April 25-May 1, 2020: Update on Of Thee I Sing!

[In honor of Patriots’ Day, and inspired by my book-in-progress for the American Ways series on the history of American patriotisms, a series on that topic and examples of critical patriotism from across American history. Leading up to this special post on that next book project of mine!]

It's done (a draft of the manuscript, that is)!

What, you want to hear more? Okay, here are three more things about my next book, which I’m hoping will be out before 2020 is done:

1)      A Sequel, but Not the Same: Of Thee I Sing is in the same Rowman & Littlefield American Ways series as was my last book, We the People, and it would certainly be fair to describe it as a sequel, presenting a parallel lens through which to analyze debates over American identity (this time the spectrum between celebratory, mythologizing, active, and critical patriotisms, rather than exclusion and inclusion). But it’s of course not identical to that prior book, and one definite difference is in the structure: while We the People moved roughly chronologically, each chapter focused on a particular ethnic/cultural group; while the eight chapters of Of Thee I Sing focus directly on eight historical moments: the Revolution, the Early Republic, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the Depression/WWII, the 60s, and the 80s (with a conclusion on the age of Trump, natch). That meant I could explore a number of distinct histories and stories from each time period, which helped lead to the other two elements I’ll highlight here.

2)      Hidden Gems: One benefit of that time period approach was that for each chapter I could in my research/reading dig deep into that period for histories and stories that seemed to have something to do with my focal forms of patriotism, and in the process I uncovered many that were entirely unfamiliar to me and I have to believe are likewise relatively unknown to most Americans. Here’s one compelling example: under the World War I-era Espionage and Sedition Acts, a silent film about the Revolution entitled The Spirit of ’76 (1917) was seized by the government for portraying the English (now America’s wartime allies) too harshly, and the film’s producer, a Jewish American immigrant from Germany named Robert Goldstein, was sentenced to ten years in prison; at the sentencing Judge Benjamin Bledsoe told Goldstein, “Count yourself lucky that you didn’t commit treason in a country lacking America’s right to a trial by jury. You’d already be dead.” There’s a lot more such amazing, largely untold stories in the book!

3)      Rethinking the Familiar: The chapters’ time period focal points also, and I would say just as importantly, allowed me to focus on histories with which we are all generally familiar, and reexamine them through the lens of these debates over patriotism. That started with the very first chapter, on the Revolution, and with a great question asked of me by series editor John David Smith. He pushed me to think about the era’s Loyalists, which nicely lined up with my longtime interest in that community and sense of the Revolution as at its heart a civil war. To that end, I argue in my Revolution chapter for the value of seeing Loyalists as critical patriots—not quite to the United States of America, both because the nation didn’t exist yet and because they weren’t advocating for its creation; but to the American community of which they were just as much a part as the Revolutionaries. That’s one example of many such reframings in Of Thee I Sing, which I can’t wait to share with you all soon!

April Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other examples or forms of patriotism you’d highlight?

April 24, 2020: Models of Critical Patriotism: America is in the Heart

[In honor of Patriots’ Day, and inspired by my book-in-progress for the American Ways series on the history of American patriotisms, a series on that topic and brief examples of critical patriotism from across American history. Leading up to a special post on that next book project of mine!]

On an author and book that both introduce under-narrated histories and redefine American identity.

One of my bigger pet peeves with the dominant narratives of American history is the notion that multi-national and –ethnic immigration has been a relatively recent phenomenon, or at least that it has been most pronounced in the last few decades. It’s true that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the first immigration law that opened up rather than closed down immigration for various groups and nationalities, led directly to certain significant waves, especially those from war-torn Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. And it is also true that certain ethnic groups represented particularly sizeable percentages of the immigrants in the last decades of the 20^th century: Asian Americans, again, and also Hispanic and West Indian immigrants. None of those facts are insignificant, and our understanding of America in the 1970s and 80s (for example) needs to include them in a prominent place. But my issue is with the very different notion that America prior to 1965 didn’t include immigrants from these nations (an idea advanced in its most overt form, for example, by Pat Buchanan in an editorial after the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007, which he blamed on the shooter’s status as the son of South Korean immigrants).

Multicultural historian Ronald Takaki notes this belief in the introduction to his magisterial book A Different Mirror (1993), recounting a conversation when a cab-driver asks him how long he has been in the US, and he has to reply that his family has been here for over 100 years. While the most obvious and widespread problem with this belief is that it makes it much easier to define members of these groups as less American than others, I would argue that another very significant downside is that it enables us to more easily forget or ignore the stories of earlier such immigrants; that group would include Yung Wing, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Sui Sin Far, and my focus for today, the Filipino-American migrant worker, novelist, poet, and labor activist Carlos Bulosan. Bulosan came to the United States in 1930 at the age of 17 (or so, his birthdate is a bit fuzzy), and only lived another 26 years, but in that time he worked literally hundreds of different jobs up and down the West Coast, agitated on behalf of migrant and impoverished laborers and citizens during and after the Depression, published various poems and short stories (and wrote many others that remained unpublished upon his far too early death), and wrote the autobiographical, complex, deeply moving, and critically patriotic novel America is in the Heart (1946).

