![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Empire is central to US foreign policy aims but is rarely taken directly into account in studies of American presidential foreign policy rhetoric. We argue here that in doing such studies, analytic attention should be paid to questions of empire as foundational to the development of the United States and to articulations of the American nation. We examine two historical and two heuristic categories used to understand US presidential foreign policy discourse and argue for refocusing analysis by placing questions of whiteness, empire, and colonialism at the core of those categories.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Darrel Wanzer-Serrano and anonymous reviewers for their critical engagement with this piece and Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristen Herring for their editorial expertise.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 See, for example, Jason Edward Black, “Native Resistive Rhetoric and the Decolonization of American Indian Removal Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 1 (2009): 66–88, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630802621052; Carrie Crenshaw, “Resisting Whiteness’ Rhetorical Silence,” Western Journal of Communication 61, no. 3 (1997): 253–78, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570319709374577; DeChaine D. Robert, ed., Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012); Lisa A. Flores, “Creating Discursive Space Through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 2 (1996): 142–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639609384147; Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 4–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2016.1183871; Dreama Moon and Lisa A. Flores, “Antiracism and the Abolition of Whiteness: Rhetorical Strategies of Domination Among ‘Race Traitors,’” Communication Studies 51, no. 2 (2000): 97–115, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970009388512; Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 291–309, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639509384117; Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002); Ersula J. Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019); Darrel Allan Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee's Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 647–57, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41940627; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015).
2 Although few scholars of presidential foreign policy rhetoric talk about empire directly, there is a strain of thinking that focuses on ideology and American exceptionalism. See, for example, Denise M. Bostdorff, The Presidency and the Rhetoric of Foreign Crisis (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993); Denise M. Bostdorff and Steven R. Goldzwig, “Idealism and Pragmatism in American Foreign Policy Rhetoric: The Case of John F. Kennedy and Vietnam,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1994): 515–30, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27551281; Jason A. Edwards, “Foreign Policy Rhetoric in the 1992 Presidential Campaign: Bill Clinton's Exceptionalist Jeremiad,” Speaker & Gavel 52, no. 2 (2015), https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/speaker-gavel/vol52/iss2/6; Allison M. Prasch, “The Rise of the Global Rhetorical Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2021): 327–56, https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12713; Allison M. Prasch, The World is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2023); Philip Wander, “The Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 4 (1984): 339–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638409383703.
3 A prime example of this tendency can be found in the three-volume series, A History and Criticism of American Public Address. The first two volumes, edited by William Norwood Brigance, were published by the National Association of Teachers of Speech in 1943. The third volume, edited by Marie Hochmuth Nichols, was published by the Speech Association of America in 1960. Both associations were precursors to what is now the National Communication Association.
4 See Stephen J. Heidt, “Introduction: The Study of Presidential Rhetoric in Uncertain Times: Thoughts on Theory and Praxis,” in Reading the Presidency: Advances in Presidential Rhetoric, eds. Stephen J. Heidt and Mary E. Stuckey (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2019), 1-19.
5 For more on the centrality of US presidential rhetoric in public address scholarship, see Lisa M. Corrigan and Mary E. Stuckey, “Rebooting Rhetoric and Public Address,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 24, no. 1–2 (2021): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.24.1-2.0001.
6 Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 17.
