Instructor Finds Goldwater Speech Rates High in 'Aesthetic Reference'

Why did some people feel that Senator Barry Goldwater's acceptance speech last July was "strange"?

A Harvard researcher yesterday suggested that Goldwater's famous statement on extremism in the defense of liberty may not have been the explanation.

Emphatic Words'

Using a computer to analyze the occurrence of certain words in candidates' acceptance speches, Philip J. Stone, lecturer in Social Relations, found that the Arizonan scored unusually high in using "emphatic words" and "aesthetic-visual references" and unusually low in references to "human feelings and emotions."

He told a Minneapolis convention of social scientists that these peculiarities may be the reason some were "attracted or repulsed by the speech without being able to specify why." Attempting to explain a speech's strangeness on the basis of a single statement, such as the one on extremism, is "a classical defense mechanism," he said.

Stone and two associates here punched 14 speech texts onto IBM cards and used a computer to count the number of times each candidate used words in certain key categories. The category of "ideal values," for example, included such words as "energetic," "faith," "freedom," "healthy," "honest," "liberty," "victory," and so on.

Many Ideals

Both Johnson and Goldwater were found to be high in their references to ideals, but three words--"free," "freedom," and "liberty"--accounted for more than one-third of Goldwater's references. Stone reported that Goldwater used these words 40 times and in all but two cases he used them without modiflers, as in "The tide is running against freedom."

Among the rescarchers' other findings was that Goldwater approached politics "with an aesthetic frame of reference." "He describes American constitutional government as a 'great framework,' a 'system of beauty,' [and something] 'inspiring' to the world," Stone said.

'Unique' Emphasis

Such visual emphasis is "quite unique" among the candidates studied, according to Stone. Johnson, he said, "is only moderate in artistic references."

Stone said that Goldwater scored high in using emphatic words, such as "powerful" rather than "ready," but called him "markedly low" in references to human feelings and emotions. Johnson scored "moderately" in both categories, he said.