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ABSTRACT
When Kenneth Burke visited the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Road to Victory: A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War” in the summer of 1942, he most likely did not expect to leave with such intense and intensely contradictory impressions. His visit there offers rhetoric scholars an opportunity to examine the exhibition – important for museum rhetoric because of its propagandistic political message and its innovative visual and material design. Considering the exhibition on its own terms, and the way designers managed problems of circulation and implemented new methods of “extended vision” helps us to present Burke’s then-developing theories (placement, the pentad) as themselves decidedly visual – photographic, even – and concomitantly, for that moment at least, as decidedly war-directed.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank John Marsh for reading the whole essay twice and for making a key suggestion regarding arrangement and emphasis. They also thank audience members at ISHR in London (2017), including co-panelists Cara Finnegan and Vanessa Beasley, for engaging an earlier version of this work. The archivists on whose labor and expertise we relied while conducting our research include Elisabeth Thomas, Assistant Archivist, Museum of Modern Art; Rachael A. Dreyer, Head of Research Services, Eberly Family Special Collections Library, PSU; and Carolyn Vega, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Curator of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. The journal’s two anonymous reviewers provided insights that strengthened the essay—those insights have been incorporated and credited herein. We are grateful to them and to the journal’s editors for their conscientious labor.
Notes on contributors
Debra Hawhee is McCourtney Professor of Civic Deliberation and Professor of English and of Communication Arts and Sciences at The Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of three books, including, most recently, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation, published in 2017 by the University of Chicago Press.
Megan Poole is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Penn State University, where she is completing her dissertation, “Technical Beauty: Rhetoric and the Aesthetics of Science,” a study of aesthetics and feminist epistemologies that resist traditional reason-based approaches to scientific knowledge making. Her research is forthcoming in Western Journal of Communication.
Notes
* The editor thanks Lisa Flores for doing the editorial work on this essay.
1 Monroe Wheeler, “Re: Steichen Exhibition,” May 13, 1942, MoMA Exhs. Series Folder 182.1, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY. The museum’s Publicity Director, Sarah Newmeyer, quotes Wheeler in the press release as well. Museum of Modern Art, “Two Famous Americans Arrange Road to Victory Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art,” May 13, 1942, p. 1, https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_325317.pdf
2 The majority of the photographs came from the Farm Security Administration, the Army Signal Corps, and the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics. Monroe Wheeler, “A Note on the Exhibition,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 9, no. 5/6 (June 1942): 18–20.
3 Handwritten note, “Attendance,” by Miss Ulrich, listing month-by-month attendance for the exhibit. MoMA Exhs. Series Folder 182.3, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY. The total number of attendees according to this tally sheet was 108,426.
4 Cara Finnegan, Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 5. Finnegan’s quotations around the word “eventfulness” refer to her own use of the word in her first book, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), xii; 178 n 8.
5 Finnegan, Making Photography Matter, 4 (emphasis in original).
6 Jens E. Kjeldsen, ed., Rhetorical Audience Studies and Reception of Rhetoric: Exploring Audiences Empirically (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Amos Kiewe and Davis W. Houck, The Effects of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Effects: Past, Present, and Future (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2015).
7 Kenneth Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” American Journal of Sociology 48, no. 3 (1942): 404.
8 For an elaboration of the concept “rhetorical vision,” see Debra Hawhee, “Looking into Aristotle’s Eyes: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Vision,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 14 (2011): 139–65.
9 See, for example, Eric Aoki, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, “The Master Naturalist Imagined: Directed Movement and Simulations at the Draper Museum of Natural History,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 238–65. Kenneth S. Zagacki and Victoria J. Gallagher, too, examine how the Museum park at the North Carolina Museum of Art enacts a material, civic rhetoric by means of deliberately fashioned “spaces of attention.” Kenneth S. Zagacki and Victoria J. Gallagher, “Rhetoric and Materiality in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 2 (2009): 181. M. Elizabeth Weiser’s book Museum Rhetoric brings together the disciplines of rhetoric and museum studies to examine how national museums create civic identity, and Lisa King draws on visual and material rhetorics to show how Indigenous museums in the U.S. move toward “legible sovereignties.” M. Elizabeth Weiser, Museum Rhetoric: Building Civic Identity in National Spaces (University Park: Penn State Press, 2017). See in particular Weiser’s first chapter, “the Rhetorical Museum,” 19–36. Lisa King, Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017).
