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ABSTRACT
This essay forwards a theory of “visceral publics” through a case study of a bitter public health controversy in a small midcentury New England town. Proponents of fluoridation claimed that it yielded significant positive health outcomes, while opponents charged that the measure was politically suspect and physically dangerous. In this essay, I analyze the controversy as it took shape in letters to the editor and argue that the root of opposition to fluoridation was not in political ideology, as scholars have often claimed, but in a perceived threat to the body's boundaries, which created intense feelings. Although visceral publics are most clearly observable in controversies over the boundaries of the human body, the essay concludes by showing how the concept may be applied to controversies over the boundaries of the national body as well.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers, Barbara Biesecker, Hillary Palmer, Christa Olson, Vanessa Beasley, Isaac West, and the members of Vanderbilt University's Social and Political Theory working group for their helpful feedback on this essay as it developed, and Liz Barr for her invaluable research assistance.
Notes
1 Anna J. Alberti, letter to the editor, North Adams Transcript, February 3, 1953, 6.
2 In May, 2013, for example, Portland, Oregon voted against fluoridation for the fourth time since 1956. Francie Diep, “Portland, Oregon, Says No to Fluoridation,” Popular Science, May 22, 2013, http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013–05/fluoridation-defeated-portland-oregon
3 See, for example, J. Roy Doty, “The Irresponsible Opposition to Fluoridation,” The Journal of the American Dental Association 47, no. 2 (1953): 203–5. Donald R. McNeil, The Fight for Fluoridation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957); Thomas F. A. Plaut, “Analysis of Voting Behavior on a Fluoridation Referendum,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1959): 213–22; William Kornhauser, “Power and Participation in the Local Community,” Health Education & Behavior 1, no. 6 (1959): 28–40; Morris Davis, “Community Attitudes toward Fluoridation,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 23, no. 4 (1959): 474–82; Judd Marmor, Viola W. Bernard, and Perry Ottenberg, “Psychodynamics of Group Opposition to Health Programs,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 30, no. 2 (1960): 330–41; William A. Gamson, “The Fluoridation Dialogue: Is It an Ideological Conflict?” The Public Opinion Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1961): 526–37; Arnold L. Green, “The Ideology of Anti-Fluoridation Leaders,” Journal of Social Issues 17, no. 4 (1961): 13–25; Benjamin D. Paul, “Fluoridation and the Social Scientist: A Review,” Journal of Social Issues 17, no. 4 (1961): 1–12; Irwin T. Sanders, “The Stages of a Community Controversy: The Case of Fluoridation,” Journal of Social Issues 17, no. 4 (1961): 55–65; Arnold Simmel, “A Signpost for Research on Fluoridation Conflicts: The Concept of Relative Deprivation,” Journal of Social Issues 17, no. 4 (1961): 26–36.
4 John A. Hutchinson, “Small-Town Fluoridation Fight,” The Scientific Monthly 77, no. 5 (1953): 240–43, 240.
5 Carolyn R. Miller, “Risk, Controversy, and Rhetoric: Response to Goodnight,” Argumentation and Advocacy 42, no. 1 (2005): 34–37, 37. For more on the role that feeling plays in deliberation over science policy, see Craig Waddell, “The Role of Pathos in the Decision-Making Process: A Study in the Rhetoric of Science Policy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76, no. 4 (1990): 381–400.
6 Green, “The Ideology of Anti-Fluoridation Leaders,” 13.
7 I take “representative character” from Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley Kubrick (United States: Columbia Pictures, 1964).
8 Hutchinson, “Small Town Fluoridation Fight,” 242.
9 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989); Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80. It is well beyond the scope of this essay to outline the vast rhetorical literature building on Habermas and his critics, but of special note with regard to discursive theories of the public are Gerard A. Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999); Robert Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 2 (2004): 189–211; and especially Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2005).
10 On the role of images in public formation, see, e.g., Kevin Michael Deluca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 125–51 and Christa Olson, Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). On the role of emotion, affect, and feeling in public formation, see, e.g., Craig R. Smith and Michael J. Hyde, “Rethinking ‘The Public’: The Role of Emotion in Being-With-Others,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 4 (1991): 446–66; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Dissent and Emotional Management in a Liberal-Democratic Society: The Kent State Iconic Photograph,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2001): 5–31; Dana Cloud, “Therapy, Silence, and War: Consolation and the End of Deliberation in the ‘Affected’ Public,” Poroi 2, no. 1 (2003): doi.org/10.13008/2151–2957.1060; Jenny Rice, Distant Publics: Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); and Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
11 It might be argued that visceral publics can arise in the absence of discourse. However, although there is a large and compelling literature on human behavior that stresses the role of things like sensation and feeling in guiding collective action—imagine a large, frightened crowd that stampedes—to call all gatherings of humans “publics” risks stretching the term to the point of meaninglessness. For more on the role of feeling in group behavior, see the overview on the subject in Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 51–73. Nonetheless, the emphasis on discursive publics in this essay and elsewhere raises the very troubling question of whether individuals without the capacity for language (or with limited language), in addition to being excluded from other aspects of democratic life, are excluded from theories of publics by definition. See Stacy Clifford Simplican, The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
