Statesmanship and the Power of Being Brief

On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address. It took two minutes.  Most of us know some of it – perhaps from memorizing it in school.  Brevity can be powerful.  When it captures the essence of the nation’s mood, challenges and hopes, the words last. In that skill, Lincoln was a master.

Do you recall these four sentences?

“The Depression is now having its full impact: too many Americans are out of work, banks are failing, and the national mood is grim.  It’s understandable that so many Americans are concerned about their futures, that they don’t know what lies ahead.  But that is holding us back from being able to confront our many problems. It’s not good to live this way, nor is it necessary.”   

If you don’t it’s because no one said them.  Instead newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on March 4, 1933, said: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”  Generations later those ten words define him as a statesman and the determination he summoned to get us through the Great Depression.

“Our long national nightmare is over.”

 “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country?”

Gerald Ford and John F. Kennedy, in their first presidential speeches, knew the power of short sentences as a statesmanship tool.  Ford sought to help the nation move on from Nixon and Watergate and Kennedy sparked a new generation’s dedication to public service.   

Yet, leaders (and their speechwriters) know being brief is difficult. The Roman statesman Cicero understood, telling a correspondent:

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.  You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.”

To experience this, take something you wrote. What can you leave out yet retain your core message? What sentences can you shorten?  How many one syllable words can you substitute for multi-syllable ones?  This will take time.  Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address was just 703 words (the second shortest in history); 505 were one syllable.  Kennedy’s memorable line had 16 words, 14 of which were one syllable.

In an information-flooded society, where so many messages compete for attention, brevity has an advantage. various studies show that between 60-80 percent of us read only the headline of a news story or Facebook post.  The average length of a news “sound bite” went from 43 seconds in the 1960s to about 8 seconds today.

Short sentences in statesmanship can have global power as well.  President Reagan, standing at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in 1987 knew this: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!”  Brevity doesn’t tire or bore us.  It respects our time and focuses our attention. If we expect someone will drone on, we tune out if we even tune in.  In the first sentence of his famed Second Inaugural, Lincoln said “there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first.”  That’s a sure sign to pay attention.

In statesmanship, brevity can also invite followers to do some work because it leaves details to be filled in. The statesmen who crafted the 1787 Constitution used only about 4,000 words, the length of a short book chapter.  They left it to the American people to talk about, debate and act on those words.  We have been doing so ever since. 

There are certainly times when statesmen and stateswomen must speak at length. Even within those longer addresses, short, simple sentences – ones with emotional resonance – are more likely to have an impact and be remembered. 

Brevity, of course, is a value-neutral skill. Demagogues have used it to enrage, attack, lie, mislead and destroy democracy.  Clipped, negative political speak - tweets, memes, slogans – cheapen civil dialogue.  You can be a leader and use brevity to sway an audience towards disastrous ends.  But that’s bad leadership, not good statesmanship.  Brevity anchored in the speaker’s character and moral values that asks followers to rise to their nation’s moral creed is good statesmanship. That’s what FDR did in asking Americans to face the Depression, what Lincoln and Ford did in asking Americans to forgive and what Kennedy did in asking them to sacrifice for a greater purpose.   

Asked to speak to the Ladies” Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, New York on July 4, 1852 about the meaning of Independence Day, Frederick Douglass accepted their invitation, but refused to speak on that particular day, a day enslaved Americans could not celebrate.  So, on July 5th his long speech included these two short sentences:

 “This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

Escaped from slavery, mostly self-taught in how to read, write and speak, Douglass understood the power of brevity in statesmanship.  He would become Lincoln’s friend and collaborator in the great work of emancipation that his words helped forge.

Photo Credit: Inauguration of John F. Kennedy, courtesy wikimediacommons.org