lynchings in 1945 and 1946, nor more publicizedthan the terror against the African American community of Columbia, Ten-nessee, in February of 1946.In fact, as McCoy and Ruetten note, the racialviolence of the postwar period had declined by 1947.55 While the upcomingpresidential election probably inXuenced Truman’s discourse, he always couldbeneWt from African American support; his party could have beneWted fromblack support especially in the 1946 congressional elections.Besides, if AfricanAmericans perceived that Truman’s emphasis on urgency was primarily a prod-uct of electoral concerns, he was likely to lose support.In other words, the temporal moment external to Truman’s NAACP speechdid not seem to constitute an exigency for civil rights action any more thanearlier moments had constituted a crisis.Whereas historians have focused onlyon the political and historical urgencies that inXuenced his address, I argue that44■The Modern Presidency and Civil Rightsin the NAACP speech Truman rhetorically constructs an urgency.Truman doesnot merely respond to events, as many scholars have suggested; instead, hisspeech becomes part of the events.Truman’s speech does not take on its mean-ing exclusively from historical events; racial discrimination and violence hadlong been persistent conditions.His speech attempts to give meaning to eventsby investing them with a sense of urgency.Truman’s address is signiWcant be-cause it represents the Wrst instance in the modern presidency when the nation’schief executive deWned civil rights as a crisis.That is, Truman attempts to com-municate that current developments are critical and that his recommendedcourse of action is necessary to remedy the critical situation.56The rhetorical construction of social problems—that is, moving issues outof the realm of damaging conditions and into the realm of political discussion—always is saturated with ideological concerns.57 In deWning certain circumstancesas problems, rhetors give force to their deWnitions by connecting them withideologies.In his NAACP speech, Truman deWnes civil rights as an urgent so-cial crisis and supports his claim by appealing to dimensions of the Americanideology.In other words, while Truman does direct his appeals toward theexigence of the moment, he does not argue purely from circumstance.Time isalways connected to another issue in the president’s address.The three proofsto which Truman connects a sense of urgency have already been mentioned:American history, domestic circumstances (chieXy, racial violence), and inter-national political circumstances.Truman devotes most of his attention to theWrst and third of these, which are the two most imbued with ideology.In the Wrst section of the address, Truman argues that immediate action oncivil rights is necessary because broader historical concerns warrant it.He be-gins by referring to the nation’s past concern with civil rights: “The civil rightslaws written in the early years of our Republic, and the traditions which havebeen built upon them, are precious to us.Those laws were drawn up with thememory still fresh in men’s minds of the tyranny of absentee government.Theywere written to protect the citizen against any possible tyrannical act by thenew government in this country.” Here, the president alludes to the Declara-tion of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights and attemptsto give those documents a sense of presence in the immediate circumstance.His implied argument is that the nation has been committed to civil rights fromits earliest years, a commitment embodied in its founding documents, and mustmaintain that commitment.Truman’s speech reinforces aspects of the Ameri-can ideology—namely, that Americans understand their nation to be a sacredland for the defense of human freedom.Truman, however, does not allude toh a r r y t r u m a n a n d t h e n a a c p■45the nation’s key documents in order to argue from principle.Whereas manylater orators who spoke out on civil rights, including Martin Luther King, Jr.,used the nation’s key documents as a springboard to discuss how the broaderprinciples of liberty and democracy demanded action, Truman seems simplyto argue from tradition.Truman then suggests that the nation cannot rest upon its traditional com-mitment to civil rights; rather the nation must move ahead: “But we cannotbe content with a civil liberties program which emphasizes only the need ofprotection against the possibility of tyranny by the Government.We cannotstop there.We must keep moving forward with new conceptions of civil rightsto safeguard our heritage.The extension of civil rights today means, not pro-tection of the people against the Government, but protection of the people bythe Government.” Truman’s claim here is signiWcant: rather than merely argu-ing that the nation needs to live up to ideas conceived in the past, he arguesthat America must move beyond its historical understanding of civil rights todevelop new, enriched understandings.Perhaps the most common theme inthe long tradition of American reform rhetoric is that the nation needs to liveup to the basic concepts conceived early in its history.Subsequent presidentsappealed to this theme of fulWllment in their civil rights discourse.For example,on June 11, 1963, John F.Kennedy claimed, “Now the time has come for thisNation to fulWll its promise.” On March 15, 1965, Lyndon B.Johnson argued,“A century has passed.since equality was promised.And yet the Negro isnot equal.A century has passed since the day of the promise.And the promiseis unkept.” Activists also appealed to the theme of fulWllment: in his “I Have aDream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr., urged the United States to live up tothe promises of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.In hisNAACP address Truman, though, seems to be asking for more.Instead ofmaking a case for fulWllment, he argues for growth.The need for national growth on civil rights is one of the most signiWcantrhetorical possibilities contained in President Truman’s speech.Truman seemswilling to explore new concepts of civil rights, grounded in cherished tradi-tions, rather than focusing only on the past, which might be limited in its ap-plicability in the present.Although he proposes growth and change, Trumanconnects his ideas for development with the nation’s heritage; his words sug-gest that change is a logical extension of the nation’s history; it will “safeguardour heritage
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