Abstract In the decades after the Civil War, countless Americans saw the bloody conflict as some kind of message from God. These perceptions created a problem for the preeminent Republican orator of the day, Robert Ingersoll, who was also a fierce opponent of revealed religion. In speaking for the Republican Party during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, Ingersoll managed to interact successfully with religiously structured memories of the war while maintaining his reputation as the Great Agnostic. This essay explores how he was able to do so. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s work on the rhetoric of religion, I argue that Ingersoll interacted with Civil War memory by redirecting supernatural terms to natural and sociopolitical contexts. In so doing he imbued political culture with a sacred character that allowed believers, nonbelievers, and people of various persuasions to participate in memories of the war. In the end, Ingersoll’s oratory modeled a “pluralistic civil religion,” which employs religious language for civic ends but eschews references to the divine as a way of accommodating a range of beliefs.

Abstract Jesus often spoke about the Christian obligation to provide for the poor. Yet, public opinion polls and scholarly studies consistently find that conservative Protestant voters favor economic policies of low taxes, limited state spending on welfare, and personal responsibility for financial success. This study uses evangelical sermons as a means for analyzing how conservative economic discourse, defined as a preference for limited government interference in market activities, proliferated inside American megachurches over four years following the 2008 recession. It also examines how pastors of large congregations rhetorically justified support for policies that scholars have shown work against the economic interests of middle-class and poor citizens alike. The study found that when megachurch pastors speak about economic issues, they deploy language and arguments that emphasize American economic providence and the need for individuals to take personal responsibility for financial outcomes, premises that afforded pastors the discursive space necessary for making claims about the superiority of private charity over public welfare. These findings suggest that, contrary to arguments that situate the public discourse of conservative Protestants as being mostly about social issues, there is inside evangelicalism a robust conversation about financial questions. This economic discourse is strikingly similar to that of nonreligious conservatives in the United States, a confluence that works to create a rhetorical resonance among the base constituencies inside the Republican Party and so fortify its ideological appeal and strength.

Other| March 01 2015 The Intimate and Ugly Politics of Emancipation Kirt H. Wilson Kirt H. Wilson Kirt H. Wilson is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Public Discourse at Pennsylvania State University in State College. He thanks Charles E. Morris III for organizing this forum and his fellow authors for their insightful interpretations. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (1): 121–128. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.1.0121 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kirt H. Wilson; The Intimate and Ugly Politics of Emancipation. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2015; 18 (1): 121–128. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.1.0121 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract This essay defines and describes the atheistic voice. Drawing from Thomas Lessl’s “voice” metaphor (“The Priestly Voice”), the logology of Kenneth Burke, and the literary insights of Mikhail Bakhtin, I map out the rhetorical tropes of the atheistic voice by analyzing the rhetoric of Christopher Hitchens, which exemplifies the atheistic voice as a rhetorical ideal. Hitchens demonstrates that the rhetorical strategies of burlesque and grotesque rejection are the atheistic voice’s primary means of ridiculing and tearing down the god-terms of priestly and bardic discourses. After analyzing these strategies, I point to concerns—some perennial, some contemporary—that the ebb and flow of atheistic voices in a democratic public sphere present.

Abstract This article explores questions about “civility” in the 2012 election. Through an analysis of media discussions raising the term, four themes are constructed focusing on the limitations of civility discourse. While seeking to preserve the best that civil orientations afford, I argue that adding a deliberative approach to such discourse addresses moments when civil appeals appear to be most limited. This essay finds that working between civil and deliberative constructs provides an instructive perspective for understanding the workings of and possibilities for public discourse during situations when civility rhetoric is typically raised. Relative to civil communication—and associated concepts such as dialogue and advocacy—specific norms, benefits, examples, and implications of a deliberative rhetorical vision are charted for problem-solving, public policy contexts.

Abstract This essay analyzes three pedagogical manuals on publicity design published by the National Committee of Patriotic Societies (NCPS) during the First World War. The NCPS represented dozens of nationalistic organizations dedicated to the mission of preparedness. This essay argues that in its publicity guidebooks, the NCPS suggested that propaganda designed with a Republican aesthetic could wed the working class to the war effort. Such advice was predicated on the psychological notion that affective experiences conditioned audiences for further persuasive appeals. Examination of these manuals thus highlights the importance of psychological theories of affect to the aesthetics of propaganda.