10 Finnegan, Making Photography Matter, 125–68. Like Finnegan’s work with the Exhibition, our examination of “Road to Victory” relies on a good deal of reverse engineering based on archival accounts and a mixture of published and unpublished photographic and written accounts of “Road to Victory.”
11 For a consideration of “Road to Victory” as the first in a series of “political and propagandistic shows mounted at the Museum during World War II and the Cold War,” see chapter 4, “Installations for Political Persuasion,” in Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 209.
12 Wheeler, “A Note on the Exhibition,” 20.
13 “Road to Victory,” Vogue, July 15, 1942, 26. We would be remiss not to mention Steichen’s former position as photography editor at Vogue.
14 Robert van Gelder, “An Interview with Mr. Carl Sandburg,” The New York Times, May 31, 1942, 14.
15 “Road to Victory,” Vogue, July 15, 1942, 26.
16 Our description of visitor movement through the exhibition is based on the Museum’s press release, “Museum of Modern Art Opens Road to Victory Exhibition Arranged by Edward Steichen and Carl Sandburg,” Press Release, 1942, MoMA Exhs. Series Folder 182.2, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY.
17 For a history of the Farm Security Administration’s role in bringing poverty to the forefront of American minds, see Finnegan, Picturing Poverty.
18 Wheeler, “A Note on the Exhibition,” 20. Source information, including photographer ([Cliff] Segerblom) is included in a six-page typed document titled (by hand) “Photographs.” MoMA Exhs. Series Folder 182.2, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY.
19 Eighteen inches is the authors’ estimation based on exhibit photographs included in Vogue magazine that summer. We derived the height from an estimation of the height of visitors pictured on the ramp. “Road to Victory,” Vogue, July 15, 1942, 26–7.
20 Edward Steichen and Carl Sandberg, “Road to Victory, a Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 9, no. 5/6 (June 1942): 14.
21 Mary Stuckey, “On Rhetorical Circulation,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 609.
Finnegan discusses circulation as one of five complementary methods for studying public address’s “visual modes.” “By combining attention to circulation with the study of reproduction,” writes Finnegan, “the critic is able to explore both the specificity and fluidity of visual images.” Cara Finnegan, “Studying Visual Modes of Public Address: Lewis Hine’s Progressive-Era Child Labor Rhetoric,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), 258. In collaboration with Jiyoeon Kang, Finnegan develops a theory of circulation for public sphere theory. Cara Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang, “‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 4 (2004): 395. Rhetoric and Writing scholar Laurie Gries frames circulation studies as “the study of rhetoric and writing in motion.” Laurie A. Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2015), xix. See also Sean Patrick O’Rourke, “Circulation and Noncirculation of Photographic Texts in the Civil Rights Movement: A Case Study of the Rhetoric of Control,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 685–94. Jason Edward Black defines “rhetorical circulation” as a framework that “attends to the ways rhetoric flows, unanchored, around and through our daily lives.” Jason Edward Black, “Native Authenticity, Rhetorical Circulation, and Neocolonial Decay: The Case of Chief Seattle’s Controversial Speech,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 636. Catherine Chaput conceives of rhetorical circulation somewhat broadly as “a fluidity of everyday practices, affects, and uncertainties.” Catherine Chaput,“Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 43, no. 1 (2010): 6.
22 The leading authority on museum circulation is Stephen Bitgood. See especially Stephen Bitgood, Attention and Value: Keys to Understanding Museum Visitors (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013); Stephen Bitgood, “An Analysis of Visitor Circulation: Movement Patterns and the General Value Principle,” Curator: The Museum Journal 49, no. 4 (October 2006): 463–75; Stephen Bitgood and Amy Cota, “Principles of Orientation and Circulation within Exhibitions,” Visitor Behavior 10, no. 2 (1995): 7–8. See also Arthur W. Melton, “Visitor Behavior in Museums: Some Early Research in Environmental Design,” Human Factors 15, no. 5 (1972): 393–403; Hans-Joachim Klein, “Tracking Visitor Circulation in Museum Settings,” Environment and Behavior 25, no. 6 (November 1993): 782–800; Kutay Guler, Stimulating Visitor Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 47 ff.
