The preservation and use of public resources: Transforming the immoral into the merely factual

Abstract

This paper examines the rhetorical process by which an ensemble of calculative practices and techniques including accounting came to be adopted, developed and justified in the State of Wisconsin at the turn of the century under the Progressive leadership of Governor Robert M. La Follette. Toward this end, the authors use primary and secondary archival materials to explicate three rhetorical strategies—Shakespearean, formalist, and expertise—the governor employed. They find that the process of institutionalizing these calculative techniques was and is profoundly political and reflective of the relative power, both oven and covert, of organized interest groups. The paper concludes with implications derived from the analysis.