Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

U.S. political rhetoric might be getting more musical over time. In the 1850s, most presidential addresses were delivered with college-level rhetoric when judged by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, a method developed for the U.S. Navy in the 1970s to ensure the simplicity of military instruction manuals. But since the 1940s, presidential addresses have been more like a sixth-grader’s level. It’s tempting to see this trend as the dumbing down of the American audience. But the United States is considerably better educated than it was in the 1800s. The increased simplicity of political rhetoric is really a sign that political speeches aim to reach a broader audience and so are emulating other populist forms of mass entertainment, like music. In the early republic, when only white men could vote, “presidents could assume that they were speaking to audiences made up mostly of men like themselves: educated, civic-minded landowners,” said Jeff Shesol, a historian and former speechwriter for Bill Clinton. But as voting rights expanded, presidential appeals broadened. The major shift toward simpler presidential speeches happened around 1920, which coincides with at least four positive developments: the Seventeenth Amendment allowing direct election of senators in 1913; the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote in 1920; the movement to make public education mandatory in the 1920s; and the spread of radio, which passed 50 percent penetration among U.S. households by...