7 For some of the most recent scholarship on this point, see Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui, “Unpacking African Epistemological Violence: Toward Critical Africanness in Communication Studies,” Review of Communication 21, no. 4 (2021): 293–309, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2021.2001687; Godfried Agyeman Asante, “#RhetoricSoWhite and US Centered: Reflections on Challenges and Opportunities,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 484–88, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669892; Godfried A. Asante and Jenna N. Hanchey, “African Communication Studies: A Provocation and Invitation,” Review of Communication 21, no. 4 (2021): 271–92, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2021.2001844; Noor Ghazal Aswad, “Radical Rhetoric: Toward a Telos of Solidarity,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 24, no. 1–2 (2021): 207–22, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.24.1-2.0207; Kristiana L. Báez and Ersula Ore, “The Moral Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: On Civility and Walking-in-White in Academe,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 331–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1533989; Sara Baugh-Harris and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Against Cannon; Engaging the Imperative of Race in Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 337–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1526386; Christina Cedillo, “Unruly Borders, Bodies, and Blood: Mexican ‘Mongrels’ and the Eugenics of Empire,” Journal for the History of Rhetoric 24, no. 1 (2021): 7-23, https://doi.org/10.1080/26878003.2021.1881307; Michelle Colpean and Rebecca Dingo, “Beyond Drive-By Race Scholarship: The Importance of Engaging Geopolitical Contexts,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 306–11, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1533988; José M. Cortez, “On Disinvention: Dr. Ersula Ore and the Rhetorics of Race at the US-Mexico Border,” Journal for the History of Rhetoric 24, no. 1 (2021): 87–103, https://doi.org/10.1080/26878003.2021.1881312; Matthew deTar, “Why ‘Anticolonial’ International Rhetorical Studies?,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 24, no. 1–2 (2021): 191–206, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.24.1-2.0191; Brandon M. Erby, “Surviving the Jim Crow South: ‘The Talk’ as an African American Rhetorical Form,” Journal for the History of Rhetoric 24, no. 1 (2021): 24–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/26878003.2021.1881308; Miriam L. Fernandez, “La Llorona and Rhetorical Haunting in Mexico's Public Sphere,” Journal for the History of Rhetoric 24, no. 1 (2021): 54–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/26878003.2021.1881310; Megan Fitzmaurice, “Recirculating Memories of the Presidents as Benevolent Slaveholders on Presidential Slavery Tours,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 22, no. 4 (2019): 495–531, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0495; Lisa A. Flores, “Towards an Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 349–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1526387; Jenna N. Hanchey and Godfried A. Asante, “African Communication Studies: Applications and Interventions,” Review of Communication 22, no. 1 (2022): 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2022.2027997; Scarlett L. Hester and Catherine R. Squires, “Who are We Working For? Recentering Black Feminism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 343–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1533987; Matthew Houdek, “The Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: Toward Divesting from Disciplinary and Institutionalized Whiteness,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 292–99, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1534253; Matthew Houdek, “Metaphors to Live and Die By,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 24, no. 1–2 (2021): 269–89, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.24.1-2.0269; Florianne Jimenez, “Echoing + Resistant Imagining: Filipino Student Writing Under American Colonial Rule,” Journal for the History of Rhetoric 24, no. 1 (2021): 39–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/26878003.2021.1881309; Andre E. Johnson, “My Sanctified Imagination: Carter G. Woodson and a Speculative (Rhetorical) History of African American Public Address, 1925-1960,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 24, no. 1–2 (2021): 15–49, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.24.1-2.0015; Erik Johnson, “In the Midnight Hour: Anticolonial Rhetoric and Postcolonial Statecraft in Ghana,” Review of Communication 22, no. 1 (2022): 60–75, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2022.2027996; Paul Elliott Johnson and Raymie E. McKerrow, “Ideology's Absent Shadow: A Conversation About Rhetoric,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 24, no. 1–2 (2021): 69–88, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.24.1-2.0069; Taylor N. Johnson and Danielle Endres, “Decolonizing Settler Public Address: The Role of Settler Scholars,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 24, no. 1–2 (2021): 333–48, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.24.1-2.0333; Martin Law and Lisa M. Corrigan, “On White-Speak and Gatekeeping: Or, What Good are the Greeks?,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 326–30, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1533640; Alexis McGee & J. David Cisneros, “Looking Back, Looking Forward: A Dialogue on ‘The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 300–305, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1533643; John M. Murphy and Michael Lechuga, “The Role of the Critic,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 24, no. 1–2 (2021): 51–68, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.24.1-2.0051; Tiara Na'puti, “Speaking of Indigeneity: Navigating Genealogies Against Erasure and #RhetoricSoWhite,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 495–501, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669895; Adedoyin Ogunfeyimi, “The Grammar and Rhetoric of African Subjectivity: Ethics, Image, and Language,” Review of Communication 21, no. 4 (2021): 310–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2021.2001842; Christa J. Olson, “Introduction: This Is America,” Journal for the History of Rhetoric 24, no. 1 (2021): 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1080/26878003.2021.1881306; Vincent N. Pham, “The Threat of #RhetoricNotSoWhite,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 489–94, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669894; Gloria Nziba Pindi, “Promoting African Knowledge in Communication Studies: African Feminisms as Critical Decolonial Praxis,” Review of Communication 21, no. 4 (2021): 327–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2021.2001843; Karrieann M. Soto Vega, “Afterlives of Anticolonial Dissent: Performances of Public Memory Within and Against the United States of América,” Journal for the History of Rhetoric 24, no. 1 (2021): 69–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/26878003.2021.1881311; Karrieann Soto Vega and Karma R. Chávez, “Latinx Rhetoric and Intersectionality in Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 319–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1533642; Stacey K. Sowards, “#RhetoricSoEnglishOnly: Decolonizing Rhetorical Studies Through Multilingualism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 477–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669891; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Decolonial Rhetoric and a Future Yet-to-Become: A Loving Response,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 21, no. 3 (2018): 326–30, https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2018.1526551; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric's Rac(e/ist) Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 465–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669068; Shereen Yousuf and Bernadette Calafell, “The Imperative for Examining Anti-Muslim Racism in Rhetorical Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 312–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1533641.
