The Age of Charisma

Jeremy C. Young maintains that Americans were thoroughly acquainted with the concept of “charismatic leadership” long before the German sociologist Max Weber coined the term in the 1920s. During the late nineteenth century a new genre of public speakers emerged to stir up mass meetings called for religious, political, or other purposes. Perhaps William Jennings Bryan comes most readily to mind, but he was only one of a number of spellbinders such as Henry Ward Beecher, Theodore Roosevelt, Billy Sunday, and Eugene V. Debs who drew massive audiences with their carefully choreographed, highly emotional, oratorical fireworks. Most practitioners were white males, though some women (Aimee Semple McPherson) and members of minority groups (Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington) made similar appeals. Their “charisma of rhetoric” mobilized Americans after 1900 behind a variety of crusades promising a brighter or more righteous future. The faith that many Americans of the Progressive Era invested in the power of charismatic leadership to transform society proved illusory. Yet, the author insists, the phenomenon deserves our attention because it represented a new type of relationship between leaders and followers. Audiences demanded public figures at the pulpit or on the stump who were “emotionally available” and connected with them on an immediate and even physical level (p. xx). The charismatic style of public speaking contrasted with the aloof and coldly reasoned addresses we associate with the early republic. The mass movements spawned by this new breed of magnetic public speakers afforded average citizens agency in tackling the vexing issues of their times. Whether a style of public speaking that relied so heavily on artifice and emotion represented a more democratic form of discourse, as Young argues, may be a matter worthy of debate

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