William Keith, Christian Lundberg, and James M. Farrell have thoughtfully reviewedmy effort to explicate howmodern public speaking came to be conceptualized on the basis of antecedent text genres.My argumentwas that a newunderstanding of oral rhetoric emerged between 1890 and 1930 as authors experimentally and variously appropriated concepts and frameworks from elocution (in its several iterations), from oratorical composition (as given in new-rhetoric treatises, advanced rhetorics, and composition books), and from varietal popular or professional works (of extemporaneous speaking, debating, and audienceadapted preaching). More broadly, my “Inventing Public Speaking” represents an effort to rebalance the larger history of rhetoric, 1730–1930, along the lines of orality in the context of a post-1980 emphasis upon writingcentered schoolbooks and pedagogies. Here my three colleagues usefully expand this principle of disciplinary balance by showing how the text-based conceptualizing of rhetoric may be enhanced, in Farrell’s telling, by deeper understandings of the professional and institutional roots of the modern communication discipline and, from Keith’s and Lundberg’s perspective, by historically sensitive refinements of pedagogy to promote speechmaking that is communicative, communitarian, and deliberative. But before exploring intersections betweenmy article and the commentaries of Farrell, Keith, and Lundberg, I wish to expand a bit on what I see as the Big Problem in

In the mid-1980s, when I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Michael Leff organized a series of informal summer reading groups for rhetoric graduate students. During one of those summers, at Leff’s suggestion, the groupmet weekly to enjoy some Leinekugel’s beer and discuss the founding documents of our discipline—the key articles published in the Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking from 1915 to 1923. Leff always emphasized the importance of understanding the institutional and pedagogical history of the communication field, and the exercise of reading those founding documents was, for me, formative. Thus, I appreciate enormously Professor Sproule’s effort to discover and illuminate a vital chapter in the “communication discipline’s own creation story.” His essay explores the multifaceted origins of the “quintessential modern speech book” that emerged in the early twentieth century from an eclectic theoretical and pedagogical ancestry stretching back over the previous two centuries. To Professor Sproule, the evolution of the modern public speaking text is revealing of a lively disciplinary fermentation and stands as the chief manifestation of both a new paradigm of speech pedagogy, and of a “growing confidence” in the youthful speech discipline. In the texts that emerged from this evolution, and especially in JamesWinans’s “widely influential” Public Speaking (1915), Sproule witnesses the materialization of the discipline’s rejection of its elocutionary heritage and its embrace of a mode of public address “that was plain, practical, ideafocused, extemporaneous, conversationally direct, audience-adapted, outline-prepared, and library-researched.”

Abstract On March 2, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court determined in Snyder v. Phelps that protests by members of Westboro Baptist Church, a small group of religious fundamentalists committed to communicating their beliefs publicly in spectacular fashion, were protected under the First Amendment based on a dual standard of “public concern”; that is, their speech dealt with sociopolitical issues and their speech attracted media attention. This rhetorical conflation of sociopolitical issues with subjects of media interest provides legal encouragement for the creation of media spectacles on the part of hate groups and other ideologues and discourages the development of the very public reason taken for granted by the Court. To defend this claim, we first provide a brief history of the Westboro Baptist Church and its strategic manipulation of the mass media and free speech law, situated within competing traditions of public sphere theory. After next providing a history of the judicial evolution of Snyder v. Phelps, we engage in a close reading of the majority and dissenting Supreme Court opinions to reveal the rhetorical conflation of “public issues” and “public concern,” and we conclude with reflections on the relationships among that conflation, the role of different forms of spectacle in advanced capitalist societies, and the possibilities for more informed democratic citizenship.

Book Review| December 01 2013 Public Discourse in America: Conversation and Community in the Twenty-First Century Public Discourse in America: Conversation and Community in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Judith Rodin and Stephen P. Steinberg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003; pp. xv + 336. $24.95 paper. Samuel McCormick Samuel McCormick San Francisco State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2013) 16 (4): 801–806. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.4.0801 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Samuel McCormick; Public Discourse in America: Conversation and Community in the Twenty-First Century. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2013; 16 (4): 801–806. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.4.0801 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract This essay examines the role of the USS Nautilus (SSN 571), the world's first atomic powered submarine, as an agency for advancing the Cold War objectives of the Eisenhower White House in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's successful launches of Sputniks 1 and 2 and the early failures of the U.S. Vanguard program in late 1957 and early 1958. Specifically, it examines the campaign to exploit Nautilus for domestic propaganda purposes, which culminated in “Operation Sunshine,” the first submerged transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans via the North Pole. The essay argues that architects of the technological spectacle faced the necessity of reconciling the material and symbolic aspects of the mission, and identifies three areas where this may have been necessary. In addition to illuminating the role of the Eisenhower White House in a significant, but largely forgotten episode in the Cold War, the essay illustrates the interplay of material and symbolic elements in Operation Sunshine and identifies some constraints that may be inherent in such technological spectacles.

