Darryl V. Caterine, Le Moyne College
Abstract
The Presidential Medal of Freedom originated under the administration
of John F. Kennedy to honour peacetime service by United States civilians. Emerging
at the dawn of the television age, this new addition to the symbolism of
American civil religion reflects the increased interdependence between
political and popular culture beginning in the mid-twentieth century. Even as
Anglo-Protestant culture has continued to wane in political influence, the
"pop pioneers" of Kennedy's award have effectively demarcated the boundaries of the American
nation under successive presidencies. Kennedy's Medal exemplifies the
transformation of American civil religion from the written and spoken word to
the crafted and consumed image.
[1] In 1963, John Fitzgerald
Kennedy introduced a new cast of cultural exemplars to the tradition of
American civil religion.1 By Executive Order 11085, the
Presidential Medal of Freedom was established to honour extraordinary peacetime
service to the United States. The idea of creating an executive award analogous
to the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour reflected Kennedy's broader vision of
re-animating service to the country through the charisma of his presidency.2 Emerging at the dawn of the television age, the Medal
could in theory go to citizens of any background. While the first recipients
did include lesser-known patriots, the Medal was bestowed primarily to
high-profile celebrities and artists. These included Marian Anderson, Pablo
Casals, and Rudolph Serkin, who had already graced the First Lady's tastefully
restored White House. Thus the prestige of the presidency and the glamour of
popular culture were aligned to create a new spectacle of American nationalism,
setting a precedent that would shape the selection of Medalists by presidents
in the future.3
[2] Today the proverbial
pantheon of Medalists features such American cultural legacies as Muhammad Ali,
Rachel Carson, Walt Disney, and—more recently—Julia Child and
Mister (Fred) Rogers. Its nearly four hundred awardees reflect the full
sociological diversity of United States culture, and include a small number of
foreign-born "honorary Americans"—men like Vaclav Havel of the
former Czechoslovakia or women like Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar who embody for
various presidents the multivalent ideal of freedom. For equally meritorious,
though typically less well-known, exemplars of freedom, a separate executive honour
is set aside—the Presidential Citizens Medal established by President
Richard Nixon in 1969.
[3] Serious scholarship on
American civil religion was inaugurated decades ago by the great American
sociologist Robert Bellah, who outlined the discourse wielded by American
presidents as a cosmogonic myth of the nation’s political community.4 His seminal essay began with an exegesis of Kennedy's
inaugural speech as an invocation of a nationalist discourse
ultimately derived from seventeenth-century Puritan mythology.5 Less than a decade later, Bellah wondered aloud in The
Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial whether this
discourse was still suited for a United States beset with the social problems
of the late-twentieth century.6 Much of the subsequent scholarship on civil religion has
similarly been guided by an implicit narration of the decline and fall of
Anglo-Protestant nationalism inherited from the Puritans. The virulent
"culture wars" debates of the 1990s, for example, posited deep
divisions in "moral values" among the citizenry—allegedly
divided between "orthodox" defenders of an Anglo-Protestant status
quo and "progressive" rationalists—which included their
attitudes towards the continuing viability of civil religious mythology. By the
time sociologists had compiled enough data to disprove the hypothesis, the
events of September 11 spawned a resurgence of American civil religion in
passionate speeches delivered by President George W. Bush. While its initially
enthusiastic reception has since given way to heated debates, Puritan-derived
civil religion largely sets the parameters of political discourse in the current
era nonetheless.7
[4] In this essay I would like
to consider the Presidential Medal of Freedom as exemplifying a
twentieth-century expression of American civil religion no less important than
the Puritan-derived rhetoric studied by scholars since Bellah. A legacy from
the twilight years of the liberal consensus, the Medal may be of limited use in
today's realm of realpolitik to invoke sentiments of patriotic
self-sacrifice. For historians of civil religion, however, it stands as an
early political spectacle formalizing the alliance between the White House and
other hubs of charismatic power in popular culture. While some public
intellectuals have lamented the transformation of the presidency into the
"celebrity-in-chief" as a de-evolution of American politics,
political anthropologists would invite us instead to consider the strategic
advantages of dispersing symbols of the nation throughout society rather than
keeping them consolidated around an imperial hub in Washington. The Medal
itself has faded into relative obscurity, but the history of its deployment is
a striking instance in the mass media age of what Edward Shils referred to as
"attenuated and dispersed charisma"—or the "extension of
the circle of charisma" beyond America's political centre.8 Such diffusion helps to safeguard and stabilize civil
religious symbolism amidst political oscillations in the nation's capital.
[5] In the following discussion
I will first outline the ways in which the Presidential Medal of Freedom leaves
scholars a nuanced record of how successive administrations since Kennedy have
perpetuated their various visions of the ideal republic through extending presidential
charisma to select recipients. Presidents have used the Medal to evoke the
imagined boundaries of the nation in and through its alleged
"pioneers," much in the same way that British royalty has harnessed
the prestige of its cultural and military leaders through the ceremonies of
knighthood. I will then problematize the Presidential Medal of Freedom as a
quintessentially twentieth-century transformation of civil religion from the
written and spoken word to the crafted and consumed image. The photographs and
stylized citations of the Medal's awardees obfuscate political analysis of
their complex lives and their equally complicated relationship to the United
States of America. At the same time, they reveal to the scholarly observer how
civil religion, at least in its late-twentieth-century variant, legitimizes
partisan agendas through carefully crafted images of the president's solidarity
with "the people."
