How leaders build a collective identity with Vanessa Beasley

**Vanessa Beasley** (0:00)
I don't think we have a learning-how-to-speak problem. I think everybody and their brother has a way to speak in a podcast, and I think we have a learning-how-to-listen problem.

**Adam Grant** (0:15)
Hey, everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast with TED on the science of what makes us take. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
Vanessa Beasley is the president of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She's also an expert on presidential rhetoric in the US. And across her career, she's explored the relationship between mass media, the presidency, and American identity. Vanessa shared her research in her seminal 2004 book, You the People, and it's a topic that's only become more relevant in modern politics.

**Vanessa Beasley** (0:54)
When I look at presidential rhetoric, I tend to focus on the constitutive. Who are they telling us we are? And how do we believe there's a we in the first place?

**Adam Grant** (1:03)
Vanessa and I also talk about how to reinvent liberal arts colleges in this changing era of higher ed, and how to become better listeners as well as speakers. Vanessa Beasley, welcome to ReThinking.

**Vanessa Beasley** (1:16)
Happy to be here.

**Adam Grant** (1:17)
I'm excited to find out what you're going to ask me to rethink today.

**Vanessa Beasley** (1:20)
All right, came on.

**Adam Grant** (1:22)
As a rhetoric expert, what do you look at first when you're analyzing a presidential speech? What are the signals that stand out to you right away?

**Vanessa Beasley** (1:31)
Yeah.
So I'm super interested in two things. One is the intersection between the evolution of the presidency and the evolution of media, because they don't exist without each other. And the strengths and the weaknesses of both systems need each other. And the other thing I'm really interested in is the activation of what we call constitutive rhetoric. If you and I think about giving a speech, the first thing we might think of as leaders is, what does it do? What's our message? How do we want to motivate people? What behavior do we want to result from it? And that's instrumental use of rhetoric. But I'm more interested in the constitutive part. Who does that leader tell you you are in that moment? How does that leader build community through their words? What are they constituting as an audience?

**Adam Grant** (2:17)
Well, you wrote a whole book on this, so you're the perfect person to ask.
Even the idea of the American people as a we, as an identity that was held collectively, I didn't realize the extent to which presidents actually created that and shaped the content of it. Talk to me about that. What were the American people before presidents started describing them as a collective or as a community, and how did it change?

**Vanessa Beasley** (2:44)
So before there was a way to spread news through telegraph and before there was a way to get printed newspapers across the country, everything would have been local. So people wouldn't have thought about an American people as much as they would have thought about what was happening in their state. And for politicians, it would have been what's happening within the parties within their state. So my argument is there isn't a conception of actual American people before that time, outside of the Constitution and outside of the constitutionally and ritually mandated practices that presidents had at their disposal, including the inaugural address, which is when you tell the American people ritualistically who they are, and that starts with Washington. He was the first person obviously to do that. So I think it's a rhetorical creation over and over and over again. And as media changes, we just have more ways to show it or feel it perhaps is a better verb.

**Adam Grant** (3:48)
Who do you think is the greatest American president that people don't respect or fully appreciate?

**Vanessa Beasley** (3:55)
So I'm not going to name a president. I'm going to name a change, a shift in media history, because I tend to think about the presidency as the channels of communication changed. So on that note, Theodore Roosevelt was one of the first people that we call a rhetorical president, which meant that he had the gall to go speak directly to the American people.
And then once Woodrow Wilson started doing that and radio started, it was all off the chain. Everything before that would have made presidents think it was base or beneath them to speak directly to the American people.

**Adam Grant** (4:33)
That's so interesting because I think about the image of Lincoln sitting down for office hours with citizens. That was definitely not beneath him to speak to the people. Did it change between him and Roosevelt or was he just an outlier?