![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
This essay examines citizen correspondence to the White House following Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)’s “Fala speech.” During the 1944 presidential election, citizens often engaged in prosopopoeia by writing from the perspective of their pets and Roosevelt’s dog, Fala. I argue that citizens used this classical rhetorical figure to identify with the president and express their views of FDR’s character. Thus, animals offered a strategic, seemingly nonpolitical locus for expressing judgments about the election.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the staff at the FDR Presidential Library, specifically Bob Clark, Virginia H. Lewick, Matthew C. Hanson, Sarah L. Malcolm, and William Baehr, as well as Lori Birrell, Manuscript Librarian at the University of Rochester’s archives. The author also recognizes Rosa Eberly, Thomas W. Benson, an anonymous reviewer, and Susan Jarratt for their kind words and keen insights during the composition and revision processes.
Funding
This project was supported by a research grant from the Roosevelt Institute. The author also received a dissertation grant and research award from the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University.
Notes
1 Indeed, one of the more renowned animal rights organizations, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), rose to prominence while exposing scientific abuses. In 1981, police raided psychologist Edward Taub’s Silver Spring laboratory after a PETA member documented rampant animal cruelty. Three years later, PETA’s expose, Unnecessary Fuss, revealed primate abuse in Thomas Gennarelli’s head injury laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania (Blum 105–32).
2 Knutson first uttered the rumor on the floor of the House of Representatives on August 31, 1944; see Barbara Stuhler. Knutson later inquired whether a plane was used to retrieve the dog (see “Presses ‘Fala’ Inquiry”).
3 A contemporaneous example of this stereotype may be seen in Walt Disney’s 1943 propaganda cartoon, The Spirt of ‘43. In the cartoon, Donald Duck contemplates whether he should spend his paycheck on frivolous pleasures or save it to pay his income taxes, so as to help defeat the Axis powers. His internal debate is illustrated by the popular angel and devil on the shoulder routine, except that in this case the angel is represented by an unnamed Scottish duck, who was most likely the early inspiration for Scrooge McDuck. I thank one of my reviewers for pointing out both the enthymeme in FDR’s remarks and the Disney cartoon.
4 Eight years to the day after FDR delivered the “Fala speech,” Richard Nixon famously delivered a televised speech defending himself from accusations of mishandling campaign funds. Nixon’s remarks are better known as the “Checkers speech.” For a comparative analysis of these two dog speeches, see John Llewellyn.
5 This correspondence is stored in the President’s Personal File #7288 (Fala Letters) at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, located in Hyde Park, NY. Altogether, the White House received almost 2,000 Fala-related documents (including letters, greeting cards, postcards, telegrams, and newspaper clippings) between November 1940 and April 1945. By my count, 897 documents were addressed directly to Fala. Of these, 481 employed prosopopoeia. I digitized these documents for subsequent close-textual analysis in March 2012 and during a return trip in September 2014.
6 For an overview of the gusto with which citizens wrote to FDR, see Gerard A. Hauser (232–267), Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine (1–24), and Leila A. Sussmann. Notably, Levine and Levine observe that people sometimes addressed letters to Eleanor hoping that she would forward their message to the president (6). During his years in the White House, Fala often served a similar function in that letters addressed to him would stand apart from the thousands received daily by the Roosevelts.
7 For an alternative take on prosopopoeia, see Megan Foley, who, in her analysis of Terri Schiavo, has posited that this trope may be used “to invest bare life with sovereign rights” (383). In other words, because nonhumans and some humans are unable to speak for themselves and protect their self-interests, humans speak on their behalf, thereby politicizing them and creating space for them in our legal arena. This use of prosopopoeia in the United States has flourished in recent decades.
8 Fala signified different things depending on the audience. For instance, whereas many people honed in on the loving relationship they saw between the president and his dog, other citizens recognized the Scottie as a status symbol. On several occasions, concerned citizens wrote letters to the White House offering to have Fala groomed as befitting his breed at no cost to the president. FDR’s constant, yet polite refusal to each of these offers allowed him to keep Fala’s appearance amenable to both interpretations. For more information on the historical connection between bourgeois society and pet-keeping practices, see Kathleen Kete.
9 E. B. White, in “Dog Training,” remarks, “The possession of a dog today is a different thing from the possession of a dog at the turn of the century, when one’s dog was fed on mashed potato and brown gravy and lived in a doghouse with an arched portal. Today a dog is fed on scraped beef and Vitamin B1 and lives in bed with you” (161).
