April 7, 2025: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Gatsby’s Pool

[On April 10^th, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I have my problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and important novels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post featuring fellow GatsbyStudiers!]

On the tragic dip that’s as difficult to pin down as the man taking it.

Jay Gatsby spends his final moments relaxing in his home’s luxurious swimming pool. As Nick Carraway is about to leave his neighbor for what turns out to be the last time, Gatsby’s gardener arrives to drain the pool; fall is arriving and the gardener is worried that “leaves’ll start falling pretty soon and then there’s always trouble with the pipes.” But Gatsby asks him to hold off for one more day, noting to Nick, “you know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer.” And so it is during Gatsby’s first and only dip in his own swimming pool, lying on “a pneumatic mattress that had amused his guests during the summer,” that the grieving George Wilson arrives, an “ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.” Wilson is armed and crazed, seeking vengeance for the tragic death of his wife Myrtle, and kills both Gatsby and himself.

It’s a striking and evocative image and moment, as so many of Fitzgerald’s are. And like so many others in the novel, it seems clearly symbolic—but of what, exactly? The imminent shift in seasons feels significant—Gatsby is a novel of summer, and here the season has ended but Gatsby is not willing to let it go, not least because he has not yet had a chance to enjoy it. Or perhaps the pool is simply a microcosm of Gatsby’s palatial home—the height of luxury and excess, of the Roaring 20s and their decadent atmosphere, but offering those thrills less for its actual owner (who barely makes use of it as anything other than a host for visitors) and more for all those guests who come to bathe in its excesses. Or maybe it’s just the final irony in a novel full of them—Gatsby finally takes a moment to relax, for what feels like the first time in years, and looks what it gets him.

All of those interpretations hold water (sorry), but I would also note a historical context that it’s easy for us 21^st century readers to forget: like so many of the novel’s crucial social and technological features (cars, Hollywood films, recorded music), an in-ground swimming pool in the early 1920s represented a striking innovation. The first such pools in America had been open for less than two decades, and were generally public or communal spaces; it was not until more than two decades later, after World War II, that they would become part of the typical imagery of the ideal American home. So as with every aspect of Gatsby’s success, here too he would seem to have been ahead of the curve, helping to embody the American Dream—as well as its dark and violent undersides—as it would continue to develop for the rest of the American Century, and into our own.

Next GatsbyStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts?

April 4, 2025: Foolish Texts: Fool

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

First, repeating yesterday’s a bit of inside baseball: I haven’t yet had a chance to check out either of the texts on which my last two posts in this series will focus. I don’t want to pretend to have specific things to say about them, but I did want to both highlight them and use them as a lens for broader AmericanStudies questions. So in honor of Christopher Moore’s 2009 novel reframing King Lear from the Fool’s perspective, here are AmericanStudies takeaways from a trio of similar such Shakespearean adaptations:

1)      Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966): Tom Stoppard’s play is quite simply one of the most unique and compelling cultural works I’ve ever encountered, and I’d say the 1990 film adaptation captures its essence (if you’re able to check that out more easily than the play). There are a lot of reasons why, from the philosophical debates to the witty wordplay to the ultimate pathos, but I’d say a significant element in the play’s success is integral to this broader genre of cultural text: it reminds us that many of our greatest literary works (especially from earlier centuries, although the trend undoubtedly continues) focus too fully on elite characters and worlds, and that it’s worth stopping to consider how different the story and our takeaways from it alike might look from the perspective of others (to foreshadow next week’s series, Myrtle Wilson, anyone?).

2)      Shakespeare in Love (1998): Look, I know there are people who think this film (co-written by Tom Stoppard!) is one of the most overrated ever, not least because it beat out Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan for the Best Picture Oscar. Maybe all I need to say here is that I 1000% support that Oscar win, and think this is one of the most clever, funny, and ultimately moving films I’ve ever seen. But even if you don’t agree with all of that, I think it’s undeniable that Shakespeare offers a unique and thoughtful perspective on both the creative process and how it intersects with broader historical events. Given how much we tend to think of plays like Romeo and Juliet as timeless or universal, I very much appreciate this film’s reminder that it was created in one time and place, by a playwright and a group of collaborators fully and importantly immersed in that world.

3)      Opheliamachine (2013): I’ve only had the chance to read that Google Books excerpt of Magda Romanska’s postmodern drama (which as you can see only features peripheral materials for and about the play), and so will mostly direct you to check out that excerpt as well as the Wikipedia entry on what sounds like a fascinating attempt to adapt Shakespeare’s characters in a 21^st century world. While there are lots of reasons to create such adaptations, as just these few examples of the genre clearly reflect, I’d say their most important effect is precisely Romanska’s goal: to help us think further about both the original work and our own moment, on their own terms but also and especially in conversation with each other. I love this genre for both those reasons, and look forward to reading Fool soon to add another example!

