The Evolution of the Rhetorical Presidency and Getting Past the Traditional/Modern Divide

Scholars of the presidency often begin research or examination of the institution with the “modern” presidential era that is said to begin with Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This kind of approach, as well as the “traditional/ modern” paradigm in general, is problematic because it tends to summarily dismiss a large percentage of the executive officeholders due to their seeming lack of contribution to our understanding of the contemporary presidency. Instead, when the presidents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are closely examined alongside all of their peers, they are remarkable not for the ways in which they fail to resemble today's executive, but for the ways in which they are similar. As such, we, as scholars who are looking for the most complete examination of the presidency, its evolution, and its changes, must move past the adoption of easy handles and evaluate the entirety of presidential history to ensure each era be recognized for its important contributions to the twenty‐first century presidency.