8 See, for example, Roderick P. Hart, Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Paul Elliott Johnson, I the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2021); Casey Ryan Kelly, “Donald J. Trump and the Rhetoric of Ressentiment,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 1 (2020): 2–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1698756; Michael J. Lee, “The Conservative Canon and its Uses,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 15, no. 1 (2012): 1–39, https://doi.org/10.1353/rap.2012.0008; Michael J. Lee, “Considering Political Identity: Conservatives, Republicans, and Donald Trump,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 20, no. 4 (2017): 719–30, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.4.0719; Michael J. Lee, Creating Conservatism: Postwar Words that Made an American Movement (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014); Stephanie A. Martin, Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2021).
9 Here we gesture towards the method of descriptive analysis outlined in Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Susan Schultz Huxman, and Thomas R. Burkholder, The Rhetorical Act: Thinking, Speaking, and Writing Critically, 5th ed. (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2015) and often used to teach the process of rhetorical criticism.
10 See, for example, Stephen Howard Browne, The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic (State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 2020); Stephen E. Lucas, “Washington and the Rhetoric of Presidential Leadership,” in The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership, ed. Leroy G. Dorsey (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 42-72.
11 Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2002), 8-9.
12 Robert G. Parkinson, Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
13 See, for example, Jason Edward Black, American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2015); Black, “Native Resistive Rhetoric”; Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019); The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, eds. Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein (New York, NY: One World, 2021); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York, NY: Bold Face Books, 2016); Kyle T. Mays, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (New York, NY: Beacon Press, 2021); Richard Morris, “Educating Savages,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 2 (1997): 152–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639709384178; Richard Morris and Philip Wander, “Native American Rhetoric: Dancing in the Shadow of the Ghost Dance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76, no. 2 (1990): 164–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639009383912; Na’puti, “Speaking of Indigeneity”; Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016); Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020); Clint Smith, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2021); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
14 See, for example, David Brody, Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Sam Erman, Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empires (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico During U.S. Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, rev. ed. (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2011); Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Charles R. Venator-Santiago, Puerto Rico and the Origins of US Global Empires: The Disembodied Shade (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015).
15 Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, April 27, 1809; Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Thomas Jefferson, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/149.html. For a discussion of this point, see Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
16 Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 19-20. On the persistence of the myth of the vanishing Indian, see, among many others, Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and US Indian Policy, rev. ed. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991).
17 James Monroe, “Seventh Annual Message,” December 2, 1823, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Wooley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/205755.
18 See Mark T. Gilderhus, “The Monroe Doctrine: Meanings and Implications,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2006): 5–16, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5705.2006.00282.x; Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2011).
19 James K. Polk, “First Annual Message,” December 2, 1845, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/200590.
20 Christa J. Olson, “But in Regard to These (the American) Continents: U.S. National Rhetorics and the Figure of Latin America,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2015): 264–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2015.1032857. See also Stephen J. Heidt, “Presidential Power and National Violence: James K. Polk's Rhetorical Transfer of Savagery,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 19, no. 3 (2016): 365–96, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.3.0365.
21 William McKinley, “Message to Congress Requesting a Declaration of War with Spain,” April 11, 1898, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/304972.
22 Lyndon B. Johnson, “Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Need for Higher Interest Rates on U.S. Savings Bonds,” online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/239487.
23 On the domino theory, which motivated this reasoning, see Jerome Slater, “The Domino Theory and International Politics: The Case of Vietnam,” Security Studies 3, no. 2 (1993): 186–224, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636419309347547.
