December 11, 2024: Hawaiian Histories: Annexation

[150 years ago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrived in Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of a more than two-month state visit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and other Hawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations of the islands.]

A quarter-century after the United States welcomed King Kalākaua with such respect, the federal government treated another Hawaiian monarch, one who had served as Queen Regent during his subsequent 1881 world tour, with utter disrespect. I’ve written at length about the violent overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani and the subsequent annexation of Hawaii in two pieces, this one for We’re History and this one for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column. So in lieu of a full post today, I’ll ask you to check out those two interconnected and complementary pieces, and to help us better remember this pivotal and painful moment in Hawaiian and American history.  

Next Hawaiian history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?

December 10, 2024: Hawaiian Histories: King Kalākaua’s Visit

[150 years ago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrived in Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of a more than two-month state visit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and other Hawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations of the islands.]

On three striking moments in the state visit beyond the time in DC (on which check out that piece and this one, among much other coverage).

1)      San Francisco: A significant layer to my recently completed podcast was the story of San Francisco in the 1870s (and into the September 1881 moment in which the Celestials played their last game). This was the city with the nation’s oldest and largest Chinatown community, and also the city that became the violent epicenter of the period’s anti-Chinese American movement; obviously those two facts are related, but they also reflect the true duality of a community that both embodied and challenged our foundational diversity throughout this decade. Which makes it pretty interesting to think about King Kalākaua’s celebratory week in the city in late November and early December 1874. To quote one telling response, from the Black newspaper Pacific Appeal, “there has either been a sudden abandonment of colorphobia prejudice, or an extraordinary amount of toadyism to a crown head by the San Francisco American people.”

2)      Transcontinental Train Trip: On December 5^th, the King and his traveling party boarded a train for the weeklong journey across the continent to Washington. They would make extended stops along the way at such significant Western and Midwestern American communities as Cheyenne (in what was then Wyoming Territory), Omaha, and Chicago. But it’s the trip itself that interests me most here—this was just five years after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad (with the famous 1869 Golden Spike Ceremony), and thus still quite early in the histories both of this way of traversing the nation and of the concept of a more genuinely interconnected nation and continent at all. Changes which contributed to the so-called “closing of the frontier,” and which likewise can be directly connected to the need for further expansion which prompted, among countless other things, the annexation of Hawaii 25 years after the King’s visit (on which more in tomorrow’s post).   

3)      New Bedford: That was all still ahead in the nation’s Transpacific future in 1874; but toward the end of his time in the US, the King also visited a city that was absolutely essential to the nation’s Transatlantic past. That city was New Bedford, Massachusetts, center of the whaling industry for well more than a century and also profoundly interconnected with the histories of American slavery, among other defining origin points and communities. Among the many compelling details of the King’s visit to New Bedford on New Year’s Day, 1875, my favorite for all those reasons has to be the epic dinner hosted by Mayor George Richmond and featuring 100 master mariners from the community (with each and every one of whom the King shook hands at the dinner’s end). Ain’t that America?

Next Hawaiian history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?

December 9, 2024: Hawaiian Histories: Three Shifts

[150 years ago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrived in Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of a more than two-month state visit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and other Hawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations of the islands.]

On three moments through which Hawaii’s history significantly shifted.

1)      1778-1779, Contacts: I was pretty tempted to order these three focal moments non-chronologically, as I really don’t want to reinforce the idea that contact with non-Hawaiians/Europeans was the most significant part of Hawaiian history. But with a full recognition that any individual choices for a post like this will be partial and reductive, and a hope that you all understand where I’m coming from, I decided to stick with chronology. And there’s no doubt that Captain James Cook’s controversial series of voyages to the islands in the late 1770s, the first known encounter between Europeans and Hawaiians, altered the histories of both this particular community and multiple nations (including Cook’s native Great Britain but also the new United States). Not to mention the effects on Cook, who was killed in February 1779 during a confrontation with Hawaiian leaders.