[6] Through the sound bites of
civil religion afforded by the Medal, various presidents are at liberty to
construct idealized visions of the republic that metamorphose with the times
and agendas of successive presidencies. These are crafted and disseminated with
a speed and agility that create an illusion of continuity with the past. The
Presidential Medal of Freedom continues as a political heirloom of what
Jacqueline Kennedy posthumously memorialized as Camelot, a presidency famous
for the self-conscious crafting of the executive image for mass-media
consumption. In my conclusion I will return to the imagination of civil
religion inaugurated by Bellah's scholarship. If, as Bellah claimed long ago,
the rhetoric of Kennedy's inaugural speech has indeed become an outmoded relic
of American political history, then the strategies for manufacturing national
consensus reflected in the Medal have remained constant features of American
civil religion. The glorification of charismatic individualism and the
celebration of America's national innocence have continued to defy the cultural
contradictions of the twentieth century, weathering the demise of
Anglo-Protestant mythology.
Pioneering
Uses of the Medal
[7] The most significant
contribution of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the evocation of civil
religion comes from its expansion of national mythology to include a diverse
repertoire of cultural icons. Prior to Kennedy, the evocation of civil religion
centered largely around the people, places, and relics of the country's
founding, as well as memorials and holidays devoted to its military leaders and
martyrs throughout successive generations. With the invention of the Medal, the
proverbial tool kit of civil religion was greatly expanded and subsequently
mobilized to evoke social unity and historical continuity where many would
argue there is none. As historian of religion Bruce Lincoln has demonstrated,
the invocation of sacred ancestors effectively calls into being the social
worlds of traditional societies. In the case of the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, the example of living heroes is analogously summoned to demarcate the
boundaries of the American nation.9
[8] The original Medalists were
the proverbial pioneers of Kennedy's New Frontier, reflecting the ongoing
subjection of the wilderness—both natural and political—in and
through the civilizing forces of rationality, democratic polity, and the
Protestant work ethic. Presidential Medalists since that time have continued to
embody the "cutting edge" of the nation, extending the symbolic
boundaries of America to the moon (as in the case of the Apollo 13 crew,
awarded Medals by Nixon) into cyberspace (reflected in the Medal's extension by
George W. Bush to Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, computer scientists
instrumental in the invention of the Internet) and throughout democratizing
corners of the globe (in the periodic honouring of the Medal to such
non-American citizens as Poland's Lech Walesa by George Bush, Sr. or German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl by Bill Clinton).
[9] There would seem to be two
related but distinctive uses of the Medal of Freedom. First, there is the
bestowal of the award on political “insiders”—statespersons, staff
members, and administrators—whose careers come to the attention of
American citizens during times of short-term political crisis. The nomination
of former CIA director George Tenet—together with General Tommy Franks
and L. Paul Bremmer, III, director of reconstruction in Iraq—is an
example of this kind of deployment. Here the bequeathing of the Medal attempts
to enshrine citizens as so many martyrs to a national cause, in a political
strategy that can and has backfired on the White House. The granting of the
Medal to Tenet, for example, provoked a scathing editorial by the Washington
Post in a rare excursus on the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which
was likened in this context to the state ceremonies of the former Soviet Union.10 George W. Bush was hardly the
first president to wield the Medal in this way; Johnson had extended the award
to Robert McNamara, the highly controversial Secretary of Defense throughout
much of the Vietnam War, in a similarly failed attempt to distance Washington
insiders from the unsavoury stuff of politics.
[10] In its second, more pro-active
use, the Presidential Medal of Freedom has been harnessed to construct
idealized notions of the American republic. The various medalists leave
scholars of American history and civil religion a nuanced record of how the
meaning of freedom has been reconceptualized in the passage of the so-called
liberal consensus to the Reagan Revolution with its attendant resurgence of
American conservatism. As Eric Foner and David Hackett Fischer have documented,
the meaning of freedom in America has vacillated historically between what
should properly be called "liberty"—an individual's or
corporation's immunity from state control—and freedom as a citizen's
inclusion in the polis, regardless of background.11 The establishment of FDR's liberal state
ensconced freedom-as-inclusion as the term's hegemonic meaning for much of the
twentieth century, while presidents since Reagan have evoked freedom in the
other sense, as liberty. Accordingly, the general profile of Presidential
Medalists in the areas of economics, social theory, and religion undergoes a
basic change beginning with Reagan: capitalists replace labour leaders,
libertarians usurp various philosophers of the common good, and the gospel of
personal salvation eclipses the prophetic theology of Judaism and
Christianity.
[11] It should come as no
surprise that Ronald Reagan, with his understanding of the political importance
of wielding mass media, was particularly drawn to Kennedy’s ritual, leaving to
posterity the most articulate exegeses of the symbol’s meaning. In his third
Medal presentation ceremony, Reagan hearkened back to the image of
"ordinary heroes" of American society evoked in his first inaugural
address.12 Elsewhere he spoke of freedom as a gift
from God, conflating Adam's original disobedience with the birthright of every
American: "It's a word that describes the God-given condition of the
human soul. For what we know is this: God created us free, just as he created
us man and woman. Indeed, since Adam ate of the Tree of Knowledge, there's
nothing that defines us human beings so much as the fact that we're free."13
[12] Kennedy established the
Medal to underscore the sacrificial dimension of liberal citizenship, as I will
discuss further below, extending the cultural archetype of warriorship into the
peacetime context. Reagan, in contrast, used the Medal to illustrate a new
ideal of citizenship as heroic individualism unfettered by the state. Barry
Goldwater, Reagan's longtime political ally and a pioneer in the resuscitation
of American conservatism, received a Medal, as did several of Reagan's
associates in the entertainment industry—including Frank Sinatra, Jimmy
Stewart, and Helen Hayes. These and other Medalists were once described by
Reagan as the "happy rebels" of American society, who exercised their
right to say "no" to the limiting dictates of convention.14
[13] It was also during the
Reagan administration that a new category of Medalist appeared—that of
the entrepreneur—with the awarding of a Medal to Charles “Tex” Thornton,
founder of Litton Industries. Here the overarching symbol of citizenship was no
longer sacrifice, but the near-godlike ability to create ex nihilo a material bounty that then circulated
through the social body, guided by the Invisible Hand of deregulated capitalism.
