April 30-May 1, 2022: April 2022 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

April 4: Tree Tales: The Giving Tree: A series for Arbor Day’s 150^th anniversary starts with two ways to teach “one of the most divisive books in children’s literature.”

April 5: Tree Tales: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: The series continues with historical, cultural, and literary contexts for a beloved novel’s central symbol.

April 6: Tree Tales: The Learning Tree: Gordon Parks’ moving and important autobiographical novel and film, as the series grows on.

April 7: Tree Tales: Into the Woods: On the deep dark heart of fairy tales—and musicals?!

April 8: Tree Tales: The Overstory: The series concludes with the long legacy of cli fi, and a stunning recent novel that reveals the genre’s true potential.

April 9-10: Arbor Day Activists: A special weekend post on three historical figures who helped create the holiday we still celebrate.

April 11: Presidential Scandals: The Corrupt Bargain: For the 100^th anniversary of Teapot Dome, a scandal-tastic series kicks off with a 19^th century electoral controversy.

April 12: Presidential Scandals: Iran-Contra: The series continues with three foreign policy contexts for the 1980s scandal, and one crucial lingering question.

April 13: Presidential Scandals: Clinton and Lewinsky: How my perspective on the key questions about a 1990s scandal has evolved over time, as the series roils on.

April 14: Presidential Scandals: Teapot Dome: On Teapot Dome’s 100^th, three figures at the heart of (at the time) the biggest presidential scandal in American history.

April 15: Presidential Scandals: Watergate: The series concludes with three pop culture representations of a generation-defining scandal.

April 18: Boston Marathon Studying: The First Marathon: A series for the Marathon’s 125^th anniversary kicks off with three interesting layers to that 1897 first race.

April 19: Boston Marathon Studying: Katherine Switzer: The series continues with the vital voice of groundbreaking racer Katherine Switzer.

April 20: Boston Marathon Studying: Rosie Ruiz: Three layers to an infamous sports story beyond the headlines, as the series races on.

April 21: Boston Marathon Studying: The Bombing: Re-upping this 2013 year in review post on the worst history related to the Marathon.

April 22: Boston Marathon Studying: Team Hoyt: But wanted to conclude the series with one of the Marathon’s and sports’ most inspiring stories.

April 23-24: Tiffany Chenault’s Guest Post: Boston Marathon RECAP: My newest Guest Post, the awesome Tiffany Chenault on her Boston Marathon experience and her overarching project on race and running in America!

April 25: Ulysses Grant Studying: His Presidency: A series for Grant’s bicentennial kicks off with what’s undeniable and what’s misunderstood about his presidency.

April 26: Ulysses Grant Studying: His Book: The series continues with three figures in Grant’s life we can better remember through his excellent memoir.

April 27: Ulysses Grant Studying: His Heritage: On Grant’s 200^th birthday, three interesting and important facts about his heritage and birth.

April 28: Ulysses Grant Studying: His Friends: Three representative relationships across Grant’s iconic life, as the series rolls on.

April 29: Ulysses Grant Studying: His Legacies: The series concludes with one of my more controversial claims, and why it’s worth engaging even if you disagree.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

April 29, 2022: Ulysses Grant Studying: His Legacies

[April 27^th will mark the 200^th birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, one of the more influential but also more misunderstood 19^th century Americans. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for our 18^th president who was also so much more!]

On a very controversial claim, and a couple arguments for it that are worth engaging even if you disagree.

I won’t make you wait for the controversial claim: I might well argue that Ulysses Grant’s presidency was both more important and more inspiring than Abraham Lincoln’s. Let me hasten to add, lest you start a petition to strip me of my AmericanStudies Card (and you have no idea how difficult it is to get one of those in the first place, so I’ll be damned if I let it slip away), that I’m being at least a bit hyperbolic for effect. I don’t believe any American president faced more dire nor more significant circumstances than did Lincoln, and I don’t know that any other could have handled it any better. Whatever his flaws and mistakes—and it’s certainly important to remember and engage them, even more so because of the hero worship that has accompanied our collective memories of Lincoln far too often (and which began in his own era, especially after his assassination)—Lincoln was without any question a top-five American president, and a case can certainly be made for the greatest of all.

But I said what I said—and while ranking presidents against each other is ultimately silly, I would nonetheless make the case that in some key ways Grant’s presidency was both more important and more inspiring than Lincoln’s. When it comes to importance, I’m thinking specifically about how vital it was that Grant followed Andrew Johnson—for my money the worst president in American history (at least until, I dunno, 2016 or thereabouts), and of course one for whose proximity to the presidency Lincoln himself bears a frustrating responsibility. While the die was unfortunately already cast for many of the awful things Johnson did between 1865 and 1869 to challenge Reconstruction, African American rights, and all the possibilities of America’s second founding, there’s no doubt that a great deal worse could have been done over the next eight years—and at the very least, that a different next president might have done precious little to push things in the right direction when it came to those unfolding histories. Which is to say, following a historically horrific presidency has to be one of the most important things a president could do, and I would argue Grant it did amazingly well.

