Podiums, Power and Progressivism: Measuring the Wilsonian Rhetorical Legacy on the State of the Union Address

This project makes the claim that Woodrow Wilson institutionalized the lexicon of the Progressive Movement into the rhetorical genre of the State of the Union Address when he re-instituted the oral delivery of the State of the Union Address. It attempts to quantify and measure his impact by selecting terms from historical studies of works of the Progressive Movement and Woodrow Wilson in order to come up with a Wilsonian Progressive vocabulary. In the first approach of this analysis, this project measures the combined frequencies of these words in a summation called the Wilsonian Score and runs bivariate correlation to show that these words are more likely to be used after Wilson. In the second approach, context based analysis and existing theoretical literature is used to try to understand why this Wilsonian Progressive vocabulary is used by successive presidents. This project concludes with reflections on the ideographical implications of these words and their relation to the expansion of presidential power