When George Clooney recently appeared on Broadway as journalist Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, the production closed with a montage about media disinformation. It contained clips of Republicans denying that President Donald Trump had lost the 2020 election and of Democrats vouching for Joe Biden’s mental acuity.
Asked by Jake Tapper why he took shots at both parties, Clooney said that “we need to speak truth to power no matter who is in power.” And in media interviews with Tapper and Alex Thompson, the co-authors of Original Sin—the hot new book exposing the conspiracy to conceal Biden’s physical and mental deterioration even as he ran for reelection— the phrase “speaking truth to power” has come up again and again.
As catchphrases go, “speaking truth to power” is a beaut. It’s a storied expression that packs loads of meaning and emotional pow! into four short words. Like a deft line of poetry, “speaking truth to power” uses familiar words in an unfamiliar way to win attention and hold onto it.
I have always admired the phrase and wanted to know more about it. And a couple weeks ago, I thought of putting it to use in an essay I was drafting on the war of pamphlets between the American colonies and Great Britain in the years leading up to the American Revolution. But as I went to do so, I hesitated. Would “speaking truth to power” in this context be, I wondered, anachronistic?
Although described by Wikipedia as a “non-violent political tactic employed by dissidents against the received wisdom or propaganda of governments they regard as oppressive,” the phrase may designate any speech or writing that questions an official narrative from a position of relative weakness. A Vanity Fair article in 2018 described the ideal Saturday Night Live political sketch as one that succeeds by “speaking truth to power and brazenly punching up at the highest office in the land.” It has been used many times to describe the work of journalists and whistleblowers and dissenters of all types. “Greta Thunberg does not mince words when speaking truth to power,” said an article published by the World Economic Forum.
Meaning can be rather subjective, of course, but frequency is another story. And the frequency of “speaking truth to power” began to spike somewhere around 1998, when Anita Hill picked it as the title of her memoir-slash-rebuttal against Clarence Thomas’s elevation to the Supreme Court. From there its usage in the New York Times grew in fits and starts—in George W. Bush’s second term, during the Iraq war, for example—before doubling in the span of a single year during the first Donald Trump presidency. By my counting, the phrase peaked in the Times in 2017, appearing 59 times.
A quick pass through book titles in the last couple of decades shows the phrase has become a standby of rhetoric about rhetoric. The same year Anita Hill published her book, Columbia University African American studies professor Manning Marable published his own book called Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Resistance, and Radicalism. The phrase has also been used as a title for an anthology of sermons, in the titles of books about confidential informants, about Singaporean civil servants, and about human rights activists, as part of the title of a book by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, and the title of an audio memoir by Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello.
Before all this, “speaking truth to power” was much less popular. The phrase was used for those bearing witness to totalitarianism during the Cold War, a chapter heading in various books of sociology and urban studies, and the title of Aaron Wildavsky’s 1979 book on the theory and practice of political science.
But where did the phrase originate? Examining some two dozen dictionaries of quotations at the public library, I came away empty-handed. After some research, I can say its precise moment of birth continues to be a mystery, though online archives make it possible to antedate its earliest citations by decades if not centuries—and, thus, improve our understanding of the place of this pungent phrase in the history of political rhetoric.
One might guess it belonged to the Civil Rights era—after all, the elegantly spoken Bayard Rustin is widely credited with popularizing the phrase. Raised a Quaker, Rustin was one of several authors who contributed to Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence, a 1955 report from the American Friends Service Committee on the subject of international conflict. The phrase seemed to be rooted in the history of Quakerism, as the report states: “Our title, Speak Truth to Power, taken from a charge given to Eighteenth Century Friends, suggests the effort that is made to speak from the deepest insight of the Quaker faith.” The phrase does seem evocative of early Quaker doctrine on the need to bear witness in the face of persecution. But the words themselves have not been found in the writings of George Fox or any other early Quaker. And nearer precedents found online using Google Books suggest a somewhat different provenance.