That in and of itself makes Grant’s presidency deeply inspiring as well, but I mean something a bit different by my use of that term. I’ve long argued, in this space and many other spaces, that over the quarter-century following the Civil War the U.S. became thoroughly neo-Confederate and white supremacist, profoundly exclusionary on some of the most defining and national levels. No individuals, not even those as powerful as a president, could likely have stopped those trends, and to be sure no individuals were able to do so. But that makes it all the more important to highlight those individuals (as well as communities) who challenged those unfolding histories, who modeled a more inclusive and ideal America in the face of those worst sides of us (then, now, and always). I believe Ulysses S. Grant was one of those individuals, and that his presidency, whatever its scandals and shortcomings, offered an 8-year glimpse into what it would mean to have such inclusive allies at the highest levels of American government. That’s a model and a legacy that can and should inspire all of us as we fight to challenge the worst and extend the best of Reconstruction and America here in 2022.

April Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Grant histories or contexts you’d highlight?

April 28, 2022: Ulysses Grant Studying: His Friends

[April 27^th will mark the 200^th birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, one of the more influential but also more misunderstood 19^th century Americans. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for our 18^th president who was also so much more!]

Three representative relationships across Grant’s iconic life (besides his friendship with Mark Twain, about which I wrote on Tuesday).

1)      James Longstreet: As that hyperlinked article indicates, certain famous details of the friendship between Grant and Longstreet are a bit difficult to pin down for a certainty; but there’s no doubt that the two became close during their time at West Point, that they remained connected through Grant’s wife Julia (a distant relation of Longstreet’s), and that they served together in the Mexican American War, all early experiences that were no doubt formative for their friendship. That’s one of many such examples of how U.S. and Confederate soldiers and generals were as intimately interconnected as were the regions themselves. But it also adds an interesting layer to Longstreet’s post-Civil War evolutions, about which I wrote at length in this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column and many of which took place during Grant’s presidency.

2)      Ely Parker: I’ve written about Ely Parker, one of my favorite 19^th century Americans, many times before in this space. He and Grant first became friends during Parker’s time supervising government engineering projects in Galena, Illinois, where Ulysses and Julia lived with family for a time just before the Civil War. During the war Parker became both adjutant and secretary to Grant, writing much of Grant’s correspondence and (most famously) drafting the Appomattox surrender documents. When Grant became president, he appointed Parker his Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the first Native American to serve in the role; as the first hyperlinked article above notes, he and Grant worked hard to extend rights and protections to Native Americans during his brief time in the position. Every part of that story is more complicated than these few lines permit, but the bottom line is that Grant’s multiracial alliances and solidarities extended not just to African Americans but very much to Native Americans, as inspired by his longtime friendship with Ely Parker.

3)      John McDonald: Parker was an example of how Grant brought his friends into his administration in significant and inspiring ways; but as I discussed in Monday’s post, the scandals that became so much of the story of the Grant presidency were also deeply tied to his friends in far more problematic ways. That was particularly the case with John McDonald, a friend and fellow Civil War general whom President Grant appointed as Revenue Collector of the Missouri District in 1869. McDonald would become the corrupt center of the scandal known as the Whiskey Ring, a scandal exposed and investigated by Grant’s own Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin Bristow. That latter fact is to Grant’s credit, and seems to reflect his genuine lack of awareness of (and frustration with) what supposed friends such as McDonald were up to. But at the same time, those frustrating friends fundamentally shaped narratives of Grant’s presidency, in its own era and throughout the 150 years since, in the process far overshadowing more inspiring friendships like those with Longstreet and Parker.

Last GrantStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Grant histories or contexts you’d highlight?

April 27, 2022: Ulysses Grant Studying: His Heritage

[April 27^th will mark the 200^th birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, one of the more influential but also more misunderstood 19^th century Americans. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for our 18^th president who was also so much more!]

To celebrate Grant’s bicentennial, three interesting and important facts about his heritage and birth:

1)      A Legacy of Service: Grant wasn’t quite one of those folks able (and often all too proud) to trace his American origins back to the Mayflower, but he wasn’t far off either: his ancestors Matthew and Priscilla Grant arrived at the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. But that’s not the part of Grant’s multi-century American heritage (about which he wrote at length in his memoir) that interests me; I’d highlight instead the multi-generational story of civic and military service, which includes his great-grandfather (Noah) serving in the French and Indian War (as did Grant’s great-granduncle Solomon) and his grandfather (also Noah) seeing extensive action during the American Revolution. Grant’s choice to attend West Point at the age of 17 was of course his own (as well as his father’s, who wrote to his Congressman Thomas Hamer requesting that his son be nominated for the academy), but it was also very much in the steps of his ancestors, and would profoundly shape every subsequent stage of his life.

2)      An Abolitionist Dad: That father, Jesse Root Grant, didn’t serve in that particular way (he was only 18 at the time of the War of 1812, so wouldn’t have had a lot of opportunity in any case), but offered Ulysses another powerful model for civic engagement nonetheless. Jesse was a committed member of the Whig Party who would later serve as mayor of two Ohio towns close to Ulysses’ birthplace of Point Pleasant, Georgetown and Bethel. But he was also, and most impressively for the era, an even more committed abolitionist, one who broke from the Jacksonian Democrats over the issue of slavery and contributed a number of editorials on the subject to local and state papers. Moreover, Jesse lived in John Brown’s house when the two were both young and remained close to Brown, linking him even more potently to radical abolition. As I wrote Monday, Grant’s presidency was as progressive on issues of race as any in American history, and that seems clearly related to his father’s influence and legacy.

