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Abstract
This essay presents Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidential rhetoric as an iteration of an American synecdochal sublime. Eisenhower's rhetoric sought to re-aim civic sight beyond corporeal objects to the nation's transcendental essence. This rhetoric is intimately connected to prevailing political anxieties and exigencies, especially the problem of “the Bomb” and the related philosophy of deterrence. Over and against the material presence of the atomic bomb, which threatened to concentrate national energies, Eisenhower advanced an expansive vision of national “spiritual” being to which corporeal images could only gesture. Correlatively, he positioned himself as a kind of priestly mediator. Therefore, he not only justified a strong deterrent stance in the Cold War, but made moral sense of it.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Bryan Taylor for his fruitful feedback on an earlier version of this essay, presented at the National Communication Association Conference in 2006. He would also like to thank John Lucaites for his excellent editorial guidance. Finally, he wants to thank the anonymous reviewers and his colleagues Stephen Hartnett, Debra Hawhee, and David Tell for their help. The author alone takes responsibility for the errors, omissions, and opinions in this essay.
Notes
1. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 4.
2. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 61. See also Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
3. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Address before the General Assembly of the United Nations on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, New York City, December 8, 1953,” also known as “Atoms for Peace,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1953), document 256, 1953; available from John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online] (Santa Barbara, CA: University of California [hosting], Gerhard Peters [database]), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9774. Hereafter presidential statements that are part of the Public Papers series will be cited as PPP, document number and year, followed by the URL for the document as it can be accessed in online The American Presidency Project.
4. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream, 7, 12.
5. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 49 (emphasis in original).
6. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 362.
7. Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” in The Complete Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman: As Prepared by Him for the Deathbed Edition; With an Introduction by Malcolm Cowley (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1948), 2:213.
8. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1915), 227–8. David E. Nye presents the American sublime as a form of civil religion, in American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). See pages 21–2, 28, and 36.
9. Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” in American Civil Religion, ed. Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 40. This article was originally published in Daedalus in the winter of 1967. For more on American civil religion, see the rest of American Civil Religion, and also Roderick P. Hart and John L. Pauley II, eds., The Political Pulpit Revisited (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005); Michael Novak, Choosing Our King: Powerful Symbols in Presidential Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1974); and Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). A recent reappraisal of civil religion as political philosophy has been offered by Patrick J. Deneen, Democratic Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
10. Eisenhower quoted in Ira Chernus, Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 32.
11. Rachel L. Holloway, “‘Keeping the Faith’: Eisenhower Introduces the Hydrogen Age,” in Eisenhower's War of Words: Rhetoric and Leadership, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1994), 66.
12. This problem is taken up by Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla in the introduction to The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
13. On the way in which the sublime shaped tourist practices, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959). On the relation of the sublime to reading practices, see Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime, and Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject (New York: Blackwell, 1989).
14. Phillip Blond, “Introduction: Theology before Philosophy,” in Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, ed. Phillip Blond (New York: Routledge, 1998), 16.
15. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 231.
16. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 230.
17. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 231.
18. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 348.
19. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” 24, 40.
20. Hart and Pauley, Political Pulpit Revisited, 21.
21. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 227 (emphasis in original). Longinus, ‘Longinus’ on the Sublime, Greek text, ed. D. A. Russell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).
22. Nicolas Boileau Déspreaux, “Préface: Traité de Sublime,” in Oeuvres Complètes de Boileau Déspreaux: Précédées des Oeuvres de Malherbe, Suivies des Oeuvres Poétiques de J. B. Rousseau (Paris: Lefevre, 1835), 520. “Ekstasis,” in Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones, A Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). On the etymology of “sublime,” see Jan Cohn and Thomas H. Miles, “The Sublime: In Alchemy, Aesthetics, and Psychoanalysis,” Modern Philology 74 (1977): 289–304.
23. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 228–9.
24. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff, introd. Talcott Parsons (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 3, 12.
25. See James P. McDaniel, “Figures for New Frontiers, from Davy Crockett to Cyberspace Gurus,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 91–111; Ned O'Gorman, “The Political Sublime: An Oxymoron,” Millennium Journal of International Studies 34 (2006): 889–915.
26. Kenneth Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” in A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), 506, 509 (emphasis in original).
27. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 34.
28. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 134 (emphasis in the original); see also Burke's discussions of “transcendence upwards” in Attitudes toward History, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). David Tell's “Burke's Encounter with Ransom: Rhetoric and Epistemology in ‘Four Master Tropes,’” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34 (Fall 2004): 33–54, is helpful for understanding Burke's perspective on metonymy and synecdoche.
29. Dwight D. Eisenhower, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, ed. Alfred D. Chandler Jr. et al. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 1:527. Electronic version available at http://eisenhower.press.jhu.edu/index.html.
30. C. D. Jackson, “Notes on Ike,” in “Eisenhower, Dwight D.–Correspondence, 1954,” Box 50, C. D. Jackson Papers, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library.
31. Stephen E. Ambrose, Ike: Abilene to Berlin (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), xii–iii.
32. Eisenhower, Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, 2:824.
33. Ira Chernus, General Eisenhower: Ideology and Discourse (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002), 293.
34. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Address before the American Alumni Council upon Presentation of the Council's Award of Merit, Amherst, Massachusetts, July 11, 1946,” in Eisenhower Speaks: Dwight D. Eisenhower in His Messages and Speeches, ed. Rudolph L. Treuenfels (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1948), 120.
