Communication
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Item The Educational Imaginary in Radical Reconstruction: Congressional Public Policy Rhetoric and American Federalism, 1862-1872(2016) Steudeman, Michael Joseph; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Facing the exigencies of Emancipation, a South in ruins, and ongoing violence, between 1862 and 1872 the United States Congress debated the role education would play in the postbellum polity. Positing schooling as a panacea for the nation’s problems, a determiner of individual worth, and a way of ameliorating state and federal tensions, congressional leaders envisioned education as a way of reshaping American political life. In pursuit of this vision, many policymakers advocated national school agencies and assertive interventions into state educational systems. Interrogating the meaning of “education” for congressional leaders, this study examines the role of this ambiguous concept in negotiating the contradictions of federal and state identity, projecting visions of social change, evaluating civic preparedness, and enabling broader debates over the nation’s future. Examining legislative debates over the Reconstruction Acts, Freedmen’s Bureau, Bureau of Education, and two bills for national education reform in the early 1870s, this project examines how disparate educational visions of Republicans and Democrats collided and mutated amid the vicissitudes of public policy argument. Engaging rhetorical concepts of temporality, disposition, and political judgment, it examines the allure and limitations of education policy rhetoric, and how this rhetoric shifted amid the difficult process of coming to policy agreements in a tumultuous era. In a broader historical sense, this project considers the role of Reconstruction Era congressional rhetoric in shaping the long-term development of contemporary Americans’ “educational imaginary,” the tacit, often unarticulated assumptions about schooling that inflect how contemporary Americans engage in political life, civic judgment, and social reform. Treating the analysis of public policy debate as a way to gain insights into transitions in American political life, the study considers how Reconstruction Era debate converged upon certain common agreements, and obfuscated significant fault lines, that persist in contemporary arguments.Item An Analysis of Presidential Campaigns of Sitting and Former Vice Presidents: So Close and Yet so Far(2014) Mansharamani, Neil Hiro; Kendall, Kathleen E; Klumpp, James F; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the presidential campaign communication of American sitting and former vice presidents. In recent history, four sitting U.S. vice presidents have run for president with only one (George H. W. Bush) succeeding. Three, Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and Albert Gore in 2000, lost close elections, with Nixon and Gore losing in very close and controversial contests. In the two cases of former vice presidents who ran for president, Nixon prevailed in 1968, whereas Walter Mondale failed in 1984. All of these candidates faced similar rhetorical problems attributable to their vice presidential status, particularly in defining their relationship with the president and their role in the administration. This study is a content analysis and historical analysis of campaign speeches, statements made during debates, and television advertisements by sitting and former vice presidents in the elections of 1960, 1968, 1984, 1988, and 2000. The purpose is to understand each vice president's discourse regarding both the president and the administration in which he served; and better appreciate how the inherent rhetorical situation that accompanies a superior-subordinate relationship is illustrated in these types of campaigns. Results showed that some vice presidents (e.g. Richard Nixon) chose to discuss their president/administration more often, while others chose to almost never discuss their president/administration (e.g. Al Gore). This analysis shows that when a vice president seeks election to the presidency, he has tended to pursue one or more of the following strategies: run on the administration's record; minimize the record and argue that if elected, he will produce better results; emphasize their own personal involvement and achievements in the administration; or mostly avoid discussing the president/administration.Item Congressional Widowhood and Gubernatorial Surrogacy: A Rhetorical History of Women's Distinct Paths to Public Office(2013) Hayes, Lindsay; Parry-Giles, Shawn; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)More than fifty women have ascended to elective office through a matrimonial connection; the current study is a rhetorical history of these ties to office. Specifically, this study explores the rhetorical leadership of six female candidates who assumed office via one of two matrimonial paths--gubernatorial surrogacy and congressional widowhood--between 1920 and 1968, a period often referred to as the "doldrums" of the women's rights movement. By examining the public discourse created by and about these female candidates and officeholders, the study explores how these women used the rhetorical resources available within their historical context to expand their capacity to act publicly. Drawing upon and stretching the cultural constructions of maternal authority and spousal duty, these leaders rhetorically established, employed, and expanded matrimonial paths to office. Their public discourse not only served to justify their candidacies, it also had important implications for women's history, female equality, and gender ideology. To that end, this study explores the ways in which these rhetorical performances helped advance the cause of female equality and opportunity during the doldrums. It accounts for the ways in which the candidates and officeholders studied helped women make progress electorally, moved the nation closer to the ideals of representative democracy, and contributed to our "public vocabulary" regarding women and institutional power. This project emphasizes the ways that, through the exercise of their rhetorical agency, these women helped create powerful justifications for female campaigning and office holding while helping to shape notions of femininity in ways that facilitated greater female agency, opportunity, and public activity.Item Boosting the Mythic American West and U.S. Woman Suffrage: Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain Women's Public Discourse at the Turn of the Twentieth Century(2013) Lewis, Tiffany; Maddux, Kristy L; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines how white women negotiated the mythic and gendered meanings of the American West between 1885 and 1935. Focusing on arguments made by women who were active in the public life of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain States, these analyses illustrate the ways the mythic West shaped the U.S. woman suffrage movement and how Western women simultaneously contributed to the meaning of the American West. Through four case studies, I examine the ways women drew on Western myths as they advocated for woman suffrage, participated in place-making the West, and navigated the gender ideals of their time. The first two case studies attend to the advocacy discourse of woman suffragists in the Pacific Northwest. Suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway of Oregon championed woman suffrage by appropriating the frontier myth to show that by surviving the mythic trek West, Western women had proven their status as frontier heroines and earned their right to vote. Mountaineer suffragists in Washington climbed Mount Rainier for woman suffrage in 1909. By taking a "Votes for Women" pennant to the mountain summit, they made a political pilgrimage that appropriated the frontier myth and the turn-of-the-century meanings of mountain climbing and the wilderness for woman suffrage. The last two case studies examine the place-making discourse of women who lived in Rocky Mountain states that had already adopted woman suffrage. Grace Raymond Hebard, a Wyoming historian and community leader, participated in the pioneer reminiscing practices of marking historic sites. Hebard's commemorations drew on the agrarian myth and Wyoming woman suffrage to domesticate Wyoming's "Wild West" image and place-make Wyoming as settled, civilized, and progressive. When Jeannette Rankin was elected as Montana's U.S. Representative in 1916, she introduced herself to the nation by enacting her femininity, boosting Montana's exceptionalism, and drawing on the frontier myth to explain Western woman suffrage. As I conclude with an analysis of Henry Mayer's "Awakening" cartoon, I illustrate the ways place-based arguments for woman suffrage and the boosting of Western woman suffrage worked together to construct the meaning of the West as a place of gender equality in the early twentieth century.Item J. EDGAR HOOVER AND THE RHETORICAL RISE OF THE FBI: THE PUBLIC CAMPAIGNS AGAINST VERMIN, THE FIFTH COLUMN, AND RED FASCISM.(2012) Underhill, Stephen Michael; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)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.Item (Re)Placing America: Cold War Mapping and the Mediation of International Space(2011) Barney, Timothy; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The United States emerged from World War II as an undeniably global power, and as the Cold War unfolded, America faced decisions about where to place and display its power on the globe. The Cold War was a battle between two ideologies and competing world systems, both of which were vying for space and had the tools and technologies to control those spaces. Maps became a central vehicle for the testing of these new boundaries. Mapping projects and programs emerged from a variety of popular cartographers, foreign policy strategists, defense leaders, Congressional representatives, scientists, oppositional movements, labor unions, educational publishers, even everyday citizens. As each of these sources confirms, the scope of American commitments had expanded considerably; to account for this expansion, a cartographic impulse underwrote the continually evolving Cold War, and the tensions of art and science, realism and idealism, and space and place inherent in this impulse helped form the fault lines of the conflict. (Re)Placing America looks largely at the ways that cartography adapted to such changes and tensions in the second half of the twentieth century, and how the United States marshaled the practice of mapping in a variety of ways to account for the shift to internationalism. This dissertation explores how cartography mediated visions of space, and particularly, how it defined America's place within those spaces. Treating cartography as a complex rhetorical process of production, display, and circulation, the five chapters cover major geopolitical thematics, and the responding evolution of maps, from World War II until the Cold War's end in the early 1990s. Some of these driving themes include the "air-age" expansion of visual perspectives and strategic potential in journalistic maps; the appropriation of cartography as a medium for intelligence and national security objectives; the marshaling of maps as evidential weapons against the Soviet Union in diplomatic exchanges, Congressional reports, and government-sponsored propaganda; the shifts from East/West antagonisms to North/South ones as cartography was drafted into the modernization efforts of the U.S. in mapping the Third World; and the Defense Department's use of maps to argue for nuclear deterrence, while protest groups made radical cartographic challenges to these practices of state power. (Re)Placing America reads closely the maps of the forty-years-plus conflict and considers the complexity of their internal codes (in colors, shapes, icons, etc.), while also reaching out externally to the intersecting interests and visions of the cartographic producers and the Cold War contexts in which they emerged. The project seeks out and explores particular nodal points and thematics where maps consolidated and shaped changing shifts in perception, where cartographic fragments cohered around the defining moments, but also sometimes in the everyday politics of the Cold War. Ultimately, this project offers four conclusions about and conduct and operation of American mapping during the complex, ideologically charged time of the Cold War. First, the function of the map to both "fix" and "unfix" particular perceptions of the world is relevant to assessing how America sought to stabilize its place in a rapidly changing world. Second, the internationalism of the Cold War was bound up in the capacities for cartography to document and adapt to it. Third, the humanistic notion of a geographical imagination is central to understanding why particular Cold War agents and institutions continually drew on cartography to represent their interests. Finally, combining an ideological approach to reading maps as articulators of contextual tensions and historical ideas with an instrumental approach to maps as material, strategic documents can best help to situate cartography as an ongoing process of production, circulation, and display.