George W. Bush, in particular, has used the Medal of Freedom to frequently
valorize the entrepreneur: among his selections include Gordon Moore,
founder of the Intel Corporation; R. David Thomas, founder of Wendy's; and
Estee Lauder, founder of the cosmetics company. In and through the
sanctification of entrepreneurship, Republican presidents have been able to
assert in a new way the triumph of American individualism in the late modern
age.
[14] The Presidential Medal of
Freedom has been consistently used to construct idealized memories of the
American nation. Beginning with Johnson's administration—precisely as the
liberal consensus began to erode—the Medal was increasingly deployed to
shore up the "Americanness" of liberalism, meaning here its allegedly
organic connections to an imagined past and its abiding commitment to the
ideals of pluralism. Johnson's election of the poet Carl Sandburg is of
particular interest in this context. Sandburg was popularly dubbed the
"poet of the people" for his Whitmanesque free-verse style and his
thematic focus on the working class and American "folk.” He was
particularly important to liberal-era presidents for his well-known conflation,
as America's de
facto authority on
Abraham Lincoln, of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's nation with Lincoln's Union. By
evoking Sandburg as an exemplar of American freedom in the context that he did,
Johnson was asserting the continuity of his Great Society with a sacred myth of
origins in American cultural mythology.
[15] Throughout the era of the
Reagan Revolution as well, the wide range of potential candidates proved
especially effective in symbolically reconstituting a post-liberal America. Where
Johnson had given a Presidential Medal of Freedom to a biographer of Lincoln,
Reagan chose to give a medal to Dumas Malone, prolific biographer and
interpreter of Thomas Jefferson, thus orienting his vision of the nation with a
sacred time of American beginnings that bypassed the Civil War—not to
mention the New Deal—altogether. Reagan's successful re-imagination of American
identity necessitated a skillful excision of liberals from the national fold. Reagan
enshrined Sidney Hook and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who like he had once embraced
socialist-tinged liberal ideologies—but repented of their ways to become
neoconservatives and militant anticommunists. It would fall to both Bush
administrations to more fully excise former liberals from the nation altogether—just
as liberals had once excommunicated laissez
faire capitalists and
social libertarians from the political fold.
[16] Through the Presidential
Medal of Freedom, Democrats and Republicans alike have crafted genealogies that
simplify and distort political history since the ’sixties. The fact that the
liberal state foundered in large part on issues of race did not deter
Johnson from selecting a number of African American medalists—Ralph
Ellison, novelist; Leontyne Price, operatic vocalist; Philip Randolph, trade
unionist; Whitney M. Young, Jr., director of the National Urban League; and
Lena Edwards, physician and humanitarian. Neither did it deter Jimmy Carter or
Bill Clinton from selecting medalists celebrating racial unity as a lasting
legacy of the liberal nation, particularly as it became embodied in the New
South. For their part, Republican presidents since Reagan have taken pains to
include non-white Medalists among their candidates, who include such economic
conservatives as Leon Sullivan or figures like Jackie Robinson, the first
African American professional baseball player, and television celebrity Bill
Cosby. In the meantime, Clinton’s New Democratic ideal internalized much of the
anti-federal rhetoric of the Reagan Revolution, even as it claimed continuity
with an older liberalism. Clinton's ideal republic consisted not only of ethnic
subcultures and social activists, but also wealthy philanthropists like David
Rockefeller, Eugene Lang, or Brooke Astor who could underwrite the post-Reagan
liberal nation.
[17] For all of its malleability
and seeming diversity, however, the Presidential Medal of Freedom reflects a
strikingly stable bourgeois mentalité. The heroes of the disenfranchised are
welcomed for leading the margins of American society to its classically liberal
centre, while tragic prophets of the American Dream—the likes of African
American author James Baldwin or American Indian Movement icon Leonard Peltier—
are conspicuously absent. As the scholarship of Richard Slotkin has argued, the
symbol of the American pioneer has weathered the demise of Anglo-Protestant
cultural hegemony with remarkable resilience.15 Reappearing as Presidential
Medalists of Freedom, pioneers mark the shifting boundaries of the nation, and
embody the enduring values of a capitalist America. Long after the collapse of
Camelot, they continue to evoke the medieval Freedom of the City ceremonies,
which distinguished mercantilists and property owners from vassals of feudal
lords.
Politics
and Popular Culture
[18] The invention and granting
of medals by the presidency dates back to the Cold War Era. In his 1955 State
of the Union Address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower suggested that
"awards of merit be established whereby we can honour our fellow civilians
who make great contributions to the advancement of our civilization and this
country."16 On February 22, 1963, Kennedy
reassigned Harry Truman's Medal of Freedom for use in a ceremony celebrating
peacetime achievements, to be held on or near the Fourth of July, and at other
times the president felt so moved. The pretext for the Presidential Medal of
Freedom was clearly Kennedy's call for self-sacrifice to the nation, as
adumbrated in the inaugural address. As the president explained, "In a
period when the national government must call upon an increasing portion of the
talents and energies of its citizens, it is clearly appropriate to provide ways
to recognize and reward the work of persons, within and without the Government,
who contribute significantly to the quality of American life."17 While the Peace Corps was created
in 1961 to expedite service overseas, the Medal was founded to honour
unsolicited acts of service at home and abroad. As if to underscore this
parallelism, Kennedy included Genevieve Caulfield—hailed as a
"one-woman Peace Corps" for establishing a school for the blind in
Thailand—as one of the first medalists.
