Language: The Slogan Society

In politics, it seems, bad times make good slogans. Herbert Hoover’s promise of “a chicken in every pot” did not get him re-elected in 1932, but it was a far more ingenious catch phrase than the Republicans’ 1944 theme, “Time for a change,” or “I like Ike” in 1952. And for all John F. Kennedy’s eloquence, no Democratic orator since the Depression has matched Franklin D. Roosevelt’s phrasemaking prowess on behalf of “the forgotten man.” Lyndon Johnson’s vision of “the Great Society” is not only vague, but vieille vague as well; the term was the title of a 1914 book by British Political Psychologist Graham Wallas, and the idea is as old as Plato’s Republic. Equally lackluster is Barry Goldwater’s “In your heart you know he is right”—which L.B.J. could not resist parodying in his speech before the Steelworkers Union last month (“You know in your heart that I am telling you the truth”).

“Word Magic.” To many scholars, all slogans are bad slogans. George Mowry, dean of social sciences at U.C.L.A., argues that they “compress a lot of truth into what is basically an untruth.” Indeed, for the majority of voters not inclined to analyze issues for themselves, slogans are a welcome substitute for logical argument. “Most people would rather die than think,” says Bertrand Russell. “In fact, some do.” Russell’s own ban-the-bomb marchers, mindlessly chanting “Better Red than dead,” prove his point.

Phrases such as “Peace in our time” and “Prosperity is just around the corner” invoke “word magic,” as linguists call verbal formulas that promise to make dreams come true through sheer repetition. On the other hand, observes San Francisco State College’s S. I. Hayakawa, a pioneering U.S. semanticist. “You don’t move a mass society with a volume by Galbraith.” Particularly in the U.S., as Cambridge Historian Denis Brogan has pointed out, “the evocative power of verbal symbols must not be despised, for these are and have been one of the chief means of uniting the United States and keeping it united.”

The most effective political slogans are timely, yet live long beyond their time. Passing into the language, they help crystallize great issues of the past for future generations: “Give me liberty or give me death”; “Lebensraum”; “The world must be made safe for democracy”; “There’ll always be an England”; “unconditional surrender”; “the Great Leap Forward”; “We shall overcome.” In an increasingly complex society, as Hayakawa points out, such coinages are essential “short cuts to a consensus.”

Seven Is Tops. The word “slogan,” from the Gaelic sluagh (army) and gairm (a call), originally meant a call to arms—and some of history’s most stirring slogans, from “Erin go bragh” to “Remember Pearl Harbor” have been just that. In peacetime, argues Hayakawa, electorates respond more readily to slogans that promise change, since people are rarely satisfied with things as they are. One notable exception was the catch phrase that helped return Britain’s Tory Party to power in 1959: “You never had it so good.” In general, though, Democrats, like detergent manufacturers, favor slogans that offer a new and better product (“New Deal,” “New Frontier”). The Grand Old Party, like whisky distillers, prefers to emphasize aged-in-the-wood reliability, from Abraham Lincoln’s “Don’t swap horses in the middle of the stream” to 1924’s “Keep cool with Coolidge.”

To be fully effective, say psychologists, a slogan should express a single idea in seven words or less. “It is a psychological fact,” says Harvard’s Gordon Allport, “that seven is the normal limit of rote memory.” (Example: telephone numbers.) Whether plugging cat food or a candidate, sloganeers lean heavily on such verbal devices as alliteration (“Korea, Communism, Corruption”), rhyme (“All the way with L.B.J.”), or a combination of both (“Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”).* Other familiar standbys are paradox (“We have nothing to fear but fear itself”), metaphor (“Just the kiss of the hops”), metonymy (“The full dinner pail”), parody (a Norwegian travel folder promises “a Fjord in Your Future”), and punning (“Every litter bit helps”). By using what semanticists call “affective” language, many slogans deliberately exploit chauvinism (“Made in Texas by Texans”), xenophobia (“Yankee go home”), insecurity (“Even your best friends won’t tell you”), narcissism (“Next to myself I like B.V.D. best”), escapism (“I dreamed I barged down the Nile in my Maidenform bra”).

Long before Poet T. S. Eliot expounded his theory of the “auditory imagination,” Pioneer Adman Earnest Elmo Calkins used pocket poetry to make “Phoebe Snow” glamorize passenger service on the coal-burning Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. Slogans nearly always overload the language and often debase it (“cof-fee-er coffee”). English teachers curse Madison Avenue for institutionalizing bad grammar with such calculated lapses as “us Tareyton smokers” and “like a cigarette should.” By contrast, some of history’s most enduring slogans were plucked from literature. Winston Churchill’s call to “blood, sweat and tears”—boiled down from his first statement as Prime Minister in 1940, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”—was adapted from a passage in a 1931 book by Churchill; but strikingly similar words were used in previous centuries by the British poets John Donne, Byron and Lord Alfred Douglas.

The Boomerang. “Knocking” slogans, in adman’s parlance, are apt to be risky—though pollsters find that the “carpetbagger” label has been damaging to Robert Kennedy’s senatorial campaign in New York. By failing to repudiate promptly a supporter’s denunciation of “rum, Romanism and rebellion” in 1884, James G. Elaine lost New York’s electoral votes and the presidential election against Grover Cleveland. Barry Goldwater has probably lost votes by charging that Lyndon Johnson is “soft on Communism”—an inflammatory Republican slogan a decade ago, but now a burnt-out cliché. Another Goldwater slogan that boomeranged was “extremism in the defense of liberty”—even if it was intended as a paraphrase of Tom Paine’s aphorism: “Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice.”

To be compelling, a slogan must above all be simple. Its acceptance, says University of Houston Psychologist Richard Evans, “is rooted in man’s basic intolerance for ambiguity.” But it doesn’t always work that way. One of the most successful slogans in recent years was a “Vote for clean water” campaign in St. Louis, which led many citizens to believe that a proposed $95 million bond issue would be spent to purify their drinking water. In fact, it was intended to reduce pollution of the Mississippi River downstream from the city, but confused St. Louisans passed the bond issue in a 5-1 landslide. Nothing ambiguous about that.

*Tyler was the Whig vice-presidential candidate in 1840. “Tippecanoe” was used to glamorize Gentleman Farmer William Henry Harrison, who had scored a dubious victory over the Indians in a skirmish at Tippecanoe Creek 29 years earlier, but routed Martin Van Buren in the election. A more forgettable Whig slogan affirmed: “With Tip and Tyler we’ll bust Van’s biler.”