24 See, for example, Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997). We think it is not a coincidence that these critiques emerged simultaneously with the Civil Rights Movement and arose largely because of the actions of people of color.
25 See, for example, Kevin J. Ayotte and Mary E. Husain, “Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil,” NWSA Journal (2005): 112–33, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4317160; Zoë Hess Carney and Mary E. Stuckey, “The World as the American Frontier: Racialized Presidential War Rhetoric,” Southern Communication Journal 80, no. 3 (2015): 163–88, https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2015.1043139; Zubeda Jalalzai and David Jefferess, eds. Globalizing Afghanistan: Terrorism, War, and the Rhetoric of Nation Building (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
26 Todd Miller, Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border Around the World (London, UK: Verso, 2019).
27 Eric A. Heinze, “The Rhetoric of Genocide in US Foreign Policy: Rwanda and Darfur Compared,” Political Science Quarterly 122, no. 3 (2007): 359–83, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20202884.
28 See, for example, Leroy G. Dorsey, “The Frontier Myth in Presidential Rhetoric: Theodore Roosevelt's Campaign for Conservation,” Western Journal of Communication 59, no. 1 (1995): 1–19; Leroy G. Dorsey, “Managing Women's Equality: Theodore Roosevelt, the Frontier Myth, and the Modern Woman,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 16, no. 3 (2013): 423–56, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.3.0423; Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2019); Tiffany Lewis, “Winning Woman Suffrage in the Masculine West: Abigail Scott Duniway's Frontier Myth,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 2 (2011): 127–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2011.553877; Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York, NY: Atheneum, 1985); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).
29 Hans Kohn, American Nationalism: An Interpretative Essay (New York, NY: Collier Books, 1961), 34; Stephen Howard Browne, “Samuel Danforth's ‘Errand into the Wilderness’ and the Discourse of Arrival in Early American Culture,” Communication Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1992): 91–101, https://doi.org/10.1080/01463379209369825.
30 Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1; Dahl, Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018), 4. On the centrality of white American anxieties as they dispossessed Indigenous peoples and claimed the continent, see Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence.
31 Christa J. Olson, “The Democratic Hemisphere,” in Adrianna Angel, Michael L. Butterworth, and Nancy R. Gómez, eds., Rhetorics of Democracy in the Americas (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021), 27. See also, E Cram, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the American West (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2022).
32 See Bruce E. Johansen, Debating Democracy: Native American Legacy of Freedom (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishing, 1998).
33 Roosevelt, “Fifth Annual Message.”
34 See, for example, Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990).
35 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/208712.
36 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Remarks at Carrasco Airport, Montevideo, Upon Leaving for Puerto Rico,” March 3, 1960, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/235367.
37 Just after this trip Eisenhower authorized the CIA to go ahead with its plan to conduct a clandestine military invasion of Cuba, a mission that culminated in the Bay of Pigs. For a detailed account of the Eisenhower Administration's actions in Cuba during this period, see Geoffrey Warner, “Eisenhower and Castro: US-Cuban Relations 1958-1960,” International Affairs 75, no. 4 (1999): 803–17, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.00110.
38 On Eisenhower specifically, see Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). On Cold War foreign policy toward Latin America more generally, see Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015).
39 Adam Clymer, Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998).
40 Dan Wasserman, “We Built It, We Paid for It, It's Ours”, NACLA Report on the Americas, 15, no. 4 (1981): 25–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.1981.11723680.
41 J. Michael Hogan, “Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy: The Case of Illusory Support for the Panama Canal Treaties,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 71, no. 3 (1985): 302–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638509383738; Thomas A. Hollihan, “The Public Controversy over the Panama Canal Treaties: An Analysis of American Foreign Policy Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 50, no. 4 (1986): 368–87, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570318609374244.
42 For a discussion of the rhetorical aspects of this colonialism and the resistance to it, see, for example, Ashley Noel Mack and Tiara Na'puti, “‘Our Bodies are not Terra Nullius’: Building a Decolonial Feminist Resistance to Gendered Violence,” Women's Studies in Communication 42, no. 3 (2019): 347–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2019.1637803; Tiara Na'puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 4–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2019.1572905; Tiara Na'puti and Michael Lujan Bevacqua, “Militarization and Resistance from Guåhan: Protecting and Defending Pågat,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2015): 837–58, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2015.0040.
