Out, Damned Tweet!

摘要

AMERICA WAS BUILT by work, but it was created by words. A declaration, heady with classical eloquence, pitch perfect in the gravity of its steady polemical meter, brought the republic into the world. Knowing that one rebels in poetry but governs in prose, the Constitution gave the nation its institutions in more austerely workmanlike English. Where its language is sharp and clear, arguments are contained; where ambiguous and elastic, contention is invited, never more so than now. Along the way to the present, rhetoric of great passion and moral intelligence-that of Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, William Jennings Bryan, and Franklin Roosevelt-reminded Americans of the highest purposes of the Union and of the terrible penalties of falling short.