Feeding the body politic: metaphors of digestion in Progressive Era US immigration discourse

ABSTRACT

In the era between the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1924, nativist advocates for immigration restriction commonly invoked metaphors of eating and digestion to support their cases. This essay draws on political, popular, and scientific discourses around immigration and digestion in order to analyze the affective power of the rhetorically constructed “body politic.” While numerous scholars have addressed the ways immigrants have been variously figured as threats to the nation—as pollutants, toxins, disease, floods, or invading armies—few have analyzed metaphors of eating and digestion. I argue that the national body became a metonym for the ideal (white) citizen body, which supported anti-immigrant rhetoric through metaphors of eating, digesting, and eliminating undesirable aliens—those who did not agree with the national stomach. The body politic came to represent the ideal US American body as individuals were invited to identify with the nation through the trope of the body politic; immigrants who did not share this ideal body were rendered undesirable through their association with indigestibility and disgust. This essay demonstrates the affective and thus political power that digestion metaphors provided, shedding light on an early instantiation of the disgust that pulses through twenty-first-century anti-immigrant discourse in the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• rhetoric
• digestion
• immigration
• nativism
• race

Acknowledgements

KC Councilor is a doctoral candidate in Communication Arts (Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The author would like to acknowledge Sara McKinnon, Karma Chávez, Lynda Barry, Ebony Flowers and the two anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and guidance on this project.

Notes

1. On how metaphors in public discourse have shaped contemporary views and policies on Latinos, see Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphoric Representations of Latinos in Contemporary Public Discourse (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); on the portrayal of Mexican immigrants as pathogens and parasites, see Jonathan Xavier Inda, “Foreign Bodies: Migrants, Parasites, and the Pathological Body Politic,” Discourse 22, no. 3 (2000): 46–62.

2. See, for example, Aimee Carrillo Rowe, “Whose ‘America’? The Politics of Rhetoric and Space in the Formation of US Nationalism,” Radical History Review 89 (Spring 2004): 115–34; D. Robert DeChaine, “Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Alienization, Fence Logic, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 1 (2009): 43–65; D. Robert DeChaine, ed., Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012); Lisa Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 20, no. 4 (2003): 362–87; Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, ed., Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).

3. Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

4. Ralph Gilbert, Congressional Record 68, Pt. 6 (April 12, 1924), 6262; Addison Smith, Congressional Record 68, Pt. 6 (April 5, 1924), 5698.

5. Benjamin Rosenbloom, Congressional Record 68, Pt. 6 (April 8, 1924), 5851.

6. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 12.

7. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1930), 222.

8. “Assimilate, v,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/11928?rskey=LV5vAy&result=2&isAdvanced=false (accessed September 20, 2015).

9. William Franke, “Metaphor and the Making of Sense: The Contemporary Metaphor Renaissance,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 33, no. 2 (2000): 151.

10. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 3.

11. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 503.

12. I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 100.

13. David Douglass, “Issues in the Use of I. A. Richards’ Tenor-Vehicle Model of Metaphor,” Western Journal of Communication 64, no. 4 (2000): 405–24.

14. Lisa Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders,” 381; Kent Ono, “Borders that Travel: Matters of the Figural Border,” in Border Rhetorics, ed. D. Robert DeChaine, 24.

15. Kyla W. Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 7.

16. Daniel Brouwer, “The Precarious Visibility Politics of Self-Stigmatization: The Case of HIV/AIDS Tattoos,” Text and Performance Quarterly 18 (1998): 114–36; Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); John J. Jordan, “The Rhetorical Limits of the ‘Plastic Body,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 3 (2004): 327–58; John Jordan, “Reshaping the ‘Pillow Angel’: Plastic Bodies and the Rhetoric of Normal Surgical Solutions,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 20–42.

17. Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico 1880–1920 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 19.

18. Though we can say that race is a political and economic system, a legal construction, or a social one, it has always been tied to and in relation to the body. As Dorothy Roberts puts it, race is a political category disguised as a biological one. Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New York: New Press, 2011). Blood quantum and the “one-drop rule” are clear examples of biological manifestation (and technology) of political racial formation. On how race is read through peoples’ bodies and their embodiment, see Carlson’s analysis of the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander case. A. Cheree Carlson, “‘You Know It When You See It:’ The Rhetorical Hierarchy of Race and Gender in Rhinelander V. Rhinelander,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 111–28. On Africans being hailed into the contemporary American racial order as African American, see Sara L. McKinnon, “Unsettling Resettlement: Problematizing ‘Lost Boys of Sudan’ Resettlement and Identity,” Western Journal of Communication 72, no. 4 (2008): 397–414. On the affective and embodied politics of fear in relation to race, see Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004) and Mitchell, Coyote Nation. Fundamentally, race impacts how people move through and exist in the world. Our possibilities for being in the world are embodied negotiations.

19. Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 7.