23 Olivier Lugon, “Dynamic Paths of Thought: Exhibition Design, Photography and Circulation in the Work of Herbert Bayer,” in Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, ed. François Albera and Maria Tortajada (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 117–44, 117.
24 Lugon, “Dynamic Paths of Thought.”
25 See, in particular, their essay on the Draper Museum of Natural History, “The Master Naturalist Imagined.”
26 The creators of this exhibition designed it with the U.S.’s distinctive situation in mind. The exhibition did in fact travel beyond New York – across the Midwestern United States (Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis), to San Francisco and Honolulu, and it even appeared in London, albeit with a different title – 66,000 people saw it there as “America Marches with the United Nations: A Procession of Photographs of a Nation at War.” The exhibition’s traveling of course adds yet another mode of circulation, one that space prevents us from attending to. We will focus instead on the circulation of visitor bodies.
27 Given the date of the memorandum, one must conclude that the bombing of Pearl Harbor figured into their deliberations, though archival materials available at the MoMA are silent on such connections. The MoMA’s department of photography was created at the very end of 1940, with Newhall as curator and McAlpin as Trustee Chairman. See the memorandum “Museum of Modern Art Establishes New Department of Photography” for details. https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/661/releases/MOMA_1940_0092_1940-12-24_401224-83.pdf
28 Correspondence from Mr. Dyer to Mr. Wheeler, Mr. Newhall, Mr. McAlpin, December 12, 1941, MoMA Exhs. Series Folder 182.1, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY. Douglas C. McGill, “Monroe Wheeler, Board Member of Modern Museum, is Dead at 89,” The New York Times, August 16, 1988.
29 Correspondence from Mr. Dyer to Mr. Wheeler, et al.
30 Correspondence from Mr. Dyer to Mr. Wheeler, et al.
31 Correspondence from Mr. Dyer to Mr. Wheeler, et al..
32 And as we detail in the following sub-section, such visual, dramatic tension was further enhanced by wall and floor color, the materials used for framing images, and so forth. For example, Christopher Phillips explains Bayer’s decision that the floors, walls, and ceiling of the MoMA must be painted white so that “the main elements of division” in “Road to Victory” were the photographs. Christopher Phillips, “Steichen’s ‘Road to Victory’,” in Public Photographic Spaces: Exhibitions of Propaganda, from Pressa to The Family of Man, 1928–55 (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008), 366–78, 376.
33 “Photo 75, Pearl Harbor: USS Shaw explodes, U.S. Navy (9875),” from an unpublished catalogue list of exhibition photographs, MoMA Exhs. Series Folder 182.1, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY. The term iconic photograph is of course from Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 5–6.
34 This photograph of a Texas farmer who became a migratory worker in Kern, California, was taken in 1938 by FSA photographer Dorothea Lange. For a discussion of the repurposing of these photographs see Christopher Phillips, “Edward Steichen and World War II Naval Photography,” MFA Thesis, Rochester Institute of Technology, 1981, p. 26. The use of Lange’s photograph in this context perfectly illustrates Finnegan’s point about the “fluidity and specificity of [FSA photographic] images’ meanings across the contexts in which they circulated in the 1930s and 1940s.” Cara Finnegan, “FSA Photography and New Deal Visual Culture,” in American Rhetoric in the New Deal Era, 1932–1945 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2006), 117. One of our anonymous reviewers pointed out, tantalizingly, that the use of the photograph bears at least a suggestion to exhibition visitors that the Great Depression is officially over. It bears remembering, too, that the prevailing worry among Americans at the time was that a move beyond the Great Depression would only be temporary.
35 The leaders of the national America First Committee voted for the AFC’s dissolution on December 11, 1941. Wayne S. Cole, “The America First Committee,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908–1984) 44, no. 4 (Winter 1951): 321. For a brief, popular account linking the AFC to Donald Trump’s “America First” slogan, see Krishnadev Calamur, “A Short History of ‘America First’,” The Atlantic, January 21, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/trump-america-first/514037/ (accessed September 20, 2018).
