CONSTITUTING THE IDEAL AMERICAN: JESSE OWENS AND THE RHETORIC OF ATHLETIC ACHIEVEMENT
Open Access
- Author:
- Sierlecki, Bonnie J
- Graduate Program:
- Communication Arts and Sciences
- Degree:
- Master of Arts
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- September 18, 2008
- Committee Members:
- Jeremy Engels, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Jeremy Engels, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- presidential rhetoric
Jesse Owens
sport
American Dream rhetoric
American ideals
nationalism
autobiography
Jesse Owens Museum - Abstract:
- This thesis argues that Jesse Owens, Olympic track star and hero of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, has been used as a symbolic figure to rhetorically constitute American ideals through his sporting achievements, and that such a constitution is beneficial in helping various rhetors to accomplish other rhetorical tasks. Beginning with Gerald Ford, who awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Owens, the presidency has consistently and repeatedly upheld Owens as an example of the ideal American in order to reinforce nationalism and to provide citizens with a model for how they ought to live. Through his autobiographies, Owens negotiates the tension between his status as an ideal American and the racial discrimination he experienced by maintaining that he accomplished his athletic feats and overcame hardships through strength of character and by accepting personal responsibility for his success rather than blaming his misfortunes on social conditions. The Jesse Owens Memorial Park and Museum rhetorically induces a nationalistic argument that Owens’s athletic achievements in the 1936 Olympics served as a triumph over the Nazi ideology and as an example of a citizen attaining the American Dream, while ignoring ongoing racial tensions in the United States throughout Owens’s lifetime. Owens and his athletic achievements function as a particularly useful symbol because they allow speakers to accomplish a variety of significant rhetorical tasks: to reinforce American nationalism, to help citizens cope with the disparity between promised American ideals and reality, to re-imagine historical attitudes toward race, and to bolster the myth of the American Dream.