12 Smith and Hyde, “Rethinking ‘The Public,’” 461.
13 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 23–45.
14 Debra Hawhee, “Rhetoric's Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 12, emphasis added.
15 Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 4.
16 Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 51–73.
17 Although letters to the editor are by no means a perfect measure of a public or its opinion—they are mediated by editors who curate content and mediate tone—these forms of discourse nonetheless “shape policy, influence opinion, swing the course of events, defend interests, advance causes.” Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, The State, and Law and Order (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1978), 121.
18 My thanks to Isaac West for bringing this to my attention.
19 Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, “Watershed as Common-Place: Communicating for Conservation at the Watershed Scale,” Environmental Communication 7, no. 1 (2013): 80–96.
20 “Visceral.” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/visceral. My thinking on the visceral throughout this essay is indebted to the authors in the 2014 special double issue of GLQ on the topic. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 4 (2014).
21 On magnitude, see Thomas B. Farrell, “The Weight of Rhetoric: Studies in Cultural Delirium,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 41, no. 4 (2008): 467–87.
22 Leon R. Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” The New Republic 216, no. 22 (1997): 20. For an incisive critique of this argument, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
23 Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999): 49–84, 58.
24 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
25 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1896; reprint, Kitchener, ON: Batoche, 2001), 13.
26 Sharon Crowley, “Afterword: The Material of Rhetoric,” In Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999): 357–64, 360. Crowley is extending arguments of Irigaray and Freud here.
27 Sharon P. Holland, Marcia Ochoa, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “On the Visceral,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 4 (2014): 391–406, 394.
28 This point is discussed thoroughly in Holland et al., “On the Visceral.” For a discussion of “hyperembodiment” as it plays out in the fantasies and practices of eating, also see Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012). Eating, in Tompkins' analysis, is an act shot through with power—there are eaters and the eaten, and neither is a purely active or purely passive role.
29 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 107.
30 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966; reprint, New York: Routledge, 2004), 150.
31 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 69.
32 Rollo H. Britten and George St. J. Perrott, “Summary of Physical Findings on Men Drafted in the World War,” Public Health Reports 56, no. 2 (1941): 41–62.
33 Jane C. Riley, Michael A. Lennon, and Roger P. Ellwood, “The Effect of Water Fluoridation and Social Inequalities on Dental Caries in 5-year-old Children,” International Journal of Epidemiology 28, no. 2 (1999): 300–305.
34 Frederick S. McKay, “The Relation of Mottled Enamel to Caries,” Journal of the American Dental Association 15, no. 8 (1928): 1429–37.
35 H. Trendley Dean, “Endemic Fluorosis and Its Relation to Dental Caries,” Public Health Reports 53, no. 33 (1938): 1443–52.
36 For the sake of space, I am significantly abbreviating and simplifying this history. For an in-depth study of the history of fluoridation in the United States, see McNeil, The Fight for Fluoridation and R. Allan Freeze and Jay H. Lehr, The Fluoride Wars: How a Modest Public Health Measure Became America's Longest Running Political Melodrama (New York: Wiley, 2009), 92–126.
37 Michael A. Lennon, “One in a Million: The First Community Trial of Water Fluoridation,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 84, no. 9 (2006): 759–60.
38 “Achievements in Public Health, 1900–1999: Fluoridation of Drinking Water to Prevent Dental Caries,” Morbity and Mortality Weekly Report 48, no. 41 (1999): 933–40.
39 David B. Scott, “Evolution of the Grand Rapids Water Flouridation Project,” Journal of Public Health Dentistry 41, no. 1 (1989): 59–61, 60.
40 Green, “The Ideology of Anti-Fluoridation Leaders,” 14.
41 In this way, the midcentury fluoridation controversy might be seen as an early example of a manufactured scientific controversy. Leah Ceccarelli, “Manufactured Scientific Controversy: Science, Rhetoric, and Public Debate,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 2 (2011): 195–228.
42 Celeste M. Condit, “Pathos in Criticism: Edwin Black's Communism-As-Cancer Metaphor,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 1 (2013): 1–26, 6.
