Special thanks to the National Urban League and the National Humanities Center library for helping secure Paul Muni’s 1943 performance of “Freedom’s Plow.” This audio was most accessible to audiences than the poem’s printed version, so it was popular leading to the time of Hughes’s visit to Wilson, NC. It likely influenced the St. Alphonsus students’ rendition of it as they recited Hughes’s poem back to him.
Langston Hughes’ “Freedom’s Plow” (1943) advocates for a racially integrated future that is fertile with the collective efforts of all Americans. Although initially sold as ten-cent pamphlets, “Freedom’s Plow” became more known through Paul Muni’s Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life’s radio performance of it. Its performative delivery offers three rhetorically convicting elements in conjunction with the written word: soundscapes of America being built; Negro Spirituals by the Golden Gate Quartette, and accessibility through its shared form.
The soundscapes complementing the poem succeed in helping Americans imagine what being an American actually is, providing an imaginative framework for Muni’s performance. In the poem, both “free hands and slave hands…” go down into the earth to labor, and the radio performance presents sounds of the plowing, trains steaming, and coachmen whipping their horses as the poem advances through “the many hands” that contributed to America’s settlement and industrialization (Muni, 5:00). Blair writes that in developing societies, such as the American society Muni performs about, language also develops. It starts “very narrow” then adds words and ideas through its conscious relations to other ideas, thus creating the figurative language of tropes as a memory aid for what is in their society (Blair 1044). Tropes are also naturally refined the more humans correlate and define their ideas. Expanding on this theoretical definition, the composers of the poem and its performance recognize the concept of being American as an already defined trope by their society, which is shown through these soundscapes of collaborative hard work. During 1943 U.S. Segregation, racial equity and integration was nonexistent for Americans, so movements such as the WWII Double-V Campaign for racial inclusion at home, and this performance, sought to put a name and definition to integration for legislative change. Therefore, the performance seeks to refine the trope by adding “Black” as another characteristic or “proper name” to the figurative of being American (Blair 1045). Tropes are commonly viewed as “Figures of Words,” which Blair conditions that one word alteration could significantly change the principal, the initial meaning, of the figurative. The societal fear was that by adding African Americans to their trope would change the values of a white-dominated America. This performance recognized this, and its appeal to the Aristolean ethos-in getting the audience’s trust-eases into its main goals of introducing racial integration through these familiar sounds. It keeps the word “American” as the figurative trope and inquires listeners to reflect on the “sentiments and passion” the soundscapes give them. Ultimately, the soundscape in the “Freedom’s Plow” performance provides a non-discourse copias that encourages listeners to think of a racially integrated America where African Americans are also considered part of society, just as they have been throughout the making of the nation.
After recognizing the American trope through soundscapes, the poem employs passion through the longing, yet powerfully performed, Negro Spirituals to invoke the listener’s emotions about moving forward with this racial integration, which adds to its patriotic trope. During the last half of the poem, the Golden Gate Quartette elevates the poem with the spiritual “Keep Your Hand on the Plow Hold On” (Muni 13:50). Muni’s voice also emerges from the song as he speaks the same verses. The oral again takes the listener back, but this time they are encouraged to imagine the enslaved toiling in the fields and to be reminded of the journey forward. Through the mix of high and low acoustics, Blair’s theory about passion in public speaking not lasting too long is met. If this passion was kept too long, the performers may be considered extremists and if it was too short, the audience would not be able to feel enough of the performer’s longing to be comfortable enough to convict themselves to refine their ideas. Therefore, the appeal to emotions (pathos) rhetorically works as listeners from either side of the Civil Rights Movement may become inspired, saddened, or enraged. The poem also recognizes that fear may be a major concern due to white citizens not knowing much about Black culture. Yet, the passion invoked by Christianity through the musical performance again helps to illustrate what 1940s America would consider good people in their American trope. Blair and Aristotle convey that this type of personal virtuosity in one’s society has more weight in persuasion, which is shown through the understanding of moral Christian goodness in this spiritual performance directed to a Christian-centered America.
Lastly, the accessibility of the performance has the ultimate goal of using appeals of logic (logos) and credibility (ethos) to garner a definitional stasis for its audience to define the place for Black Americans in America. Muni ends the poem by explicitly exclaiming “No!” to the enemies of “freedom,” “brotherhood,” and “democracy”-he shows that integration is exactly what he and Hughes are persuading. “Freedom’s Plow” was well-known for its accessibility, especially through these invigorating appeals to the tastes of radio-entertained listeners of the 1940s. The compositionists knew that their main job was to convince white and black audiences to stay on the course of Civil Rights racial advancement so that it could have its place in the developing American trope. The appeal to logic here does not include any numbers or science. The science of African Americans being biologically no different from their white counterparts would not have the same emotional passion as a well-distributed audio that figuratively tells this. The evidence for agreeing to racial inclusion and equality is that Black people have worked and done just as much as White Americans to build the American trope. So, while Blair shies away from the argumentative aspect of public speaking, this artifact is strongly rooted in argumentation even though it comes without discourse. Cicero describes this type of contentment that we see in society as people describing a “deed” using different terms (Cicero 263). Known as a definitional stasis, this performance audibly seeks a definitional stasis as its current society names and defines the term “American.” They are considering if racial integration is a term they should use for it. Moreover, a fact has already been established that Black people are living and free in American society. Now, the performance expresses through its orality that there needs to be an agreement on their quality and place in society before they can move on to any issues of quality, circumstance, and the decision to invoke an action towards U.S. policy. All of this can only be done through listeners understanding the performance and participating in the Civil Rights movement to get the same definition of American. Additionally, Blair investigates if oppressed people cannot provide eloquence about this type of social rearrangement due to this theoretical issue, stating that the slave could only give “ornamental flattery” (Blair 1052). Seeing the performance as fixing a definitional issue expands his limiting theory by the words of Hughes as a Black man being amplified and essentially defining exactly what integration will look like in the 1940s (not just during settlement and industrialization) through the audio. Though not slaves, Hughes and Muni both promote how the actions of the Civil Rights movement can be eloquent to democracy through the exact depiction of what that looks like in the 1940s-a Black man and white man collaborating democratically. Adding Muni’s voice to this African American composed art may seem to obscure the Black nature of the poem, especially since African American rhetorics equates the spoken word to life through the concept of nommo. Yet, like so much Civil Rights art, the performers understood that the reasoning needed to make others comfortable with defining the social change and going forward with the social advancement stood in the performance of white and black discourse arguing for the same goal.
In essence, Blair’s theory of nomenclature and tropes applies to how Hughes’ “Freedom’s Plow” and Muni’s performance of it defines and provides a consciousness to what this socially looks like for Americans. In the most accessible format of the time, listeners find that this “new” rhetorically refined America is something they have experienced before, just under less democratic restrictions. They now need to name or specifically state that racial integration is part of the American trope so that they can take action from the passion and their agreement on their description of it.
Sources Cited
Aristotle. (322 B.C.E). Rhetoric. The Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, 3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s
Blair, Hugh. (1783). Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. The Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, 3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s
Cicero. (86 B.C.E). De Inventione. The Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, 3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s