The State of Our Union: The Choreographed Pageantry of a Rotting Empire
How the president’s message evolved from a simple constitutional mandate to the performative spectacle we’ve come to know today
[A similar version of this article was published last year.]
The State of the Union has become muscle memory for a city that’s been recycling the same script for decades. But what we saw last night is lightyears from what the framers intended for this procedural, fairly insignificant part of the presidency. How the pomp and circumstance surrounding the president’s Annual Message – as the State of the Union was known until the early 20th century – evolved over two centuries is worth a look.
According to Article II, Section 3, Clause 1 of the Constitution, the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” The document does not specify how this generic requirement must be fulfilled, or how often.
To satisfy this part of the job description, George Washington delivered the speech before Congress. When he did it again the following year, he established an unwritten precedent that this would be done annually. John Adams, our second president, followed in his footsteps.
Thomas Jefferson, however, considered this to be a “monarchical” practice, opting to send a written message instead.
“I have had principal regard to the convenience of the legislature, to the economy of their time, to their relief from the embarrassment of immediate answers on subjects not yet fully before them, and to the benefits thence resulting to the public affairs,” Jefferson wrote. In Jefferson’s view, there was little to be gained from delivering the message orally.
The 23 presidents who followed agreed. For more than a century, the president’s Annual Message was little more than a report prepared for lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The addresses of the 19th century are nothing like the ones we’ve grown accustomed to today.
Take, for example, this passage from Ulysses S. Grant’s 1875 message:
“The number of pensioners still continues to decrease, the highest number having been reached during the year ending June 30, 1873. During the last year 11,557 names were added to the rolls, and 12,977 were dropped therefrom, showing a net decrease of 1,420. But while the number of pensioners has decreased, the annual amount due on the pension rolls has increased $44,733.13. This is caused by the greatly increased average rate of pensions, which, by the liberal legislation of Congress, has increased from $90.26 in 1872 to $103.91 in 1875 to each invalid pensioner, an increase in the average rate of 15 per cent in the three years. During the year ending June 30, 1875, there was paid on account of pensions, including the expenses of disbursement, $29,683,116, being $910,632 less than was paid the preceding year. This reduction in amount of expenditures was produced by the decrease in the amount of arrearages due on allowed claims and on pensions the rate of which was increased by the legislation of the preceding session of Congress. At the close of the last fiscal year there were on the pension rolls 234,821 persons, of whom 210,363 were army pensioners, 105,478 being invalids and 104,885 widows and dependent relatives; 3,420 were navy pensioners, of whom 1,636 were invalids and 1,784 widows and dependent relatives; 21,038 were pensioners of the War of 1812, 15,875 of whom were survivors and 5,163 were widows.”
Grant’s message was, quite literally, a report about the state of the union.
Some of the prose – as when Grant notes the “ingenuity and skill of American mechanics have been demonstrated at home and abroad in a manner most flattering to their pride” – foreshadows the State of the Union template that would develop during the course of the next century. But as a whole, it’s rather clear that the goal of the message is to inform, not entertain.
If Woodrow Wilson hadn’t resurrected the practice of delivering the report in person, there’s a chance Joe Biden could’ve spent his evening at the White House last night. We’ll never know. What we can be certain of, however, is that his 1913 decision changed the Annual Message forever.
In the decades that followed, presidents would still sometimes choose the written word over a congressional address, but by the second half of the century, it was clear that Jefferson’s preference was on its way out.
In 1965, Lyndon Johnson, to attract a larger audience, moved the address – usually given in the afternoon – to primetime. For more than five decades, that’s where it’s stayed.
Seventeen years later, Ronald Reagan invited Lenny Skutnick, who’d saved a woman from the Potomac River after a plane crash, to sit next to the First Lady. That tradition stuck around too. Today, no State of the Union is complete without a handful of people for the president to acknowledge.
Not to be outdone by his predecessors, Donald Trump used his 2020 address to surprise the hate-filled conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh with the Congressional Medal of Freedom.
Post-World War II, the ritual became more performative in every other way imaginable.
It wasn’t just what the president said. How members of Congress reacted and how often became just as important.
Eisenhower and Kennedy averaged less than 40 applause breaks per speech. By comparison, in 2018, Trump’s substance-free speech received 70 standing ovations from Republicans, who spent approximately 30 minutes of his speech clapping.
The antics are far from spontaneous.
As Andre Tartar relayed in a 2013 New York Magazine piece, “In 1982, Democratic congressman Dennis Eckart of Ohio was so intrigued by the “over-the-top” synchronized cheering from Republicans that he went across the aisle and picked up a copy of Reagan’s remarks. They differed in one key respect from the remarks distributed to Democrats: Specific applause cues were peppered throughout.”
Who gets to shake the president’s hand when he first enters the House chamber has also transformed into an important part of the process.
The tradition of getting some camera time with the president appealed so much to Eliot Engel as a freshman congressman that he decided to make it a tradition of his own, arriving on the House floor hours before everyone else to stake out his spot.
“It appealed to me 27 years ago when I was a freshman, because you can get on TV shaking the president’s hand,” Engel, who was successfully primaried by Jamaal Bowman in 2020, once noted during an interview.
At times, this hyper-politicized custom has also been used to express contempt.
In 2017, the Washington Post ran an article entitled “Democrats’ dilemma: To shake or not to shake President Trump’s hand”.
“I have no desire to sit on the aisle and shake the president’s hand,” Democratic Congressman Bill Pascrell Jr. was quoted in the article as saying. Pascrell didn’t believe that the new president deserved a handshake, but he did believe that he deserved a higher defense budget to wage war with, and voted in favor of the following year’s National Defense Authorization Act. For Democrats in the midst of a faux resistance, the theatrical nature of the State of the Union always came in handy. Who could forget all the mainstream news actors talking about Nancy Pelosi ripping up a copy of Trump’s speech in homeroom the next day?