3)      A S-ymbolic Name: My final detail here is both more well-known and less significant than those other two, but I think it’s telling nonetheless. Jesse and his wife Hannah named their first child Hiram Ulysses, with Hiram a family name from Hannah’s Simpson clan and Ulysses drawn from a hatful of prospective names. Ulysses would be known throughout his childhood by his middle name, however, and when Congressman Hamer put forward the Grant family’s application to West Point, he called the young man Ulysses—and then, for whatever erroneous reason, listed his middle initial as “S.” The initial thus literally referred to nothing, but as a result Grant’s West Point peers began calling him Sam, as “U.S.” was a common abbreviation for “Uncle Sam” (a character first developed around the War of 1812). Partly this detail reminds us that the public persona of presidents is always distinct from the private realities; but partly it’s one further proof that U.S. Grant was descended from and destined for civic service and critical patriotism.

Next GrantStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Grant histories or contexts you’d highlight?

April 26, 2022: Ulysses Grant Studying: His Book

[April 27^th will mark the 200^th birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, one of the more influential but also more misunderstood 19^th century Americans. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for our 18^th president who was also so much more!]

On three figures in Grant’s life we can better remember through his acclaimed autobiography The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (1885-1886).

1)      Mark Twain: Twain of course needs no help garnering a prominent place in our collective memories; but as that hyperlinked article indicates, his friendship with Grant is its own complex and compelling story, and one that contributed significantly to the writing, publication, and success of Grant’s memoir. Ever the marketing genius, Twain also devised a particularly innovative and impressive plan for publicizing and selling the book. But as I’ve learned while researching my current book project, the influences of Grant and Twain’s friendship went far beyond that final stage in Grant’s life (the book was published posthumously), and included their mutual connection to and role in advocating for the Hartford Chinese Educational Mission. One of many reasons to better remember these unlikely friends!

2)      Adam Badeau: As that article traces at length (through the eyes of Henry Adams, no less), Grant’s longtime junior officer and friend had a far more fraught and controversial relationship to The Personal Memoirs. It seems likely, as the article notes, that Badeau served only as a researcher and fact-checker for the memoir, not (as he later litigiously claimed) its true author; but on the other hand, he had written multiple books about Grant’s military career, among many other works of nonfiction and fiction, so he might well have offered additional content and/or writing suggestions to Grant along the way. In any case, he reminds us that Grant’s Civil War service wasn’t just a central subject of the book—it remained, two decades later, the organizing principle around which most of Grant’s relationships and legacies were organized.

3)      Julia Grant: But not the only nor the most important such organizing principle, of course. Julia and Ulysses were engaged as early as 1844 (although his Mexican American War service put the wedding off for a time), married in 1848, and remained married through Ulysses’ 1885 death. But she was more than a life partner; she was also very much the motivation for his race to finish the book before his death, as he had lost everything in a Ponzi scheme a year earlier and was desperate to provide for Julia and the family (hence Twain’s elaborate publicity and sales scheme, and hence Julia’s resistance to Badeau’s lawsuit for royalties). In the book Grant focuses almost entirely on his public persona and affairs, as was the norm for memoirs by public figures in the period; but it’s fair to say that the whole book was about his marriage in the most fundamental and inspiring ways.

Next GrantStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Grant histories or contexts you’d highlight?

April 25, 2022: Ulysses Grant Studying: His Presidency

[April 27^th will mark the 200^th birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, one of the more influential but also more misunderstood 19^th century Americans. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for our 18^th president who was also so much more!]

[Gonna start the series by resharing this 2019 150^th anniversary post, as it makes clear what I mean by misunderstood.]

On the 150^th anniversary of his inauguration, the inescapable truths about President Grant, and how to move beyond them.

On March 4^th, 1869 Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated as President of the United States. Grant was replacing the truly odious Andrew Johnson, one of the worst presidents (and most tragic and destructive mistakes) in American history, and so he was bound to look pretty good in comparison. And his measured and thoughtful inaugural address indicated the possibility of an impressive and influential presidency to come: in his adamant support for the 15^th Amendment and African American suffrage in particular; but also for example in his argument in favor of “the proper treatment of the original occupants of this land,” including advocacy for Native American citizenship. At this pivotal moment in American history, with so much of the post-war era yet to be decided and shaped, this former general with no prior governing experience seemed to be poised to help guide the nation in progressive and productive directions.

Unfortunately, that “no prior governing experience” part ended up influencing Grant’s presidency far more fully and disastrously than his impressive ideas. Grant brought a number of friends and allies with him to his administration, both as Cabinet members and as appointees to other positions, and trustingly delegated authority to them (as perhaps any president has to, of course). When time and again a shockingly high percentage of these administration members were revealed to be taking part in corrupt schemes, Grant tended to stand by them, at least initially; while as far as historians can tell he neither knew about nor profited from any of those schemes, his friendship with and support for these scandalous figures inevitably and unquestionably sullied his own image and reputation. As much as I’d like to argue (and partly will in a moment) that the scandals didn’t define Grant’s presidency, the simple truth is that his was one of the most scandal-ridden in American history (perhaps the most so until, I dunno, right now), and will always be associated with that corruption.