Abstract In 1951, the American Federation of Labor produced a map of the Soviet Union showing the locations of 175 forced labor camps administered by the Gulag. Widely appropriated in popular magazines and newspapers, and disseminated internationally as propaganda against the U.S.S.R., the map, entitled “‘Gulag’—Slavery, Inc.,” would be cited as “one of the most widely circulated pieces of anti-Communist literature.” By contextualizing the map's origins and circulation, as well as engaging in a close analysis of its visual codes and intertextual relationships with photographs, captions, and other materials, this essay argues that the Gulag map became an evidentiary weapon in the increasingly bipolar spaces of the early Cold War. In particular, “‘Gulag’—Slavery, Inc.” draws on cartography's unique power of “placement” to locate forced labor camps with authenticity and precision, infiltrating the impenetrable spaces of the Soviet Union as a visually compelling mode of Cold War knowledge production.

Abstract Following a democratic uprising in 1998, the Muslim-majority nation of Indonesia embarked on a transition from four decades of authoritarian rule to become the world's third largest democracy. A recent surge in religious intolerance, however, has sparked concern over an apparent backlash against the political and religious pluralism of the new democratic era. As the world looks to this vast country of 237 million as a model for other Muslim nations now rebelling against their own dictatorships, it is important to understand this political turn marked by a growing incapacity to deal with otherness. This article examines public discourse surrounding accelerating attacks on religious minorities in Indonesia to provide insight into a similar rise in intolerance worldwide, and to address a pressing question for many rhetoric scholars: how does religion work to legitimate or eliminate violence?

Abstract This essay makes two key arguments. The first is that preemptive politics often rely on strategies of rhetorical irony to cultivate perceptions of reasonableness, humility, and dialectical transcendence. As such, I expand the rhetorical conception of Stephen Skowronek's “political time” thesis to reveal its dimensions as a Burkean “ironic development.” The second argument is that Barack Obama's rhetorical strategy more directly fits the typology of preemptive presidents than that of reconstructive presidents, making him far more comparable in “political time” with Richard Nixon than with Ronald Reagan. I proceed to analyze the two presidential candidates' rhetoric in their first winning campaigns for the presidency to discern the extent of these parallels and reveal the applicability of an ironist political style in preemptive electoral situations. The essay concludes by examining the trajectory of liberalism in political time and the implications of this analysis for preemptive “wild cards” in presidential rhetoric.

Research Article| December 01 2012 Democratic Circulation: Jacksonian Lithographs in U.S. Public Discourse Brandon Inabinet Brandon Inabinet Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (4): 659–666. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940628 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Brandon Inabinet; Democratic Circulation: Jacksonian Lithographs in U.S. Public Discourse. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2012; 15 (4): 659–666. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940628 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract Formerly a synonym for oratory and elocution, "public speaking" after 1900 signaled, instead, a paradigm shift whereby extemporaneous-conversational speechmaking replaced declamation and oratorical composition. This study of more than 200 key titles published between 1730 and 1930 demonstrates that the modern public-speaking book emerged, not as an innovation in whole cloth, but rather from a generation-long process of selectively recombining materials extracted from preceding text genres. As a practical revolution, the new public speaking contributed to democratic, argument-rich public affairs and, as an intellectual movement, furthered the emergence of speech as a separate academic discipline.

Abstract The American Colonization Society emerged at a time when some Americans believed that a "moderate" solution to the problem of slavery could be achieved by removing free blacks to Africa. Upon announcing its formation in 1816, the society received a public rejoinder: the Counter Memorial against African Colonization. This essay explores multiple interpretations of the Counter Memorial to demonstrate the instability of colonizationists moderate rhetorical position. More specifically, this essay argues that the Counter Memorial suspends colonization within the uneasy and unresolved tensions manifested by competing depictions of blackness, or black personae, in American public discourse at the time.

Book Review| June 01 2012 Speechwright: An Insider’s Take on Political Rhetoric Speechwright: An Insider’s Take on Political Rhetoric. William F. Gavin. Craig R. Smith Craig R. Smith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (2): 372–374. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940578 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Craig R. Smith; Speechwright: An Insider’s Take on Political Rhetoric. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2012; 15 (2): 372–374. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940578 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract Barack Obama’s "A More Perfect Union" speech was widely viewed as a key rhetorical moment in the 2008 presidential campaign. The purpose of this essay is to unpack reasons why the speech was significant, focusing particularly on the complex historical and contemporary dynamics of African American oratory black churches, race relations, and American politics. largue that the significance of the speech lies in the specific rhetorical challenges posed by the immediate context, the rhetorical strategy that Obama used to negotiate those challenges, and the way in which this strategy resonated more broadly with the rhetorical themes underlying Obamas candidacy.

