Perspectives on argumentation, education, and composition from the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, 1895--1916

From 1895 to 1916, American educators, diplomats, law scholars, and politicians gathered at the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration to debate strategies for influencing public opinion and shaping administrative policy in favor of international arbitration. The participants negotiated and published twenty-two yearly consensus documents appealing to heads of state to negotiate international treaties and to strengthen democratic institutions at The Hague. Under the leadership of educators, the participants also issued seven annual calls for undergraduate essays on the topic of international arbitration. This dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the deliberations, consensus statements, and student essays generated by this conference. It reads these texts as a case study of American political deliberation and citizen activism. These deliberations worked, first, to define best-practices in international democracy, and second, to promote internationalist values among students as citizens of the world. Focusing on the construction of arbitration as a term and as a practice, this dissertation explicates the operations of power, truth, and genre in the conference's efforts to make their conflicts productive. Through this close reading, this study draws a link between models of democratic action and genres of argumentation and suggests that a knowledge of these different models be integrated into writing instruction at the college level.