If we can’t change the events of the past, however, we can and should think about collective memories, about what we most fully and centrally remember about historical events. And without denying the factual realities of the Grant Administration scandals, I would nonetheless argue that the historical emphasis on them is related to the triumph of neo-Confederate narratives of Reconstruction, the Civil War, race, and much else in the late 19^th century (and ever since). That is, frustratingly bad as Grant was at managing his corrupt friends, he was in other ways the progressive president foreshadowed by his inaugural address: helping gain passage of the 15^th Amendment, opposing the Ku Klux Klan, and, perhaps most influentially, founding the Justice Department primarily to advocate for African American rights; and appointing his friend and Civil War comrade (and amazing American) Ely Parker as the first Native American Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and working toward a very different and more peaceful relationship between the federal government and Native American tribes. If Grant’s corrupt administration contributed to the failure of some of these initiatives (and I’m sure it did, although white supremacist opposition contributed even more), that’s no reason for us to forget or minimize their existence as we celebrate the sesquicentennial of this presidency.

Next GrantStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Grant histories or contexts you’d highlight?

April 23-24, 2022: Tiffany Chenault’s Guest Post: Boston Marathon RECAP

[On April 19^th, 1897, the first Boston Marathon was run. So for the 125^th anniversary of this iconic road race, this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of Marathon histories and contexts, leading up to this special Guest Post from my favorite RunningStudier!]

[As I wrote in this post, one of the best things I’ve done in my career was reaching out to Tiffany Chenault to be a co-leader of the SSN Boston Chapter. A Sociology professor at Salem State University and one of the leaders of higher ed faculty unions throughout the state, Tiffany is also a very serious runner (she’s completing a project to run a half-marathon in every state) and an equally series studier of running and race. I’m really excited to share some of her thoughts and work in this Guest Post!]

I could not believe I was participating in the 126^th Boston Marathon. This was something that was never on my bucket list. To be honest I didn’t know anything about it (Boston Marathon) until I moved to Boston in 2005. I learned through my white colleagues that everyone goes to watch the Marathon on Patriot’s Day. It was the ultimate tailgating event, I was told. That was how it was framed to me. The black friends I met in Boston, could have cared less about the Marathon. They never went downtown on Marathon Monday and they were a bit indifferent about it. It meant there was more traffic downtown. Also, in reality, their Boston neighborhoods were not impacted. I should say, their neighborhoods were excluded from the signs, banners, and advertisements which celebrates the arrival of the marathon and the runners. Those items I would see in the middle/upper-class white neighborhoods of the city. This was my first experience with the Boston Marathon.  

Fast forward ten years later when I would become a runner. This was an identity that I never thought I would claim or imagine ever saying those words out of my mouth.  The loss of my mother and my grief led me to running as an outlet for healing. As I was running and healing, the sociologist in me started to look around my new running space and realized the whiteness of this space. Where were the other black women who looked like me that ran? This was a question that developed the more I ran, the more I healed, the more my sociological inquiry developed.

I started off with 5k (3 miles), 10ks (6 miles), half marathons (13.1 miles) and later built up to my first marathon (26.2 miles) in 2015.  For me, if I was going to run one marathon in my life, I was going to do it in my hometown and in the place my mother was buried. The Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati, Ohio was my first and I thought was my last marathon. For all the time, energy, money, sweat, and pain you go through, I wanted the marathon I chose to mean something. I wanted to have a connection to the place, the space, and the people. Even in that race, I saw more black women running but we were still a small minority within the minority of the less than 1% of the U. S. population that has run a marathon. Again, I never thought about or had a connection with running the Boston Marathon.

Exploring the research, literature, and social media on running, running, culture and the industry, I discovered that women/female runners are always white. Black women and other women of color were hardly mentioned or studied. When race is discussed in the running space, it usually revolves around black men. When people think of black marathoners, they are thinking of the elite, African runners, who come from countries such as from Kenya and Ethiopia, Morocco, and Algeria. Yes, they are black but they are not African-American domestic runners. What was missing and invisible, were the intersectional experiences of black women runners. It became important to consider the social location of race, gender, and social class that black women experience in running through their lens and ideas.

I found that recreational long-distance running, and the running industry in general, are primarily spaces for white women, white men, and “Africans.” I wanted to know why. On my personal journey of running and healing I wanted to explore why Black women were invisible and use my voice to make us visible.  

To answer these questions, I started a research journey of running a half marathon in every state. I sought out and found a community of black women who ran. From 5ks (3 miles), marathons (26.2 miles), ultra-marathons (30 miles are more) and everything in between. As a sociologist, I am interested in how larger social structures shape the lived experiences of individuals, and how those experiences are influenced by systems of power, especially around race, gender, and class. Over the last five years of my running and racing journey, I’ve had multiple conversations (formal and informal) and gathered survey data from over 200 African-American women about their motivation for running.

Through my qualitative and quantitative research, I have observed emerging patterns around hair and body politics, gendered racism, racialized connection with community and spaces, safety, running routes, heterogeneity of blackness, social class, and running in a racial hostile time of black lives matter, say her name, and the Trump era. 

Fast forward to April 18^th, 2022. The 126^th Boston Marathon.  I didn’t have an interest or desire in running the Boston Marathon. The last couple of years in the height of the pandemic, the Marathon was virtual. Last year, the 125^th Boston Marathon was in October face to face. This year the race would be back on its regular scheduled time; the third Monday of April. This Marathon also celebrated the  50^th anniversary of women running the marathon.    

As one of the co-ambassadors for Black Girls Run! Boston chapter, I received an invitation bib to run the marathon, this was in February. My thoughts, do I do this?

