A public rallied around the Sodders

Warning: Sad story ahead. One of my history-buff roommates told me about this strange occurrence.

To summarize, on the night before Christmas of 1945, a family’s home went up in flames. The Sodder parents managed to escape with four of their children, though five other children in the house never made it out. At first the parents thought those children must have died in the fire, but an investigation revealed no trace of the bodies. The family began to piece together any and all recollections of odd happenings prior to the tragedy; they concluded the children must still be alive and commenced on a nation-wide search for them. To date, no information has been found concerning the missing Sodder children. (Read here for the full account). 

One might say the Sodder’s story went public the moment they hung up a flyer, but this is inaccurate. According to Warner, it is not single texts that create publics but rather “the concatenation of texts through time” (62). I’m not sure when the newspapers really started to pick up the story, but the earliest “intertextual” newspaper clipping I found came from a 1968 article. Notice that this article references other news articles, the Sodder’s letters to the FBI, tips and leads from perhaps well-intentioned but misinformed people, and the billboard depicting the missing children (photo). Not only is the article itself intertextual/intergeneric, but it implies a pre-existing public discourse. I do want to acknowledge, however, that some of the referenced material in the article, such as the letters, were not public (unless they were published or printed in a different news article).

The knowability of the audience seems to also differentiate between “private” and “public” texts. If the scope and specific persons comprising the audience is known, then that discourse cannot be public, for “publics are different from persons, that the address of public rhetoric is never going to be the same as address to actual persons” (Warner 58). We might say that publics are made of an unbounded, half real and half imaginary-potential, audience. Habermas states, “[P]ublic opinion can by definition only come into existence when a reasoning public is presupposed” (50). Even he hints at the idea of the imaginary audience with the word, “presupposed.”

Fraser breaks down Habermas’s idea of “matters of general” into separate categories, one of which is “common concern.” She says that “what will count as a matter of common concern will be decided precisely through discursive contestation” (71). If you take another look at this Smithsonian article, scroll down to the comments section. You will find one of three recurring trends within those comments: 1) the desire to know what really happened 2) comments and advice for how to proceed with the (cold) case 3) personal recollections and stories regarding that event and/or subsequent search. I looked up multiple different websites and discussion forums about the Sodder case, and those trends remain pretty consistent throughout—and so I would call those trends “common concerns.” And though I don’t have earlier resources, I would guess these common concerns were present as well when the case first went public.