2)      1795, Kingdom: I don’t know nearly enough about the island’s histories to be able to say for sure whether this second shift was in any direct way related to that first one, but it seems likely that there’s some causality between the two events, that these encounters with outsiders pushed Hawaiian leaders to establish a more formal and forceful rule. There had of course been prominent native Hawaiian community leaders for centuries by this time, but it was in 1795 that the leader who came to be known as King Kamehameha I founded the House of Kamehameha, a royal dynasty that would reign over the islands for the next century. As anyone with a general knowledge of human history and/or human nature would expect, he didn’t unify the islands under his rule without multiple, extended conflicts, though—including a particularly significant, subsequent shift…

3)      1819, Conflicts over Kapu: Across much of those prior centuries of leadership, Hawaii had been a theocracy, governed by a set of religious and social rules known as kanawai. More exactly, these rules outlawed various practices, known as kapu, a list of forbidden customs that included women eating alongside men. But in 1819, again likely influenced by the prior half-century of contacts and changes, King Kamehameha II publicly dined with two royal women, including his mother Queen Keopuolani. The controversial moment ignited an extended civil conflict that ended with both a reinforcement of the dynasty’s rule and with a newfound sense of Hawaiian modernity—one that would directly connect to the royal outreach which inspired this week’s series and about which I’ll write tomorrow.

Next Hawaiian history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?

December 7-8, 2024: McCarthy’s America: 21st Century Echoes

[70 years ago this week, the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, a key final step in the downfall of that domineering and divisive demagogue. So in this series I’ve AmericanStudied a few layers to McCarthy’s America, leading up to this weekend post on his and the moment’s modern echoes.]

[NB. I’m drafting this post before the election, so y’know, as with every other damn thing in 2024, its meanings will likely vary wildly depending on how that goes.]

On throughlines, overt and overarching, and what we must learn from them.

I haven’t had a chance to see the new film The Apprentice (2024), and I’m not sure I will ever do so; spending an extra couple hours in the company of Donald Trump and Roy Cohn isn’t high on my to-do list. But I certainly believe there’s significant value in trying to highlight, in any way and through any medium, that defining figure and relationship in Trump’s life. Long before he was involved in politics in any real way, Trump seems to have learned a great deal from Cohn, who was (as I argued in Thursday’s post) one of the most hypocritical as well as one of the most vile and destructive figures in 20^th century American history. Trump has dominated the last decade of our political and national life in ways that are strikingly similar to McCarthy’s influence in the late 1940s and early 1950s [again, I’m drafting this before the election, so I don’t know how much he will dominate the next few years, but no matter what I’m frustratingly sure we are not close to through with him], and right there at the center of both moments is the odious Roy Cohn.

The more one learns about Joe McCarthy, though, the more it’s he who parallels Trump in so many ways. McCarthy lied about everything all the time, including if not especially his own past and identity and actions. He attacked almost everyone else, defining them as enemies of both himself and the entire United States, in ways that can only be read as projections of his own blatant desire to undermine the American experiment. And when he was called out on those and so many other horrors, he made himself the victim (such as in the “lynch party” response to the censure resolution that I highlighted in Friday’s post), because ultimately all of it was about his own fragile ego. (And oh yeah, he defended freaking Nazis too.) I’m not sure we can find anywhere in American history two littler men than Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump, and that littleness is, ironically but unquestionably, at the heart of the outsized influence that the two men exercised on their respective moments.

