Abstract
Though it has been insufficiently noticed, Kenneth Burke spoke at the first meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Chicago on March 25, 1950. Archival sources reveal that his remarks—“Rhetoric—Old and New”—drew from his recently completed A Rhetoric of Motives and from another volume, The War of Words, that he intended to publish separately. Burke sought to restore instruction in rhetoric to composition courses, explained his newly developed concept of “identification,” and later saw the published version of his remarks mysteriously missing from the first issue of College Composition and Communication.