On September 3, 1919, Woodrow Wilson embarked upon one of the 
most ambitious and controversial speaking tours in the history of 
American politics: a grueling 8,000-mile, twenty-two-day tour across 
the Midwest and Far West in support of the League of Nations. 
Historians still debate Wilson's motivations for touring, but most 
agree with Thomas Bailey that the tour proved a "disastrous 
blunder." Not only did Wilson collapse before completing it but the 
treaty likely would have been defeated even if the tour had 
succeeded.

    In this masterful work, J. Michael Hogan offers the first detailed 
analysis of Wilson's speeches on the tour, including the most 
celebrated speech of the campaign, his address in Pueblo, Colorado. 
Assessing the tour in light of Wilson's own scholarly writings, Hogan 
provides a new understanding of this watershed event in the history 
of American public address. Over the course of the tour, Hogan 
argues, Wilson abandoned his own principles of oratorical 
statesmanship and increasingly resorted to the techniques of the 
propagandist and the demagogue. In the process, he subverted what 
he himself called the "common counsel" of public deliberation and 
foreshadowed some of the worst tendencies of the modern rhetorical 
presidency.    

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J. MICHAEL HOGAN is a professor of rhetoric at Pennsylvania 
State University and the author or editor of four other books on 
political rhetoric. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of 
Wisconsin at Madison.


Library of Presidential Rhetoric


What people are saying about this book

". . . an attractive work for students of presidential rhetoric . . . the 
book's careful attention to what Wilson actually said, and its detailed 
historical recreation of the tour, make many concepts less abstract 
and more understandable. This volume represents an interesting and 
important contribution to our understanding of Wilson on his own 
terms."—Argumentation & Advocacy, Spring 2006