George W. Bush as the “Man in the Arena”: Baseball, Public Memory, and the Rhetorical Redemption of a President

Abstract

Presidential libraries and museums are important sites for understanding the rhetorical construction of presidential legacies in the United States. The newest of these institutions is the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Texas. The museum assists in the rhetorical redemption of a historically maligned presidency, anchoring President Bush’s legacy in the virtues of masculine, authoritative leadership. This is aided in particular by a noteworthy focus on baseball as a mythic expression of American exceptionalism, most dramatically featured in a 2015 temporary exhibit called Baseball: America’s Presidents, America’s Pastime. Far from being simply a colorful metaphor for national identity, baseball celebrates Bush’s moral authority and links him to the legacy of previous presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt. In short, the exhibit makes clear that one cannot understand the Bush presidency without baseball.

Baseball Made ‘Whole’: Rhetorical Hierarchy and Post-racial Discourse in Major League Baseball’s Inclusion of the Negro Leagues

“…The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, MO, the city where the Negro Leagues were officially established in 1920, continues to struggle financially despite donations by MLB (Bryant, 2020). Since baseball parks and stadiums also serve as important sites of public memory (Butterworth, 2019), the economic disparities that hindered Negro League teams also threaten the preservation of the stadiums in which they played. League Park in Cleveland, OH is one such example, where decades of disrepair following the integration of baseball in the 1940s and 1950s have rendered preservation efforts of the facility a referendum on preservation of Negro League histories (Hill, 2020) 5 .…”

“…In the United States baseball has been played professionally since 1869, with the modern iteration of the game generally agreed to have begun with the "live ball" era in 1920, the same year the Negro Leagues were founded. Throughout its history, baseball has been used to promote democratic values as well as ideologies inherent to US national identity, religious expression, economic opportunity, and self-reliance (Butterworth, 2010(Butterworth, , 2019Carroll, 2006;Everbach, 2005;Von Burg & Johnson, 2009). Writers covering the exploits of players and teams in the press became an important part of newspaper coverage, serving as the primary documentation of professional baseball for millions of readers.…”