36 Duncan Phillips, “Visual Road to Victory,” Art News 41, no. 9 (Sept. 1942): 29.
37 Edith Anderson, “Sandburg and Steichen Produce Fine War Photo Exhibit,” Daily Worker, May 24, 1942, 7. ESA IV.C.1, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY.
38 Edward Alden Jewell, “In Photographic Display of the ‘Road to Victory’,” The New York Times, May 21, 1942.
39 Anderson, “Sandburg and Steichen,” 7.
40 Our decision to call Bayer’s design “exhibition rhetoric” is inspired by Bayer himself. In “Fundamentals of Exhibition Design,” he writes that an exhibition’s theme “should be brought close” to the spectator; it “should explain, demonstrate, and even persuade and lead [the spectator] to a planned reaction.” Herbert Bayer, “Fundamentals of Exhibition Design,” PM 6, no. 2 (December 1939), 17. The “PM” in the magazine’s title referred to production managers; the subtitle of the PM is “An Intimate Journal for Advertising Production Managers, Art Directors, and their Associates.”
41 Alexander Dorner, The Way Beyond “Art”—The Work of Herbert Bayer (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), 193.
42 Dorner, The Way Beyond, 207.
43 Herbert Bayer, “Aspects of Design of Exhibitions and Museums,” Curator: The Museum Journal 4, no. 3 (1961): 257–58.
44 Bayer, “Fundamentals,” 24.
45 Bayer, “Fundamentals,” 17–25. This diagram amounts to a depiction of Bayer’s ideal viewer, shown here with eyeball and emphatic eyebrow in place of a head and dressed in a leisure suit. Although the suit codes the viewer as a man, the long lashes and manicured brow framing the eye undercuts such straightforward coding. This image is too little to suggest that Bayer embraced gender inclusivity and neurodiversity in his exhibition designs, but it does present a foil to the objective gaze that had dominated museum studies up to that time. There is no ideal gaze in Bayer’s visual rhetoric. Instead, there is a bodily optics, a moving viewer who scans, questions, interprets, and acts. Bayer reproduced the diagram in a 1961 Curator article: Bayer, “Aspects of Design,” 277, Fig. 35.
46 In an examination of how Bayer’s work evolved over time and in a global political context, art historian Kristie La notes that Bayer’s “viewing circumference reached 360 degrees” by 1939. See Kristie La, “‘Enlightenment, Advertising, Education, Etc.’: Herbert Bayer and the Museum of Modern Art’s Road to Victory,” October 150 (Fall 2014): 63–86.
47 Olivier Lugon, “Dynamic Paths of Thought: Exhibition Design, Photography and Circulation in the Work of Herbert Bayer,” in Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, ed. François Albera and Maria Tortajada (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University press, 2010), 117–44, 125.
48 Bayer, “Aspects,” 264.
49 Edward Steichen, “The Museum of Modern Art and ‘The Family of Man’,” A Life in Photography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1963), 227 (emphasis added). Thanks go to one anonymous reviewer for pointing out a potential parallel between Bayer’s close/long viewing theory and the concepts of close and distant reading practices, the latter first articulated by Franco Moretti. Close reading, as humanities and digital science scholar Inge van de Ven delineates, involves “a devout and detailed attention to the meaning and composition” of texts, while distant reading involves the use of computational methods for “aggregating and processing information about, or content in, large bodies of texts.” Inge van de Ven, “Creative Reading in the Information Age: Paradoxes of Close and Distant Reading,” The Journal of Creative Behavior (December 2017): 2–3. Jay Jin identifies Burke as a key critic of “close reading” when the reading technique emerged among the New Critics in the 1930s and 1940s. Jay Jin, “Problems of Scale in ‘Close’ and ‘Distant’ Reading,” Philological Quarterly 96, no. 1 (2017): 118. While Burke would not employ what digital humanists consider “distant reading,” he did consider rhetorical analysis as necessary contextualization for close reading, and his notion of placement enables a zoom out to something perhaps analogous to genres or systems, that distance Moretti calls “condition of knowledge.” Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 48–9. Yet the centrality of viewing for such reading is critical in this instance. Bayer, too, considered viewers’ attention in his juxtaposition of close and distant viewing practices, and these practices imply that reading and viewing practices may be most productive when considered through a bifocal approach in which each view (close and distant) is placed in relation to one another. Or as Steichen explains how images were stacked in the exhibit: smaller, close-range photographs were placed with larger, distant-range photographs as a backdrop so that viewers were encouraged to move in order to close the space between the two photographs through their viewing.
