The World as the American Frontier: Racialized Presidential War Rhetoric

Abstract

We use the frontier myth and the rhetoric of the Indian Wars as a heuristic for analyzing four racial valences in presidential rhetoric on the War on Terror. First, the naming of the enemy in both instances racializes and conflates identities, amplifying a potential threat and justifying a similarly amplified reaction. Second, the war zone is characterized by shifting borders and alliances, suggesting a racialized political hierarchy in which the United States wars against nonwhite tribal leaders. Third, presidents distinguish between savagery and civilization in war practices such that technology, specifically contrasted to trickery, is a marker of whiteness. Fourth, in both wars, the disciplining of nonwhite bodies is justified as the means to spreading and preserving democracy.

Notes

George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11,” September 20, 2001, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=64731.

On the Indian Wars in general, see, among numerous others, Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Bantam, 1972); Robert Utley, Wilcomb E. Washburn, Indian Wars (Glendale, CA: American Heritage Library, 2002); Bill Yenne, Indian Wars: The Campaign for the American West (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2008).

See, among many others, Denise M. Bostdorff, The Presidency and the Rhetoric of Foreign Crisis (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994); Stephen John Hartnett and Laura Ann Stengrim, Globalization and Empire: The US Invasion of Iraq, Free Markets, and the Twilight of Democracy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006); Robert L. Ivie, “Presidential Motives for War,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974): 337–345; Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and America's War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); John M. Murphy, “‘Our Mission and Our Moment': George W. Bush and September 11th,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6 (2003): 607–632; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Carol Winkler, “Parallels in Preemptive War Rhetoric: Reagan on Libya; Bush 43 on Iraq,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10 (2007): 303–334.

Dana L. Cloud, “To Veil the Threat of Terror”: Afghan Women and the ⟨Clash of Civilizations⟩ in the Imagery of the US War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 285–306.

Gargi S. Bhattacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the “War on Terror” (London: Zed Books, 2008); Jasmine Jiwani, “Trapped in the Carceral Net: Race, Gender, and the War on Terror,” Global Media Journal 4 (2011): 13–31.

Shawn J. Parry-Giles, “Constituting Benevolent War and Imperial Peace: U.S. Nationalism and Idyllic Notions of Peace and War,” in Public Address and Moral Judgment: Critical Studies in Ethical Tensions, ed. Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2009), 185.

Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (New York: Athenium, 1992), 5–6.

Leroy Dorsey, “‘Sailing into the ‘Wondrous Now': The Myth of the American Navy's World Cruise,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 453.

See Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Eloquence of Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. Ronald H. Carpenter (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1983); Janice Hocker Rushing, “The Rhetoric of the American Western Myth,” Communication Monographs 50 (1983): 14–32; Mary E. Stuckey, “The Donner Party and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14 (2011): 229–260; Leroy G. Dorsey and Rachel M. Harlow, “‘We Want Americans Pure and Simple': Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6 (2003): 55–78; M. J. Heale, “The Role of the Frontier in Jacksonian Politics: David Crockett and the Myth of the Self-Made Man,” The Western Historical Quarterly 4 (1973): 405–423.

Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 10.

See Stuckey, “The Donner Party” and Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 10.

Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 10.

The use of the frontier myth and the Indian Wars as a source of invention justifying war is not new; our argument is not that presidents have never used such warrants before but that it has been largely ignored by rhetorical scholars and that, in justifying the War on Terror, it has been startlingly consistent. The most prominent example of scholarship connecting the Indian Wars to U.S. justifications for war can be found in Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997).

We have read all presidential rhetoric regarding Indians and believe strongly that the examples we use are representative. We also understand that using fragments separates the language from its immediate context in order to place it in conversation with a larger one. In this, we follow McGee, seeking the ideological overtones of discourse.

See Mary E. Stuckey and John M. Murphy, “By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North America,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25 (2001): 73–98.

On amplification, see Chaïm Perleman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 175–176.

On Andrew Jackson, see most famously, Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (Piscatawy, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991).

Other politicians, including Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, also first became prominent as Indian fighters. For an extended discussion of this connection, see Thomas G. Mitchell, Indian Fighters Turned American Politicians: From Military Service to Public Office (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).

There is a vast literature on this topic. See, among many others, Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007); Lindsay G. Robinson, Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their Lands (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

See Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

The literature here is immense, and often the most useful literature is tribally specific. For overviews of the arc of indigenous history in the United States, see Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); Peter Iverson, “We Are Still Here”: American Indians in the Twentieth Century (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997); Jake Page, In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000 Year History of Native Americans (New York: Free Press, 2004); David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

See, for example, Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987); John Orman, Comparing Presidential Behavior: Carter, Reagan, and the Macho Presidential Style (New York: Praeger, 1987).

Tzevtan Todorov, The Conquest of America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996).