Every moment of the State of the Union is very carefully orchestrated, and no part of the process is more meticulously planned than choosing what the president will say. Because the speech has nothing to do with informing Congress and everything to do with politics, it takes the president’s speechwriters months to lock down a final draft.
In their book, The President’s Words, Michael Nelson and Russell L. Riley detail the four stages every modern White House must go through to complete this process.
“Stage One: “Casting a Wide Net” – “In terms of formal advice, cabinet secretaries and other political appointees press the White House to showcase initiatives and achievements emanating from their departments. Well-known scholars and best-selling authors have also been invited to submit their thoughts and ideas. According to Clinton speechwriter Michael Waldman, “Before Christmas, we had sent Clinton a book of memos from two dozen writers and academics – from Arthur Schlesinger Jr to Garrison Keillor. Casting a wide net ensured a variety of perspectives and enabled the White House to move “beyond the beltway.”
Stage Two: Consolidation – “… presidential pollsters have become prominent behind-the-scenes advisers on the state of the union address. Although they are not formally members of the White House staff because they do not draw a government salary and are not listed on official staff rosters, their advice on speeches can be influential: incorporating data from polling, testing themes and phrases with focus groups, and measuring reactions to the speech in real time by using pulse-meters. Such data are often used to inform both the delivery and content of the address. Pollsters claim to provide a “scientific” approach to identifying what will resonate, what will fall flat, and what parts of the speech still need work.”
Stage Three: Practice, Practice, Practice
Stage Four: The Post-State of the Union Road Show – “Beginning with Clinton… The practice emerged when Clinton visited fourteen cities after the address. Bush engaged in this strategy even more vigorously than his predecessor, making twenty-eight post-state of the union trips across the country.””
It’s an effort that requires all hands on deck. During the Truman administration, the White House went as far as asking John Jessup, the chief editorial writer for Life magazine, to contribute to the president’s 1953 address.[i]
Pollster Richard Wirthlin utilized “pulse-meters” for Ronald Reagan’s addresses by arranging for volunteers to watch the speeches while recording which parts they liked or disliked.[ii]
Bill Clinton’s White House leaned just as heavily on pollsters for his State of the Union speeches, with pollster Mark Penn being “involved quite a bit in helping us with policy points that we wanted to make.”[iii]
Over time, rhetoric became more important than reality. As the years rolled on, presidents cared more about how a policy prescription sounded than whether or not it was actually likely to be implemented.
“I don’t want to go fifty-five or sixty minutes… most of [the State of the union speeches] do, you know. I’d say about forty-five minutes. Five thousand words,” Richard Nixon is said to have instructed. “Why do we have to have all that dull stuff about Indians and agriculture and cesspools? I want an idea speech rather than a programmatic one. Let’s get the dull subjects out of the way in one paragraph toward the beginning. Let’s direct this one to the television audience. Keep it short on foreign policy and foreign aid; it’s a losing battle. A brief but strong reference to Vietnam. New directions. The Nixon doctrine… agriculture in a State of the Union isn’t worth a damn. And you lose your audience if you talk about inflation. A State of the Union has to have hope in it.”[iv]
And it wasn’t just what the president said. How he said it was just as important.
As just one example, in an effort to try to tap into the legacies of FDR’s New Deal or John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, Jimmy Carter’s speechwriters became obsessed with working the word "new" into the State of the Union.
In preparation for Carter’s 1979 address, senior staff kicked around possible slogans like “New Groundwork” and “New Building Blocks”. During a January 2 Oval Office meeting, Carter and his team wrestled with how to address the problems plaguing America but “talk kept returning to the complex, intractable nature of the problems the country faced – inflation, energy, government inefficiency – and how, because the solutions all long term, there were no political dividends in addressing them.” They ultimately settled on “New Foundation.”[v]
The phrase made it into the first line of Carter’s address, but lost steam soon after and swiftly evaporated from his White House.
The State of the Union began to exhibit less and less substance as the years continued. In the decades that followed, the appearance of success became much more important than actual accomplishment. Speechwriters became more concerned with producing crisp sound bites than they were with communicating tangible goals. Weaving a narrative that could excite your base began to override sound, realistic policy.
Every one of our institutions is broken and it feels like every one of our elected officials has been corrupted. Americans’ confidence in their government has never been lower and the prospect of nuclear war is as high as it’s ever been. Of course, you’d never know it by listening to the president speak because the main takeaway is always that “the State of the Union is strong.”
Today, the state of our union is known to all, especially members of Congress. The administration uses social media, its army of cable guests, and the White House Briefing Room to reinforce its message every hour of every day. The messaging it conveys is rarely truthful and its tactics are always political.
The State of the Union, as it’s executed today, isn’t needed and only benefits the people who are inside the Capitol while it’s happening.
This is a constitutional mandate we as a nation could comfortably forget about.
[i] Ritter, Kurt; Medhrust, Martin, Presidential Speechwriting, Texas A&M University Press, 2004.
[ii] Nelson, Michael; Riley, Russell, The President’s Words: Speeches and Speechwriting in the Modern White House, University Press of Kansas, 2010.
[iii] Nelson, Michael; Riley, Russell, The President’s Words: Speeches and Speechwriting in the Modern White House, University Press of Kansas, 2010.
[iv] Gavin, William, Speechwright, Michigan State University Press, 2011.
[v] Schlesinger, Robert, White House Ghosts, Simon & Schuster, 2008.