43 Amos Kiewe and Davis W. Houck, eds., The Effects of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Effects: Past, Present, Future (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2015).
44 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
45 Campbell and Jamieson, Presidents Creating the Presidency, 221.
46 On recent considerations of context, see Charles E. Morris, III and Kendall R. Phillips, eds. The Conceit of Context: Resituating Domains in Rhetorical Studies (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2020).
47 James K. Polk, “Special Message to Congress on Mexican Relations,” May 11, 1846, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/200910.
48 For additional context, see Heidt, “Presidential Power and National Violence”; Robert W. Merry, A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican American War, and the Conquest of the American Continent (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2009); Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, rev. ed. (New York, NY: Back Bay Books, 2008), 155-176.
49 John Quincy Adams as quoted in Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University of Press, 2017), 192.
50 Robert Hunter as quoted in Frymer, Building an American Empire, 193.
51 John C. Calhoun as quoted in Frymer, Building an American Empire, 195.
52 See James K. Polk, “Fourth Annual Message,” December 5, 1848, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/200618.
53 Piero Gleijeses, “Ships in the Night: The CIA, the White House and the Bay of Pigs,” Journal of Latin American Studies 27, no. 1 (1995): 1–42, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X00010154; Jim Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2012).
54 John F. Kennedy, “Address Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors,” April 20, 1961, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/234688.
55 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat,” December 9, 1941, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/210419.
56 National Archives and Records Administration, “Japanese-American Incarceration During World War II,” website last reviewed January 24, 2022, https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/japanese-relocation#background.
57 See Allan W. Austin, “Eastward Pioneers: Japanese American Resettlement During World War II and the Contested Meaning of Exile and Incarceration,” Journal of American Ethnic History 26, no. 2 (2007): 58–84, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27501805; Maegan Parker, “Memory, Narrative, and Myth in the Construction of National Identity: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Senate Debate over Reparations for Japanese Americans,” in Rhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement, eds. Gerard Hauser and Amy Grim (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), 277–84; Mira Shimabukuro, “‘Me Inwardly, Before I Dared’: Japanese Americans Writing-to-Gaman,” College English 73, no. 6 (2011): 648–71, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23052366; Lynn Thiesmeyer, “The Discourse of Official Violence: Anti-Japanese North American Discourse and the American Internment Camps,” Discourse & Society 6, no. 3 (1995): 319–52, https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926595006003003.
58 George W. Bush, “Remarks at the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance,” September 14, 2001, online by Gerard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/213374; George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11,” online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/213749. For a rhetorical analysis of these speeches, see John M. Murphy, “‘Our Mission and Our Moment’: George W. Bush and September 11th,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (2003): 607–32, https://doi.org/10.1353/rap.2004.0013.
59 Richard J. Ellis, ed. Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
60 For citations and discussions of circulation, see the special forum on rhetorical circulation published in Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 609–94.
61 For more on this point, see Prasch, “The Rise of the Global Rhetorical Presidency” and Prasch, The World is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War.
62 Vanessa B. Beasley, You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011); Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Barack Obama, the Tea Party, and the Threat of Race: On Racial Neoliberalism and Born Again Racism,” Communication, Culture & Critique 4, no. 1 (2011):23–30, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1753-9137.2010.01090.x; Mary E. Stuckey, Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
63 Who Belongs in America?: Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration, ed. Vanessa B. Beasley (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006); Josue David Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013); Lisa A. Flores, Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the ‘Illegal’ Immigrant (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020); Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2019); Sara L. McKinnon, Gendered Asylum: Race and Violence in US Law and Politics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016); Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.
64 Franklin Pierce, “First Annual Message,” December 5, 1853, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/201860.
65 Calvin Coolidge, “Proclamation 1713—Historic Areas on Certain Military Reservations Declared National Monuments,” October 15, 1824, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/317704.
66 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address at Roosevelt Park, New York City,” October 28, 1938, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/208364.
67 Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks Upon Signing Proclamation Adding Ellis Island to the Liberty Island National Monument,” May 11, 1965, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/241606.
68 Richard Nixon, “Special Message to the Congress Outlining Plans for the Bicentennial Observance in the District of Columbia,” February 4, 1972, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/255577.
69 William J. Clinton, “Proclamation 6967—Martin Luther King, Jr., Federal Holiday, 1997,” January 17, 1997, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/224621.
70 Robert D. Plotnick, “Changes in Poverty, Income Inequality, and the Standard of Living in the United States during the Reagan Years,” International Journal of Health Services 23, no. 2 (1993): 347–58, https://doi.org/10.2190/H95U-EX9E-QPM2-XA94; John W. Sloan, “The Reagan Presidency, Growing Inequality, and the American Dream,” Policy Studies Journal 25, no. 3 (1997): 371–86, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0072.1997.tb00028.x.
71 Barack Obama, “Commencement Address at Miami Dade College in Miami, Florida,” April 29, 2011, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/289986.
72 Robert E. Terrill, Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2015).
73 Denise M. Bostdorff and Steven R. Goldzwig, “Barack Obama's Eulogy for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, June 26, 2015: Grace as the Vehicle for Collective Salvation and Obama's Agency on Civil Rights,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 23, no. 1 (2020): 107–52, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.1.0107; Josue David Cisneros, “The Son of a Black Man from Kenya and a White Woman from Kansas: Immigration and Racial Neoliberalism in the Age of Obama,” in American Identity in the Age of Obama, eds. Amílcar Antonio Barreto and Richard L. O’Bryant (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 84-113; James Darsey, “Barack Obama and America's Journey,” Southern Communication Journal 74, no. 1 (2009): 88–103, https://doi.org/10.1080/10417940802571151; David A. Frank and Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Barack Obama's Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: Trauma, Compromise, Consilience, and the (Im)possibility of Racial Reconciliation,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 4 (2005): 571–93, https://doi.org/10.1353/rap.2006.0006; Theon E. Hill, “Sanitizing the Struggle: Barack Obama, Selma, and Civil Rights Memory,” Communication Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2017): 354–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/01463373.2016.1275728; John M. Murphy, “Barack Obama, the Exodus Tradition, and the Joshua Generation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 4 (2011): 387–410, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.608706; Allison M. Prasch, “Obama in Selma: Deixis, Rhetorical Vision, and the ‘True Meaning of America,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 1 (2019): 42–67, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2018.1552366; Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, “One Dream: Barack Obama, Race, and the American Dream,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 1 (2011): 125–54, https://doi.org/10.2307/41940526; Robert E. Terrill, “Unity and Duality in Barack Obama's ‘A More Perfect Union’,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 4 (2009): 363–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630903296192; Kirt H. Wilson, “Dreams of Union, Days of Conflict: Communicating Social Justice and Civil Rights Memory in the Age of Barack Obama,” Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, National Communication Association, Philadelphia, PA (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 2016).
74 Prasch, “The Rise of the Global Rhetorical Presidency”; Prasch, The World is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War.
75 Black, “Native Resistive Rhetoric”; Kevin R. Kemper, “Who Speaks for Indigenous Peoples? Tribal Journalists, Rhetorical Sovereignty, and Freedom of Expression,” Journalism & Communication Monographs 12, no. 1 (2010): 3–58, https://doi.org/10.1177/152263791001200101; Randall A. Lake, “Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 2 (1991): 123–51, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639109383949; Morris and Wander, “Native American Rhetoric”; Mary E. Stuckey and Richard Morris, “The Other Side of Power,” in Presidential Frontiers: Underexplored Issues in White House Politics (New York, NY: Prager, 1998), 179–93; Anna Tsing, “Indigenous Voice,” in Indigenous Experience Today, eds. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007), 33–67.