43 Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1984). On the far right's fight against psychiatry, see Michelle M. Nickerson, “The Lunatic Fringe Strikes Back: Conservative Opposition to the Alaska Mental Health Bill of 1956,” in The Politics of Healing: Histories of Alternative Medicine in Twentieth-Century North America, ed. Robert D. Johnston (London: Routledge, 2004): 110–23.
44 Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–39.
45 The papers of many antifluoridationists preserved in the Wisconsin State Historical Society, for example, feature leaflets like these, which circulated among activists through the mail. Moreover, the Williamstown antifluoridationists frequently mention pamphlets and leaflets in their letters to the editor, and it was clear that many of them, Michael Ambrose in particular, had been in contact with antifluoridationists across the country.
46 “The Unholy Three” references the 1925 Tod Browning silent film of the same name. It is unclear why, since the film is about three sideshow performers who team up to commit robberies. It may simply gesture to the film's star, Lon Chaney, who was a perennial evil character in early American film. Clarence Aaron Robbins and Waldemar Young, The Unholy Three, directed by Tod Browning (United States: Metro-Goldwyn, 1925).
47 United States Census, “Massachusetts: Population of Counties by Decennial Census: 1900 to 1990,” http://www.census.gov/population/cencounts/ma190090.txt
48 “Less Tooth Decay,” editorial, North Adams Transcript, November 16, 1950, 6.
49 “Dr. Strongin Resents Fluoridation Stress,” North Adams Transcript, March 2, 1951, 2.
50 “Nothing to Resent,” editorial, North Adams Transcript, March 3, 1951, 4.
51 Michael Ambrose, “Rat Poison Peddlers,” paid advertisement, Berkshire Evening Eagle, January 11, 1952, 22; “Stalin Got a Curtain? The Eagle Has One, Too!” paid advertisement, Berkshire Evening Eagle, January 19, 1952, 3; “Fluoridation Delusion From Following Pied Pipers,” paid advertisement, Berkshire Evening Eagle, January 31, 1952, 5; “Has Somebody Been Taken for a ‘Flo—Ride’?” paid advertisement, Berkshire Evening Eagle, February 9, 1952, 2.
52 “No Mottled Teeth in Cities Which Control Fluoridation,” The Berkshire Evening Eagle, November 24, 1951, 18.
53 “Political Activity Gives Way to Budget, Fluoridation Issues,” North Adams Transcript, January 27, 1953, 9.
54 “Mrs. Alberti Says 500 Here Want Fluoridation Outlawed,” North Adams Transcript, March 5, 1953, 4.
55 “Report Fluoridation is Continuing Well As Conflict Rages,” North Adams Transcript, March 4, 1953, 21.
56 “Mrs. Alberti Tells Committee Anti-Fluoride Papers Taken,” North Adams Transcript, March 6, 1953. As efforts to pull back fluoridation in Williamstown continued, the city council of nearby Northampton voted not to continue its fluoridation program after three members switched sides in response to pressure from antifluoridationists. Northampton, too, saw “bitter” opposition to fluoridation—the mayor publicly declared that the American Medical Association had not endorsed fluoridation, which one of the council members characterized as an “outright lie.” “Northampton Fluoride Allowed to Run Out as Three Switch Vote,” North Adams Transcript, March 6, 3.
57 “Pittsfield Opponent of Fluoride Wants Project Held Up Here,” North Adams Transcript, January 31, 1953, 9.
58 “Fluoridation Held Up,” North Adams Transcript, February 4, 1953, 19.
59 “Ask 4 More Questions,” North Adams Transcript, February 9, 1953, 9.
60 “Board Reads Letter,” North Adams Transcript, February 7, 1953, 9.
61 “As We See It: A Propaganda Victory,” editorial, North Adams Transcript, April 30, 1953, 6.
62 Michael Ambrose, “Rat Poison Peddlers,” paid advertisement, Berkshire Evening Eagle, January 11, 1952, 22.
63 Michael Ambrose, letter to the editor, North Adams Transcript, January 14, 1952, 4. Ambrose's use of all-caps in this screed to signal the depth of his anger is found in all of his other advertisements, yet it is not found in his published letters to the editor, which suggests that the editors dampened the emotional intensity of his letters. As a side note, the use of all-caps is currently used as a measure of sentiment intensity. See Efthymios Kouloumpis, Theresa Wilson, and Johanna Moore, “Twitter Sentiment Analysis: The Good the Bad and the OMG!” International Conference on Web and Social Media 11 (2011): 538–41.
64 The phrase was originally “An Englishman's home is his castle,” a common saying formally set into British law by seventeenth-century jurist Sir Edward Coke. Edward Coke, The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke, ed. Steve Sheppard (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2003 [1600]), 136. See also Jonathan L. Hafetz, “‘A Man's Home is His Castle?’: Reflections on the Home, the Family, and Privacy During the Late Nineteen and Early Twentieth Centuries,” William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law 8, no. 2 (2002): 175–242, 175f2; and Amanda Vickery, “An Englishman's Home Is His Castle? Thresholds, Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House,” Past & Present 199, no. 1 (2008): 147–73.
65 J. Douglas Porteous, “Home: The Territorial Core,” Geographical Review 66, no. 4 (1976): 383–90.
66 The logic of the castle doctrine and the scope of curtilage has become the subject of intense controversy in recent years. For example, the castle doctrine was invoked in the defense of Theodore Wafer, who shot and killed Renisha McBride, a nineteen-year-old Black woman, after she knocked on his door to seek help. Wafer was convicted of second-degree murder. Mary M. Chapman and Julie Bosman, “Detroit-Area Man Convicted of Murdering Teenager on His Porch,” New York Times, August 7, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/us/detroit-area-man-convicted-of-murdering-woman-who-knocked-on-his-door.html
67 The territories are nested as follows: body, home, community, urban, region, nation, globe. Neil Smith, “Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographical Scale,” Social Text 33 (1992): 54–81, 66.
68 Marion E. Lyon, letter to the editor, Berkshire Evening Eagle, February 15, 1952, 14.
69 Arlene H. Hayden, letter to the editor, North Adams Transcript, April 25, 1953, 4.
70 “Dentists Give Up Fluorine Vote Drive; Try Education,” North Adams Transcript, January 24, 1952, 2.
71 Joseph H. Allard, letter to the editor, North Adams Transcript, September 26, 1952, 4.
72 Anne Southwick, letter to the editor, North Adams Transcript, April 25, 1953, 4.
73 Bernard Lenhoff, letter to the editor, North Adams Transcript, March 31, 1952, 6.
74 M. Elizabeth Spencer, letter to the editor, North Adams Transcript, August 18, 1952, 4.
75 M. S. Alderton, letter to the editor, Berkshire Evening Eagle, February 4, 1952, 14, my emphasis.
76 From a science communication standpoint, this may have been one of the biggest challenges proponents faced, since they were forced to answer “Yes, but . . .” to the question: is fluoride poison? To counter this charge, proponents employed a number of creative rhetorical strategies. One common analogy was that of a bathtub—the amount of fluoride necessary to achieve beneficial results was equal to one drop in a bathtub—one part per million. In one of the more performative moments of the Williamstown controversy, Vlado Getting, the Massachusetts commissioner of health, attempted to counter the poison argument by drinking water containing twenty times the concentration required in front of an audience. “Drinks 20-Strength Fluoridated Water,” North Adams Transcript, March 13, 1953, 4.
77 Green, “The Ideology of Anti-Fluoridation Leaders,” 14.
78 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 191.
79 Chen, Animacies, 203.
80 “Calls Anti-Fluoride Charges In Area ‘Moral Violations,’” North Adams Transcript, March 12, 1953, 2.
81 Mahlon F. Hayden, letter to editor, North Adams Transcript, February 9, 1953, 6.
82 “As We See It: A Propaganda Victory,” editorial, North Adams Transcript, April 29, 1953, 6.
83 For many years, the typical response from scientists and science communication scholars to controversies like fluoridation was to see them as a symptom of poor scientific literacy. If people like Anna Alberti just knew the science, the thinking went, or just trusted the scientists, they would be compelled to make or support sound policy decisions. This position, known as the deficit model, has been subject to strident critique from science studies and science communication scholars, who find it paternalistic as well as incorrect: “lay expertise” can shape scientific knowledge, and scientists are also members of “the public.”
84 Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 135. As Ahmed points out, although the threat of the terrorist is faceless, the affective economy of terrorism is not random: fear sticks to some bodies, namely, those read as Arab, Asian, Eastern, Muslim, more than others and results in the restriction of their movement.
85 Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics (Abbreviated Version),” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 413–25, 425f3.
86 Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 417.
87 Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 417.
88 Tanya Somanader, “President Obama Address the Nation on Keeping the American People Safe,” The White House Blog, December 6, 2015, https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/12/05/president-obama-addresses-nation-keeping-american-people-safe
89 “Civil Defense Evacuee Test Held in W'mstown,” North Adams Transcript, April 8, 1953, 6.