In December 1954, McCarthy was finally and thoroughly rebuked by his colleagues (including many of his fellow Republicans), a culminating fall from grace that apparently served to push him out of the public eye (and likely contributed to his death from complications of alcoholism less than three years later, in May 1957). To say it one more time, this time not in brackets but in the main prose of this post: I’m drafting this prior to the 2024 election, and so I can only hope—and sweet sassy molassy do I hope—that those results will serve as a similar and even more truly communal and national rebuke of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. But whatever has happened by the time this post airs, there’s no doubt that we will need to continue pushing back, in every way and every moment, on another figure who has embodied the very worst of our histories, of our identity, of our impulses.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 6, 2024: McCarthy’s America: Censure

[70 years ago this week, the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, a key final step in the downfall of that domineering and divisive demagogue. So in this series I’ll AmericanStudy a few layers to McCarthy’s America, leading up to a weekend post on his and the moment’s modern echoes.]

On a series of quotes that reflect the histories and figures at the end of the December 1954 censure vote.

1)      “Contrary to senatorial traditions”: By the spring of 1954 McCarthy had been bullying and blustering his way through countless Senate hearings, but his April hearings on the U.S. Army still represented an escalation of those actions and attitudes. And one that prompted a striking response from one of his Senate and party colleagues: on July 30^th, Senator Ralph Flanders (R-VT) introduced a censure resolution against McCarthy, arguing that his actions ran “contrary to senatorial traditions.” The Senate has always been a body divided between its ideals and its realities, as reflected by the history of the filibuster for example; but clearly McCarthy’s ugly realities had finally become too much to bear by mid-1954, and the unusual step of a censure debate illustrates that shift.

2)      “A lynch party”: On August 2^nd, the Senate convened a bipartisan select committee, chaired by Senator Arthur V. Watkins (R-UT) and featuring three Senators total from each party, to investigate Flanders’ resolution and the censure charges and report back to the entire body. Throughout their months of work McCarthy was as aggressive and hostile of a colleague as we would expect, building to an extended debate in November during which McCarthy called the entire investigation “a lynch party.” I’m not sure I need to say anything else about what that quote reveals about this man and his perspective, do I?

3)      “Dishonor and Disrepute” vs. “Dignity”: In response to McCarthy’s attacks, Senator Watkins delivered a speech on the Senate floor defending the “dignity” of the body. And when the Senate voted on December 2^nd, 1954 to accept the committee’s recommendation and censure McCarthy, they continued to use that term and contrasted it with two others, arguing that McCarthy had “acted contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity.” Whatever we might say about the real vs. ideal histories of this body, there’s no doubt that this unusual senatorial action reflected just how far and how low McCarthy had gone—a lesson, as I’ll argue this weekend, we would do well to heed.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 5, 2024: McCarthy’s America: Roy Cohn

[70 years ago this week, the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, a key final step in the downfall of that domineering and divisive demagogue. So in this series I’ll AmericanStudy a few layers to McCarthy’s America, leading up to a weekend post on his and the moment’s modern echoes.]

On the figure who embodies American hypocrisies—and perhaps something more.

Back before he went around a whole series of increasingly extreme bends, the journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote a scathing critique of the modern GOP entitled Great American Hypocrites (2008). While I certainly agree with Greenwald’s premise and his specific examples, and similarly feel that hypocrisy has become a core ingredient of a party’s entire political platform in a way that it has perhaps never before been, I would also emphasize just how strong a role hypocrisy has played in American narratives throughout our existence. That argument could go back, for example, to the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which depicted a Native American begging prospective arrivals to “Come over and help us”: the seal reveals not only a core hypocrisy in the Puritans’ perspectives, since (as William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation and many others documents demonstrate) the local Native tribes quickly (well before this seal’s creation) and thoroughly became the Puritans’ greatest perceived obstacle to overcome on the path to building their city on a hill; but also another and more subtle hypocrisy in their experiences, since without the early aid of local Native Americans such as Squanto (as Bradford does admit, to his credit) the Plymouth colony (and thus likely the Puritan settlements that followed it) would almost certainly have failed.