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

April 3, 2025: Foolish Texts: This Fool

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

First, a bit of inside baseball: I haven’t yet had a chance to check out either of the texts on which my last two posts in this series will focus. I don’t want to pretend to have specific things to say about them, but I did want to both highlight them and use them as a lens for broader AmericanStudies questions. So in honor of the acclaimed recent sitcom about cholo young men and their families and communities in LA, some thoughts on three other Latino cultural works that each redefined their respective genres (as that sitcom seems to have):

1)      Ruiz de Burton’s novels: Between that post for the American Writers Museum blog and posts here like this one, I’ve said a good bit about María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, one of my favorite 19^th century American authors and a truly unique voice and perspective on our history, community, identity, and more. Here I’ll just add one thing: I wrote in this post about my friend Larry Rosenwald’s excellent book Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature (2008), and while Ruiz de Burton published her novels in English, I’d still say she exemplifies a multilingual literary legacy that can help us radically reframe what American literature itself includes and means.

2)      The Salt of the Earth (1954): When it comes to this groundbreaking film about Latino and labor history, I can’t say it any better than did the great film historian Vaughn Joy in that first hyperlinked post for her Review Roulette newsletter. In many ways Salt is in conversation with other films about labor history, including one of my personal favorites from my favorite filmmaker, John Sayles’ Matewan (1987). But in the mid-1950s, with the horrific Operation Wetback in frustratingly full swing, a film about Latino workers represents a truly radical cultural work—and one that likewise embodies an alternative vision of what the era’s “social problem films” could be and do.

3)      In the Heights (2005): As part of a 2016 series on Puerto Rican stories and histories, I wrote about West Side Story (1957), which as I noted there started with very distinct cultural backgrounds for its protagonists before evolving to feature a Puerto Rican heroine (and her even more overtly Puerto Rican friends and community). Given that multilayered evolution, I’d say that the title of “first Latino Broadway musical” was still up for grabs, and that In the Heights might well qualify. But such distinctions are ultimately less important than what cultural works themselves feature and do, and there’s no doubt that the voices and beats, the identities and communities, put on stage by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes added something significant to the genre of the Broadway musical, as each of these texts has in its respective genres.

Last foolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

April 2, 2025: Foolish Texts: Nobody’s Fool

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

Two important American Studies lessons from one of our quirkier, funnier, and more affecting late 20^th century films.

Nobody’s Fool (1994), the Paul Newman starring vehicle based on the 1993 Richard Russo novel of the same name (which I will admit, in a very non-literature professor moment, to not having read), is a very funny movie. It’s funny in its script, which includes plenty of laugh-out-loud funny insults, retorts, and quips; Newman’s Sully gets the lion’s share, but perhaps the single funniest line is given to a judge who critiques a trigger-happy local policemen by noting, “You know my feelings on arming morons: you arm one, you’ve got to arm them all, otherwise it wouldn’t be good sport.” And it’s just as funny in its world, its creation of a cast of quirky and memorable characters (who, not coincidentally, are played by some of our most talented character actors, including Jessica Tandy in her final role). That those same characters are ultimately the source of a number of hugely moving moments is a testament to the film’s (and probably book’s) true greatness.

Unlike many of the other late 20^th and early 21^st century films I’ve discussed in this space—Lone Star and City of Hope, Gangs of New York, Jungle Fever and Mississippi Masala, and many more—Nobody’s Fool is not explicitly engaged with significant American Studies issues. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t American Studies lessons to be learned from its subtle and wise perspectives on identity and community. For one thing, Sully’s most central culminating perspective (SPOILER alert, here and in the next paragraph!) is a powerful and important vision of our interconnectedness to the many communities of which we’re a meaningful part: “I just found out I’m somebody’s grandfather. And somebody’s father. And maybe I’m somebody’s friend in the bargain,” Sully notes, rejecting a tempting but escapist future in favor of staying where he is; while he has ostensibly known about all these relationships for years, what he has realized through the film’s events is both how significant these roles are for his own identity and life, and how much his presence or absence in relation to them will in turn influence the people and communities around him.

If Sully has learned that specific, significant lesson by the film’s end, he has also, more simply yet perhaps even more crucially, done something else: recognized the possibility for change. Sully’s not a young man by the time we meet him, and it’s fair to say that he’s very set in his ways; one of his first lines of the film, in response to his landlady (Tandy) offering him tea, is “No. Not now, not ever,” and the exchange becomes a mantra of sorts for the film, shorthand for Sully’s routines (with every person in his life) and the fixity of his perspective and voice. So it’s particularly salient that the film ends with an extended and different version of this exchange: “No. How many times do I have to tell you?” Newman replies, and Tandy answers, “Other people change their minds occasionally. I keep thinking you might.” “You do? Huh,” are Newman’s final words in the film, and he delivers them with surprise and, it seems to me, a recognition, paired with the earlier epiphany about interconnections, that perhaps Tandy is right, and he has future shifts ahead of him that he can’t yet imagine. If the American future is going to be all that it might be, that’s going to depend on most—perhaps all—of us being open to change, most especially in our own identities and perspectives; Sully’s only begun that trajectory, but exemplifies its possibility, at any point in our lives and arcs, for sure.

