Douglas MacArthur as Frontier Hero: Converting Frontiers in MacArthur's Farewell to Congress

Abstract This analysis focuses on Douglas MacArthur's Farewell Speech in terms of MacArthur's rhetorical positioning as a frontier hero. By reading the speech through the lens of the Frontier Myth, a better understanding of the conflict represented in the speech can be gained. I argue that the frontier in the speech is rhetorically converted from material spaces into an ideological frontier, where MacArthur's position as frontier hero undermines the Cold War policy of containment. Notes Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1921). http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/turner/ (accessed August 19, 2010). Douglas MacArthur, "Farewell Address to Congress," http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/douglasmacarthurfarewelladdress.htm (accessed August 19, 2010). The full text of this speech is taken from the American Rhetoric Web site's top 100 speeches. Richard Rovere and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., General MacArthur and President Truman: The Struggle for Control of American Foreign Policy (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1992), x. Ibid., 248–49. Ibid., xiii. Ibid., xiii–xv. It is worth noting that Schlesinger writes in hindsight that Truman's actions in deploying troops to Korea without Congressional approval was a poor one, and the precedent set by this decision has been a dangerous one in regard to president's "ignoring" Congress when entering into military conflicts with other states. William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1978), 661–662. One example of the hero worship MacArthur enjoyed was Representative Dewey Short, following MacArthur's address, exclaiming, "We heard God speak here today, God in the flesh, the voice of God!" Manchester writes that much of the viewing and listening public felt much the same way following the address. Manchester also details the large amounts of MacArthur memorabilia such as corncob pipes, pins, and other mementos that were sold with great success both in New York and Washington, DC, during the parades that were held for MacArthur in both cities. MacArthur memorabilia became an overnight cottage industry consumed by an adoring public. Frederick Haberman, "General MacArthur's Speech: A Symposium of Critical Comment," Quarterly Journal of Speech 37, no. 3 (1951), 321–331. Representative Dewey Short responded to the speech by saying, "We heard God speak today." Examples of praise can be found in Rovere and Schlesinger's book cited in Note 3, as well as in the Haberman moderated forum in The Quarterly Journal of Speech, cited in Note 8. Rovere and Schlesinger, General MacArthur, 12. Richard B. Frank, MacArthur: A Biography (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 30. According to the data collected for a PBS documentary on MacArthur in the time following his dismissal, his approval rating was higher than President Truman's. Of the total 84,097 telegrams and letters that were received by the White House immediately following the dismissal 46,389 condemned the dismissal. http://www.pbs.org/cgi-registry/poll/poll.pl (accessed August 20, 2010). John W. Spanier, The Truman-MacArthur Controversy (New York: Belknap Press, 1959), 211. Rovere and Schlesinger, General MacArthur, 102. Manchester, American Caesar, 10. For examples, see Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1980); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the American Frontier in 20th Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992); Robin W. Winks, The Myth of the American Frontier: Its Relevance to America, Canada, and Australia (Leicester, England: Leciester University Press, 1971); Howard Roberts Lamar, The Trader on the American Frontier: Myth's Victim (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1971). Stephen Arron, "What's Next, What's West," OAH Magazine of History, November 2005: 22–25; here, 23. Ibid, 23. Ronald Carpenter, "The Rhetorical Impact of the Frontier Thesis," Quarterly Journal of Speech 63 (1977): 117–129. Mary Stuckey and John M. Murphy, "By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North America," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25, no. 4 (2011): 73–98. Turner, The Frontier. Leroy Dorsey, We are all Americans, Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 144. Leroy Dorsey, "The Myth of War and Peace in Presidential Discourse: John F. Kennedy's 'New Frontier' Myth and the Peace Corps," The Southern Communication Journal 62, no. 1 (1996): 42–55. Lynne M. Sallot, "The Man on a White Horse: The Presidency, Persuasion and Myth," Florida Communication Journal 18, no. 1 (1990): 1–8. Dorsey, We are all Americans, 145. See Drinnon, Facing West and Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation. Leigh H. Edwards, "The Endless End of Frontier Mythology: PBS's Frontier House 2002," Film & History 37, no. 1 (2007): 29–34; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600–1900 (Middletown, CT: Weslyean University Press, 1973); Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation. … Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation,13; Drinnon, Facing West, xv–xviii. Ronald Carpenter, "America's Tragic Metaphor: Our Twentieth Century Combatants as Frontiersmen," Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 no. 1 (1990): 1–22. Carpenter, "America's Tragic Metaphor"; Dorsey, "The Myth of War." Carpenter, "America's Tragic Metaphor." MacArthur, "Farewell Address to Congress," (accessed August 22, 2010). Janice Hocker Rushing, "Mythic Evolution of 'The New Frontier' in Mass Mediated Rhetoric," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3, no. 3 (1986): 265–296. Ronald H. Carpenter, "Revisiting Janice Rushing about 'The Western Myth' (Now More Important than Ever)." Southern Communication Journal 71, no. 2 (2006): 179–182; here, 181. Mary E. Stuckey, "The Donner Party and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 2 (2011): 299–260. Rushing, "Mythic Evolution," 265 ; Janice Hocker Rushing, "Evolution of 'The New Frontier' in Alien and Aliens: Patriarchal Co-Optation of the Feminine Archetype," Quarterly Journal of Speech 75, no. 1 (1989): 1–24; Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing, "Integrating Ideology And Archetype In Rhetorical Criticism, Part II: A Case Study Of Jaws," Quarterly Journal of Speech 79, no. 1 (1993): 61–81; Janice Hocker Rushing, "The Rhetoric of the American Western Myth," Communication Monographs 50, no. 1 (1983): 14–33. Carpenter, "Revisiting," 180. Dorsey, We are all Americans, 145. Russell Buhite, Douglas MacArthur: Statecraft and Stagecraft in America's East Asian Policy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 20; Rovere and Schlesinger, General MacArthur, 60; Mark R. Grandstaff, "No Substitute for Victory: Lessons in Strategy and Leadership from General Douglas MacArthur," Parameters: US Army War College 37, no. 3 (2007): 128–130. Buhite, Douglas MacArthur, 6. MacArthur's infatuation with his father's service is well documented in his biographies but is probably explicated most clearly in Geoffrey Perrett, Old Soldiers Never Die (New York: Random House, 1996). MacArthur's father had been charged with defending an outpost in the Southwest from Apache raids led by Geronimo. MacArthur's fond memories of this time would be incorporated into his ideas about the role of the military in paving the way for civilization. Manchester, American Caesar, 3–10. Janice Hocker Rushing, "Frontierism and the Materialization of the Psyche: Frontier Rhetoric of Innerspace." Southern Communication Journal 56, no. 4 (1991): 243–256. This staging effect is discussed at length in Buhite's Douglas MacArthur: Statecraft and Stagecraft in America's East Asia Policy. Richard Rovere and Arthur Schlesinger also give a thorough treatment of MacArthur's projection of fantasy into reality in the first chapter of The MacArthur Controversy and Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965). MacArthur's public staging of his own glory may have been vain but was well received to the extent that he had been considered as a Republican candidate for President in 1944 and 1948. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 8. Evjue in Haberman, "General MacArthur's Speech." A search of Truman's public papers dating from 1950–1952 turns up 20 papers with the word "frontier," where the usage is relevant to the invocation of the frontier myth or labels Korea or another part of Southeast Asia with the term "frontier." These documents can be retrieved from http://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php (accessed August 22, 2011). All speeches and communication regarding Truman's use of the frontier were retrieved from this site. Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1–31. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 4–5. Rovere and Schlesinger, General MacArthur, 239. Ibid., 102. Buhite, Douglas MacArthur, 137. Rovere and Schlesinger, General MacArthur, 249. Ibid., 165. Manchester, American Caesar, 629. Ibid., 629. Buhite, Douglas MacArthur, 144. Rushing, "Frontierism," 244. Spanier, The Truman-MacArthur Controversy, 197–207. MacArthur, "Farewell Address to Congress.". Ibid. Rovere and Schlesinger, The MacArthur Controversy, 225–227. Stuckey, "The Donner Party," 233. Buhite, Douglas MacArthur, 114. MacArthur, "Farewell Address to Congress." Rovere and Schlesinger, General MacArthur, 188. MacArthur, "Farewell Address to Congress." Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Rushing, "Frontierism," 246. MacArthur, "Farewell Address to Congress." Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. James Darsey, "Joe McCarthy's Fantastic Moment," Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 65–86. In the speech, MacArthur directly references Taiwan (Formosa) as a strategic concern, though the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Truman Administration had long since dispensed with idea of colluding with Chang Kai Shek, as means of fending off Chinese Communism on the mainland. The frontier for MacArthur expands, even as the Truman administration seeks to close it off through limited engagements and surfacing of communism. MacArthur's willingness to engage in total war is well described in Buhite, Douglas MacArthur: Statecraft and Stagecraft in America's East Asia Policy, but some of these claims can be countered by more moderate accounts of MacArthur's positions in Perrett, Old Soldier's Never Die, and Schlesinger and Rovere, The MacArthur Controversy and Foreign Policy. Buhite, Douglas MacArthur, 136–140. Ibid., 135–158. Carpenter, "Revisiting," 180. Rushing, "The Rhetoric," 16–17. Dennis D. Wainstock, Truman, MacArthur, and the Korean War (New York: Enigma, 1999), 113. MacArthur, "Farewell Address to Congress." Buhite, Douglas MacArthur, 20. MacArthur claimed to have a different and almost exclusive understanding of the "Asian mind" as well as the region itself. MacArthur constructed Asia and the South Pacific as his own territory. This possessive approach to the territory leads him into direct conflict with his superiors. Buhite, Douglas MacArthur, xii. MacArthur, "Farewell Address to Congress." Ibid. Ibid. Stuckey and Murphy, "By Any Other Name," 74. Stuckey, "The Donner Party," 233. MacArthur, "Farewell Address to Congress." Rushing, "Frontierism," 246. Ibid., 246. Rushing, "Mythic Evolution," 272. Rushing, "Frontierism," 247. Turner, The Frontier. MacArthur, "Farewell Address to Congress." Ibid. Ibid. Stuckey, "The Donner Party," 238–242, 248–250. MacArthur, "Farewell Address to Congress." Ibid. Haberman, "General MacArthur's Speech," 328. For a discussion of the possible applications of the frontier myth in relation to the First and Second Gulf War, see Ronald H. Carpenter, "Revisiting Janice Rushing About 'The Western Myth' (More Important Now Than Ever Before)," Southern Communication Journal 71, no. 2 (2006): 179–182. Rovere and Schlesinger, General MacArthur, xi. Carpenter, "The Rhetorical Impact," 180–181. Bacevich, American Empire. Ibid., 23–31; William Appleman Williams, "The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy." Pacific Historical Review 21, no. 4 (November 1955): 379–395. Rovere and Schlesinger, General MacArthur, 226. Buhite, Douglas MacArthur, 141; Wainstock, Truman, MacArthur, 119. Stanley Weintraub, MacArthur's War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero (New York: Free Press, 2000), 337; also see Buhite, Douglas MacArthur, 145. Buhite, Douglas MacArthur, 1. Ibid., 144. Robert Scott, "Cold War and Rhetoric," in Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology, ed. Martin J. Medhurst, Robert L. Ivie, Philip Wander, and Robert L. Scott (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 11. Weintraub, MacArthur's War, 333. Philip Wander in Martin J. Medhurst, Robert L. Ivie, Philip Wander, and Robert L. Scott, Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 132. Buhite, Douglas MacArthur, 150–151. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSamuel P. Perry Samuel P. Perry, Baylor Interdisciplinary Core, Baylor University.

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