Debating Society

"As an exemplar of the gauzy distortions of hindsight, Guelzo cites late media scholar Neil Postman's pronouncement that where Lincoln-Douglas embodied a literary oratory and belonged to 'the Age of Exposition,' Nixon-Kennedy and subsequent made-for-TV clashes were nothing but creatures of 'the Age of Show Business.'
"Please, Mr. Postman. Scholars should know better than to traffic in such nostalgia; the Lincoln-Douglas contest, after all, provided plenty of entertainment, too. Guelzo's feat is that he does more than just resist the romanticized view of the event. He takes on with equal relish the counterclaim, widely accepted by academics, that the Lincoln-Douglas encounters were simply the trashy 'political theater' of a pre-wired era. While some historians have argued that the turnout at debates like these reflected simply the robust energies of the party machines, which hustled out crowds and plied them with food and drink, Guelzo gives the debates their popular due.
"He does so by locating them within the context of the 1858 senatorial campaign, enfolding them in a seamless, if sometimes heavy-going, narrative. He also grounds them in confident analyses of the period's political culture: the state of the parties, the prevalent style of campaigning and public speaking, and the issues that voters worried about—above all, the debate over slavery's expansion into the American West."

David Greenberg reviews Allen C. Guelzo's Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America in Slate.