Next foolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

April 1, 2025: Foolish Texts: “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On AmericanStudies lessons and limits from an English classic rock anthem.

In one of my early posts, nearly 14 years ago, I wrote about the Australian rock band Midnight Oil (whose excellent latest album I included in this much more recent post), and the limits but also and especially the possibilities of the transnational turn in AmericanStudies. Since I’m writing about a song by another rock group from outside of the US, England’s The Who, in today’s post, I’d ask you to check out that prior one (the first hyperlink above), and then come on back for some thoughts on that transnational band and one of their biggest hits.

Welcome back! The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (1971) is very much a product of its early 1970s moment, and specifically of a rising sense of pessimism and even cynicism about the prior decade’s social movements and efforts to change the world. That tone is present throughout the song, but most especially in the chorus: “I’ll tip my hat to the new Constitution/Take a bow for the new revolution/Smile and grin at the change all around/Pick up my guitar and play/Just like yesterday/Then I’ll get on my knees and pray/We don’t get fooled again.” A lot has been written about how Watergate contributed to an erosion of trust and shift away from 1960s idealism in the early to mid-1970s, but this song (featured on the album Who’s Next) came out nearly two years before that scandal began to break, and despite its English origins I have to think it can be contextualized in similar perspectives in the US as well. The transition between decades is never a singular nor linear one, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t moments of demarcation, and I’d say this Who song can help us identify one between the 60s and 70s.

At the same time, it’s fair to say that a bunch of English white men aren’t going to be the best judges of what did and didn’t take place for disadvantaged American communities, and I think this Who song also features some less apt moments along those lines. For example, there’s the second verse: “A change, it had to come/We knew it all along/We were liberated from the fold, that’s all/And the world looks just the same/And history ain’t changed/’Cause the banners, they were all flown in the last war.” Maybe that last line is an anti-Vietnam War sentiment, in which case fair enough on that score, but when it comes to American domestic history I think it’s impossible to argue that the world looked just the same after 1960s changes like (for example) the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement, the Great Society programs, and more. I’m not a historian of England, and maybe less had really changed across the pond during this turbulent decade; but here in the US, I think it’d be foolish to suggest that “history ain’t changed” over that time.

Next foolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

March 31, 2025: Foolish Texts: A Fool’s Errand

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two inspiring layers to one of our most unique novels.

In this early post, I wrote about the life and career of Albion Tourgée, one of my favorite Americans for a wide variety of reasons (including but not limited to those I detailed in that post). I had a good bit to say there about his first novel A Fool’s Errand, by One of the Fools (1879), so I’d ask you to check out that post if you would and then come on back for some further thoughts.

Welcome back! As I discussed in that post, the title of Tourgée’s novel is not misleading, as it takes a consistently ironic and self-deprecating perspective on its autobiographical protagonist’s efforts to contribute positively to Reconstruction’s efforts. To be very clear, that doesn’t mean Tourgée is critical of Reconstruction’s goals when it comes to African Americans and equality (he dedicated his life to those goals, as I hope that prior post illustrated at length), but rather that he recognizes that his own youthful, lofty ambitions and sense of self-importance were severely punctured by his experiences during Reconstruction and his recognition of the limitations of both any individual’s reach and (more complicatedly to be sure) societal change. I remain less cynical and more optimistic than the tone of Fool’s Errand (yes, even in early 2025), but I nonetheless think being able to reflect thoughtfully and critically on our own ambitions and arc is an important and inspiring skill to model.

In both that prior post and the paragraph above I focused on the real-life elements of Tourgée’s book—the autobiographical echoes and the political and cultural contexts of Reconstruction. But while those are undoubtedly present and perhaps even paramount in the book, it’s important to add that it is a novel, a work of fiction, as was Tourgée’s follow-up second book about the Black experience of Reconstruction, Bricks Without Straw (1880). Which is to say, having spent years serving as a lawyer, politician, and journalist (careers he would continue fully and successfully for the rest of his life), at the age of 40 Tourgée turned his hand to creative writing and published not one but two novels in a two-year span. And they’re good, with really interesting creative choices (such as the distanced third-person narration of Fool’s) that engage his readers and get them thinking about those aforementioned personal and political contexts. As someone who’s own career and writing have evolved a good bit over the decades, and who hopes that trend continues for the rest of my life, I find this aspect of Tourgée’s not-at-all foolish books particularly inspiring as well.

