The Materiality of Leadership: Fort Knox’s General George Patton Museum of Leadership as a Living Field Manual

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a rhetorical analysis of both textual and material leadership narratives at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Contributing to research on military communication, leadership studies, and narrative criticism, we argue that the General George Patton Museum on Leadership (GPML) is what we call a living field manual that materially performs the evolutive leadership definitions in U.S. Army Field Manuals from 1948 to the present. Using rhetorical fieldwork methodologies, we show that the Patton Museum appropriates the symbolic iconicity of General George Patton as a timeless rhetorical resource for teaching the Army’s principles of leadership to cadets, cadre, and publics. Leadership is not transmissional, but embodied and alive. While Patton himself may have displayed a traits-oriented style of leadership that cannot be replicated, the U.S. Army has nevertheless shaped memories of his life and career to meet the Army’s changing leadership needs in the present.

KEYWORDS:

• General George Patton
• Fort Knox
• leadership
• military studies
• narratives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Readers will notice gaps between all of the definitions of leadership (e.g., 1965–1973 and 2015 and 2019). During these intermediate periods no field manuals on leadership were published and the US Army used previous field manuals on leadership in classrooms. We emphasize the end dates of these periods (1965 and 2015) because these are the last dates the Army published leadership field manuals that applied the respective definitions of leadership (e.g., 1965 as an activity and 2015 as a process).