Styles of Communication (Dec 2018)
Woodrow Wilson’s War to End All Wars Textual Features of the Presidential Address to Congress Delivered on April 2, 1917
Abstract
Only five presidential messages led to formally declared wars in the history of the USA. While attempting to shed some light on the role of discourse in the origins of armed conflicts, the contribution explores a selection of textual aspects of war discourse on the basis of President Woodrow Wilson’s Address to Congress Requesting a Declaration of War Against Germany. The address is analysed in the context of the remaining four presidential messages delivered before the formally declared wars by J. Madison, J. Polk, W. McKinley and F. D. Roosevelt. The first section of the paper gives a short description of the relevant theoretical foundations of the analysis. In the second section the methodological underpinnings of the analysis are established (Fairclough, 1992; Chruszczewski, 2002). The problematic of readability of texts is introduced and it is followed by the introduction of the typology of arguments devised by Chruszczewski (2003). In the third section the analysis of the presidential speech is preceded by a brief overview of Wilson’s presidency. Following the presentation of the results of the readability test, the structure of a general model of argument development is presented and the results of the analysis are discussed with focus on the semantic content of Wilson’s Address as well as on the reasons for the continual increase in the readability of the five consecutive presidential war messages.