Next foolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

March 29-30, 2025: March 2025 Recap

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

March 3: Hockey Histories: Origin Points: On the 150^th anniversary of the first organized hockey game, a series on the sport’s histories kicks off with three telling layers to that first game.

March 4: Hockey Histories: Fighting: The series continues with the way not to argue for the sport’s violent tradition, and a possible way to do so.

March 5: Hockey Histories: The Miracle on Ice: The symbolic role of sports in society, and the line between history and story, as the series skates on.

March 6: Hockey Histories: Black Players: Three groundbreaking players who together reflect the sport’s gradual evolution towards its more diverse 21^st century community.

March 7: Hockey Histories: Team Trans: The series concludes with two complicated and equally important ways to contextualize a groundbreaking hockey team.

March 8-9: Significant Sports Studiers: Following up my own SportsStudying, a special weekend post highlighting Bluesky Starter Packs of other SportsStudiers.

March 10: Spring Breaking at the Movies: Spring Break: A Spring Break series on cinematic representations of the college tradition starts with more and less destructive pop culture stereotypes in a 1983 non-classic.

March 11: Spring Breaking at the Movies: Spring Breakers: The series continues with the fine line between challenging and exploiting the objectification of female celebrities.

March 12: Spring Breaking at the Movies: From Justin to Kelly: What wasn’t new about a historic beach bomb, and what was, as the series parties on.

March 13: Spring Breaking at the Movies: Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise: American anti-intellectualism and the worse and better ways to challenge it.

March 14: Spring Breaking at the Movies: Baywatch: The series concludes with a repeat of one of my favorite posts, on why the beautiful beach bodies are also a body of evidence.

March 15-16: Reflections of a College Dad: As I near the end of my first year as a college dad (and the start of my first year with two young men in college…le sigh), three of the countless moments when I’ve been pleasantly reminded of my changed circumstances.

March 17: ScopesStudying: The Butler Act: For the 100^th anniversary of the anti-evolution Tennessee law, a series on it and its famous legal aftermath kicks off with three historical ironies.

March 18: ScopesStudying: John Scopes: The series continues with three interesting facts about the science teacher who became the center of one of our most famous trials.

March 19: ScopesStudying: Bryan and Darrow: Two ways to contextualize the trial’s most famous debate, as the series evolves on.

March 20: ScopesStudying: Three Plays: How three stage adaptations of the trial reflect the fraught relationship between art and history.

March 21: ScopesStudying: “Part Man, Part Monkey”: The series concludes with three layers to one of Springsteen’s funniest and most under-rated tracks (just ask my wife!).

March 22-23: 21^st Century Attacks on Educators: A special weekend post on what’s new about our horrifying spate of anti-education attacks, and what’s frustratingly not.

March 24: Patriotic Speeches: Patrick Henry: A series for the 250^th anniversary of the “Give me liberty” speech kicks off with excerpts from book on the contested history of American patriotism.

March 25: Patriotic Speeches: Frederick Douglass: The series continues with the stunning critical patriotic speech that’s just as important 170 years later.

March 26: Patriotic Speeches: August Spies: The inspiring patriotic speech that concluded a farcical show trial, as the series orates on.

March 27: Patriotic Speeches: Margaret Chase Smith: Why we shouldn’t misrepresent a famous 1950 speech as apolitical, and why it’s well worth celebrating nevertheless.

March 28: Patriotic Speeches: Alexander Vindman: The series concludes with another excerpt from my book, this one on a crucial 21^st century moment of critical patriotism.

April Fools series starts Monday,

Ben

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

March 28, 2025: Patriotic Speeches: Alexander Vindman

[250 years ago this past Saturday, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech to the Virginia Assembly. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other patriotic speeches!]

Since I began this week’s series with an excerpt from Of Thee I Sing, I wanted to end it with another, the opening paragraphs of the book’s Introduction:

“On November 19th, 2019, Army Lt. Colonel and National Security Council (NSC) official Alexander Vindman testified before the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Vindman, who had first-hand knowledge of the telephone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, offered testimony that was highly damaging to the president, and so Trump’s defenders and allies went on the attack against Vindman. They did so in large part by using his story as a Ukrainian American immigrant to directly impugn his patriotism and implicitly accuse him of treason: after Fox News host Laura Ingraham highlighted Vindman’s background in relationship to his work as a Ukraine expert for the NSC, law professor and former Bush administration official John Yoo replied, “I find that astounding, and some people might call that espionage”; and the next morning CNN contributor and former Republican Congressman Sean Duffy went further, claiming, “I don’t know that he’s concerned about American policy, but his main mission was to make sure that the Ukraine got those weapons . . . He’s entitled to his opinion. He has an affinity for the Ukraine, he speaks Ukrainian, and he came from the country.” Unstated but clearly present in these responses is the idea that Vindman’s criticism of the president had marked him as unpatriotic and even un-American, opening up these broader questions about his affinities and allegiances.

