Oratorical Footing in a New Medium: Recordings of Presidential Campaign Speeches, 1896-1912

When Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, the capacity of the new invention that most impressed him was that it provided the means to overcome the ephemerality of human speech; it made the spoken word durable and available for future reproduction. But what kinds of speech were worthy of being recorded? Understandably, the preservation and dissemination of oratory seemed an appropriate and desirable use for the phonograph. As early as 1896, the new technology of sound recording was employed in political campaigns; by 1908, the new medium had become sufficiently well established to be enlisted in the campaign for the presidency. The recorded texts of these campaign speeches and other historical records relating to the use of sound recordings in political campaigns signal the ambiguity of a new medium whose capacities had not yet assumed—or been disciplined into—a clear shape; the campaign recordings were unsteadily poised between varying alignments to an audience and other aspects of context. In this paper, we analyze how this work of contextualization was effected, with special attention to how the recorded speeches were aligned to various publics, constituting or reconstituting those publics in the process. 1