“During these long months, while this program [tax reform] was being developed and brought before the national Legislature--debated, argued, and enacted--there have been sitting on the sidelines, of course, the prophets of gloom and doom. Some of them saw a great inflation that the policies of the administration in taking off controls was leading to. They have been proved wrong.”—President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Address at the Illinois State Fair at Springfield, August 19, 1954
I should have written about this quote two days ago, on the 45th anniversary of the day it was delivered—but William Safire’s “On Language” column in The New York Times Magazine from last March inexplicably (and, more important, incorrectly) listed the date as two days later than it actually was. You just can’t trust left-wing newspapers—nor the rightwing pundits they have hired in their ideological-affirmative-action-program—anymore!
The column reflected Safire’s fascination with how the rhyming phrase (“gloom and doom”) was echoed in later coinages: “nattering nabobs of negativism” (written by the former Times op-ed columnist when he was a speechwriter for the abominable Spiro Agnew) and “troubadors of troubles and crooners of catastrophe” (Clare Boothe Luce, laying on the archness a bit too thickly for my tastes).
Nowadays, Dwight Eisenhower is little credited with eloquence, even by admirers. As a former speechwriter himself, under his commander in the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur, he had become a bit dry-eyed about the uses of rhetoric, telling an aide that if Americans wanted a wordsmith in the Oval Office, “we ought to elect Ernest Hemingway.”
But in his own way, he contributed a far number of catchphrases that made their way into the language of politics, with the most famous ones being “the domino theory” and “the military-industrial complex.”
What interests me about this particular speech is not its scintillating rhetoric (of which it is nearly shorn) so much as its very ordinariness. Indeed, its one memorable phrase—the one Safire quoted about “prophets of gloom and doom”—stands out all the more starkly for being part of an address designed to be folksy rather than grandiloquent--sort of the way, I recall a connoisseur of Dylan songs wrote some years ago, that "Like A Rolling Stone" would have a seemingly endless stream of banal phrases, only to conclude each verse with an absolutely savage line ("And say, would you like to...make a deal?")
This kind of speech is your bread-and-butter Presidential “Rose Garden” speech—i.e., one that you dash off for a not especially memorable occasion. It was nothing like Ike’s “Atoms for Peace” speech, when, casting about for a different tone—and, as it turned out, a different policy—he required multiple drafts before getting what he wanted, on a matter he considered of crucial importance.
Again, this was an ordinary occasion—a midterm rally—in front of the kind of mid-America audience that had swept the President into office nearly two years before. And Ike was speaking in front of an unusually warm, appreciative crowd (225,000 strong—the largest in the history of that state fair, at least up to that point), engaging in the usual kids of stuff visiting Presidents do: making mild-mannered fun of a local politico, urging the crowd to vote Republican—as well as what every President, no matter what his party, just loves to do: crow about his success.
Many Americans look back on the Eisenhower administration as a decade of peace and prosperity, and it is true that, except for a mild recession toward the end of his second term, America did not experience the economic failure being predicted by economic soothsayers.
In another sense, though, that success bred a complacency that encouraged Americans not to examine their business shortcomings too much—leaving the auto industry, for instance, vulnerable to Japanese carmakers who built more dependable, fuel-efficient vehicles.
Moreover, a success that Ike claimed on the foreign-policy front—preventing Iran from going Communist—turned out to be a pyrrhic victory at best, since the CIA-sponsored coup did as much as anything else to poison attitudes in that country toward Americans as any other single event over the past half-century.
If the Eisenhower era was not quite the paradise its supporters claim, there is no doubt that the President’s foray into wordsmithing was a success. When I typed “prophets of gloom and doom” into Google, I got 93,600 hits—the vast majority of which, I’d wager, haven’t the least idea where the phrase came from.
I should have written about this quote two days ago, on the 45th anniversary of the day it was delivered—but William Safire’s “On Language” column in The New York Times Magazine from last March inexplicably (and, more important, incorrectly) listed the date as two days later than it actually was. You just can’t trust left-wing newspapers—nor the rightwing pundits they have hired in their ideological-affirmative-action-program—anymore!
The column reflected Safire’s fascination with how the rhyming phrase (“gloom and doom”) was echoed in later coinages: “nattering nabobs of negativism” (written by the former Times op-ed columnist when he was a speechwriter for the abominable Spiro Agnew) and “troubadors of troubles and crooners of catastrophe” (Clare Boothe Luce, laying on the archness a bit too thickly for my tastes).
Nowadays, Dwight Eisenhower is little credited with eloquence, even by admirers. As a former speechwriter himself, under his commander in the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur, he had become a bit dry-eyed about the uses of rhetoric, telling an aide that if Americans wanted a wordsmith in the Oval Office, “we ought to elect Ernest Hemingway.”
But in his own way, he contributed a far number of catchphrases that made their way into the language of politics, with the most famous ones being “the domino theory” and “the military-industrial complex.”
What interests me about this particular speech is not its scintillating rhetoric (of which it is nearly shorn) so much as its very ordinariness. Indeed, its one memorable phrase—the one Safire quoted about “prophets of gloom and doom”—stands out all the more starkly for being part of an address designed to be folksy rather than grandiloquent--sort of the way, I recall a connoisseur of Dylan songs wrote some years ago, that "Like A Rolling Stone" would have a seemingly endless stream of banal phrases, only to conclude each verse with an absolutely savage line ("And say, would you like to...make a deal?")
This kind of speech is your bread-and-butter Presidential “Rose Garden” speech—i.e., one that you dash off for a not especially memorable occasion. It was nothing like Ike’s “Atoms for Peace” speech, when, casting about for a different tone—and, as it turned out, a different policy—he required multiple drafts before getting what he wanted, on a matter he considered of crucial importance.
Again, this was an ordinary occasion—a midterm rally—in front of the kind of mid-America audience that had swept the President into office nearly two years before. And Ike was speaking in front of an unusually warm, appreciative crowd (225,000 strong—the largest in the history of that state fair, at least up to that point), engaging in the usual kids of stuff visiting Presidents do: making mild-mannered fun of a local politico, urging the crowd to vote Republican—as well as what every President, no matter what his party, just loves to do: crow about his success.
Many Americans look back on the Eisenhower administration as a decade of peace and prosperity, and it is true that, except for a mild recession toward the end of his second term, America did not experience the economic failure being predicted by economic soothsayers.
In another sense, though, that success bred a complacency that encouraged Americans not to examine their business shortcomings too much—leaving the auto industry, for instance, vulnerable to Japanese carmakers who built more dependable, fuel-efficient vehicles.
Moreover, a success that Ike claimed on the foreign-policy front—preventing Iran from going Communist—turned out to be a pyrrhic victory at best, since the CIA-sponsored coup did as much as anything else to poison attitudes in that country toward Americans as any other single event over the past half-century.
If the Eisenhower era was not quite the paradise its supporters claim, there is no doubt that the President’s foray into wordsmithing was a success. When I typed “prophets of gloom and doom” into Google, I got 93,600 hits—the vast majority of which, I’d wager, haven’t the least idea where the phrase came from.
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