Just over a century earlier, however, former president Teddy Roosevelt began his 1918 Metropolitan magazine article “Lincoln and Free Speech” with these lines: “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country . . . In either event it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth—whether about the President or anyone else.” And in the prepared statement with which he began his testimony, Alexander Vindman expresses his own vision of patriotism clearly. “I have dedicated my entire professional life to the United States of America,” he begins. “As a young man I decided that I wanted to spend my life serving the nation that gave my family refuge from authoritarian oppression, and for the last twenty years it has been an honor to represent and protect this great country.” He contextualizes his ability to offer such honest public testimony as part of “the privilege of being an American citizen and public servant.” And he ends with his father, whose “courageous decision” to leave the U.S.S.R. and move his family to the United States had, Vindman argues, “inspired a deep sense of gratitude in my brothers and myself and instilled in us a sense of duty and service.” Addressing his father directly with his closing words, Vindman makes a moving and compelling case for Roosevelt’s point about the essential patriotism of telling the truth: “Dad, my sitting here today . . . is proof that you made the right decision forty years ago to leave the Soviet Union and come here to the United States of America in search of a better life for our family. Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth.””

As I go on to trace there, and as has only become more evident in the years since, Vindman was not entirely fine, as he paid both a professional and a personal price for his truth-telling critical patriotism. Here in March 2025, a couple months into the second and even more radical and unhinged administration of the President whose allies and supporters levied those attacks on Vindman, it’s fair to say that critical patriotism has become one of the most fraught perspectives one can take on the U.S. government. But, as I hope every figure and speech in this week’s series has illustrated, critical patriotism has always been fraught and fragile, always put those who express and fight for it in danger, and always been an absolutely essential element of our nation’s ideals and identity. May we learn from and live up to the legacies of these figures, and of all our critical patriots, past and present.

March Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Speeches you’d highlight?

March 27, 2025: Patriotic Speeches: Margaret Chase Smith

[250 years ago this past Saturday, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech to the Virginia Assembly. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other patriotic speeches!]

On why we shouldn’t misrepresent a 1950 Senate speech, and why it’s well worth celebrating nonetheless.

Throughout her long and impressive life and political career, Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995) was two things in roughly equal measure: a groundbreaking woman in American politics, including the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress and the first to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency at a major party’s political convention; and a prominent figure and voice in the Republican Party, both in her home state of Maine and on the national landscape. There’s of course nothing wrong with her being associated with both of those histories, and indeed I would say the opposite—too much of the time we view our most pioneering figures as somehow outside of our politics, and reversing that trend would help us understand how everything in our history is political, even if (or rather especially because) it also has the potential to transcend politics.

The single most famous moment in Smith’s political career, her June 1, 1950 “Declaration of Conscience” speech to the Senate, perfectly embodies both of those layers. It most definitely represented a Republican Senator’s perspective on both the Democratic Truman administration and the upcoming presidential election, as illustrated by lines like: “The Democratic administration has greatly lost the confidence of the American people by its complacency to the threat of communism here at home and the leak of vital secrets to Russia through key officials of the Democratic administration….Surely these are sufficient reasons to make it clear to the American people that it is time for a change and that a Republican victory is necessary to the security of the country.” Smith, a moderate Republican throughout her career, had previously been an ally of President Truman on various issues, and so these political and electoral statements were significant ones and can’t be overlooked when we remember Smith’s speech.

Yet Smith’s speech also and crucially transcended such partisan political concerns, offering one of the earliest public critiques of Senator Joe McCarthy and in the process making a critical patriotic case for a very different vision of the Senate, the US government, and American ideals. It did so through perhaps her most famous lines, “As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist….They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of our ourselves.” But it also did so through her argument for “some of the basic principles of Americanism,” including “The right to criticize,” “The right to hold unpopular beliefs,” and “The right to protest.” Throughout Of Thee I Sing I make the case for both criticism overall and protest specifically as core characteristics of critical patriotism, and I’m not sure anyone has made that case more potently in a political setting than did Margaret Chase Smith on the Senate floor.

Last SpeechStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Speeches you’d highlight?

March 26, 2025: Patriotic Speeches: August Spies

[250 years ago this past Saturday, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech to the Virginia Assembly. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other patriotic speeches!]

On the inspiring patriotic speech that concluded a farcical show trial.

From the outset, the arrest and trial of the Haymarket “bombers” was an overt case of presumed guilt, and not just (not really at all) for the Haymarket Square bombing. The media used the bombing to whip up xenophobic fears and violent exclusionary fantasies, as illustrated by a Chicago Times editorial that argued, “Let us whip these slavic wolves back to the European dens from which they issue, or in some way exterminate them.” The police followed suit, raiding the offices of the pro-labor newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung without a warrant and arresting its editors, and then doing the same with the residences of numerous known socialist and anarchist activists. While the eight men eventually charged with the bombing were indeed swept up during these widespread raids (including those two newspaper editors, August Spies and Michael Schwab), there is ample evidence to suggest that the raids were designed and executed to intimidate and destroy entire communities, and that picking scapegoats for the bombing from among those targets was simply a convenient side effect.