50 “The new plan, we believe, retains the advantages of the first, in particular its spaciousness and the placement of the large photomural so there may be a long approach to it.” Correspondence from Mr. Dyer to Mr. Wheeler, Mr. Newhall, Mr. McAlpin, December 12, 1941, MoMA Exhs. Series Folder 182.1, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY.
51 “Estimate for Steichen Show Based on Details Available,” April 17, 1942, MoMA Exhs. Series Folder 182.3, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY.
52 Christopher Phillips, “Steichen’s ‘Road to Victory’,” in Public Photographic Spaces: Exhibitions of Propaganda, from Pressa to The Family of Man, 1928–55 (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008), 366–78, 375.
53 Bayer, “Aspects,” 284–5.
54 Bayer, “Aspects,” 270–6.
55 Elizabeth McCausland, “Photographs Illustrate Our ‘Road to Victory’,” Photo Notes, June 1942. ESA IV.C.1, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY.
56 For a solid overview of scholarly treatments of rhetorical effects, see Amos Kiewe and Davis W. Houck, “Introduction,” in The Effects of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Effects, ed. Amos Kiewe and Davis W. Houck (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015), 1–28.
57 Phillips, “Visual Road to Victory,” 29.
58 Jorge Ribalta, “Introduction,” in Public Photographic Spaces Exhibitions of Propaganda, from Pressa to The Family of Man, 1928–55, 19.
59 These materials are listed in the work estimate for the exhibition initialed by D. L. Baxter. “Estimate for Steichen Show Based on Details Available,” April 17, 1942, MoMA Exhs. Series Folder 182.3, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY.
60 After combing through two archives, we have deduced the date of Burke’s visit from three letters he wrote. The first is a somewhat oblique reference to the exhibition in a June 18, 1942 letter to James Sibley Watson: “Are you going to be in NY next week? And if so, could I see you, say, Thursday? Or any other day but Friday (when I bring down enemy planes)?” This visit is followed by another letter dated June 30 confirming a meeting between the two on Thursday (July 2). Kenneth Burke to James Sibley Watson, June 18, 1942 and Kenneth Burke to James Sibley Watson, June 30, 1942. James Sibley Watson/The Dial Papers, Series III, Papers related to Kenneth Burke, Box 16, Folder 17, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, with permission from The Kenneth Burke Literary Trust. The third is a letter to Malcolm Cowley dated July 6 confirming that the visit went forward as planned: “Was in town last week looking at the America (as per Sandburg) photographs at the Modern Museum.” Kenneth Burke to Malcolm Cowley, July 6, 1942. Box 52, Folder 6, Kenneth Burke papers, 6369, Special Collections Library, University Libraries, Pennsylvania State University, with permission from Robert Cowley. According to Weiser’s deeply archival account, at this point Burke was probably redrafting the book that would become A Grammar of Motives, a manuscript that at this point he had titled “On Human Relations.” Weiser aptly demonstrates how the entry of the U.S. into World War II reconfigured his frame more generally, perhaps even inspiring him to place dramatism at its center. Elizabeth Weiser, “Burke, War, Words: Rhetoricizing the Theory of Dramatism,” Rhetoric Review 26, no. 3 (2007): 286–302. Elizabeth Weiser, Burke, War, Words: Rhetoricizing Dramatism (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), xiv; 5–26.
61 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 408.
62 Kenneth Burke to Malcom Cowley, July 6, 1942. Box 52, Folder 6, Kenneth Burke papers, 6369, Special Collections Library, University Libraries, Pennsylvania State University. Burke’s resistance to Sandburg’s accounts of America is not all that surprising. See Jack Selzer’s detailed discussion of the idealistic, liberal versus radical visions of America in the 1920s, Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns, 1915–1931 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 29–35. We thank the anonymous reviewer who pointed out that Sandburg’s Pulitzer-prize winning, two-volume Lincoln biography set him firmly on the side of liberal nostalgia.
