America’s entry into World War I was a watershed moment in the history of political thought in the US, marking the beginning of the modern era of diplomatic, bureaucratic and civil discourse, researchers from Columbia University and the LSIS-INRA reported in a new study.
As the authors explained in this week’s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they conducted a computer analysis of presidential State of the Union addresses since 1790, and found that the hallmarks of modern political thought such as funding of infrastructure, the regulation of business and nation building clearly began to emerge after 1917.
“1917 was the first year that political understandings resembled our own more than those of the country’s founders,” lead author Alix Rule, a graduate student at Columbia, explained to redOrbit via email. “It marks a fundamental shift from 19th century to modern categories of political thought. During this ‘modern’ period, post-1917, the pace at which particular objects pass through the lens of political discourse also picks up.”
Rule and her colleagues developed algorithms to analyze the more than 1.7 million words used by US presidents in their various State of the Union addresses, starting with the 1790 original by George Washington through current president Barack Obama’s latest remarks in 2014. The goal was to find specific trends or word clusters to find what topics dominated the social and political discourse of each moment in time.
Focus on Navy ends, welfare state emerges after 1917, study finds
The researchers found that, while discussions of industry, finance, and foreign policy tended to be topics featured every year, a new set of terms became increasingly prominent in State of the Union addresses given starting in 1917, the year in which the US joined Allied forces in the global conflict against Germany.
For instance, words such as “democracy,” “unity,” “peace”, and “terror” emerged and started to replace older terms centered around statecraft and diplomacy as keywords, Rule and her fellow investigators found. By the 1940s, a cluster of new words focusing on the Navy, believed to be indicative of an isolationist foreign policy, all but disappears from presidential addresses.
Furthermore, they discovered an overall shift in the terminology dominating domestic policy in the US, as new discussions over the size of the federal government. its role in the regulating the economy and whether or not it had a responsibility to provide equal opportunity emerged during this post-WWI era. Keywords such as the “Treasury,” “amount” and “expenditures” are replaced by “tax relief,” “incentives” and “welfare” during this transitional period.
“What our analysis shows is not just what emerged as new in the modern period, but what ended,” Rule told redOrbit. “After 1917, a topic of political conversation that had existed since the first state of the union address in 1790, about the Navy, dies away. So does another strand of conversation about noninterventionist foreign policy. After WWI, the welfare state becomes recognizable as a topic of political discourse, but we also show that this conversation had its origin in pre-1917 conversation about political and economic reform.”
“We show that it is possible to analyze text in a manner that makes the outcomes of that analysis immediately interpretable,” she added. “We can see how terms are related to other terms, how clusters of concepts are related to one another, and so on. And that is because we can represent the State of the Union as a giant network of intertwined terms.”
—–
Feature Image Credit: GalleryHip.com
Comments