The trial itself was no more fair or legally sound. The eight defendants were charged not with the bombing itself, but with the broader and vaguer charge of conspiracy, which came to mean simply producing anarchist journalism and propaganda that might have inspired a bomb-thrower: as state’s attorney Julius Grinnell instructed the jury, “The question for you to determine is, having ascertained that a murder was committed, not only who did it, but who is responsible for it, who abetted it, assisted it, or encouraged it?” That jury was hand-picked from the jury pool by the court’s bailiff, a break from the normal random selection procedure; it included no immigrants or laborers. After presenting the jury with a long series of circumstancial and tangential details and accusations that only vaguely connected any of the defendants to the Haymarket violence, in his closing argument Grinnell made plain the trial’s true stakes: acquitting the defendants would mean more radicals on the city’s streets, “"like a lot of rats and vermin”; and only the jurors “stand between the living and the dead. You stand between law and violated law.”

Unsurprisingly, the jury convicted the defendants, with seven sentenced to death and one (labor organizer Oscar Neebe) to fifteen years in prison. Four were executed in November 1887, while three others had their sentences commuted to life in prison or otherwise were still in limbo when Illinois Governor John Altgeld pardoned them in 1893, his first year in office (due to his outrage at the farcical arrests and trial). That pardon (which cost Altgeld his political career) was one inspiring moment to emerge from this historic injustice, but to my mind even more inspiring was August Spies’s concluding statement to the judge and jury. “The contemplated murder of eight men,” Spies argued, “whose only crime is that they have dared to speak the truth, may open the eyes of these suffering millions; may wake them up.” Detailing the prosecutor and judge’s numerous inappropriate and likely illegal staetments, he added, “I will say that if I had not been an Anarchist at the beginning of this trial I would be one now.” And in his concluding paragraphs, he brilliantly reversed the concepts of patriotism and treason that had been used to condemn the defendants: “I can well understand why that man Grinnell did not urge upon the grand jury to charge us with treason. I can well understand it. You cannot try and convict a man for treason who has upheld the Constitution against those who trample it under their feet.” A moment of American ideals amidst a history that did indeed trample upon them.

Next SpeechStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Speeches you’d highlight?

March 25, 2025: Patriotic Speeches: Frederick Douglass

[250 years ago this past Saturday, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech to the Virginia Assembly. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other patriotic speeches!]

On the stunning critical patriotic speech that challenges us as much today as it did 173 years ago.

I’ve written many times, in this space and elsewhere, about the inspiring history of Elizabeth Freeman, Quock Walker, and their Revolutionary-era peers. Freeman and Walker, and the abolitionist activists with whom they worked, used the language and ideas of the Declaration of Independence (along with the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution) in support of their anti-slavery petitions and legal victories, and in so doing contributed significantly to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. I’m hard-pressed to think of a more inspiring application of our national ideals, or of a more compelling example of my argument (made in this piece) that black history is American history. Yet at the same time, it would be disingenuous in the extreme for me to claim that Freeman and Walker’s cases were representative ones, either in their era or at any time in the more than two and a half centuries of American slavery; nor would I want to use Freeman and Walker’s successful legal victories as evidence that the Declaration’s “All men are created equal” sentiment did not in a slaveholding nation include (indeed, embody) a central strain of hypocrisy.

If I ever need reminding of that foundational American hypocrisy, I can turn to one of our most fiery texts: Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass’s speech is long and multi-layered, and I don’t want to reduce its historical and social visions to any one moment; but I would argue that it builds with particular power to this passage, one of the most trenchant in American oration and writing: “Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?” The subsequent second half of the speech sustains that perspective and passion, impugning every element of a nation still entirely defined by slavery and its effects. Despite having begun his speech by noting his “quailing sensation,” his feeling of appearing before the august gathering “shrinkingly,” Douglass thus builds instead to one of the most full-throated, confident critiques of American hypocrisy and failure ever articulated.

As an avowed and thoroughgoing optimist, it’s far easier for me to grapple with Freeman and Walker’s use of the Declaration and the 4^th of July than with Douglass’s—which, of course, makes it that much more important for me to include Douglass in my purview, and which is why I wanted to include Douglass's speech in this week’s series on patriotic speeches. There’s a reason, after all, why the most famous American enslaved person is undoubtedly Harriet Tubman—we like our histories overtly inspiring, and if we’re going to remember slavery at all, why not do so through the lens of someone who resisted it so successfully? Yet while Tubman, like Freeman and Walker, is certainly worth remembering, the overarching truth of slavery in America is captured far better by Douglass’s speech and its forceful attention to our national hypocrisies and flaws. And despite the ridiculous recent attacks on “too negative” histories or the concept of “apologizing for America,” there’s no way we can understand our nation or move forward collectively without a fuller engagement with precisely the critically patriotic lens provided by Douglass and his stunning speech.

