Imagining presidents: Fictions of American leadership in popular literature, film, drama, and electronic media

This dissertation offers a history of America's "presidential fictions"---works in various media in which American presidents and the presidency figure importantly as characters, motifs or literary devices. It explores the ways in which such fictions have evolved over time, and suggests how they might contribute to our understanding of the American presidency as a site of struggle not just for power, but for meaning. Important points of reference include recent scholarship on cultural imagining or "memory"; cultural histories of recurring character types and their uses (mothers, murderers, killers, hillbillies, Indians, Jesus, Elvis Presley); and Benedict Anderson's theory of nations as "imagined communities" constructed in large part through media representations and storytelling. If nations depend on acts of shared memory and belief, so too must a nation's leaders. Analyzing fictional U.S. presidencies, and real presidencies re-conceived in fictional ways, can therefore also help us better understand America's real politics, public life and evolving national identities.; The particular ways of representing presidents familiar to us today became possible as a result of developments in politics, media, and conventions of story- and image-making since the 18th century. Chapters 1 tracks these developments through the American Founding; chapter 2 considers narratives and public performances of comic doubling in the Jacksonian period; and chapter 3 traces the deepening of presidents' psychology in stories associated with Lincoln and on through the Progressive era. Chapters 4-6 survey the years from 1930 to the present, considering ways in which the representation of political reality has evolved in distinct phases and, in part, under the influence of emerging media: radio, film, television, digital media and the internet. Chapter 6 also suggests where this evolution might lead in the future, and chapter 7 concludes the study with an analysis of media representations of the president in crisis on "9/11." As was true at the beginning of the American Republic, stories about presidents do not simply report or reflect political reality; they create expectations and conditions to which the real presidency must somehow answer.