What Presidents Mean by Power: Nineteenth Century Views

• In Event: Questions of Executive Power: Foundations, Assumptions, and Rhetoric

Abstract

“What Presidents Mean by Power: Nineteenth Century Views”

By Richard W. Waterman and Sherelle Pierre
University of Kentucky

Presidential power has been the focus of countless studies since the early days of the Republic. Political scientists, historians, legal scholars, journalists, pundits, visitors from other countries, and ordinary citizens have expressed their views on the meaning and significance of power as it relates to the American presidency. While many studies focused on power and how to keep it, power and its impact, power and its constitutional/legal meaning, abuses of power, the need for more or less power, and power and policy, one viewpoint remains underrepresented. While there are again countless biographies of individual presidents and how they used power, we know relatively little about how presidents use “power” when they communicate with others. This study examines each and every mention of the word power, and variations of that word such as empower, to determine what presidents mean by power. How do they characterize their own power? How do they refer to the power of other actors or institutions? How has their usage of language changed over time? Have references to power become more personal overtime, such as references to “my power?” And what can we learn from presidential rhetoric and communications? Through an analysis of the documents and speeches contained in the American Presidency Project (APP), in this paper we examine this issue during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As such, we address a gap in the scholarly literature: a thorough, empirical study of presidents and how they interpret and use the word POWER.

Authors

• Richard W. Waterman, University of Kentucky

• Sherelle Roberts-Pierre, University of Kentucky