This was largely the experience of the California Indians. See, for example, Jerry Stanley, Digger: The Tragic Fate of the California Indians from the Missions to the Gold Rush (New York: Knopf, 1997).

See, for example, the history of the Chickasaw nation, in James R. Atkinson, Splendid Land, Splendid People: The Chickasaw Indians to Removal (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003).

Most work on the political role of women in indigenous nations is tribally specific. See, for example, Barbara Alice Mann and Paula Gunn Allen, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (New York: Peter Lang, 2006).

Jeremy Engels explains that in early America, one rhetorical strategy for creating an enemy was to name the enemy, thereby erasing individuality. See Jeremy Engels, Enemyship (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 21.

Andrew Jackson, “Second Annual Message,” December 6, 1830, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29472.

Ulysses S. Grant, “Second Annual Message,” December 5, 1870, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29511.

Benjamin Harrison, “First Annual Message,” December 3, 1889, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29530.

Mary E. Stuckey, Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 87. See also, Mary E. Stuckey and John M. Murphy, “By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North America,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25 (2001): 73–98.

Stuckey, Defining Americans, 237.

Dorsey and Harlow, “We Want Americans,” 69.

David Domke, Philip Garland, Andre Billeaudeaux, and John Hutcheson, “Insights into US Racial Hierarchy: Racial Profiling, News Sources, and September 11,” Journal of Communication 53 (2003): 606–623.

Ambalavaner Sivanandan, “Race, Terror and Civil Society,” Race & Class 47 (2006): 1–8; Elahe Izadi, “Boston Bombing Case Upends Assumptions About Racial Profiling,” National Journal, April 19, 2013, http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/boston-bombing-case-upends-assumptions-about-racial-profiling-20130419.

George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on the Terrorist Attacks,” September 11, 2001, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=58057.

Bush, “Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11.”

For more on Sheridan's phrase, which has become, as Dee Brown argues, an American aphorism, see Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Picador, 2007), 171–172.

George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 28, 2003, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29645.

This phrase, of course, was used by General John Chivington as a justification for the Sand Creek Massacre. For a history of the massacre and the continuing controversy it created, see Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

See also David Zarefsky, “Making the Case for War: Colin Powell at the United Nations,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10 (2007): 275–302.

George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 31, 2006, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=65090.

Barack Obama, “President Obama's speech on Afghanistan,” The New York Times, June 22, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/world/asia/23obama-afghanistan-speech-text.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

Grover Cleveland, “Second Annual Message (first term),” December 6, 1886, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29527.

For more on racial profiling since the start of the War on Terror, see William J. Stuntz, “Local Policing After the Terror,” Yale Law Journal 1111 (2002): 2137–2194.

This dynamic is very clear in many narratives of the frontier. See, for example, S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

These negotiations played out differently in every nation.

On the politics of Indians and the American government, see among many others, Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); David E. Wilkins and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, American Indian Politics and the American Political System (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010).

This was the logic governing much of the state-sponsored violence on the frontier. See, for example, Scott W. Berg, 38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier's End (New York: Vintage, 2012).

Chester A. Arthur, “First Annual Message,” December 6, 1881, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29522.

See Gregory F. Michno, The Encyclopedia of Indian Wars: Western Battles and Skirmishes 1850–1890 (Missoula, MT: Mountain Press, 2003).

“Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11.”

Ibid.

Barack Obama, “Obama's Speech on Drone Policy,” The New York Times, May 23, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/us/politics/transcript-of-obamas-speech-on-drone-policy.html?_r=0.

Ibid.

For further discussion of the mobility of enemies, see Stephen J. Heidt, “The Mobile Savage: Presidential Peace Rhetoric and the Perpetuation of Enemies” (PhD Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2014), 225–277.

Barack Obama, “Obama's Speech on Drone Policy.”

Ibid.

For more on amorphous borders in war, see Heidt, “The Mobile Savage”; and Joshua Reeves and Matthew S. May, “The Peace Rhetoric of a War President: Barack Obama and the Just War Legacy,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs (2013): 639.

Andrew Johnson, “Fourth Annual Message,” December 9, 1868, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29509.

See Robert L. Ivie, “Images of Savagery in American Justifications for War,” Communication Monographs 47 (1980), 279–291; and Robert L. Ivie, “Savagery in Democracy's Empire,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2005): 55–65.

George Washington, “First Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union,” January 8, 1790, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29431.

James Madison, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1813, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25806.

Abraham Lincoln, “Second Annual Message,” December 1, 1862, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29503.

See, for example, Ulysses S. Grant, “Sixth Annual Message,” December 7, 1874, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29515.