I could probably maintain a daily blog on such American hypocrisies and not run out of examples any time soon, but for this week’s series I wanted to focus on a figure whose public and personal lives and identities perhaps most fully embody (in every sense) these national hypocrisies: Roy Cohn (1927-1986). Cohn rose to prominence in political and public life as one of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s nastiest attack dogs, a lawyer who seemingly thrived on ferreting out hidden and secret (and, as ever in the McCarthy era, dubious at best) details of the lives of government employees and other McCarthy targets and helping expose them for a paranoid and fearful nation. As was generally the case in the anti-Communist witch hunts, Cohn was never averse to directly linking homosexuality and other forms of “deviant” behavior to Communist leanings, since, in this perspective, one kind of secret life was likely to echo and reveal others. It was only decades later, when Cohn was publicly diagnosed in the 1980s with the decade’s newest and most threatening disease, AIDS, that the truth of Cohn’s own very secret (he had been famously linked to various famous women over the years) gay identity was similarly revealed. While it is of course both unfair and ultimately impossible to speak with any authority about any other individual’s sexual and intimate experiences and life, it’s perhaps least unfair to do so when that individual has made identifying and attacking the sexual preferences of others part and parcel of his career and legacy—after all, if Cohn believed, as both he and McCarthy stated explicitly on numerous occasions, that being homosexual should disqualify someone from taking part in political life in America, then his own identity as a closeted gay political figure was ideologically as well as personally hypocritical.

The truths of both individual identity and communal existence, however, are really more complicated than that, and while it’s tempting simply to point out Cohn’s hypocrisy, and more saliently to use it to critique the profoundly destructive and illegitimate roots of McCarthyism more broadly, there’s significant value in trying to imagine and analyze this very complex and certainly very representative American’s life and perspective. By far the best such imagined version of Cohn produced to date, at least to my knowledge, would have to be that created by playwright Tony Kushner in his two-part, Pulitzer-winning, innovative and brilliant play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991-1993). Kushner’s play has a lot to recommend it, including some of the most raw and powerful depictions of AIDS yet produced in any genre or medium, but without question one of its strongest elements is the characterization of Cohn, a vulgar, violent, petty, power-hungry aging lawyer and Washington player who also manages to be funny, charismatic, likeable, and ultimately even sympathetic as he struggles with both the disease that he refuses to admit he has and the ghosts of those (especially Ethel Rosenberg) to whose destruction he contributed so centrally. In a play full of interesting characters and show-stopping moments, Cohn is perhaps the linchpin and certainly the anti-hero and villain and star, and I can’t think of a better description of national hypocrisies more generally.

Last McCarthy context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 4, 2024: McCarthy’s America: Edward R. Murrow

[70 years ago this week, the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, a key final step in the downfall of that domineering and divisive demagogue. So in this series I’ll AmericanStudy a few layers to McCarthy’s America, leading up to a weekend post on his and the moment’s modern echoes.]

On the special report that helped begin McCarthy’s fall, and the response that only hastened it further.

In this piece for the Saturday Evening Post, on the 50^th anniversary of Walter Cronkite’s famous February 27^th, 1967 special report on the Vietnam War, I argued that Cronkite, along with his contemporary investigative reporter David Halberstam, helped provide models of adversarial journalism that changed the journalistic landscape and have endured into our own moment. But in so doing, CBS Evening News anchor Cronkite was also following in the footsteps of his equally influential predecessor at CBS (both in radio and television), Edward R. Murrow. Murrow had been delivering radio reports for CBS since the late 1930s, and by the early 1950s was one of the nation’s most prominent journalists in multiple media. His longstanding radio program Hear It Now transitioned to television on November 18^th, 1951 as See It Now, and at the same time Murrow began contributing both reporting and opinion pieces to the CBS Evening News.

