Abstract Less than a year after the bombing of Hiroshima, Congress passed the McMahon Bill for the domestic control of atomic energy, otherwise known as the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. In this article, I reconstruct the controversy surrounding the passage of this legislation, and specifically the effort by proponents of the McMahon Bill to focus the controversy on what role, if any, the military should have in decisions related to atomic policy. Throughout the controversy, proponents of the McMahon Bill evoked the threat of the garrison state to stress the dangers of a politically powerful military and presented the public with a choice between a slow-motion coup d’état led by experts in violence and a commission of experts appointed by the president. In so doing, they transformed what began as a controversy over how to control atomic energy in a manner consistent with the best traditions of representative democracy into a controversy over who was best qualified to manage atomic energy on the public’s behalf. This transformation allowed them to herald the passage of the McMahon Bill as a victory for democracy even as they acknowledged it as a historic break from tradition. The controversy over domestic control must be acknowledged as a key moment in the evolution of Cold War rhetoric—a rhetoric in which national security would trump issues of public participation and in which the public’s exclusion from the policy process could be taken for granted.

Research Article| December 01 2012 Celluloid Circulation: The Dual Temporality of Nonfiction Film and Its Publics Nathan S. Atkinson Nathan S. Atkinson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (4): 675–684. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940630 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nathan S. Atkinson; Celluloid Circulation: The Dual Temporality of Nonfiction Film and Its Publics. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2012; 15 (4): 675–684. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940630 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.

We review Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's original formulation of presence as a technique of argument associated primarily with the selection of individual rhetorical elements, and the recent extension of the notion by Gross and Dearin, where presence is understood as a second-order effect that denotes the systematic expression and inhibition of patterns of rhetorical elements across an entire text or rhetorical artifact. We argue for an additional extension to this more global notion of presence, one that makes it not only global within a text or class of texts, but also comparative, allowing the analyst to make rigorous comparisons of expressed and inhibited rhetorical patterns across different texts, or different classes of texts, including different rhetorical genres. A return to the original conception of presence allows us to make this extension, and we illustrate global presence within this newly proposed comparative framework by analyzing two genres of self-presentation in classroom practice: the cover letter and the self-portrait. We show the close ties between global presence and genre as ways of theorizing deep similarities across texts.