The Language of Freedom in the American Presidency, 1933-2006

Abstract

Freedom is the most familiar symbol in American political culture, but little is known about how presidents have employed this symbol in their discourse. This study uses quantitative and qualitative analysis to examine the language of freedom in more than seventy years worth of presidential speeches. The findings reveal a presidential narrative of freedom that has been remarkably constant over time. However, within this broad narrative, presidents' political ideology and the context in which they spoke led to significant differences in the way they defined freedom and in the way they used the term to define the nation.