There are two ways you get into Boston. Run a marathon with a qualified Boston time to get in or run for a charity, where you have to raise anywhere between $5000-$10,000 and still train. I was doing neither of those things. I had this great opportunity that I couldn’t let pass. To run the Boston Marathon, research Boston Marathon culture, and use this a vehicle to train for my last two continuous states (Idaho and Wyoming which I will be running in May and June), I had to jump on it.  There are a couple of issues that I thought about:

First issue, Boston is not cheap. You pay for eliteness. Everyone has to pay close to $400 to register. It doesn’t matter if you qualified, are running for charity, or received an invitation bib, everyone pays. When I ran in the Paris Marathon, that was around $150. It costs to be a recreational runner but some cost a lot more than others. I won’t even go into how expensive it is if you have to fly, pay for hotels, and food, etc.

Second issue, the 50^th anniversary of women running the Marathon. I was curious of how women were celebrated. Walking through the Expo and looking at the Runner’s guide, I did not see African American women. Marilyn Bevans was the first African- American women to run the Boston Marathon and finish in under three hours. She was also the first known women of color to complete the Boston Marathon.  In 1977, she came in second place. I did not see Indigenous women runners, Asian or Latinx female runners. In other words, the stories of women runners, were mostly white.  Knowing the history of Marilyn and other black women Boston Marathon runners, I felt that I was continuing their legacy. That was a point of pride.

Third Issue: Boston is an international running city but it is still racially segregated. The city has a racially diverse population but the residents are racially segregated. Boston has a complex history of race relations, from Busing Segregation of the 1920s, the false accusations from Charles Stuart that claimed a black man killed his wife and unborn child, to sports greats like Bill Russell, who played for the Celtics and the racism he encountered in Boston. All of that to say, Boston has not fully recovered from its past and is still dealing with race relations in the present.

Fourth issue: Connection with Black Unicorn Marathoners. The Black Unicorn Marathoners was formed in April 2015 to be a support system for each other. The Boston Athletic Association (BAA) sponsors and supports events where black marathoners could gather together to network, greet, celebrate, and support each other. In a sea of over 30,000 it is good to know other runners whom you might not see but know they are running the course with you. They have similar intersectional experiences with running like you as well.

I was able to attend the meet in greet at the Reggie Lewis Center in Roxbury (the historic hub of the black community) and meet my fellow black marathon runners. The joy to see those faces, hear their stories and experiences is something that I would not get if I didn’t know there was a central gathering place. We were all celebrated.

The community of black runners spilled over into race day.  The few black women I saw running in my running wave, we gave each other smiles, thumbs up, and hugs. One woman said “you got this sis” and kept going. I made sure to give extra words of encouragement to the black women I saw.  The cherry on top, besides running through the finish line was seeing the running groups of color, such as Pioneers and Trailblazers on mile 21 celebrating and supporting the runners in their running group and other runners of color. This was my Boston Marathon experience.

[Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Boston Marathon histories or stories you’d highlight?]

April 22, 2022: Boston Marathon Studying: Team Hoyt

[On April 19^th, 1897, the first Boston Marathon was run. So for the 125^th anniversary of this iconic road race, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Marathon histories and contexts, leading up to a special Guest Post from my favorite RunningStudier!]

I don’t really want to analyze the amazing, inspiring story of Dick and Rick Hoyt, the father-son duo known as Team Hoyt whose more than 30 Boston Marathons—among countless other races—became the stuff of true Boston, sports, and collective legend. Some stories are beyond even AmericanStudier’s need for constant analysis. But I also didn’t want to write a Boston Marathon series without highlighting the Hoyts. So check out those pieces and resources above, and here’s to one of the most iconic father-son combinations we’ve ever seen!

Guest Post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Boston Marathon histories or stories you’d highlight?

April 21, 2022: Boston Marathon Studying: The Bombing

[On April 19^th, 1897, the first Boston Marathon was run. So for the 125^th anniversary of this iconic road race, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Marathon histories and contexts, leading up to a special Guest Post from my favorite RunningStudier!]

[Re-sharing this December 2013 post on the Boston Marathon Bombing, because I would still say very much the same things.]

On a couple ways to AmericanStudy an event that’s still understandably raw and delicate.

A former Fitchburg State University student was good friends with one of the four people killed in April’s bombing of the Boston Marathon finish line (both were Chinese exchange students). One of my FSU colleagues was near the finish line with her young son and was profoundly impacted by the experience.  And as a resident of Waltham, I was required to stay in my home throughout the lockdown later that week, as police searched neighboring Watertown for the surviving second bomber and brother.  All of which is to say, I know full well how much the bombing and its aftermaths affected our local communities (as well as the nation and world), and I’m well aware that even eight months later it might feel too soon to analyze and AmericanStudy the event.

But on the other hand, I’d say that’s part—if a delicate and challenging part—of the job of a public AmericanStudies scholar, to try to provide contexts and frames for even our most raw and painful moments. One such context that has interested me ever since that fateful day in April has been the question of how we remember such events, and more exactly of why we remember some tragedies far more than others. For example, two days after the Marathon bombing, a fertilizer plant in West, Texas exploded, killing 15 people and seriously injuring more than 160 others (totals higher than the bombing’s effects). Yet while the explosion received some attention in its immediate moment, it has gone virtually unremembered on the national level since, and certainly has not occupied the continual place in our conversations that the bombing has. Of course, the bombing was a premeditated and violent act, not an accident—but the Texas explosion has its own complex and controversial histories and contexts. So why do we remember murder or terrorism so much more strongly than other tragedies? A complicated, but important, AmericanStudies question for sure.

