Published proceedings of Freudenberg Masterclass

by Graham Freudenberg

Excerpt from the Whitlam Institute Masterclass
From the Leaders' Lips
Graham Freudenberg on the Art and Craft of Political Speechwriting
Female Orphan School, UWS Parramatta, 17 August 2004

For a copy of the full text contact us at info@whitlam.org. A copy of the Masterclass proceedings is available for $20.

FREUDENBERG: Thank you, Michael Atherton and thank you, Chancellor Phillips. In the dialogue, I will try to answer some of the points you made. Thank you very much, Michael for that inspiration. Music is important in my life, and a newspaper columnist - it might even have been the doyen of them, Tony Stephens here who once suggested that I wrote my best speeches under the inspiration of Beethoven, which is true to some extent, but beer also had a lot to do with it.

But in these preliminary remarks, like Prime Minister McMahon in his speech at the White House in 1971, I shall take as my text a few familiar words from Shakespeare - not as Mr McMahon did, from Julius Caesar, which he rendered the familiar words, which he rendered thus, "There comes a time in the life of a man, in the flood of time, that taken at the flood, leads on to a time of fortune." So Mr McMahon broke one of the very first rules of speakers. If you're going to quote from a document, make sure you check it. It's a good rule, even for contemporary Prime Ministers.

My familiar words are from Hamlet, Queen Gertrude to Polonius, 'More matter with less art.'

They were in fact Gough Whitlam's standing instructions to anyone who assisted him in the preparation of speeches. 'More matter, less art' I use those words to illustrate my central theme, not just today, but my fundamental attitude to speech-making and speech-writing.

I assert the primacy of content over rhetoric. Intellect, ideas, reason, passion, emotions, belief; all these are the elements of a great speech. A good speech is an argument, not a series of clever one liners stitched together.

Rhetoric, properly understood, is a noble thing. It is precisely the lack of content that gives rhetoric its bad name, so much so that we usually couple the word rhetoric to say mere empty rhetoric.

It is the content that matters. Of course, I don't go so far as Polonius's reply to Queen Gertrude, 'Madam, I swear I use no art at all.' Although for speech-writing at least, as the chancellor indicated, I prefer the term craft.

As with all crafts and trades, there are rules and practices which can be learnt or borrowed or copied, and models that can be plagiarised. There are techniques and there are tricks of the trade, and Demosthenes and Cicero spent a lifetime learning and teaching them. I think it's interesting, as Australia's greatest researcher once found, that Isocrates, who was the first known speech writer - he wrote speeches for other Athenians - was a teacher of rhetoric.

The ancients believed that training and the acquired skills of rhetoric, logic and polemics were the whole basis of the education of the civilised man. My second basic point is that speeches are not made or written in a vacuum; that is, a speech is defined by its context, its purpose and its audience; those in the narrow and in the wider sense, the immediate and the long-term.

As for political speeches - and such is the intensity and pervasiveness of party in a democracy like Australia, almost all speeches are political to some extent - their level will be largely determined by the level of the issue. That's why we speak of rising to the occasion.

Great issues will produce great speeches.

So my two points are encapsulated in the words content and context.

Incidentally, you might note that I am trying to follow a good rule of thumb for an effective speech, and I don't know who I'm plagiarising now, but whoever said it was very wise, who said, 'First, tell the audience what you are going to say, then tell them, then tell them what you have said.'

I'll develop these two points, content and context, by reference to the greatest of them all, Abraham Lincoln.

We may cherish the story that Lincoln jotted down the Gettysburg Address on the train on the way to Gettysburg in 1863. But in fact the Gettysburg Address is the distillation of years of intense intellectual effort and his deepest convictions about the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. For all Lincoln's memorability and quotability, the hallmark of his great speeches is their relentless flow of logic, the painstaking building, point by point, of an argument.

With Lincoln, it is always the case: the art is the matter, and the matter is the art. Two books have just come out within the last few months, both on the same Lincoln speech and with almost identical titles. One is. Lincoln at the Cooper Union: The speech that made him president, by John A Corry; and the other, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The speech that made Abraham Lincoln president, by Harold Holzer.

These books deal with the speech made at the invitation of the New York Republican Committee on 27 February 1860, only three months before the Republican Convention and at a time when nobody took Lincoln very seriously as a possible candidate for the presidency. These books are reviewed by the historian, and one of Lincoln's biographers, James McPherson in the 12 August issue, the current issue of the New York Review of Books.

McPherson quotes the New York Herald of 28 February 1860, 'The loud and uproarious applause of his hearers, nearly every man rising spontaneously and cheering with the full power of their lungs.' But, writes McPherson, 'the content of the speech, rather than its oratorical style, was mainly responsible for such enthusiasm.'

Lincoln, says McPherson, 'had prepared this address more thoroughly than any of the estimated 175 speeches he had delivered since re entering politics in 1854.'

In his debate with Stephen Douglas, McPherson continues, 'Lincoln had repeatedly insisted that the founders were opposed to the expansion of slavery.' This was Lincoln's great single point, that the founders of the constitution were opposed to the expansion of slavery. Not to its existence, its expansion:

'Douglas denied it, citing the awkward fact that most of the founders themselves had slaves. Lincoln intended to put this question to rest once and for all in his Cooper Union address. For weeks, he poured over the debates of the constitutional convention in 1787, the legislation of early Congresses and other historical evidence. Perhaps no political speech has ever been so exhaustively researched.

McPherson continues:

'The Cooper Union address transformed Lincoln from just another Western politician with a country bumpkin image into an eloquent national leader. If he had not come to New York, or if his speech there had been a failure, the Lincoln of history would not have existed.'

Now, these are very large claims indeed for a single speech, but if they are remotely justified, it is a permanent tribute to the absolute primacy of intellect, research, the reasoned development of an idea, over oratorical fireworks. It is the triumph of content. If television had been at the Cooper Union in 1860, there's not a passage in it that would have provide a 20 second grab.

By saying that, I don't mean to put down television, and we will later discuss aspects of the impact of television on speeches. I'll just say that I don't regard the impact of television as intrinsically negative and I certainly don't blame television itself for any decline, if there has been any decline, in oratorical standards.

It was only at the very end of the Cooper Union speech, when he'd spent an hour and a half in argument and exposition, did Lincoln permit himself a rhetorical flourish which summed it all up, and which is probably the only passage really remembered from the speech, 'Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.' Content and context.

Neville Wran and I once made - and only half facetiously - a division of speeches into three categories. First, there was the Gettysburg speech; then there was the Chatham speech; and the third category covered most speeches, the whole spectrum from Gettysburg to Chatham type speeches.

Continued in full manuscript