Abstract President Obama’s commencement address on the University of Notre Dame campus evoked substantial controversy, providing public demonstration of rhetorical differences and demands generated by differing provincial and cosmopolitan positions. Icontend that public civic rhetoric, in an era of narrative and virtue contention, must address the creative interplay of both provincial and cosmopolitan perspectives. In this essay I examine reactions to the Obama address from news sources connected with the local Catholic diocese, as well as the South Bend and University of Notre Dame newspapers. I argue that Obamas address is an example of a public civic speech that openly engaged the interplay of provincial and cosmopolitan understandings of a controversial communal common center. Obamas Notre Dame speech framed discourse that walks within a world of tension and difference on the public stage, highlighting the communal rhetorical constitution of a speech moment shaped through the interplay of provincial and cosmopolitan commitments.

Abstract More than ten years after his death, Matthew Shepard is still remembered prominently in LGBT discourse. This discourse has been used to defy heteronormative characterizations of violence, confirm gay and lesbian identity, and to "queer" rigid notions of community. Tracing Shepard s memory through three contested memory frames, I argue for an expanded perspective of queer counterpublic memories and the strategic use of public memories by counterpublics.

Abstract This article examines the public controversy surrounding the National Park Services decision about how best to recognize the site of the nations first executive mansion—the Presidents House—in Philadelphias Independence National Historical Park. The first of the houses two presidential occupants, George Washington, kept nine slaves in the mansion while circumventing a Pennsylvania law that could have given the slaves their freedom. The National Park staff’s resistance to acknowledging Washingtons actions led to an ongoing and lengthy public debate that eventually resulted in the decision to build an installation that recognized all of the occupants of the house. Advocates for building such a site invoked two types of vernacular discourse—a counternarrative ("Liberty has been incompletely enacted") and a representative anecdote ("Excavating buried history")—that embraced the traditions of storytelling at Independence National Historical Park.

Research Article| June 01 2010 The Four Minute Men and Early Twentieth-Century Public Speaking Pedagogy J. Michael Sproule J. Michael Sproule Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2010) 13 (2): 135–147. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940495 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation J. Michael Sproule; The Four Minute Men and Early Twentieth-Century Public Speaking Pedagogy. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2010; 13 (2): 135–147. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940495 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract This essay argues for a reprivileging of the object of speech in the study of public address. To this end, public discourse concerning the tonal qualities of male and female speech, particularly in moments of affective transgression, is examined to better discern our deeply gendered, cultural norms of eloquence. The primary case study analyzes reactions to the oratory ofBarack Obama and Hillary Clinton to show how their respective vocal tones played a significant role in the 2008 presidential election.

Abstract U.S. government agencies are collaborating with outside scholars to untangle disparate threads of knotty technoscientific issues, in part by integrating structured debating exercises into institutional decision-making processes such as intelligence assessment and public policy planning. These initiatives drive up demand for rhetoricians with skill and experience in what Protagoras called dissoi logoi—the practice of airing multiple sides of vexing questions for the purpose of stimulating critical thinking. In the contemporary milieu, dissoi logoi receives concrete expression in the tradition of intercollegiate switch-side debating, a form of structured argumentation categorized by some as a cultural technology with weighty ideological baggage. What exactly is that baggage, and how does it implicate plans to improve institutional decision making by drawing from rhetorical theory and expertise? Exploration of how switch-side debating meets demand-driven rhetoric of science not only sheds light on this question, but also contributes to the burgeoning scholarly literature on deliberative democracy, inform argumentation studies, and suggest new avenues of inquiry in rhetorical theory and practice.

Book Review| March 01 2010 The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush. Elvin T. Lim. Steven R. Goldzwig Steven R. Goldzwig Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2010) 13 (1): 145–148. https://doi.org/10.2307/41955594 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Steven R. Goldzwig; The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2010; 13 (1): 145–148. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41955594 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract Communication scholars interested in presidential rhetoric on public policy are very familiar with the rhetorical presidency, but there is another paradigm worth our consideration: the unitary executive. This model emphasizes the institutional reasons why presidents might not use public discourse to promote theirpolicies, relying instead on the expanding powers of the executive branch. Although there is relatively little discussion of one model within scholarship dedicated to the other, this essay argues for the benefits of considering both models simultaneously. As changes occur within the executive office’s capacity for creating and enforcing public policy, so too must our critical orientation to the study of presidential rhetoric.