Next SpeechStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Speeches you’d highlight?

March 24, 2025: Patriotic Speeches: Patrick Henry

[250 years ago this past Saturday, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech to the Virginia Assembly. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other patriotic speeches!]

For the anniversary of Henry’s speech, I wanted to share my three paragraphs on it at the start of Chapter 1 of Of Thee I Sing:

On March 23rd, 1775, a 38-year old attorney, planter, and delegate to the Vir[1]ginia House of Burgesses named Patrick Henry (1736–1799) rose to give a speech at the Second Virginia Convention. That convention, held from March 20^th–23^rd at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Richmond in order to maintain distance from the colony’s royal Governor Dunmore and his administration in Williamsburg, was the second in a series of meetings of delegates and other civic leaders to debate the question of independence for Virginia and the colonies. Henry had proposed that the colonists raise a militia that would exist separate from the English army and government, and some of the convention’s more moderate attendees had spoken out against that proposal as too belligerent and likely to increase the chances of war.

Henry’s speech became famous, and a rallying cry for the incipient revolution, due to his closing line: “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” But what’s particularly striking about the speech is that Henry frames his revolutionary sentiments through an initial lens not of liberty but of patriotism. He opens by making his disagreement with his fellow delegates about precisely that topic, his vision of patriotism in response to theirs: “No man thinks more highly than I do of the patriotism, as well as abilities, of the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the House. But different men often see the same subject in different lights; and, therefore, I hope it will not be thought disrespectful to those gentlemen if, entertaining as I do, opinions of a character very opposite to theirs, I shall speak forth my sentiments freely, and without reserve.”

Moreover, Henry makes clear that he sees his responsibility to offer such sentiments as itself an expression and exemplification of patriotism. “Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offence,” he admits, “I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country.” Given that Virginia (like all the colonies) was still part of England at this time, and Henry thus a subject of King George like every other Virginian, he here reframes the interconnected concepts of patriotism and treason in a particularly bold and crucial way. That is, while he goes on to argue that freedom is “the glorious object of our contest,” he frames the battle to attain that freedom, “the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged” and of which his own speech becomes a part, not just as an opposition to one nation, but also and especially as a patriotic embrace of another, new nation.

Next SpeechStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Speeches you’d highlight?

March 22-23, 2025: 21st Century Attacks on Educators

[100 years ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied that law and the famous trial it produced, leading up to this weekend post on current attacks on educators.]

On what’s new about our spate of anti-education attacks, and what’s not.

In my post-Valentine’s non-favorites series two years ago, I included this post on “Non-Favorite Trends: Attacking Teachers & Librarians.” Such attacks have sadly not dissipated at all since that time—indeed, there seem to be even more of them over those subsequent two years—and so I’d ask you to check out that post if you would and then come on back with a couple further thoughts.

Welcome back! I don’t want in any significant way to echo recent voices (most notably a very frustrating Atlantic cover story published after the insurance CEO murder, to which I will not link here as I think it was as a-historical as anything I’ve read in a while) who have argued that contemporary America is more violent, or at least more accepting of violence, than in the past—I’m with Richard Slotkin when it comes to the foundational presence and role of violence in American history and identity. But I would agree with the author of this DailyKos post—our frustrating acceptance of right-wing violence, and indeed the endorsement of it by some of our most powerful political figures, is without question a deepening and terrifying trend in early 2025. No single day better reflects that trend than January 6^th, 2021, but the truth is that institutions like schools and libraries have been threatened more consistently than any other public spaces, both in the ostensible context of specific events like drag storytimes and just because, y’know, they have books and larnin’ and whatnot.

Like mass shootings and open carry and all sorts of other corollaries to our ever-more-ubiquitous gun culture, these right-wing threats do seem to have increased dramatically in recent years. But it’s really important to locate them as part of America’s longstanding, if not indeed foundational, legacy of attacks on educators and educational institutions from right-wing (and generally white supremacist) domestic terrorists. Up here in New England we’ve got one of the most overt such attacks, the 1835 destruction of Canaan, New Hampshire’s groundbreaking, abolitionist and co-educational Noyes Academy for African Americans. While I wouldn’t disagree with folks who would want to locate those histories as part of America’s overarching and equally foundational streak of anti-intellectualism, it doesn’t seem to me that anti-intellectualism alone would be enough to motivate people to physically and violently attack institutions—it takes the all-too-American marriage of anti-intellectualism with white supremacy to really produce this legacy, in which our own moment remains firmly located.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 21, 2025: ScopesStudying: “Part Man, Part Monkey”

[100 years ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famous trial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks on educators.]

