In 1984, President Ronald Reagan campaigned for reelection by appealing to a mythic vision of America as “a shining city on a hill.”¹ Democratic National Convention keynote speaker Mario Cuomo responded by evoking another powerful American myth.

The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail. “The strong”—“The strong,” they tell us, “will inherit the land.” We Democrats believe in something else. We Democrats believe that we can make it all the...

To begin a scholarly conversation about the “frontier of science” in American public address, a historical study of the metaphor is a logical starting point. As the rhetorical critic James Jasinski reminds us, “the words employed by any author are always already part of a performative tradition in which the author is situated and from which the author draws,” and a “metaphoric structure” commonly used in a particular culture is one example of a performative tradition that rhetorical critics would do well to examine.¹ The frontier of science metaphor is this sort of performative tradition, an inventional resource appearing in...

At the beginning of the twentieth century in America, when the western frontier had disappeared because the citizenry had sufficiently spread out to fill the empty places on the nation’s maps, Americans came to believe that it was a pioneering spirit that most distinguished their national character. As the preceding chapter documented, the “frontier of science” was introduced by Frederick Jackson Turner and others as a promising new metaphor to meet the American citizen’s need for an unlimited space in which to employ that characteristic spirit. As this chapter demonstrates, at the beginning of the twenty-first century American scientists continue...

One scientist whose use of the “frontier of science” metaphor has resulted in some unintended consequences for his own work is biologist Edward O. Wilson. For example, his 1998 national best seller,Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, drew on the metaphor while arguing for the construction of a bridge between the natural sciences and the social sciences and humanities. A review of his book by the historian of science D. Graham Burnett captured the skeptical response of many scholars of the social sciences and humanities to that call. “Here is a kind of bridge one might eye with suspicion, for...

Edward O. Wilson’s appeal to the frontier spirit of American readers backfired on him when Brazilian readers encountered his arguments; it also was counterproductive with American readers insofar as his celebration of frontier attitudes contradicted his central argument that we should preserve biodiversity by halting our advance across frontier lands. In a similar way, Francis Collins drew on the frontier myth to excite American readers about the accomplishments of genomic scientists, but in doing so, he created an appeal that backfired with some Native American critics of genomic research; it also resulted in a conflict between his central message about...

Like 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...

Patricia Nelson Limerick pointed out that “the relation between the frontier and the American mind is not a simple one.”¹ This book demonstrates the truth of that statement when it comes to the “frontier of science” metaphor. The metaphor guides American thinking about science so that the prospect of halting research in a particular area becomes unimaginable. It encourages themes of competitiveness and economic exploitation even when used by rhetors sensitive to the danger of such themes; it then gets interpreted against the interests of those rhetors by diverse audiences. By studying these metaphoric entailments in the public discourse of...