One of Murrow’s most important and influential See It Now pieces aired on March 9^th, 1954. Entitled “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy,” the half-hour episode used McCarthy’s own statements and speeches to highlight his contradictions and hypocrisies (foreshadowing what media commentary shows like The Daily Show would do half a century later). CBS was extremely wary of running the show, and did not allow Murrow and his longtime producer Fred W. Friendly to use the CBS logo or to take advantage of CBS resources to publicize the episode. So Murrow and Friendly paid themselves to advertise the show in newspaper across the country, clearly believing that they were doing meaningful work that should reach as broad an audience as possible. I would agree, and would emphasize that in the era before either cable news networks or the internet, it’s quite possible (if not very likely) that most Americans had not had the chance to hear the majority of the McCarthy statements and speeches used in the episode. They certainly would not have been able to hear them in close succession, and thus to understand the kinds of deceptions, falsehoods, and half-truths that (as I traced in yesterday’s post) McCarthy had been relying on throughout his life and career.

The episode’s very first statement emphasized that McCarthy would have the chance to respond on a subsequent episode of See It Now if he chose. He did, and joined Murrow for another half-hour episode on April 6^th, 1954. Unsurprisingly, given the history of ad hominem and inaccurate personal attacks that I also traced yesterday, McCarthy mostly used his TV time to take on Murrow, calling him a communist sympathizer and then adding, “Ordinarily, I would not take time out from the important work at hand to answer Murrow. However, in this case I feel justified in doing so because Murrow is a symbol, a leader, and the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose individual communists and traitors.” Not only were these accusations entirely unfounded, but they reflected McCarthy’s unwillingness (or, more exactly, inability) to respond to the specific factual charges that the original episode had leveled against him. The audience and nationwide responses to the rebuttal show were just as fully in favor of Murrow and critical of McCarthy as had been those to the original episode, and taken together these two episodes illustrate the possibility for quality adversarial journalism to truly help shift collective conversations and debates.

Next McCarthy context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 3, 2024: McCarthy’s America: Chambers, White, and Hiss

[70 years ago this week, the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, a key final step in the downfall of that domineering and divisive demagogue. So in this series I’ll AmericanStudy a few layers to McCarthy’s America, leading up to a weekend post on his and the moment’s modern echoes.]

On espionage, railroading, and the true complexity of historical nuance.

In one of my earliest posts for this blog, I used the wonderful Season 2 West Wing episode “Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail” to think about recently revealed details of the Rosenberg case and the question of historical nuance. In lieu of a new first paragraph here, I’d love for you to check out that post if you would, and then come on back here for today’s thoughts.

Welcome back! The same thorny questions I considered in that post, of how we can accurately critique McCarthyism (on which more in tomorrow’s post) while grappling with the apparent truths of the Rosenberg case, certainly seem to apply to the story of two of HUAC’s most famous targets, Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss. In August 1948, HUAC subpoenaed Whittaker Chambers, an admitted former Soviet spy now working as a senior editor at Time; in his testimony Chambers named names of other alleged Soviet agents in the U.S. government, including Treasury Department official White and State Department official Hiss. Both men denied the accusations categorically; White died of a heart attack a few days later and the question of his espionage remains entirely unclear, while Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury (thanks to documents provided by Chambers which contradicted Hiss’ sworn statements before the committee) and imprisoned for years. Hiss maintained his innocence until his death in 1996, but recently released Soviet archival materials seem to provide proof that he was at least for a time on the Kremlin’s payroll.

There’s a lot more to say about these cases than I can fit into one more paragraph, but I want to make three points here. First, it’s important to note that someone working for the federal government and spying for the Soviet Union is in a far different and more troubling position than a cultural figure accused of Communist sympathies (like all those about whom I wrote in yesterday’s post); if that was indeed the case for Hiss, he deserved at least to lose his job, and likely to serve time in prison. Second, it’s just as important to note that lives can be and were destroyed by such accusations regardless of the facts; Harry Dexter White, one of the 20^th century’s greatest economic minds, is exhibit A in that case. And third, it’s precisely the job—or at least one central job—of all who seek to explore and engage our histories to include both those points, among others, in our nuanced and multi-layered understanding and narrative of the past. We can add our own emphases and arguments to be sure, and I would argue that HUAC and McCarthy were more damaging to the US than Soviet spies. But there’s no way to understand the 1940s and 50s in America without recognizing that both those communities were problematic parts of our political and social landscape.

