http://hdl.handle.net/1903/2223 2013-05-19T05:20:54Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13849 Title: J. EDGAR HOOVER AND THE RHETORICAL RISE OF THE FBI: THE PUBLIC CAMPAIGNS AGAINST VERMIN, THE FIFTH COLUMN, AND RED FASCISM. Authors: Underhill, Stephen Michael Abstract: This project examines J. Edgar Hoover's rhetorical leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman administrations (1933-1953). Hoover launched and sustained a concerted domestic propaganda program that helped enhance his own political power and invented the FBI as a central force in domestic and international matters. In the process, he re-envisioned conceptions of U.S. citizenship by promoting notions of idealized citizenship. Hoover entered law enforcement and U.S. politics during the early decades of the twentieth century--a time of increased use of public campaigns sponsored by the U.S. government and presidential administrations to alter public opinion on important policy matters. This period witnessed, for example, the country's experimentation with domestic propaganda during World War I. While the Soviet Union and Germany used disease, vermin, parasite, and body metaphors to organize their own domestic propaganda campaigns in the following decades, Hoover used these same metaphors to advance the need to purify America and exterminate its social pariah. Through his public campaigns against vermin (1933-1939), the Fifth Column (1939-1945), and Red Fascism (1945-1953), Hoover constructed a reality in which corruption and subversion were immutable elements of democratic life. Increasingly, Hoover's tactics of threat and intimidation began to mimic the tactics of threat practiced by America's enemies, moving the country closer to what many at the time called a police state. Hoover's coupling of propaganda and coercive tactics ultimately helped him to rapidly expand the FBI and undermine his superiors and counterparts in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Whereas Roosevelt benefited politically from building up a secret police force, Truman inherited a cunning FBI director eager to use his power to expand and exploit the rhetorical presidency during the Red Scare. 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13607 Title: Crafting Queer Identity, Building Coalitions, and Envisioning Liberation at the Intersections: A Rhetorical Analysis of 1970s Lesbian-Feminist Discourse Authors: Samek, Alyssa A. Abstract: This study examines how lesbian-feminists navigated the competing pressures of identity politics and coalition politics and confronted compounding frustrations, divisions, and exclusionary practices throughout the 1970s. Specifically, the study attends to the ways lesbian-feminists rhetorically recalibrated their identities in and through coalitional relationships with such social movement communities as women's liberation, gay liberation, and anti-war activism. In the process, they were able to build coalitional relationships with activists from other movements while retaining a space for articulating and bolstering their lesbian-feminist identities. This study accordingly examines lesbian-feminist published writings and speeches given during conferences, marches, demonstrations, and political rallies between 1970 and 1980 to reveal how they crafted a space for lesbian-feminist politics, identity, and liberation from within coalitional relationships that also marginalized them. The project intersects the theories of public address, social movement rhetoric, intersectionality, identity politics, and coalition politics to examine the strategic interaction between coalition politics and identity politics in lesbian-feminist activism. In particular, recalibration allowed lesbian-feminists to strategically capitalize on intersectionality in order to negotiate the tension between identity creation and coalition formation. Using the rhetorical strategy of pivoting to feature certain aspects of their identities with the various coalitions in mind, lesbian-feminists increased their visibility. They did so not only for the sake of promoting shared political goals and legitimizing lesbian-feminism, but also to confront social movement members on issues of exclusion, homophobia, and sexism. As a result, lesbian-feminism came to hold a variety of meanings for women working in the second-wave women's liberation, gay liberation, and anti-war movements. At times, lesbian feminists upheld a separatist, vanguard ethic, which was defined in opposition to other identities and movements. Though empowering and celebrated by some as more ideologically pure, separatist identity formations remained highly contested at the margins of lesbian-feminist identity politics. With those margins clearly defined, lesbian-feminists strategically pivoted to enact political ideologies and preserve identity from within coalitional relationships. In the process, their discourse revealed a great deal about the relationship between identity politics and coalition politics in the context of U.S. social protest in the post-1960s era. 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13196 Title: EXAMINING THE EFFECTS OF HOPE AND FEAR APPEALS ON COGNITIVE PROCESSING Authors: UNDERHILL, JILL CORNELIUS Abstract: The potential of hope appeals as persuasive messages relative to other types of emotional appeals is unclear. Hope has been theorized to influence motivation, attitudes, and behaviors in meaningful ways; it is also believed to bias cognition toward goal achievement. Based on appraisal theories and the dual processing paradigm, a conceptual framework for how hope appeals could influence message processing, relative to fear appeals, was proffered. It was predicted that hope appeals would bias recipients, such that they would not pay close attention to the emotional appeal or recommendations that accompanied the appeal in order to maintain their positive mood. Fear appeal recipients were expected to counterargue the emotional appeal, but overestimate the quality of the accompanying recommendations. Emotional appeal type and recommendation quality were expected to interact to influence thought generation. Research questions addressing the influence of emotional appeals on recall were also investigated. A 3(Appeal: hope, fear, or rational) x 2(Recommendation Quality: low or high) x 2 (Source Quality: low or high) independent groups experiment was conducted. Overall, some support for the predictions was found. First, processing of the emotional appeal was examined. Hope appeal recipients generated more supportive thoughts and fewer counterarguments than fear appeal recipients. Processing of recommendations was then examined. Fear appeal recipients generated more supportive thoughts about recommendations than hope appeal recipients. Recommendation quality exerted a strong influence on thought generation. Recall of the recommendations and source was also examined. Hope appeal recipients recalled more recommendations than fear or rational appeal recipients. No interactions between emotional appeal type and recommendation quality emerged for the thought generation or recall measures. Theoretical and applied implications, as well as recommendations for future research, are discussed. 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13160 Title: PREDICTING PSYCHOLOGICAL RIPPLE EFFECTS OF CRISIS COMMUNICATION: INVESTIGATING THE JOINT EFFECTS OF MESSAGE AND MESSAGE RECEIVER ATTRIBUTES Authors: Anagondahalli, Deepa Abstract: In the event of an incidence of workplace violence, organizational post-crisis communication and media coverage of the incident typically provide details about the identity of the perpetrator and possible motivations for the act in an effort to facilitate the sense-making process for message receivers and to mitigate the organization's role in the crisis. In an increasingly globalized world, these messages are read by stakeholders of different nationalities with different cultural orientations. This dissertation examined the interacting influence of crisis message attributes such as the group membership (in-group, out-group) of the perpetrator, attributions of blame in the message (personal dispositional, situational) and message receiver attributes such as nationality (American, Indian) and cultural cognitive style (analytical, holistic) on psychological ripple effects in stakeholders and therefore on implications for an organization in crisis. Results indicated that Indian message receivers measured more holistic than American message receivers. Outcomes for an organization that had experienced a crisis depended on crisis type with the more negative implications being associated with the more preventable crisis according to stakeholders. Further, group membership of the perpetrator did not appear to affect organizational blame. However, contrary to predictions, it was the American message receivers who made a clearer distinction between in-group and out-group perpetrators and this evaluation was tied to the type of crisis. As hypothesized, holistic thinkers blamed the organization more when situational attributions were used in the crisis message; analytical thinkers blamed the organization more when personal dispositional attributions were used in the crisis message. Finally, the psychological ripple effects model showed that organizational blame decreased organizational trust, and increased anger in stakeholders. Angry stakeholders expressed a higher intention to engage in negative word-of-mouth and lowered purchase intention. Overall, the results point to a more complex phenomenon of crisis communication comprehension than is currently understood. Implications for theory and practice are discussed as well as directions for future research. 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z