Ward, Susan Mechele (Author)
By 1920, America had suffered through the worst outbreak of poliomyelitis that the nation had ever seen. In the summer of 1921, polio left its mark on the Roosevelt family as its patriarch Franklin Delano Roosevelt contracted the disease at the age of 39. FDR was determined to overcome the disease and prove not only to himself, but to the country as a whole, that he could return to political life as an able-bodied individual. During the early days of his paralysis, FDR, along with Eleanor Roosevelt and Louis Howe, devised a plan for deceiving the media and the public at large regarding the extent of his disability. This deception not only took a physical form but a rhetorical one as well. Through the use of language, FDR constructed a linguistic ``cure'' for polio that was based on the symbolic construction that able-bodied was the preference. This dissertation explores FDR's rhetoric about polio using a text in context approach that relies upon the theoretical framework of David Procter's concept of the dynamic spectacle. A dynamic spectacle is one of many arguments that flow from a given interpretation of an event, but in the end it is the one that becomes the most influential in building community. The work herein relies upon primary resources to draw important conclusions about how FDR's dynamic spectacle of normalcy influenced not only the nation's response to polio but her response to post-polio syndrome.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/01 (2005): 168. UMI pub. no. 3159818.
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