63 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
64 Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 24.
65 Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 28 (emphasis in original). Burke practices both with regard to definition. The opening of the of the “Antinomies of Definition” section reads “There is a set of words comprising what we might call the Stance family, for they all derive from a concept of place, or placement” (21).
66 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 21. We would modestly note that the eye-widening phrase “common to all thought” is a good way to account for the book’s unwieldiness.
67 Kenneth Burke, “The Study of Symbolic Action,” The Chimera 1, no. 1 (Spring 1942): 7.
68 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 408.
69 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 404.
70 Burke, “The Study of Symbolic Action,” 8.
71 As best we can tell, Burke confused Bryce Canyon with nearby Zion National Park.
72 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 408–409.
73 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 409.
74 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 409.
75 Bayer, “Fundamentals,” 19.
76 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 406.
77 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 406.
78 W. W. Norton to David Mandel, November 30, 1942. Box 21, Folder 14, Kenneth Burke papers, 6369, Special Collections Library, University Libraries, Pennsylvania State University. Thanks to Anthony Burke, co-trustee for The Burke Literary Trust for permission to quote. We were unable to locate Mandel or an estate for their permission.
79 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 409.
80 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 409.
81 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 404.
82 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 405.
83 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 405.
84 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 405.
85 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 409, 410.
86 Special thanks to Elisabeth Thomas, Assistant Archivist at MoMA Archives for locating the uncatalogued two-volume exhibition album after our sixth visit to the MoMA and to two other archives in search of the photograph.
87 Burke, A Grammar of Motives, xvi.
88 Typescript of A Grammar of Motives draft by Kenneth Burke, circa 1941–1945, Box 10, Folder 15, Kenneth Burke papers, 6369, Special Collections Library, University Libraries, Pennsylvania State University, with permission from The Kenneth Burke Literary Trust.
89 Consider this archival gem from a letter Burke sent to James Sibley Watson on December 19, 1942:
I meekly called at Norton’s to pick up the Ms. It seemed just the right day for that sort of thing.
Then, on my way home, trudging through the slush with the Ms under my arm, lo! I found myself in fond fancy knocking out a letter to you. Telling you loudly, firmly, “By God, they are wrong, I am right” (as a matter of fact, they are, I am). Then I recalled the letter of mine that had gone out to you on the same mail that brought me your remarks on the “War and Culture” article. Norton had evidently had trouble seeing the connections in my Grammar, as per your earlier response to the Am. Journ. Of Soc. Item.
My pre-letter changed its tenor. “Believe in me just a little while longer, good dr. I swear that, when all returns are in, I’ll prove that this project is … ” I tried “sound,” “basic,” “fundamentally relevant,” “clear later to those to whom it is not clear now.” And I will prove it, I swear.
90 Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 408.
91 Typescript of A Grammar of Motives draft by Kenneth Burke, circa 1941–1945, Box 10, Folder 15, Kenneth Burke papers, 6369, Special Collections Library, University Libraries, Pennsylvania State University.
92 Photo 115 is labeled “Jap Stingers” and credited to the Daily News. Unpublished catalogue list of exhibition photographs, MoMA Exhs. Series Folder 182.1, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY.
93 Finnegan, Making Photography Matter, 1.
94 Thanks once again go to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging us to consider this research in the context of reception and appropriation.
95 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Icons, Appropriations, and the Co-Production of Meaning,” in Rhetorical Audience Studies and Reception of Rhetoric: Exploring Audiences Empirically, ed. Jens E. Kjeldsen (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 285–308, 288.
96 In Language as Symbolic Action, Burke explains “terministic screens” in relation to “some photographs [he] once saw,” which were “different photographs of the same objects, the difference being that they were made with different color filters.” Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 45 (emphasis in original). Thanks again to an anonymous reviewer for reminding us about this passage. The phrase “photographic vision” was used by leaders of the museum’s department of photography to describe the department’s inaugural exhibition, “Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Esthetics”: “The exhibition – like the collecting practices of the department – was intended to preserve and promote artistic excellence in photography, not to define but to suggest the possibilities of photographic vision.” “The New Department of Photography,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 8 (January–December, 1940–41): 5.