Not Long Enough
President Donald J. Trump gave his State of the Union speech this week, and it was the longest one in American history, time wise. It wasn’t always this way. George Washington averaged just 2,080 words in his eight speeches and John Adams only 1,790 spoken words.
Andrew Jackson bumped it up to 10,645 words and James K Polk hit 18,014. But these were all written only, not delivered as a speech. It dropped to 6,838 with Abraham Lincoln, the master of brevity.
William Howard Taft was the first to top 22,000 but his successor Woodrow Wilson revived the speech form with texts averaging just 4,545 words. Franklin D. Roosevelt dropped it to 3,563 and he spoke 12 times. Things stayed manageable until Bill Clinton, who spoke, on …
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