This may come across as a teensy-weensy surprise, but Nixon's "Great Silent Majority" speech was a statement about the majority versus the minority in America.
Kinda sorta.
Nixon was trying to get his own supporters to rise up and support his ideas about Vietnam. He may have called them the majority. He may have wanted them to be the majority. He may have even wished that they were the majority. But they most likely weren't the majority.
Instead, he used the whole minority versus majority idea to both bolster his own beliefs about how to deal with the Vietnam War while criticizing the anti-war crowd at the same time.
Questions About Majority vs. Minority
- Was the "great silent majority" really a great silent majority? Who do you think he's actually referring to here?
- Wait a minute, wasn't this speech about Vietnam? Why do you think people remember the speech for the "great silent majority" statement?
- What groups of people did Nixon put into the "minority" of Americans?
- Why did Nixon save the words "great silent majority" for the end of the speech?
Chew on This
Nixon's call to the "great silent majority" is one of the great democratic statements in the history of American speech-making. When he spoke those words, he pulled at the heartstrings of every American who had felt overshadowed by boisterous politicians and had their voices drowned out by the activists whose activities seem to be played on repeat on every TV news station around.
Nixon didn't care about the "majority" of Americans. And he definitely didn't care about the "minority" of Americans, either. He only cared about himself. He used this speech for his own ends: to insult the counterculture movements of the 1960s and get support for his own presidential platform.