Rustin himself, as the religious scholar Guy Aiken notes, credited the economist Patrick Murphy Malin of Swarthmore College with using the phrase in a speech. Searching in Google Books, I found that Malin encountered it during his time as a private secretary to the Protestant missionary Sherwood Eddy in the 1920s. The phrase appears in Eddy’s 1926 book New Challenges to Faith: What Shall I Believe in the Light of Psychology and the New Science—which thanks Malin for his help in revising the manuscript.
The phrase “speaking truth to power” appears in the appendix of New Challenges to Faith, where Eddy quoted a 1923 biography of the 19th century British reformer Anthony Ashley-Cooper by J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, toward the end of which comes this passage: “This was his service to England; not the service of a statesman with wide plan and commanding will, but the service of a prophet speaking truth to power in its selfishness and sloth.”
Ashley-Cooper, like Eddy, was an evangelical supporter of the YMCA movement, and he championed laws and reforms to ameliorate conditions for the most disadvantaged. But the phrase “speaking truth to power” does not appear to have been associated with him—it was applied to him retroactively by 20th-century admirers.
The usual sources (Google Books and Internet Archive, among others) turn up scant evidence of the phrase during the 19th century. Yet in 2006 the language maven William Safire checked his files (and surely those of his many sources in reference publishing), and came up with a variation of “speaking truth to power,” seemingly from the 1820s. It appeared in a letter written by the British painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, whose famously bad historical canvases are the stuff of legend; a biography of Haydon, published in 2006, was called A Genius for Failure. To be fair, Haydon was not entirely without talent, but his true gift may have been for abusing patrons and alienating friends. Haydon once put it this way: “My life has been a whirlwind of brilliant victory and bitter defeat … because in my early and ardent aspirations after excellence I told truth to power!” Seen from this angle, a very different aspect of “speaking truth to power” comes to the fore, as the meaning shifts from bearing witness to something more like boldness of speech.
An even older instance of “speaking truth to power” from 1748 conveys much the same sentiment. It comes to us from Dublin, Ireland, where a political fight had broken out between the city’s aldermen and lord mayor on one side and the common council on the other. The common council represented tradesmen and the guilds. The aldermen, who represented the rich and the powerful, had been making political decisions without consulting the common council, giving rise to what was called the Lucas Controversy.
Enter Helvidius Priscus (a pen name thought by some to belong to Edmund Burke), author of a series of remarkable pamphlets published as The Free Briton’s Advice to the Free Citizens of Dublin. Number 2 in the series contains a stirring homage to the “Spirit of Liberty,” which the author describes as an important counterweight to power in an unequal society:
A Spirit of Liberty is a watchful spirit, and upon the first appearance of danger gives the alarm. It is undaunted and speaks without reserve to the highest powers. . . . Strange it is that men should be found abject enough to tremble at the very thought of speaking truth to power! Even to unauthorized power! Much stranger that men who profess to be free, should conceive danger in the vehemence of a Spirit of Liberty!
The Burke attribution, though obviously attractive, has been heavily litigated and seems to be false. But the writer of the 1748 pamphlets was definitely sympathetic to the oppressed, and the championing of speech as an instrument of liberty very much belongs to the mainstream of English-language Enlightenment thought of the era.
I began researching “speaking truth to power” because I was thinking of using it to describe the rhetorical boldness of pro-American writers like Thomas Jefferson, who in 1774 famously addressed King George directly, challenging the authority of the imperial crown from a position of lowly obscurity: “Open your breast, sire, to liberal and expanded thought. Let not the name of George the third be a blot in the page of history.”
The Americans frequently shocked the British with the boldness of their arguments and Jefferson’s Summary View of the Rights of British America is certainly one of the greatest moments of American linguistic impudence leading to the American Revolution. Because of what I have learned, calling Jefferson’s argument an example of “speaking truth to power” no longer seems anachronistic. It now seems rather apt.