Even more complicated and delicate, but just as important, are questions about the narratives we have constructed and continue to construct of the young bombers. I’m not looking to wade into Rolling Stone territory here—that’s been done, and done, and done. But here’s a moment that stood out to me, as I followed the media coverage during my locked-down day: George Stephanopoulos was interviewing a high school class of the surviving bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and he asked her the following pair of questions: “Did he speak with an accent? Or was he Americanized?”  I’ve written before about the equation of “American” with “English-speaking,” but this moment took that equation one step further, defining an accident (a foreign one, presumably—not a Southern or Boston accent, to be sure!) as similarly outside of the definition of “Americanized.” There would be many, many ways to push back on such a narrative—which might be relatively rare in our national community, but also might not be—but perhaps the simplest would be this: it’s quite likely that most, if not all, of the Founding Fathers spoke with a British accent. So however we define “American,” accents seem utterly inseparable from it.

Last Marathon split tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Boston Marathon histories or stories you’d highlight?

April 20, 2022: Boston Marathon Studying: Rosie Ruiz

[On April 19^th, 1897, the first Boston Marathon was run. So for the 125^th anniversary of this iconic road race, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Marathon histories and contexts, leading up to a special Guest Post from my favorite RunningStudier!]

On three layers to the infamous Boston Marathon scandal beyond the headlines.

1)      New York and Boston: I’ve been reading recently about the Mandela Effect, the way in which large groups of people can remember something differently than how it actually took place. I don’t know if this quite qualifies, but it seems to me that Rosie Ruiz is consistently remembered for having cheated her way to the 1980 Boston Marathon women’s title by taking the subway instead of running the full course. Yet that’s in fact a combination of two different sides to Ruiz’s story: she was discovered to have cheated to the Boston title (by jumping out of the crowd on Commonwealth Avenue near the finish line) and stripped of that crown; and subsequently, stories came out about her being spotted on the subway during the 1979 New York City marathon, which had provided her qualifying time for Boston and which was then also stripped from her record. Obviously these are parallel and interconnected stories, but the combination of them into one event reveals at the very least the need to reexamine our collective memories of any figure and history.

2)      Subsequent crimes: As far as I can tell, Ruiz largely disappeared from the public record after those 1980 revelations, with two specific, also parallel exceptions: her April 1982 arrest in New York (on the same day as the Boston Marathon) for embezzling from a real estate company; and her November 1983 arrest as part of a South Florida drug bust. These arrests would seem to indicate that both Ruiz’s propensity for cheating and her troubled life went far beyond the 1979 and 1980 sports scandals, but it’s also possible to see them another way: that after those scandals (before which the 26-year-old Ruiz had never been arrested) her life went off the rails, spiraling into additional criminal behavior. Obviously that’s a chicken-and-egg type question, and the answer wouldn’t change the facts of these different unethical and illegal actions in any case. But it’s always worth thinking about narratives of contingency and inevitability when it comes to the arc of any individual life, just as with all of history.

3)      A Cuban American childhood: Ruiz was born in Havana, and immigrated to (or rather fled to, given the realities of movement under Castro’s regime) the United States with her family in 1962, when she was 8. She was apparently then separated from her mother and lived with extended family in South Florida. I don’t want to overstate the relevance of these complex childhood details, as of course the vast majority of either Cuban Americans or immigrant children separated from their parents do not go on to a life of cheating and criminality. Yet if we simply examine Ruiz’s own life, it’s fair to say that these early experiences would have been influential, and perhaps more specifically that they left her with feelings of instability or uncertainty about such foundational elements as home and family. All part of understanding the story of Rosie Ruiz beyond the headlines, anyway.

Next Marathon split tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Boston Marathon histories or stories you’d highlight?

April 19, 2022: Boston Marathon Studying: Katherine Switzer

[On April 19^th, 1897, the first Boston Marathon was run. So for the 125^th anniversary of this iconic road race, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Marathon histories and contexts, leading up to a special Guest Post from my favorite RunningStudier!]

I don’t tend to dedicate entire posts to linking to another piece; but in this case, as the groundbreaking runner and Boston Marathon participant Katherine Switzer notes in her own intro to the piece I’ll share, it’s vital that we get the facts of her experiences from her own perspective, rather than the many mythologized narratives that have sprung up around them and her. So in lieu of reading a full post of mine about Switzer, I’ll ask you to check out this recollection of that 1967 Boston Marathon, drawn from her memoir Marathon Woman (2007) and originally published in Runner’s World magazine. Enjoy!

Next Marathon split tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Boston Marathon histories or stories you’d highlight?

April 18, 2022: Boston Marathon Studying: The First Marathon

[On April 19^th, 1897, the first Boston Marathon was run. So for the 125^th anniversary of this iconic road race, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Marathon histories and contexts, leading up to a special Guest Post from my favorite RunningStudier!]

On three layers to the histories of that first 1897 Boston Marathon.