This is a complicated phenomenon, of course, as Indians were depicted both as lacking civilization and thus savage and as being above civilization and thus “noble.” In both halves of the “noble savage” depiction though, their inevitable doom is implicit. See, among many others, Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979); S. Elizabeth Bird, ed., Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the American Indian in Popular Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996); Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

George W. Bush, “President Bush's Speech on Iraq,” The Washington Post, March 13, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031300813.html.

George W. Bush, “President Bush's Speech on Iraq.”

This too is complicated, as American patriots in the Revolutionary War adapted just such tactics (learned from the Indians) in defense of their freedom.

A similar type of war rhetoric was used during the Gulf War, when George H. W. Bush relied on the claim that U.S. Patriot missiles were high tech and unerringly accurate and, thus, that the United States could control the war despite Iraqi Scud attacks. See Gordon R. Mitchell, Strategic Deception: Rhetoric, Science, and Politics in Missile Defense Advocacy (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2000).

George W. Bush, “Commencement Address at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado,” May 28, 2008, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=77430.

Ibid.

See International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan” (2012), http://www.livingunderdrones.org/report/; Glenn Greenwald, “New Stanford/NYU Study Documents the Civilian Terror from Obama's Drones,” The Guardian, September 25, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/25/study-obama-drone-deaths.

Obama said, for instance, “And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.” See Obama, “Obama's Speech on Drone Policy.”.

John Brennan, “The Ethics and Efficacy of the President's Counterterrorism Strategy,” The Wilson Center, April 30 2012, http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/the-efficacy-and-ethics-us-counterterrorism-strategy.

Ibid.

George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 29, 2002, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29644.

Ibid.

John Brennan, “The Ethics and Efficacy.”

Bush, “State of the Union,” January 28, 2003.

Bush, “Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11.”

Obama, “Obama's Speech on Drone Policy.”

For more on hierarchical relationships, see Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 187.

For extensive work on the democratization of the savage enemy, see Robert L. Ivie, “Images of Savagery”; Ivie, “Rhetorical Deliberation”; Ivie, “Savagery in Democracy's Empire”; Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and America's War on Terror. See also Bostdorff, The Presidency.

Stuckey, Defining Americans, 37.

Ulysses S. Grant, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1869, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25820.

John Quincy Adams, “Fourth Annual Message,” December 2, 1828, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29470.

A similar argument to this was made on behalf of slavery. Just as American Indians were seen as children, slaves were argued to be child-like. See Stuckey, Defining Americans, 89; See also, Anne Norton, A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

Rutherford B. Hayes, “First Annual Message,” December 3, 1877, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29518.

Bush, “Address to the Nation on the Terrorist Attacks.”

Bush, ” Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11.”

For an explanation of how this rhetoric echoed that of Puritan rhetoric of “covenant renewal,” see Denise M. Bostdorff, “George W. Bush's Post-September 11 Rhetoric of Covenant Renewal: Upholding the Faith of the Greatest Generation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 293–319.

For more on presidents’ use of “just war” and “just peace,” see Joshua Reeves and Matthew S. May, “The Peace Rhetoric of a War President.”

George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” February 2, 2005, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=58746.

Bush, “State of the Union,” January 31, 2006.

Bush, “State of the Union,” January 29, 2002.

George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 23, 2007, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=24446. In the same address, Bush likewise says, “The great question of our day is whether America will help men and women in the Middle East to build free societies and share in the rights of all humanity. And I say, for the sake of our own security, we must.”

Bush, “State of the Union,” February 2, 2005.

Ibid.

Ibid.

George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 20, 2004, in The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29646.

Barack Obama, “State of the Union: Obama Speech Transcript,” Washington Post, January 24, 2012, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-01-24/politics/35440939_1_fair-share-hard-work-world-war-ii/8.

See David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).

See Engels, Enemyship, 213.

For more on globalization and race, see Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas, ed., Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Reproduction of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

Deborah A. Thomas and M. Kamari Clarke, “Globalization and Race: Structures of Inequality, New Sovereignties, and Citizenship in a Neoliberal Era,” The Annual Review of Anthropology (2013): 308.

Ibid., 313.

See John L. Jackson, Jr., “Gentrification, Globalization, and Georaciality,” in Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Reproduction of Blackness, ed. Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 193. Jackson notes that though the War on Terror gives insight into local experiences of race as well as a global understanding of race, there is no “coherent organizing principle for planetary inequality mappable along a selfsame epidermal ladder from light to dark bodies” (193).

Consider, for instance, the ways in which the Japanese enemy was treated at home and abroad in comparison to the German enemy during and after World War II.

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 17.

See David Sirota, “Let's Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber is a White American,” Salon April 16, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/04/16/lets_hope_the_boston_marathon_bomber_is_a_white_american/; on whiteness, see Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Note also, that there is a distinction between consequences of government policy as the disciplining of nonwhite bodies in U.S. war-making and the motivation of individual actors.