For the most part the book—which is certainly very autobiographical but apparently includes many fictionalized characters, hence the designation of it as a novel (in the vein of something like On the Road or The Bell-Jar)—paints an incredibly bleak picture of its multiple, interconnected worlds: of migrant laborers; of the lower and working classes in the Depression; and of Filipino-American immigrants. In the first two focal points, and especially in its tone, which mixes bleak psychological realism with strident social criticism, Bulosan’s book certainly echoes (or at least parallels, since it is difficult to know if Bulosan had read the earlier work) and importantly complements The Grapes of Wrath. But despite that tone, Heart’s ultimate trajectory (like that of Steinbeck’s novel, which is why I paired them in a chapter in my fourth book) is surprisingly and powerfully hopeful. That’s true partly because of the opening chapters, which are set in Bulosan’s native Philippines and make it much more difficult to see the book’s America as an entirely bleak place; but mostly because of the evocative concluding chapter, where Bulosan develops at length his title’s argument for the continuing and defining existence of a more ideal America, in the very hearts of all those seemingly least advantaged Americans on whom his book has focused. The idea might sound clichéd, but all I can say is “Read the book”; it works, and works beautifully, as a unique and potent literary model of critical patriotism.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other examples or forms of patriotism you’d highlight?

April 23, 2020: Models of Critical Patriotism: Suffrage Activists at the Centennial Exposition

[In honor of Patriots’ Day, and inspired by my book-in-progress for the American Ways series on the history of American patriotisms, a series on that topic and brief examples of critical patriotism from across American history. Leading up to a special post on that next book project of mine!]

On national divisions and critical patriotism at America’s 100^th birthday celebration.

Birthday parties tend to bring out both the best and the worst in those being celebrated, so perhaps it should be no surprise that America’s 100^th birthday party, the Centennial Exposition held over the six months between May and November of 1876 in Philadelphia’s newly designed Fairmount Park, was nothing if not profoundly divided in all sorts of complex ways. I’ve written at length (in the Intro to my first book) about the most defining such division, between the Exposition’s ostensible purpose (to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and thus reflect on America’s historical origins and identity) and its central focus and tone (a thoroughly forward-looking celebration of the nation’s material and cultural prowess and possibilities for continued upward progress). But on any number of specific issues and themes the Exposition displayed similarly multiple personalities: for example, it featured the first American statue dedicated to an African American figure (African Methodist Episcopal Church founder Richard Allen) but also included a restaurant known as the Southern Restaurant where a group of “old-time darkies” continually serenaded patrons with happy songs of the antebellum South.

Of the many such divisions and contradictions present on and around the Exposition grounds, though, I don’t know that any were as striking as those connected to women’s identities, perspectives, and issues. The Exposition was the first World’s Fair to include women’s voices in a central way, both in planning (through an all-female Women’s Centennial Executive Committee) and on the ground (through the Women’s Pavilion that was created as a result of that committee’s efforts and fundraising). The Pavilion was certainly a striking success in many respects, featuring work created and designed solely by women; yet it was equally striking for the near-complete absence of political perspectives or issues, including the most prominent such issue of the period, women’s suffrage. Since the inception of the Women’s Committee organizations such as the National Woman Suffrage Association had protested the absence of such perspectives and voices from the committee and in the planning process, not only from a representational standpoint but through the lens of a particularly salient irony: that women from around the country were asked to contribute money and support to this federal organization, but could not themselves vote in a federal (or any other kind of) election. The NWSA in fact scheduled their national meeting for Philadelphia in May, on the same day that the Exposition (including the Women’s Pavilion) opened, presenting another division within that city and moment for sure.

Yet the most overt and symbolic (yet also very real and critically patriotic) such division would be presented on July 4^th. On that day, for obvious reasons, the Exposition reached its fever pitch, with numerous activities and events focused around a main stage where impressive speakers and Americans gathered to lead the festivities. The NWSA asked if they could be a part of that stage and those festivities and were refused, but in truly American (and Revolutionary) fashion they created a second stage of their own elsewhere on the grounds. From that stage they read the full text of the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments of Women,” a text that had been initially composed for the 1848 women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY, and had become as much a founding document for this organization and cause as the Declaration of Independence was for the nation of which they were a complicated but vital part. Those contrasting stages were only one of many July 4^th, 1876 events that highlighted such complex national conversations and divisions—word was just reaching the East on this day of Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn; a group of parading black militiamen in Hamburg, South Carolina refused to cede the sidewalk to a white group, leading to a violent reprisal and the start of multiple days of anti-black violence in the town—but their location and proximity can drive home just how multivocal America was in this Centennial year, and in particular how much critical patriots like these suffrage activists were adding their voices to the mix.

Last critical patriot tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other examples or forms of patriotism you’d highlight?