1)      The B.A.A.: The Marathon was far from the starting point for organized athletics in the city. Ten years earlier, in 1887, the Boston Athletic Association had been founded, reflecting the rising national interest in both amateur and professional sports in the late 19^th century. The BAA built an impressive clubhouse in the city’s Back Bay neighborhood, with facilities for numerous sports including boxing, tennis, and water polo; and it began hosting track and field competitions and other athletic events, including an annual Spring competition known as the BAA Games. In 1897, perhaps in part to commemorate the BAA’s 10^th anniversary and inspired by the marathon at the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens, the Association’s leadership decided to conclude those Spring games with a marathon of their own. BAA member and Olympic Team Manager John Graham worked with local businessman Herbert Holton to choose and design the 24.5-mile course.  

2)      Patriots’ Day: That overall Spring timing was to coincide with the end of the BAA Games, but the specific timing of April 19^th was due to another factor: the newly-created holiday of Patriots’ Day. The then-Massachusetts-specific holiday was just three years old at the time, having been first celebrated in 1894 after the Lexington Historical Society petitioned the MA Legislature to create a holiday honoring the 1775 Revolutionary War Battles of Lexington and Concord. And running the Marathon on that date was even more specific than that, as the BAA sought to link the American Revolutionary effort and spirit to that displayed by the Athenian soldiers at the 490 BC Battle of Marathon for which the race had been initially named. A bit of a stretch, perhaps, but the Boston Marathon has never been anything less than grandiose!

3)      JJ “Little Mac” McDermott: The winner of that first Boston Marathon (known then as the B.A.A. Road Race) was quite a grandiose figure himself. Not in size, as the Irish American lithographer and amateur runner John J. “J.J.” or “Little Mac” McDermott was just 5’6” and 124 pounds when measured before the race. But as that hyperlinked article puts it, this was America’s first great marathoner, and I would argue one of the 19^th century’s greatest American athletes: he won the first marathon run in the U.S., in New York in September 1896; and won the first Boston Marathon just seven months later, quite possibly while running with the tuberculosis that would kill him less than a decade later. It’s not clear whether McDermott definitely had TB when he won in Boston, but when it comes to the first iteration of such a legendary race, I’m going to print the legend.

Next Marathon split tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Boston Marathon histories or stories you’d highlight?

April 15, 2022: Presidential Scandals: Watergate

[On April 14, 1922, the Wall Street Journal published a story breaking the news of a crooked deal that became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that history and four other presidential scandals, leaving aside the Grant administration as we’ll get to them in a couple weeks and the Trump administration because ugh. Share your thoughts on these & other histories, including Grant or Trump if you’d like of course, for a scandalous crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On three telling pop culture representations of the generation-defining scandal.

1)      All the President’s Men (1976): The 1976 film was of course an adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein’s popular 1974 book of the same name, but I would argue it was really the film—and of course in particular the pair of acting luminaries known as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman—that really made President’s the defining cultural representation of Watergate. There’s a lot to like about the film, including one of the best pop culture portrayals of journalism this side of Spotlight. But I wonder sometimes if the success of this story and in particular that emphasis on the journalists helped minimize the focus on the Nixon administration’s genuinely horrific misdeeds, making it easier for us to gradually forget some of the worst of (to my mind) the most stunning presidential crimes in history (at least until, well, y’know).

2)      “Sweet Home Alabama” (1974): That certainly wasn’t the only reason for our gradual downplaying of Nixon’s crimes, however. In the same year that saw Woodward and Bernstein’s book, the good ol’ boys in Lynyrd Skynyrd (man does Word not like the spelling of those words) released their Southern-fried anthem. I’ve long found the song’s second verse one of the most politically despicable in all of rock music: “In Birmingham they love the governor/Now we all did what we could do/Now Watergate does not bother me/Does your conscience bother you?/Tell the truth.” In so feeling I tended to focus on the governor lines (that’s Governor George “Segregation Forever” Wallace, to be clear); but as awful as they are, I’d say minimizing the Watergate crimes committed by the President of the U.S. by asking listeners if they have a perfectly clear conscience is just as horrific, and helped set the stage for our ongoing ability to dismiss presidential crimes through a partisan lens.

3)      Dick (1999): When I initially planned this post, I thought I’d be making the case that a silly comic film like Dick, with its focus on two fictional teenage girls who become intertwined with Nixon and the scandal, further reflects that gradual cultural (and social and political) dismissal of the worst of Watergate. And maybe that’s still the most viable argument, I dunno. But I’d also say that the film, alongside a work like Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995), could be read as part of an attempt to grapple anew, a couple decades later, with the histories and stories of this most scandalous presidency and period in American history (again, to that point). Of course scholarly and historical writing, along with further journalism and other nonfiction genres like documentary, offer their own lenses on such histories. But so do pop culture works—and, with all due respect to the boys with the unspellable band name, such works can help remind us why yes, we should be bothered by a presidential scandal like Watergate.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Takes on this scandal or other ideas you’d share for the weekend post?

April 14, 2022: Presidential Scandals: Teapot Dome

[On April 14, 1922, the Wall Street Journal published a story breaking the news of a crooked deal that became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that history and four other presidential scandals, leaving aside the Grant administration as we’ll get to them in a couple weeks and the Trump administration because ugh. Share your thoughts on these & other histories, including Grant or Trump if you’d like of course, for a scandalous crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On three figures at the heart of (at the time) the biggest presidential scandal in American history.

