Cox & Foust, “Social movement rhetoric” pp. 605-22 What is the rhetoric of the streets? The article discusses how critics created conceptual vocabulary to describe movements and rhetoric of the time. "Skeptics denounced a “climate of anarchy,” which they attributed to the “rhetoric of the streets,” including draft-card burnings, boycotts, traffic blockades, campus sit-ins, mass marches through segregated neighborhoods, and obscene chants protesting the Vietnam War (Haiman, 1967, p. 100). The new rhetoric exceeded “the bounds of permissible time, place, and manner” (p. 100) and the traditional province of rhetoric as “verbal communication” (p. 99). Most important for rhetorical critics, some charged that the new rhetoric constituted “‘persuasion’ by a strategy of power and coercion rather than by reason." (pg. 606).
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