10 FDR cared deeply for Fala. Whenever the president was apart from the Scottie, he frequently remarked how he missed him. For instance, in a letter dated November 2, 1944, FDR wrote, “I miss him [Fala] very much … . I left him at home last time I was at Hyde Park but I shall see him when I go up for Election.”
11 Newspapers and people often misspelled Fala’s name. I have preserved these misspellings for historical accuracy.
Figure 2 Phonograph trademark for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Public domain.
Figure 1 “Fala listens to his master.” As reproduced in New York Times, July 22, 1944. © AP Images. Reproduced by permission of AP Images. Permission to reproduce must be obtained from the original rightsholder.
12 In order to reduce clutter, I have opted to omit the year these letters were sent to the White House in the parenthetical citations. All of the letters I analyze were sent in 1944 and do not have page numbers. Moreover, each person I reference only sent one letter. Thus, there should be no confusion as to which letter it is in the bibliography. Unless otherwise indicated, all letters come from President’s Personal File #7288 (Fala Letters); FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.
13 It is not clear where this quotation originated. Joseph Gies claims that Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes coined it, although he provides no source to back this up (203).
14 Unlike Fala who received hundreds of letters during the election, Canute does not appear to have received any. The Thomas Dewey Papers, which are archived at the University of Rochester, contain no letters addressed to Canute. Among Thomas Dewey’s Papers, however, are Canute’s medical and food bills.
15 The person writing appears to have confused Fluffy’s campaign sign (“I’m for Dewey”) as saying that he was being given to Dewey, instead of simply supporting the Republican candidate.
16 The similar length shadows and grass suggest that these photographs were likely taken on the same day, however.
Figure 4 Private William J. Slaughter, Jr. and his dog campaign for FDR’s re-election. Courtesy of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library.
17 Adopting animal voices in personal correspondence is not entirely novel in the United States. Katherine C. Grier, for instance, notes a letter sent from one child’s cat to another in 1838 (72–73).
18 For instance, in Aelius Theon’s discussion of prosopopoeia, he notes that letter writing falls “under this genus of exercise” (Kennedy, Progymnasmata 47). Similarly, while describing ethopoeia, another name for impersonations, Nicolaus the Sophist mused, “To me, it seems also to exercise us in the style of letter writing, since in that there is need of foreseeing the character of those sending letters and those to whom they are sent” (Kennedy, Progymnasmata 166).
19 For a nontraditional account of prosopopoeia drawing on Paul de Man’s theorization of the trope as operating on humans as opposed to used by humans, see Johanna Hartelius.
20 Michael C. Leff and Gerald P. Mohrmann arrive at a similar observation, although from a different angle, in their analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech. They note that Lincoln used prosopopoeia to speak for the Southern states, so as to put words in their mouths and thereby discredit their views of slavery. Lincoln, who was vying with Stephen Douglas to become the Republican nominee, used this tactic to identify with the Republican North (355). Those who engaged in prosopopoeia during the 1944 election did not use it to spar with their pets, however. In a sense, these citizens’ prosopopoeic identification was more direct than Lincoln’s.
21 For more on FDR’s own efforts to trace public opinion through citizen letters, see Sussmann.
22 Elsewhere in this letter Fluffy refers to his/her mistress as “mommie.” Compared to the master-servant relationship expressed in other letters, this familial language empowers Fluffy and Fala as representatives of their homes and provides them with a touch more agency, albeit somewhat infantilized. Although this familial language appears in other letters addressed to Fala, it does not occur very often during the 1944 election.
23 There were several commercialized efforts at speaking for Fala, however. In 1942, Alan Foster drew twenty-five cartoons of Fala in Liberty magazine. Collier’s published sixty-three more of Foster’s Fala cartoons between December 12, 1942 and August 12, 1944. In April 1943, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) released Fala, The President’s Dog, a movie short starring Fala and narrated from the Scottie’s perspective. In January 1946, MGM released a second short, Fala at Hyde Park.
24 For a radio “interview” with Fala, which aired from Station W.R.C., National Broadcasting Company, at 6:45 PM on Saturday, September 9, 1944, see Raine Bennett.
25 For a more detailed account of FDR’s use of Fala as a political prop, see Bryan Blankfield.
26 For more about the connection between spiritualism and the development of radio, see John Durham Peters (102–05).
27 Trinka misspelled the Scottish word “braw,” which means “nice.”