76 Timothy Barney, “Václav Havel at the End of the Cold War: The Invention of Post-Communist Transition in the Address to U.S. Congress, February 21, 1990,” Communication Quarterly 67, no. 5 (2019): 560–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/01463373.2019.1668444; Jason A. Edwards, “Apologizing for the Past for a Better Future: Collective Apologies in the United States, Australia, and Canada,” Southern Communication Journal 75, no. 1 (2010): 57–75, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10417940902802605; Jason A. Edwards, "Bringing in Earthly Redemption: Slobodan Milosevic and the National Myth of Kosovo,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 18, no. 1 (2015): S187–S204, https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2015.1010879; Jason A. Edwards and Amber Luckie, "British Prime Minister David Cameron's Apology for Bloody Sunday,” Let's Talk Politics: New Essays on Deliberative Rhetoric, eds. Hilde Van Belle, Kris Rutten, Paul Gillaerts, Dorien Van De Mieroop, and Baldwin Van Gorp (Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014), 115–29; Nancy Henaku, “Discourse, Women and Politics in the Postcolony: On Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, Ghana's First Female Presidential Candidate,” PhD diss., Michigan Technological University, 2020; Louis C. Jonker, “Reflections on Leadership in Achaemenid Yehud: Case Studies from the Chronicler's Imperial, Provincial, Tribal, and Cultic Rhetoric,” in Transforming Authority: Concepts of Leadership in Prophetic and Chronistic Literature, eds. Katharina Pyschny and Sarah Schulz (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 201-222; Riikka Kuusisto, “Framing the Wars in the Gulf and in Bosnia: The Rhetorical Definitions of the Western Power Leaders in Action,” Journal of Peace Research 35, no. 5 (1998): 603–20, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343398035005004; Ignacio Moreno Segarra and Karrin Vasby Anderson, “Political Pornification Gone Global: Teresa Rodríguez as Fungible Object in the 2015 Spanish Regional Elections,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 2 (2019): 204–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1595102; Belinda Stillion Southard, “Crafting Cosmopolitan Nationalism: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's Rhetorical Leadership,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 4 (2017): 395–414, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2017.1360508; María Alejandra Vitale, “Legitimizing Leadership: Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's 2007 Inaugural Address,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2015): 250–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2015.1032856.
77 At the time of this writing, some of the most pertinent and informative discussions come from media reports, including Shaun King, “The Hypocrisy of Support for Ukraine Must Not Harden Black America's Hearts,” Newsweek, March 12, 2022, https://www.newsweek.com/hypocrisy-support-ukraine-must-not-harden-black-americas-hearts-1687360; Andrew Limbong, “Why Ukrainians are Being Treated Differently than Refugees from Other Countries,” NPR.org, February 28, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/02/28/1083580981/why-ukrainians-are-being-treated-differently-than-refugees-from-other-countries; Chris McGreal, "US Accused of Hypocrisy for Supporting Sanctions Against Russia But Not Israel,” The Guardian, March 7, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/07/us-sanctions-against-russia-but-not-israel; Andrew Mitrovica, “Ukraine Crisis: As Hope Wanes, Hypocrisy Thrives,” Al Jazeera, February 25, 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/2/25/as-hope-wanes-hypocrisy-thrives.
78 Sarah Ellison and Travis M. Andrews, “'They Seem So Like Us’: In Depicting Ukraine's Plight, Some in Media Use Offensive Comparisons,” Washington Post, February 27, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/02/27/media-ukraine-offensive-comparisons/.
79 David Bauder and Jocelyn Noveck, “A Modern Churchill? Zelenskyy Praised as War Communicator,” ABC News, March 7, 2022, https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/modern-churchill-zelenskyy-praised-war-communicator-83301684.
80 Natalie Andrews, Siobhan Hughes, and Eliza Collins, “House Passes $1.5 Trillion Omnibus Package that Includes Aid for Ukraine,” Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-lawmakers-release-13-6-billion-for-ukraine-in-omnibus-spending-bill-11646813268?mod=article_inline; Kaitlan Collins, Kevin Liptak, Phil Mattingly, Paul LeBlanc, and Maegan Vazquez, “Biden Announces Hundreds of Millions in New Security Aid for Ukraine Following Zelensky's Speech,” CNN, March 16, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/15/politics/biden-military-assistance-ukraine/index.html.
81 For more on this point, see Noor Ghazal Aswad and Antonio de Velasco, “Redemptive Exclusion: A Case Study of Nikki Haley's Rhetoric on Syrian Refugees,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 23, no. 4 (2020): 735–60, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.4.0735; Tiffany A. Dykstra, “Assemblages of Syrian Suffering: Rhetorical Formations of Refugees in Western Media,” Language, Discourse & Society 4, no. 1 (2016): 31–48, https://www.language-and-society.org/volume-4-number-1-june-2016/; Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre, “Portraying the Political: National Geographic's 1985 Afghan Girl and a US Alibi for Aid,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 4 (2010): 336–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295030903583614; Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre, “Rhetorically Representing Public Policy: National Geographic's 2002 Afghan Girl and the Bush Administration's Biometric Identification Policies,” Feminist Media Studies 7, no. 4 (2007): 433–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680770701631620.