[19] A total of thirty-one
artists, athletes, business leaders, humanitarians, scientists, and statesmen
were selected for the first ceremony, but Kennedy was assassinated before it
was held. Johnson presided over the first awards banquet in the White House
State Dining Room, extending a Medal posthumously to Kennedy, and also to Pope
John XXIII, architect of Vatican II, in absentia. (Jacqueline Kennedy,
who was not present at the banquet, had been chosen by Johnson as well, but
declined.) Kennedy had appropriated the Distinguished Civilian Service
Awards Board—a committee established by Eisenhower to select recipients
for his own civil servants' medal—to receive and screen nominees from
private citizens and organizations, as well as government agencies and groups.
Starting with Johnson, however, presidents bypassed the bureaucratized selection
process, selecting Medalist winners in quiet consultation with staff. The
Awards Board, overwhelmed with solicitations after the first ceremony, was
allowed to lapse after its appointed five-year term, and was never
re-established. Further, the Fourth of July has never figured significantly in
the history of the Medal. With the exception of one ceremony held by Johnson
near the holiday, the Medal has been awarded spontaneously, sometimes in the
heat of short-term political crises.
[20] Truman's Medal of Freedom
had been established in 1945 to award civilian contributions to war efforts.
This was a new category of service that emerged in the wake of modern
"total warfare," as civilians at home were called upon to maintain a
massive war machine during the 1940s. By extending the ideal of military
self-sacrifice as a model for peacetime citizenship during the Cold War era,
Kennedy attempted to resuscitate the symbol of the "citizen-soldier"
as a guiding metaphor for participation in the republic. Such rhetoric was a
common feature of the liberal era. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had exhorted the
country in his first inaugural address to face the Depression "as we would
treat the emergency of war." Kennedy's inaugural spoke of "the
common enemies of man-- tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself," while
Johnson would of course declare a War on Poverty as part of his vision for the
Great Society.
[21] A formal award thus
appeared extolling the freedoms of everyday life in America precisely as the
reach of the military-industrial complex extended further into the lives of its
citizens. Here it was especially important to distinguish the pervasive
influence of the American state during times of peace from that of the Soviet
Union. The rapid growth and bureaucratization of the twentieth-century nation—including
the expansion of the presidency's political influence and cultural prestige in
the wake of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration—posed a unique
threat to an American mythology based on the sanctity of the individual. Throughout
the 1950s especially, watchdogs of liberty inside and outside the federal
government sounded myriad alarms. Arthur Miller's 1949 The Death of a
Salesman was soon followed by other works exploring the spiritual wasteland
of the country's new managerial class, including David Riesman's The Lonely
Crowd (1950) and Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956). To these influential literary works could be added the popular
scholarly writings of Erich Fromm, who dissected the psychology of fascism, or
those of the social philosopher Walter Lippman, whose reflections analyzed the
insidious powers of market-driven propaganda.
[22] Through the Presidential
Medal of Freedom, Kennedy symbolically reasserted the interdependence between
the state and charismatic American individuals. This was a theme that had
already been prefigured in his own contribution to the contemporaneous
discussions of individualism, Profiles in Courage, published in 1955,
exploring the place of moral character in American politics. As Kennedy
clarified in his conclusion, "This has been a book about courage and
politics. Politics furnished the situations, courage provided the theme.
Courage, the universal virtue, is comprehended by us all—but these portraits
of courage do not dispel the mysteries of politics."18 The Presidential Medal of Freedom, in
turn, reasserted the mythology of Cold War America as a nation of free
citizens, who willingly sacrificed themselves in service to an increasingly
bureaucratized nation. Here the notion of charisma was extended to the very
institutions of American democracy themselves. In the meantime, the Soviet
Union continued to induct its own citizens in the Order of the Badge of Honour,
founded in 1935 to celebrate extraordinary contributions to the sciences, art,
and culture.
[23] But if the glorification of
democracy's "citizen soldiers" and charismatic individuals explains
the original raison d'etre of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, it
fails as an adequate description of how the civic award has been put to use
over the last half century. It did not take long for Johnson to harness its
full potential as a symbol bridging the realms of political and popular culture.
Starting with the second award ceremony in September, 1964, the list of
Medalists began to read like a Who's Who in twentieth-century American
society, as the likes of Aaron Copland, Walt Disney, Helen Keller, Reinhold
Niebuhr, Leontyne Price, Carl Sandburg, and John Steinbeck were invited to
Washington to receive the honour. Over the years a number of Nobel Prize
winners have joined their ranks, including physicist Edward Teller, geneticist
Joshua Lederberg, and economists Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith. As
the Medal continued to encompass achievement and celebrity, political influence
and cultural cachet, its relationship to fixed notions of patriotism and
"freedom" became increasingly ambiguous. At the same time, its value
as a public relations event for the White House became increasingly obvious.
