Kenneth Burke's Constabulary Rhetoric: Sociorhetorical Critique in Attitudes Toward History

Abstract

Scholars have shown that Kenneth Burke's research on drug addiction at the Bureau of Social Hygiene shaped his rhetorical theory in Permanence and Change, but less attention has been paid to another facet of this research, criminology, and its influence on Attitudes Toward History. In Attitudes, Burke uses a criminological framework, called the “constabulary function,” to characterize the rhetorical strategies political and economic elites use to bolster a deteriorating social order while deflecting attention away from broader, systemic problems. The constabulary function and its attendant terms—alienation, cultural lag, transcendence, symbols of authority, and secular prayer—provide a vocabulary for sociorhetorical critique. I examine how Burke's theory of the constabulary function grew out of his criminological research, consider how that theory informs key terms in Attitudes.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Jack Selzer and Debra Hawhee for their insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also to Sandra Steltz at Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University, for her help with the Kenneth Burke Papers, and to Michael Burke for permission to cite Burke's letter to Woods.

Notes

¹In August and September of 1919, police officers attempted to form unions in Boston, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, and in England. The police went on strike in Boston in September, leading to riots and newspaper headlines declaring “Gamblers, Thugs, and Thieves Operate Openly and Commit Crimes Against Women” (See “Battle in Boston Streets” 1). On 14 September 1919, a New York Times article reported that there were police unions organized in 37 cities around the country (See “Police Unions in Thirty-Seven Cities” 56).

²Raymond Fosdick's books also confirmed this perspective. In American Police Systems, he writes that “The modern police head will not only attack the swamps and morasses whose existence and location are more or less patent, but he will be zealous to seek out and discover secret sources of infection which lie hidden in the dark places of city life” (359), and he pinpoints a number potential “sources of infection” that may lead to criminal outbreaks: “disorderly gangs, unregulated dance-halls and other places for amusement, policy-shops, vicious ‘back-rooms,’ or rendezvous for idlers and loafers” (359).

³George and Selzer argue that in Attitudes, Burke might be considered a “critical Marxist,” one who is interested in the relationships between economics, culture, and subjectivity, as opposed to more “classical Marxists,” who were interested in laws of historical materialism (256).

⁴Burke's 1935 work, Permanence and Change, also deals extensively with problems of interpretation and what he would later call “cultural lag.” Here, Burke argues that any orientation includes a vocabulary of motives; although this is not a problem in and of itself, it can become a problem if living conditions change to the point where the serviceability of the orientation is impaired (21).

⁵For Burke, “comic ambivalence” provides a balanced approach to rhetoric, one in which “a discourse between rhetors and audiences who must be neither overly naïve nor overly cynical and—equally important—who would assume neither naiveté nor cynicism in the other” (George and Selzer, Kenneth Burke).

⁶See Chambliss.

⁷See “Vice Fighters” SM10; “Magistrates Praise Woods” 7; “Vice Declines Here” 6.

⁸Woods, like Rockefeller, belonged to a group Burke might identify with the “secular priesthood” in that he was closely connected to some of the great American capitalists. Woods' wife was Helen Morgan Hamilton, granddaughter of J.P. Morgan; Woods himself was a member of the private and very exclusive Tuxedo Club (along with Pierre Lorillard, Jr., Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Vincent Astor, among many others) and served on the Board of Directors for the Banker's Trust Company. He was also vice president of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and a trustee and director of the International Education Board.

⁹Others have pointed out that similar concerns help to explain Burke's 1935 speech, “Revolutionary Symbolism in America,” which he delivered at the American Writers' Congress. George and Selzer argue that this speech demonstrates that Burke was already moving toward the general rhetorical concept of “identification”; Burke critiqued the symbol of the “worker,” then central to classical Marxist theories, arguing that the term “the people” would prove more effective, rhetorically, in an American context. For more, see George and Selzer, “What Happened at the First American Writers' Congress?” 56.

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Notes on contributors

Jordynn Jack

Jordynn Jack is Assistant Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature