How ought we to best conceive the relationship between language and politics? In Western thought, the question dates at least to the age of Plato and the Sophists; and it remains both vexing and endlessly provocative. Rival traditions may in turn lament or celebrate that relationship, but all recognize that the two terms cannot reasonably be pulled apart. The ancient and abiding field of rhetoric has occupied itself with just this question; students of the subject accordingly ask hard questions about how language shapes politics and, in turn, how politics shapes language. Sarah Kornfield’s Invoking the Fathers lands squarely within this disciplinary effort. It is at once a study of rhetoric—how language may be deployed to political ends—and an act of persuasion in its own right. Kornfield thus examines how the “Founding Fathers” “are used and abused; how counterfactuals, nostalgia, American exceptionalism and selective amnesia about the nation’s founding ground and reinforce Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy—and how some congresspeople speak back and resist these interpretations” (8).
We are then to understand the “Founding Fathers” as dangerous. Mobilized as a trope, the phrase captures a host of value-laden assumptions and implications about gender, race, and class, and deploys it to pernicious ends. If this is rather a lot to lay in the hands of a figure of speech … well, it is; but that’s what rhetoricians do, and arguably for good reasons. Although she does not much engage the scholarship, Kornfield operates from within a longstanding insistence, running from Aristotle to Kenneth Burke to Paul Ricouer and beyond, that metaphor matters. How so? Because it functions as a kind of linguistic sleight-of-hand; well-executed, it can perform an extraordinary amount of rhetorical work with maximum efficiency. “Lamb of God,” “this sceptered isle,” “I have a dream”: these work because they at once compress and then explode into new and compelling meanings. Without metaphors, whence poetry? But Kornfield is not interested in poetry; and to the extent that she is interested in metaphors, it is in the kind of metaphor that functions not in its novelty but in its hardened familiarity. In this sense, she asks us to consider a trope made literal; always available not because it awakens but because it in effect deadens our critical faculties.
The author disposes her account into four chapters following an extensive introduction. Along the way, she alludes to a number of formidable concepts, including sovereignty, memory, identity, resistance. Something of the spirit of this approach is evident in the following: “Ultimately, Invoking the Fathers demonstrates that venerating the ‘Founding Fathers’ enacts a rhetoric of sovereignty, biasing US democracy toward whiteness, patriarchy, and the ‘family’ values typically espoused in Christian nationalism.” To this end, Kornfield delves into the Congress Record in search of confirmation. There is of course plenty to be found, and the author organized it into four persistent themes: that is, how the “Founding Fathers” trope is invoked to address issues of rights and liberties; for the purposes of praise and blame; in debates over checks and balances; and in appeals to bi-partisanship. In the process, she discovers that the metaphor “permeates congressional discourse. It pops up everywhere. It is the same song, sung by even the most bitter rivals. It is a go-resource for senators and representatives, conservatives and progressives alike. It is a metaphor that packs a white-supremacist, patriarchal punch. It is a metaphor that create or imagines ‘others’ and then constrains them” (193). A particularly illuminating case study is rendered in a look at a speech by Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) in 2015. “Our Documents of Freedom,” as it was called, provides “a tour de force of clusters, themes, and rhetoric that animate the metaphor of fatherhood within contemporary congressional discourse.” These are shown to include such familiar tendencies as the reductive binary between real and fake Americans; American exceptionalism; and relentless appeals to us–them logics of belonging. As I understand the argument, such language helps constitute the operative definition of what it means to be American, who is in charge, who counts, who, after all, is sovereign. As a rhetorical resource, the phrase “Founding Fathers” “operates across the four domains,” Kornfield concludes, “turning each of them toward whiteness, patriarchy, and Christian nationalism while delineating the American family and the nature of US democracy” (199).
Who could argue? The image of the founding fathers has been cast against the mirror since … the founding itself, and had remained an available resource ever since. There it is in Jefferson’s first inaugural address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, Wilson’s War message, in virtually all of Reagan’s public speeches, and, obviously enough, in the contemporary right. But, and I mean to stress this fact, there it is in Frederick Douglass’s July 5, 1852 address, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Solitude of Self,” in King’s “Dream,” and Obama’s “A More Perfect Union.” Kornfield is not unaware of all this, but the project cries out for more attention to these strains, to the power of the metaphor to animate better versions and greater visions of ourselves. Douglass et al. were American exceptionalists to the bone; they stand out because they were able to harness the origination myth to ends largely unseen by the first generation. This much does nothing to undermine Kornfield’s case; it rather asks that it be deepened, made more sensitive to the nuances and complications of context.
Speaking of context: why is that appeals to the founding fathers find their audience more receptive in certain moments, not so much in others? The question deserves to be asked for several reasons, not least in view of demagoguery and the current president. Perhaps the first order of inquiry is best devoted to the social conditions that render a people susceptible to such messaging in the first place. We get little of that here, and hope for more looking ahead. Finally, a few, perhaps minor notes. Jefferson did not become president (2) in 1800. And this reader, at least, would have appreciated more severe editing to correct for recurrent usage (“as such,” “indeed,” etc.) and other stylistic infelicities. In any case, we have in Invoking the Fathers a suggestive account of an important phenomenon. Metaphors matter.