[24] As the so-called liberal
consensus began to unravel shortly after Kennedy's assassination, the patriotic
idealism of Camelot quickly became an anachronism of an era gone by. What
Johnson and subsequent presidents salvaged from the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, however, was not its association with the rhetoric of sacrifice, but
rather its power as a tool of mass communication to create consensual images of
the nation and benign spectacles of the presidency. The Medal was ultimately
subsumed by the White House Office of Communications, the institutionalized
public relations wing of the executive branch established by Richard Nixon in
1969. This new executive agency was established at the height of the Vietnam
War to offset mass-media-based critiques of presidential power. The goals of
the Office of Communications were far more ambitious than those of the extant
White House Press Office, founded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to provide
Washington-based news agencies with daily updates of the goings-on in the White
House. From its inception, the Office has sought to create stable and favourable
public images of the presidency itself. As John Maltese, in his extensive study
of the White House public-relations wing, has summarized, "the Press
Office is primarily reactive[;] the Office of Communications is primarily
pro-active."19
It is both the official wing of executive spin control and the present-day
institutional matrix of American civil religion. For the last several decades,
awards of the Presidential Medal of Freedom have become the stuff of press
releases disseminated by the Office, of particular interest to local media
outlets when a recipient comes from their readership and/or viewing audience.
[25] The Presidential Medal of Freedom signals an important transformation
in the meaning and mode of transmission of twentieth-century civil religion. It
is largely a product of the technological ability of a developed nation to
fabricate, reproduce, and disseminate images of itself. Daniel Boorstin, a
contemporary of the Kennedy administration, was exploring the political
implications of mass culture even as the Presidential Medal of Freedom was
being conceptualized. In his 1961 study, The
Image, or What Happened to the American Dream (beginning in 1962, subtitled anew as A
Guide to Pseudo-Events in America), Boorstin observed that the
proliferation of print, recordings, and images of American cultural and
political life had begun to blur the boundaries, in the minds of their
beholders, between spontaneous and manufactured events. He situated his
sociopolitical analysis of American society in the broader
technological framework of what he called the "graphic revolution":
Man's ability to make,
preserve, transmit, and disseminate precise images—images of print, of
men and landscapes and events, of the voices of men and mobs— ... grew
[after the Civil War] at a fantastic pace. The increased speed of printing was
itself revolutionary. Still more revolutionary were the new techniques for
making direct images of nature. Photography was destined soon to give printed
matter a secondary role. By a giant leap Americans crossed the gulf from the daguerreotype
to color television in less than a century. Dry-plate photography came in 1873;
Bell patented the telephone in 1876; the phonograph was invented in 1877; the
roll film appeared in 1884; Eastman's Kodak No. 1 was produced in 1888;
Edison's patent on the radio came in 1891; motion pictures came in and voice
was first transmitted around 1900; the first national political convention
widely broadcast by radio was that of 1928; television became commercially
important in 1941, and color television even more recently.20
If the function of media before
the Graphic Revolution had been to report the daily occurrence of public life
in and around the republic, it had since taken upon itself to orchestrate
events—including the creation of celebrities—that could then be
presented to consumers as "newsworthy."
[26] Boorstin saw the triumph of
the so-called "pseudo-event" in American politics in the masterful
wielding of media throughout the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt
created the news for media to report—in his use of art and photography
promoting political agendas, his transformation of the presidential press
conference into a spectacle of executive competence, and his radio-broadcasted
"fireside chats" consoling Americans through the Depression and
Second World War. Boorstin confined his reflections on the Kennedy
administration to a few paragraphs on the 1960 televised presidential debates,
which he likened to a quiz show. But the entirety of Kennedy's political career
conformed closely to Boorstin's analysis. Kennedy ran for the presidency as a
politician carefully groomed for the age of the image by his father Joseph—
an influential film producer and director during the silent era, and one-time
president of the Film Booking Offices of America, which merged with the
Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain to create RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Pictures.
The media-savvy father kept a close watch on both his son's "look"—
his wardrobe and hairstyle—and his political persona to ensure that each
would resonate with the cultural expectations of masculinity and leadership of
the times.21 Through his connections he orchestrated the
publication of John Hersey's article "Survival" in a 1946 edition of
the New Yorker magazine. Hersey's article detailing Jack's heroics as
lieutenant of a sunken PT boat off the Solomon Islands staged Kennedy's
entrance into politics, portraying the young Bostonian as a man of moral
character—a theme that would reappear self-consciously in Profiles in
Courage.
[27] In short, by the time
Kennedy assumed the role of the presidency in 1961, his own public image had
come to blur hard-and-fast distinctions between political and popular culture. The
Presidential Medal of Freedom merely exemplified this categorical ambiguity in
its staging of popular celebrities as exemplary patriots, and lesser-known
patriots as political celebrities. A celebrity, of course, is both a relative
and ephemeral term. Boorstin famously defined it as "a person well known
for his well-knownness."22 Kennedy's new civic rite threatened to
diminish the real achievements of particular Medalists—even as his own
enmeshment with celebrity has detracted from his accomplishments. Not only are
the lives and deeds of the Medalists reduced to a series of pithy citations,
but their association with the public relations agenda of various presidents
leads inevitably to questions of both political favoritism and the authenticity
of their cultural capital.23
Imagining
Civil Religion
[28] The study of American civil religion was inaugurated with the 1967
publication of Robert Bellah's "Civil Religion in America."
Here Bellah used the inaugural
address of John F. Kennedy as a starting point for his analysis—as
"an example and a clue" to the perennial Judeo-Christian- and
Christian-derived symbols shaping the nationalist mythology of the United
States. Kennedy's nation, as evoked in the speech, embodied the Revolutionary
ideal of America-as-the-New-Israel, a Promised Land in covenant with a God of
power and justice. Kennedy's nation, too, evoked Abraham Lincoln's mythic
vision of America as a community renewed through the mystical powers of
redemptive sacrifice. American civil religion, as epitomized in the inaugural
address of the thirty-fifth president, is rooted in the rhetoric of Anglo-Protestant
political discourse. It is the stuff of Revolutionary sermons, the Gettysburg
Address, and presidential speeches rallying citizens to war and other national
acts of collective import, such as Roosevelt's calls for the New Deal or
Reagan's cries to scale back the influence of federal government.
