Tennessee's Governor Frank Clement, the most distinguished graduate of Mrs. Dockie Shipp Weems' School of Expression in Nashville, rose up before the 1956 Democratic Convention and demonstrated a dying art. His keynote address that night beside the Chicago stock yards was a symphony of rhetorical excess, a masterpiece of alliteration and allusion, an epic of the smite-'em style of oratorical Americana.
"How long, O how long, America!" cried Clement, in a grandiloquent filch from Cicero's First Catiline Oration. "How long, O America, shall these things endure?" In Dwight Eisenhower's foreign policy, Clement declaimed,...
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