The History of Rhetoric & Public Affairs: A Salute to Fred Bohm

With the publication of volume 11:1, Rhetoric & Public Affairs begins its second decade of service. Much has happened in the last ten years, including the deaths of two of our founding board members—Wayne C. Booth and Edwin Black—and the retirement of the man whose vision and foresight made R&PA possible in the first place, Dr. Fredric C. Bohm. This seemed as good a time as any to reflect on the first decade of the journal and to celebrate the career of Fred Bohm, a man who did more perhaps than any other single person—in his role as director of Michigan State University Press from 1990 to 2007—to support the rhetorical renaissance of the last part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Fred retired as director of MSU Press in July 2007. During the preceding 18 years, he and I worked on a number of projects that have, I think it is fair to say, changed the face of rhetorical studies. This is my tribute to Fred.

The story of Rhetoric & Public Affairs really begins in 1988, for it was in that year that I left the University of California, Davis, to take a position as a tenured associate professor at Texas A&M University. One condition of my hiring at TAMU was that I take over the direction of a national conference on communication and technology. A grant had already been secured, the conference planning had already begun, and several people had already been invited to participate before I arrived in College Station. This was not an auspicious beginning. Even so, with the help of my colleagues Alberto Gonzalez and Tarla Rai Peterson, we pulled a conference together for the spring of 1989. It featured such notables as James Carey, Bruce Gronbeck, Tom Benson, Tom Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing, Stan Deetz, Robert Hopper, and several other top-flight scholars. Part of my marching orders (and at Texas A&M they were marching orders) was to secure publication of the conference results, preferably in the form of a university press book. Upon the advice of my colleague Bob Ivie, I called Dr. Fredric Bohm. Fred was, at that time, the director at Washington State University Press.

Fred and I hit it off immediately and the first result of that relationship was Communication and the Culture of Technology (Washington State University Press, 1990). In the same year that the book appeared, Fred left Washington State to become director of the press at Michigan State University. Fred and I continued to stay in contact and I soon began to discuss with him the possibilities for starting a new quarterly journal. My motives were simple: I was becoming ever more dissatisfied with the Quarterly Journal of Speech and what seemed to me to be the emerging marginalization of public address and rhetorical criticism in the field at large. In 1991, I drafted a full-blown proposal for a new journal and sent it to Fred. At the same time that I was floating the idea of a journal to Michigan State, Bob Ivie and I were trying to interest Texas A&M University Press in a book series on rhetoric and public affairs—to no avail. This was in 1991, less than a year before President George H. W. Bush decided to place his presidential library at Texas A&M. Timing, as they say, is everything.

Having been turned down by the folks then in charge at TAMU Press, I turned back to Fred Bohm and Michigan State. Instead of pushing for the journal, I rewrote the proposal to feature a book series in rhetoric and public affairs. The journal idea was just a little too raw, with too many questions not yet answered and too few people convinced that there was a need for another journal in rhetoric. A book series, on the other hand, was a more manageable enterprise. I sent the revised proposal to Fred in the fall of 1992. He approved the new series early in 1993. By this time...