[29] Starting with his
publication of The Broken
Covenant in 1975, Bellah
speculated that Anglo-Protestant civil religion might have become an outmoded
discourse for the twentieth century. Working within Clifford Geertz's paradigm
of religion-as-a-cultural-system, he now analyzed American nationalist
mythology as a “model of” the United States as it had existed in the 1700s and
1800s—which could no longer serve as a “model for” American political
community in the 1900s. “We live at present in a … time of trial at least as
severe as those of the Revolution and the Civil War," he wrote:
It is a test of whether our
inherited institutions can be creatively adapted to meet the twentieth century
crisis of justice and order at home and in the world. It is a test of whether
republican liberty established in a remote agrarian backwater of the world in
the eighteenth century shall prove able or willing to confront successfully the
age of mass society and international revolution. It is a test of whether we
can control the very economic and technical forces, which are our greatest
achievement, before they destroy us.24
Bellah suspected that the nation looked forward to the birth of a new
mythology, one more in keeping with the cultural pluralism and unprecedented
economic, social, and ecological problems of the times.
[30] The study of American civil religion has burgeoned into an
academic subgenre since the publication of Bellah's earliest works. Many
studies within this field have continued to assume, firstly, that the civil
religion of the United States is primarily a matter of textual analysis, and
secondly that it has entered into a period of decline since the tumultuous era
of the 1960s. The genesis and history of the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
however, does not fit neatly into either one of these premises. Regarding the
rhetorical origins, Kennedy's new civic rite can
indeed be traced to his evocative political oratory—"ask not what
your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"—but
only in part. In analyzing the Presidential Medal of Freedom, it is important
to recall not only the legendary address, but also Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's
Oleg Cassini suit. As the new president called the nation to renewal and
self-sacrifice, Jackie’s fawn wool dress and matching, sable-collared
coat—complete with a Hallston pillbox hat—wordlessly announced to
the country the dawn of Camelot. Both dimensions of the Kennedy presidency—its
power and its flair, its content and its form—left a powerful impact on
the nation's cultural memory, and both must be considered when analyzing the
Presidential Medal of Freedom.
[31] In a media age, which
Umberto Eco once characterized as a kind of electronic Middle Ages, the fixed
image has come for many to overshadow discursive political analyses. Hence the
lasting usefulness to presidents of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is
decidedly a spectacle of national memory rather than a rational debate over
national values or policy. In his study The Media and Modernity, John B. Thompson has observed that
mass media is characterized by the "fixation of symbolic content in a
material substratum"—such as books, film, and photographs.25 While local, face-to-face communities
depended on rituals periodically to invoke the past, the iconic symbols of mass
culture are continuously circulated and displayed. Consistent with Thompson's
analysis, presidents after Kennedy did away with the ceremonialism of the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was enough periodically to transmit images of
presidents shaking hands and presenting medals to the various
"pioneers" of American society to convey the image of a presidency
and nation alive, well, and flourishing.
[32] Regarding the question of
civil religion's alleged "decline"—an issue that intersected
with much of the "culture wars" debate of the 1990s—the
blending of politics and mass culture throughout much of the twentieth century
invites different conclusions. Bellah's implicit use of a Geertzian model of
civil religion as a "model of" and "model for" American
society presupposes the need for a unified and coherent myth addressing new
social conditions before national unity can coalesce. From the hindsight of
forty years, however, the transformation of American civil religion in the
1960s was Hydra-like: the Anglo-Protestant nation was decapitated only to
spawn countless new heads. In the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the likes of
Duke Ellington and Aretha Franklin come with hundreds of other personages from
popular culture to join Betsy Ross and George Washington as part and parcel of
the civil religious tradition. The turn away from the written and spoken word
towards mass-media-based spin control by the White House should be read as a
metamorphosis rather than a decline in both the content and form of American
civil religion.
[33] The Presidential Medal of
Freedom perpetuates longstanding myths originally derived from an
Anglo-Protestant cultural matrix but now embodied in diverse cast of ethnic,
racial, and religious exemplars of "freedom." As I have
mentioned, one of these longstanding myths is the vision of America as a
Frontier. The other is a utopian or innocent view of the nation. The
presentation of these myths in the form of discrete images—each
accompanied by a stylized citation summarizing a Medalist's contribution to the
national cause—reflects a shift from what another contemporary of the
Kennedy era, Marshall McLuhan, once called "hot media" to
"cold."26 The so-called hot medium of the
written and spoken word through which civil religion was perpetuated for much
of the nation's history fixated the attention of the reader or listener on
specific ideas, even as it allowed for a critical detachment from the message
once it has been delivered. In contrast, the cold media of images offer vague
and impressionistic pictures even as they wash less noticed over the citizenry.
Paradoxically, by their very ambivalent nature they elicit a more total
engagement, as viewers—and scholars—are now obliged to fill in the
gaps of their indeterminate meanings.
