The Materiality of Leadership: Fort Knox’s General George Patton Museum of Leadership as a Living Field Manual

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper offers a rhetorical analysis of both textual and material leadership narratives at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Contributing to research on military communication, leadership studies, and narrative criticism, we argue that the General George Patton Museum on Leadership (GPML) is what we call a living field manual that materially performs the evolutive leadership definitions in U.S. Army Field Manuals from 1948 to the present. Using rhetorical fieldwork methodologies, we show that the Patton Museum appropriates the symbolic iconicity of General George Patton as a timeless rhetorical resource for teaching the Army’s principles of leadership to cadets, cadre, and publics. Leadership is not transmissional, but embodied and alive. While Patton himself may have displayed a traits-oriented style of leadership that cannot be replicated, the U.S. Army has nevertheless shaped memories of his life and career to meet the Army’s changing leadership needs in the present.