On the Frontier of Science: An American Rhetoric of Exploration and Exploitation

Chapter Five. Reframing the Frontier of Science: George W. Bush's Stem Cell Rhetoric

111 chapter five Reframing the Frontier of Science: George W. Bush’s Stem Cell Rhetoric x L ike Francis Collins, President George W. Bush tried to pull away from the rhetorical force of the “frontier of science” metaphor when addressing an American audience about new and promising scientific research. But unlike Collins, Bush chose not to offer an explicit critique of the troubling implications of the metaphor. Instead, he chose other rhetorical strategies to subtly call into question the intrepid boundary-crossing that the myth promoted. Bush’s attempt to pull away from the influence of this terministic screen was similar to Collins’s in another respect though; it was not entirely successful. In this chapter, I continue the project set out at the beginning of this book, to answer questions about the entailments of the frontier of science metaphor, its effects on the rhetors who use it, and efforts to counteract its influence. But this chapter is different from the others 112 Chapter Five in one significant respect. In the preceding chapters, I focused for the most part on how the frontier of science metaphor is used in the public address of scientists. This chapter turns to an investigation of its use in the popular speeches of politicians. A study of presidential speeches from the twentieth century shows that the “frontier spirit” was a topos used by almost every modern American president to praise what they saw as an exceptional national character. Americans are consistently represented as having a driving force to move forward with courage as they strive to discover or make a better future for themselves, and the frontier of science metaphor is a trope that is often used by presidents to evoke this topos. In fact, language conflating promising new scientific research with an American pioneering ethos has become so ubiquitous that it is hard for presidents to avoid it when talking about science. On August 9, 2001, George W. Bush demonstrated this point when he identified “human embryo stem cell research” as “the new frontier” in a widely viewed, nationally televised speech.1 But this was the very same speech in which he announced a policy that would effectively halt American scientists who wanted to pursue such research, keeping them from “crossing a fundamental moral line.”2 How could a president use a metaphor that associates scientists with a praiseworthy American pioneering spirit in the same speech where he offers a justification for shutting off a promising new area of scientific research? To answer that question, in this chapter I undertake a close reading of Bush’s speech and its reception history. Rhetorical analysis discloses how Bush reframed the frontier from a place of heroic American discovery into a place that should be avoided; Bush also created a productive ambiguity of meaning around a manufactured controversy to temporarily persuade an American audience to support his policy to close this new frontier of scientific research. The persuasive effect was fleeting though, as the identification of Americans with a heroic frontier spirit soon reasserted itself to counter Bush’s rhetorical reframing. To get a better sense for the performative tradition that Bush was attempting to counter, before analyzing the way he attempted to counter it, I begin this chapter with a closer look at the frontier of science metaphor in presidential speeches. Rhetoricians have produced a great deal of research on presidential uses of the frontier myth, detailing the ways in which it has defined an exceptional American identity in administration arguments about such subjects as immigration, war, and space flight.3 What is lacking in the existing scholarly literature is a sustained Reframing the Frontier of Science 113 look at how presidents connect the myth to science. My analysis of presidential speeches shows that narratives attaching the frontier myth to the scientific profession are not always told in precisely the same way; different rhetors emphasize different aspects of the myth to support different political ends. But the broad frontier story persists. Almost all American presidents have used the frontier of science metaphor to create a positive association between the nation’s scientists and its frontier heroes. Prior Presidential Uses of the Frontier Metaphor for Science Long before a figurative meaning that connected the term “frontier” to new scientific knowledge began appearing in American dictionaries in the 1940s and 1950s, the frontier of science metaphor had found its way into the speeches of American presidents...