[34] In 1985, for example, a
picture of Mother Teresa was captured as she stood between Ronald and Nancy
Reagan, about to receive a Medal, while the president memorialized her as
follows: "Most of us talk about kindness and compassion, but Mother
Teresa, the saint off the gutters, lives it. As a teenager, she went to India
to teach young girls. In time, Mother Teresa began to work among the poor and
dying of Calcutta. Her order of the Missionaries of Charity has spread
throughout the world, serving the poorest of the poor. Mother Teresa is a
heroine of our times."27 The icon admits to a myriad of
scholarly and popular interpretations. Was this the president cynically
deflecting attention away from the deleterious effects of Reaganomics for the
poor, or suggesting that organized religion take up the slack of social
services? Was the White House gesturing its support for conservative
Catholicism, or religion's endurance in the face of the formerly Communist
Albania, the birthplace of Mother Teresa? Did the heroine of the times
bless the neoconservative agenda of Ronald Reagan? Lacking any
historical context outside the award ceremony, the meeting of Mother Teresa
with the Reagans assumes a self-enclosed, hyperreal status largely impervious
to critical analysis.
[35] The cold form of the
Presidential Medal of Freedom sheds some light on the tenacity of
twentieth-century American civil religion in the face of daunting cultural
contradictions, including the massive expansion of the state in a culture
extolling the myth of individualism. Since the 1960s, the exposure of state
violence has also come increasingly to contradict a cultural mythology of
innocence. The dispersion of national symbolism into the realm of media culture
deflects attention away from the continued growth of state power and offsets
the potentially demagogic connotations of the "expert politician"
image that held sway from Roosevelt to Nixon: the presence and danger of
state power goes less noticed as presidents quote lines from their own movies,
play the saxophone on late night television, and extend awards to popular
cooking show hosts or modern dancers. The arguable banality of political
strategies exemplified in the Presidential Medal of Freedom thus turn out to be
more effective than the gravitas of traditional rhetoric in promoting
images of liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the era of American
superpower.
[36] From its inception, the
critical study of American civil religion has rested on a hermeneutics of
suspicion, the presupposition of a gap between the object of study and the
concerns of the scholar. For Bellah, this gap was originally the glaring
discrepancy between the prophetic ideals of the American nation and the injustices
exposed by both the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War protests of the
1960s. Through uncovering the biblically derived mandate of justice embedded in
the presidential rhetoric, Bellah's 1967 essay was implicitly ethical and
political; he wished to challenge American political power on its own terms. The
problematic arising from the study of a civic rite like the Presidential Medal
of Freedom relates to what Thompson refers to as "struggles for
visibility" in an era where the public sphere is largely created through
the dissemination of mass media:
Since the development of
print and especially the electronic media, struggles for recognition have
increasingly become constituted as struggles for visibility within the
non-localized space of mediated publicness. The struggle to make oneself heard
or seen (and to prevent others from doing so) is not a peripheral aspect of the
social and political upheavals of the modern world; on the contrary, it is
central to them. The development of social movements, such as the women's
movement and the civil rights movement, provide ample testimony to the fact
that the claims of hitherto subordinate or marginalized groups are advanced
through struggles for visibility in the media. The development of such movements
also attests to the fact that, by achieving some degree of visibility in the
media, the claims and concerns of particular individuals can gain some
recognition from others, and hence can serve as a rallying cry for individuals
who do not share the same special-temporal context.28
In evaluating the various
misuses of new communications technologies in a democracy, the most egregious
return once again to issues of social justice—but with an insidious twist.
Spectacles like the Medal seem to reveal a just society as a fait accompli— anticipating and neutralizing critiques of injustice before they can be
formulated.
[37] The Presidential Medal of
Freedom thus turns Roosevelt's pioneering use of mass media on its head. In
promoting his New Deal agenda, FDR deployed highly stylized images to document
social injustice throughout the United States in an effort to mobilize the
citizenry to enact reforms. The sound bites of civil religion manufactured by
the White House Office of Communications, which administers the Presidential
Medal of Freedom today, continually reassure the public that there is no cause
for alarm. The new technologies of manufacturing national consensus do not
depend on Anglo-Protestant rhetoric to evoke a republic "with liberty and
justice for all." They merely display images of it.
References
Albanese, Catherine L. America:
Religions and Religion. 3rd edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth
Publishing Company, 1999.
Bellah, Robert N. "Civil
Religion in America." Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences 96:1 (1967): 1-21.
______ The Broken
Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. New York: Seabury Press,
1975.
Boorstin, Daniel. The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream. New
York: Atheneum,
1961.
Cannon, Lou. President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. New
York: Simon and Schuster,
1991.
Fields, Wayne. Union of Words: A History of Presidential Eloquence. New York: The Free
Press, 1996.
Fischer, David Hackett. Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of
America's Founding Ideas. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Foner, Eric. The Story of American Freedom. New York and
London: W.W. Norton & Company,
1998.
Hughes, Richard T. Myths
America Lives By. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Kellner, Douglas. Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy: Terrorism,
War, and Election
Battles. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005.
Kennedy, John F. Profiles in Courage. New York: Harper &
Row, 1961.
Kertzer, David I. Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press,
1988.
Lincoln, Bruce. Discourse and the Construction of Society:
Comparative Studies of Myth,
Ritual, and Classification. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989.
Lubin, David M. Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images. Berkeley
and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.
Maltese, John Anthony. Spin Control: The White House Office of
Communications and the
Management of Presidential News. Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina
Press, 1992.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT
Press, 1994.
Schroeder, Alan. Celebrity-in-Chief:
How Show Business Took Over the White House. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 2004.
Shils, Edward. Center and
Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
______ "Charisma,
Order, and Status." American Sociological Review 30:2 (April
1965): 199-213.
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter
Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992.
Street, John. Politics and
Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997.
Thompson, John B. The
Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1995.
Tuveson, Ernest Lee. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial
Role. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Waterman, Richard W., RobertWright and Gilbert St. Clair. The
Image-Is-Everything Presidency. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.
Wetterau, Bruce. The Presidential Medal of Freedom: Winners and
Their Achievements. Washington,
D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1996.