1)      Albert Bacon Fall: President Harding’s Secretary of the Interior was the public face of Teapot Dome, eventually becoming the first Cabinet member in U.S. history to serve a prison sentence (as much for his multiple years of tax evasion as for his role in the scandal’s corruption, it seems). But Teapot Dome is just one part of Fall’s multi-layered connection to the Western U.S. in the early 20^th century—the former Senator from New Mexico was also a key player in Woodrow Wilson’s fraught and possibly illegal 1916 military invasion of Mexico (also known as the Punitive Expedition) to end Pancho Villa’s guerrilla raids. Both Teapot Dome and that invasion can after all also be connected to the foundational history of U.S. land theft throughout the West, not only from indigenous peoples but also from Mexican American communities.

2)      Thomas J. Walsh: The investigator who brought down Fall was Montana Democratic Senator Thomas Walsh, a former prosecutor whose brought those skills to his two-year investigation into Fall and Teapot Dome. Walsh wasn’t the first Senator to engage with the unfolding scandal—after the April 1922 story of the land deal first broke, it was Wyoming Democratic Senator John Kendrick who introduced an initial resolution to investigate; and then Wisconsin Republican Senator Robert La Follette who initially led that investigation in his role as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Lands. But it’s fair to say, given all the other business of the Senate as well as Fall’s careful attempts to cover his tracks, that it took the dogged persistence of Walsh to finally uncover and expose the depths of Teapot Dome.

3)      Warren G. Harding: Like the Reagan administration Iran-Contra scandal I wrote about two days ago, President Harding was never formally tied to Fall and Teapot Dome. But he was most certainly associated with the scandal, not only in the media and public opinion but through his own statements. To cite two quoted in that hyperlinked official White House history (drawn from Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey’s book The Presidents of the United States of America): he complained to allies that “My friends, they’re the ones that keep me walking the floors nights!”; and on a 1923 Western trip with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, Harding asked Hoover, “If you knew of a great scandal in our administration, would you for the good of the country and the party expose it publicly or would you bury it?” While on that trip Harding died of a heart attack in San Francisco—but the Teapot Dome scandal to which he referred (in all likelihood) would gradually emerge nevertheless.

Last scandal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on this scandal or other ideas you’d share for the weekend post?

April 13, 2022: Presidential Scandals: Clinton and Lewinsky

[On April 14, 1922, the Wall Street Journal published a story breaking the news of a crooked deal that became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that history and four other presidential scandals, leaving aside the Grant administration as we’ll get to them in a couple weeks and the Trump administration because ugh. Share your thoughts on these & other histories, including Grant or Trump if you’d like of course, for a scandalous crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On how two quite distinct things can be true at once, and how my own perspective has changed over time.

The first true thing I want to say about the President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal is that it was the result of a multi-year, highly partisan and suspect fishing expedition. After he was appointed in August 1994 as an independent counsel to investigate the nothing-burger that was the Whitewater “scandal,” attorney Ken Starr—who had long been an avowed opponent of Clinton’s and was funded by an even more overt and powerful such opponent, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife—kept expanding the scope of that investigation to other and equally suspect “scandals.” For example, in October 1997 (more than three years after his appointment) Starr released a 137-page report (drafted by Starr’s assistant Brett Kavanaugh!) on the 1993 suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. After that wasted effort, Starr turned his attention to Clinton’s adulterous relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, making the resulting scandal the sole successful product of a four-year partisan fishing expedition into all things Clinton.

But the second true thing I want to say is this: the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was more than that, was indeed a significant and serious presidential scandal. Partly that’s because of how Ken Starr initially learned of it: Clinton was being deposed in Paula Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit against him, and lied under oath about whether he had ever “had sexual relations” with Lewinsky (I’m not willing to accept Clinton’s later argument that he didn’t consider oral sex “sexual relations” and so wasn’t lying). But it’s also because of the affair itself—not because of the adultery part (countless presidents have cheated on their spouses, and to my mind that’s ultimately a personal matter) but because of its unethical and unprofessional nature: of Clinton having sex with an intern, someone over whom he had direct professional power; and of him doing so in the Oval Office, while conducting the political and national business of the presidency. I don’t imagine he was the first president for whom those things were true either, but repetition of something scandalous doesn’t make it any less scandalous, and I would argue those unethical and unprofessional sides to the affair demand our condemnation in any case.

Finally, a third, more personal but also I believe broadly relevant true thing: my perspective on the relative dynamics of those other two things has shifted significantly in the 20+ years since the scandal. At the time, I was entirely convinced that, whatever Clinton’s personal flaws and failures, the scandal was far more fully a reflection of the GOP’s unhinged hatred of him and his administration (which seems to have been a main public takeaway from the impeachment trial at the very least). But while those contexts and factors remain part of the story as I’ve said here, I have to say that over the last few years, the unfolding perspectives and narratives of the #MeToo movement have fully convinced me of the paramount importance of challenging and ending workplace sexual harassment (among many other issues of course). While Clinton’s own such workplace harassment scandal might not have risen to the level of an impeachable offense, it nonetheless reflects clearly and potently the truly ubiquitous presence of such issues, even at the highest and most powerful levels of American society. To my mind, that (along with the deeply impressive second act of Monica Lewinsky’s life and work) should be the ultimate takeaway from this 1990s presidential scandal.

Next scandal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on this scandal or other ideas you’d share for the weekend post?