Next McCarthy context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 2, 2024: McCarthy’s America: Mythic Patriotism

[70 years ago this week, the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, a key final step in the downfall of that domineering and divisive demagogue. So in this series I’ll AmericanStudy a few layers to McCarthy’s America, leading up to a weekend post on his and the moment’s modern echoes.]

An excerpt from Of Thee I Sing that highlights how HUAC and (especially) Joe McCarthy embodied the worst of mythic patriotism.

“Both the Depression and World War II eras’ fears of anti-American radi­cals, movements, and communities likewise extended into the post-war mo­ment in an even more prominent and overarching way, with the emergence of the hugely influential, mythic perspective expressed and embodied by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. Despite McCarthy’s central role in perpetuating and amplifying those myths, it’s important to note that another vital source for that perspective, the tellingly named House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), pre-dated both McCarthy (who became a Senator in 1947) and the post-war period. HUAC, also known as the Dies Committee after its chair, Texas Representative Martin Dies Jr., was created as a special investigating committee in 1938, building upon and making more official the work of earlier Congressional committees such as the 1934–37 Special Committee on Un-American Activities to Investigate Nazi Propa­ganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities. From the beginning HUAC’s investigations focused on fears of communism and targeted many of the period’s most prominent American communities: student radicals, as illus­trated by a 1939 investigation into the communist-affiliated American Youth Congress; New Deal artists, as illustrated by the 1938 subpoena of Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan to address communist influences on that project; and Japanese Americans, as illustrated by HUAC’s infamous “Yellow Report” which made the case for internment based on a number of mythic arguments about Japanese loyalty to the empire.

When Senator McCarthy extended and amplified those investigations in the post-war period, he did so with the help of two interconnected mythic pa­triotic arguments. First, the World War II veteran McCarthy used propagan­distic war stories to make the case for his own candidacy and governmental role. McCarthy had served as a Marine Corps intelligence officer and aviator between August 1942 and April 1945, and in the process received (or quite possibly gave himself) the nickname “Tail-Gunner Joe.” When he ran for the Senate against incumbent Robert M. La Follette Jr., McCarthy criticized La Follette’s lack of military service, although La Follette was 46 years old at the start of the war, and used the slogan “Congress needs a tail-gunner” to play up his own. He also created myths about his military service: an exaggerated number of aerial missions (32, rather than the actual number of 12) in order to qualify for a Distinguished Flying Cross; a broken leg that McCarthy referred to as a “war wound” but had in fact occurred during a shipboard celebration upon crossing the equator; and a letter of commendation that he claimed had been written by his commanding officer but turned out to have been written by McCarthy himself. None of these myths elide the reality of McCarthy’s wartime experiences and service, but they reflect a willingness to create pro­paganda based on such real experiences, in order to significantly bolster his own authority and arguments.

As he began making his overtly exclusionary arguments in early 1950, McCarthy did so through equally mythic images of a government and na­tion overrun by and fighting back against “enemies within.” McCarthy used that phrase in a February 9th, 1950 speech to the Wheeling, West Virginia Republican Women’s Club, an address in which he also produced “a list of names” of alleged “members of the Community Party . . . working and shap­ing policy in the State Department.” As he turned that idea into the origin point for a four-year exclusionary crusade against “anti-American” forces and communities of all types, from communists and fellow travelers to leftist intellectuals and academics, artistic and cultural figures, homosexuals, and other “subversives,” McCarthy linked that crusade to a mythic vision of an embattled American identity for which he was the consistent and chief cham­pion. “McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled,” he argued in a 1952 speech during his successful reelection campaign, and he titled his book published later that year McCarthyism: The Fight for America.”

Next McCarthy context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?