Wolfe, Alan. One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans
Really Think About:God,
Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right,
the Left, and Each Other. New York: Viking, 1998.
Notes
1 In this essay I am using Catherine
Albanese's general definition of American civil religion as "a religious
system that has existed alongside the churches [in the United States] with a
theology …, an ethic …, and a set of rituals and other identifiable symbols … related
to the political state." Catherine L. Albanese, America:
Religions and Religion, 3rd edition (Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1999), 433.
2 A term first employed in sociological
analysis by Max Weber, "charisma" refers to the ascribed state of
certain individuals allegedly endowed with a more-than-human vitality, power,
or insight. Most notably in Weber's writings, these individuals are
"prophets"—founders of new religious and/or social movements
who challenge the inherited authority of received custom and convention. Edward
Shils' reading of Weber expands the class of charismatic individuals to include
all those persons thought to have made direct contact with the cosmic order
underlying their particular societies. "Scientific discovery, ethical
promulgation, artistic creativity, political and organizational authority … ,
and in fact all forms of genius, in the original sense of the word as
permeation by the 'spirit,' are as much instances of the category of
charismatic things as is religious prophecy." See Edward Shils,
"Charisma, Order, and Status," American Sociological Review 30,2 (1965): 199-213.
3 For a biographical encyclopedia of
Presidential Medalists from the Kennedy administration up until the middle of
Bill Clinton's first term, see Bruce Wetterau, The Presidential Medal of
Freedom: Winners and Their Achievements (Washington, DC:
Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1996). Various compilations of Medalists since
that time can be found on the internet. See
<http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0002285.html> accessed March 1, 2007.
4 See Robert N. Bellah, "Civil Religion
in America," Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences 96, 1 (1967): 1-21; and The Broken Covenant: American
Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).
5 For one classic study of Puritan-derived
civil religious mythology in the United States, see Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer
Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1968).
6 "We live at present in a third time
of trial at least as severe as those of the Revolution and the Civil War. It is
a test of whether our inherited institutions can be creatively adapted to meet
the 20th-century crisis of justice and order at home and in the
world. It is a test of whether republican liberty established in a remote
agrarian backwater of the world in the 18th century shall prove able
or willing to confront successfully the age of mass society and international
revolution." Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American
Civil Religion in a Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 1.
7 For one influential analysis of the
persistence of American civil religion in and through the era of an alleged
"culture war," see Chapter Four, "Mature Patriotism," in
Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really
Think About: God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration,
Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other (New York: Viking,
1998), 133-79. Wolfe's research, based on quantitative sociological analysis
conducted as the Middle Class Morality Project, revealed the continuance into
the 1990s of the American nationalist mythology discussed by Bellah that
avoided the extremes of both reactionary anti-Americanism once prevalent in
post-’sixties countercultures and also the chauvinistic patriotism of the Cold
War.
8 "The very effort of a charismatic
elite to stabilize its position and to impose a charismatic order on the
society or institution it controls entails deliberate dispersion. It entails
spreading the particular charismatic sensitivity to persons who did not share
it previously. This means a considerable extension of the circle of charisma: more
persons have to be charismatic; existing institutions have to have charisma
infused into them; new institutions have to be created." Edward
Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1975), 133.
9 See Chapter One, "Myth, Sentiment,
and the Construction of Social Forms" in Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and
the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and
Classification (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989),
15-26.
10 Richard Cohen, "The Presidential
Medal of Failure," washingtonpost.com, December 16, 2004, retrieved July
11, 2006.
11 See Eric Foner, The Story of American
Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998); and David Hackett Fischer, Liberty
and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
12 Ronald Reagan, "Remarks at the
Presentation Ceremony for the Presidential Medal of Freedom," March 26,
1984, americanpresidency.org, retrieved
May 23, 2006,
<http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=39687&st=medal&st1=freedom>
13 Ronald Reagan, "Remarks at a
Luncheon for Recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom," November
10, 1988, americanpresidency.org, retrieved
May 23, 2006, <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=35149&st=medal&st1=freedom>
14 Ronald Reagan, "Remarks at the
Presentation Ceremony for the Presidential Medal of Freedom," May 12,
1986, americanpresidency.org, retrieved May 23, 2006, <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=37238&st=medal&st1=freedom>
15 See Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter
Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New
York: Atheneum, 1992).
16 Dwight D. Eisenhower, "Annual
Message to the Congress on the State of the Union," January 6, 1955, americanpresidency.org, retrieved
October 30, 2006 <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=10416&st=&st1=>
17 John F. Kennedy, "Executive Order
11085: The Presidential Medal of Freedom," February 22, 1963, americanpresidency.org, retrieved
January 18,
2006,<http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=59024&st=medal&st1=freedom>
18 John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (Inaugural
Ed.; New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 237.
19 John Anthony Maltese, Spin
Control: The White House Office of Communications and the Management of
Presidential News (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1992), 5.
20 Daniel Boorstin, The Image, or What
Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1961), 13.
21 See David M. Lubin, Shooting
Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2003) .
22 Boorstin, The Image, 57.
23 With the increasing consolidation and
corporate ownership of mass media throughout the late twentieth century, the
trends discussed in this article have only intensified. For an exemplary
analysis of media-driven public policy since September 11, see Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy: Terrorism, War, and Election
Battles (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005).
24 Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 1.
25 John B. Thompson, The Media and
Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1995), 195.
26 Chapter Two, "Media Hot and
Cold," in Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions
of Man (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press, 1994), 22-32.
27 Wetterau, The Presidential Medal of
Freedom, 373.
28 Thompson, The Media and Modernity, 247-48.
