Bob Fleischburg's Gettysburg Address, as Read By Lincoln?

July 4, 2008 7:46 AM

When did professional speech-ghostwriting start, and how confident can I be that those who delivered "classic" speeches and letters actually wrote them themselves?

I was heartily impressed by Sherman's letter to Atlanta, as linked in this Metafilter thread, and was thinking about it when it occurred to me that I assume that all speeches, letters, and discourse beyond a kind of fuzzy 1950-ish date were actually created by the person that delivered/sent it.

By contrast, I don't think anybody expects that even the most "inspirational" people in public life and politics actually write their own material these days; U.S. politicians certainly don't now, nor, I expect, do the leaders of corporations or huge social movements.

So how far back can I be confident that public figures actually did write their own speeches? Or did they ever?

posted by Shepherd to society & culture (10 comments total)

I wouldn't expect that any speech ever contained 100% original material. The ideas come from the speaker's entire group/campaign/organization, etc.

I think the increased need for dedicated speechwriters rose with the increased number of required speeches. It used to be that someone campaigning for office, for example, could give the same speech dozens or hundreds of times. Now each of those occasions requires at least some original content, because each speech is available to the whole nation. So I'd expect that if you graphed the number of speechwriters and the prevalence of electronic media that you'd see a strong correlation between the two curves. I'd say it's impossible for someone regularly speaking on the national stage to get by without speechwriters anymore.
posted by winston at 8:47 AM on July 4, 2008

FDR's first inaugural address in 1933 ("nothing to fear but fear itself") was written by his speechwriters.
posted by smackfu at 8:59 AM on July 4, 2008

I don't know a lot about the subject in general, but I do know that at first, Nixon wrote all his own speeches, and only later switched to using speechwriters. I don't know when that changeover took place, though.
posted by limeonaire at 9:49 AM on July 4, 2008

According to Conrad Black's Nixon biography, Nixon would also, routinely memorize his speeches in order to deliver them without notes.
posted by ewiar at 12:13 PM on July 4, 2008

I recently finished a biography of Theodore Roosevelt ("Theodore Rex", I highly recommend it, FYI) and it discussed how some of his speeches were created; although he did write some of them outright, others were drafted by his assistants (one assistant in particular was instrumental in many of them during his first term, IIRC) and then edited before delivery. This was apparently not uncommon, and the fact that he has had as much of a hand in them as he did (he was, after all, a writer) was considered worthy of note.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:01 PM on July 4, 2008

Strike "has" from the last sentence. Corrected: This was apparently not uncommon, and the fact that he had as much of a hand in them as he did (he was, after all, a writer) was considered worthy of note.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:03 PM on July 4, 2008

There are many instances of European royals (among others) having speech writers centuries ago, and no doubt examples as far back or farther back than the Romans. I'll try to dig out some specifics, but I suspect one could go back to the time of the Pharoahs and find speechwriters of a sort . . . some of those child kings / queens made pronouncements they could never have written!
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 1:42 PM on July 4, 2008

A related phenomenon in historiography is the invented speech, which stuck around from antiquity to the early modern period.

Parliamentary speeches reported in eighteenth-century English newspapers may have little or no relationship to what was actually said; in one famous instance, a beleaguered Samuel Johnson claimed that he came up with one of Pitt the Elder's "orations" out of whole cloth.
posted by thomas j wise at 2:21 PM on July 4, 2008

If I recall my Rome and America class correctly, politicians in Rome would frequently hire out their speeches.
posted by klangklangston at 3:08 PM on July 5, 2008

Hiring a good speechwriter was done in ancient Athens, at least for court proceedings, where individuals had to represent themselves (no such thing as lawyers). One very famous example of a speechwriter-for-hire is Lysias, a contemporary of Plato. (This would be around 400 BCE.)
posted by LobsterMitten at 5:12 PM on July 11, 2008