35. Eisenhower, “Address at Veterans’ Day, Nebraska State Fair, Lincoln, Nebraska, September 1, 1946,” in Eisenhower Speaks, 121.
36. Eisenhower, “Address before Convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars, Boston, Massachusetts, September 3, 1946,” in Eisenhower Speaks, 130–1.
37. Eisenhower, Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, 11:883 (all emphases and the parenthetical comment are original).
38. Eisenhower, Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, 20:1753.
39. Emmet John Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 346–7. See also chapter 2 of William E. Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
40. Chernus, Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace, 27.
41. Eisenhower, “Address—Art in Peace and War—After Being Made Honorary Fellow by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y., April 2, 1946,” in Eisenhower Speaks, 81.
42. Eisenhower, “Address at Fourth of July Observance, Warren County Courthouse, Vicksburg, Mississippi, July 4, 1947,” in Eisenhower Speaks, 243.
43. Eisenhower, “Address upon Receiving an Honorary Doctorate from Toronto University, Toronto, Canada, January 12, 1946,” in Eisenhower Speaks, 71.
44. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 173.
45. Barnett Newman, “The Sublime Is Now,” in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 552.
46. Newman, “Sublime Is Now,” 553.
47. Lawrence Alloway, “The American Sublime,” Living Arts 2 (1963): 14.
48. Weber, Sociology of Religion; see especially 1–46.
49. Weber, Sociology of Religion, 30.
50. See Weber, Sociology of Religion, 30. On the priestly function of the presidency, in addition to the scholarship on civil religion cited above, see James David Fairbanks, “The Priestly Functions of the Presidency: A Discussion of the Literature on Civil Religion and Its Implications for the Study of Presidential Leadership,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 11 (1981): 214–32.
51. Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 54.
52. All quotations of and references to Eisenhower's first inaugural address are taken from Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953,” PPP, document 1, 1953, available from John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9600&st=&st1=.
53. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address, January 20, 1945,” http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16607.
54. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1963), 100.
55. Editors, “The President's Prayer,” Nation, January 31, 1953, 91.
56. James Reston, “Inaugural is Held to Extend U.S. Commitments to the World,” New York Times, January 21, 1953, 17.
57. Eisenhower, “Opening Statement at the Geneva Conference, July 18, 1955,” PPP, document 164, 1955, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=10304&st.
58. Eisenhower, “‘The Chance for Peace’ Delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953,” PPP, document 50, 1953, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9819&st=&st1=.
59. Eisenhower, “Address before the General Assembly,” http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9774.
60. Philip Wander, “The Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 339–61.
61. Wander, “Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy,” 342–3.
62. Martin J. Medhurst, “Eisenhower's ‘Atoms for Peace’ Speech: A Case Study in the Strategic Use of Language,” Communication Monographs 54 (1987): 204.
63. Martin J. Medhurst, Dwight D. Eisenhower: Strategic Communicator (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 13.
64. Robert L. Ivie, “Eisenhower as Cold Warrior,” in Eisenhower's War of Words, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1994), 21.
65. Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 17.
66. Weber, Sociology of Religion, 4; see also 32–45.
67. Eisenhower, “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union, January 10, 1957,” PPP, document 8, 1957, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=11029&st=&st1=.
68. Eisenhower, “Special Message to the Congress on the Situation in the Middle East, January 5, 1957,” also known as the “Eisenhower Doctrine Speech,” PPP, document 6, 1957, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=11007&st=&st1=.
69. Hariman, Political Style, 20.
70. Eisenhower, “Address at Annual Dinner of Wings Club, New York, N.Y., May 5, 1947,” in Eisenhower Speaks, 185.
71. See Eisenhower, “Address at Meeting of United Jewish Appeal, Washington D.C., February 23, 1947,” in Eisenhower Speaks, 176, and “Address on Receiving the Churchman Award for the Promotion of Good Will and Better Understanding among All Peoples, New York, N.Y., December 3, 1946,” in Eisenhower Speaks, 168.
72. “Radio and Television Address to the American People on the State of the Nation, April 5, 1954,” PPP, document 72, 1954, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10201.
73. Weber, Sociology of Religion, 32–3.
74. Eisenhower, “Radio and Television Address to the American People on the State of the Nation, April 5, 1954.”
75. Deneen, Democratic Faith, 4–5.
76. Quoted in William S. White, “‘Internationalist’ Inaugural Acclaimed in Both Parties,” New York Times, January 21, 1953, 1.
77. “Nation off to a Fresh Start as Eisenhower Takes the Helm,” Newsweek, January 26, 1953, 25.
78. Editors, “The Inaugural Address,” New York Herald Tribune, January 21, 1953, 22.
79. Quoted in “Excerpts from Editorial Comment,” New York Times, January 21, 1953, 20.
80. “Eisenhower Talk Praised by Many in Both Parties,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, January 20, 1953, 2A.
81. Hughes, Ordeal of Power, 150.
82. Chernus, Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace, 27.
83. Medhurst, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 12.
84. Oliver O'Donovan, Peace and Certainty: A Theological Essay on Deterrence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 21.
85. Nye, American Technological Sublime, 254.
86. O'Donovan, Peace and Certainty, 20.
87. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1980), 3.