20. Ahmed, Cultural Politics.

21. DeChaine, ed., Border Rhetorics; Ono and Sloop, ed., Shifting Borders; J. David Cisneros, “Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of ‘Immigrant as Pollutant’ in Media Representations of Immigration,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 4 (2008): 569–601; Louise Edwards, Stefano Occhipinti, and Simon Ryan, “Food and Immigration: The Indigestion Trope Contests the Sophistication Narrative,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 21, no. 3 (2000): 297–308; Jason A. Edwards and Richard Herder, “Melding a New Immigration Narrative? President George W. Bush and the Immigration Debate,” Howard Journal of Communications 23, no. 1 (January 2012): 40–65; Tompkins, Racial Indigestion; Alan Han, “‘Can I Tell You What We Have to Put Up With?’ Stinky Fish and Offensive Durian,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 21, no. 3 (2007): 361–77.

22. Roy, Alimentary Tracts, 7.

23. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders”; Johanna Hartelius makes a similar argument in “Face-ing Immigration: Prosopopeia and the ‘Muslim-Arab-Middle Eastern’ Other,” RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 4 (July 2013): 311–334.

24. Dreama G. Moon and Lisa A. Flores, “Antiracism and the Abolition of Whiteness: Rhetorical Strategies of Domination Among ‘Race Traitors,’” Communication Studies 51 (2000): 97–115; Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 291–309; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

25. Philip Swing, Congressional Record 68, Pt. 6 (April 12, 1924), 6270.

26. Charles Stengle, Congressional Record 68, Pt. 6 (April 8, 1924), 5848.

27. Ibid.

28. “Grave Crisis at Hand, Says Commissioner General Sargent,” New York Times, January 29, 1905, X1.

29. E. Melanie DuPuis, Dangerous Digestion: The Politics of American Dietary Advice (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 89.

30. Quoted in American Federation of Labor, Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice, American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism. Which Shall Survive? (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902), 24.

31. “Concerning Meat,” The Independent (New York, NY), November 14, 1907.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 70.

35. Sylvester Graham, Lectures on the Science of Human Life, 2nd ed. (London: Horsell and Shirrefs, 1854), 567.

36. Ibid., 612.

37. Ibid.

38. John Harvey Kellogg, Practical Manual of Health and Temperance: Embracing the Treatment of Common Diseases, Accidents, and Emergencies, the Alcohol and Tobacco Habits, Useful Hints and Recipes (Battle Creek, MI: Good Health Publishing Co., 1885), 130.

39. Graham, Lectures, 612.

40. Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 69.

41. “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1904” (Washington, DC: [s.n.], 1904), 856.

42. Addison Smith, Congressional Record 68, Pt. 6 (April 5, 1924), 5704.

43. Graham, Lectures, 166.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Horace Fletcher, The New Glutton, Or Epicure (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1903), 4.

47. “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1905” (Washington, DC: [s.n.], 1905), 837.

48. Fletcher, The New Glutton, viii.

49. Irving Fisher, “The Instinct to Eat,” The Independent (New York, NY), August 1, 1907.

50. Ibid.

51. “Grave Crisis at Hand,” X1. On immigrants portrayed as pollutants, see Cisneros, “Contaminated Communities.”

52. John E. Raker, Congressional Record 53, Pt. 11 (April 26, 1916), 6882.

53. Albuquerque Morning Journal, December 15, 1918, 4.

54. Fort Wayne News Sentinel, June 1, 1922, 4.

55. Kenneth L. Roberts, Why Europe Leaves Home (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1922), 21–2.

56. Arthur Greenwood, Congressional Record 68, Pt. 6 (April 12, 1924), 6264–5.

57. Clara Witt, The Rose Cross Aid Cook Book: Containing Instructions in the Art of Cooking and the Correct Combination of Foods (Kansas City, MO, chapter of the Rose Cross Aid, 1917), http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/HumanEcol.RoseCross (accessed November 1, 2013), 12.

58. Charles Stengle, Congressional Record 68, Pt. 6 (April 8, 1924), 5848.

59. John E. Raker, Congressional Record 66, Pt. 1 (December 20, 1919), 990–1. Earlier that year, anarchist groups had sent bombs to more than 30 government officials, business leaders, and prominent figures.

60. Raker, Congressional Record 66, Pt. 1 (December 20, 1919), 991. The metaphor of the melting pot has been used to represent both the melting together of different metals and the combination of foods into a stew. Though in contemporary discourse the food metaphor is more prevalent, both were frequently used in the early twentieth century.

61. Ibid.

62. Graham, Lectures, 170.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., 509.

65. Ibid.

66. “Legion and Labor Would Bar Immigration,” New York Times, March 24, 1924, 2. Emphasis mine.

67. “The Yellow Peril,” The Commoner (Lincoln, NE), December 6, 1901.

68. American Federation of Labor, Some Reasons, 26.

69. Ibid., 27.

70. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 182.

71. “Annual Report of the Commissioner-General” (1904), 854.

72. American Federation of Labor, Some Reasons, 16.

73. Ibid.

74. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.

75. Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 89.

76. American Federation of Labor, Some Reasons, 17.

77. Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 97.