On three layers to the monkey-centered content and tone in Bruce Springsteen’s under-appreciated gem (one of my wife’s favorite Boss songs):

1)      Humorous Intent: I don’t think Bruce has written a funnier verse than this song’s first: “They prosecuted some poor sucker in these United States/For teaching that man descended from the apes/They coudla settled that case without a fuss or a fight/If they’d seen me chasin’ you sugar through the jungle last night/They’da called in that jury and a one two three/Said part man, part monkey, definitely.” I have to believe that Bruce, who has a delightful sense of humor in and about his work (and in life in general), began writing this song with precisely that straightforward thought—that this was a really funny premise and twist on relationship songs (he apparently first wrote and recorded it during the Tunnel of Love sessions, when he was focused on such subjects). Plus, as my wife would insist I add, “these United States” is one of Bruce’s funnier individual turns of phrase in any song.

2)      Human Impulses: I can count on one hand the Bruce songs that don’t have multiple layers, though, and it’s the way in which each verse in this song takes us to a new place that makes it as great as it is. The opening lines of the second verse connect the song’s central image very fully to Tunnel’s raw, honest, and frequently dark portrayal of marriage: “Well the church bell rings from the corner steeple/Man in a monkey suit swears he’ll do no evil/Offers his lover’s prayer but his soul lies/Dark and driftin’ and unsatisfied.” When the song’s speaker then asks the “bartender” what he sees and the bartender responds, “Part man, part monkey, looks like to me,” that repeated titular image is no longer just a funny depiction of the quest for sex or love—it’s a reflection of some of the most natural yet most destructive human impulses, the most animal and unattractive parts of ourselves.

3)      The Heart of the Issue: After a very sexy bridge, the song’s final verse takes us to a logical but still I would argue unexpected place—back to the Scopes monkey trial, and to the heart of that trial’s debates. “Well did God make men in a breath of holy fire?/Or did he crawl on up out of the muck and fire?/The man on the street believes what the Bible tells him so/Well you can ask me, mister, because I know/Tell them soul-sucking preachers to come on down and see/Part man, part monkey, baby that’s me.” By the heart of the issue, I do mean in part questions of religion and evolution, of what we believe about where we come from. But I also and especially mean the question of whether we believe because of the myths we’re told by traditional “authorities,” or believe based on our own critical perspectives on and understandings of the world as it is. And I’m with Bruce’s speaker (and Clarence Darrow, and Scopes): to believe based on the myths we’re told is, ultimately, soul-sucking.

21^st century contexts this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 20, 2025: ScopesStudying: Three Plays

[100 years ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famous trial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks on educators.]

How three stage adaptations of the trial reflect the fraught relationship between art and history.

1)      Inherit the Wind (1955): Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s play, which has been itself adapted into multiple films for both screen and TV, is in many ways the most well-known representation of the Scopes trial. Which is quite ironic, since in their “Playwrights’ Note” before the text Lawrence and Lee explicitly argue that the play “is not history,” that “it is not 1925,” and that “the stage directions set the time as ‘Not long ago.’ It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow.” To my mind both the play and the 1960 film adaptation are profoundly focused on contexts and questions from the age of McCarthy, making Inherit very much a counterpart to The Crucible (1953) and far more interesting as a 1950s text than a portrayal of the 1920s.

2)      Inherit the Truth (1987): As that article traces at length, Dayton playwright’s Gale Johnson’s 1980s play was overtly and entirely intended as a rebuttal to Inherit the Wind, but not so much in terms of historical inaccuracies about the trial per se. Instead, Johnson believed that the prior play had badly misrepresented both William Jennings Bryan and the town of Dayton, and sought to correct those errors with a play that is hugely laudatory toward both the man and the community (or at least its conservative Christians). I haven’t read Johnson’s play so I can’t speak to its specifics, and in any case it’s important to note that her goals are no more (or less) problematic than those of any playwright. But I’d say her use of the word “Truth” in her title is deeply problematic, and indeed extends Bryan’s embrace of mythic patriotism about which I wrote in yesterday’s post.

3)      The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial (1993): Whatever its flaws, though, Johnson’s play seems to have had at least one important positive effect: it helped encourage playwright Peter Goodchild to write a play based far more explicitly on the trial’s transcripts and histories than either of the Inherits had been. In awarding Goodchild’s play its Earphones Award, Audiofile magazine noted that, “Because there are no recordings of the actual trial, this production is certainly the next best thing.” I hear that, and using transcripts is definitely a way to guarantee a significant degree of historical accuracy. But at the same time, any actor who performs Goodchild’s roles is an actor who’s performing, not (for example) Bryan or Darrow themselves. So the relationship of art and history remains at least a bit complicated here, if certainly distinct than with either of those prior stage adaptations.

Last Scopes context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 19, 2025: ScopesStudying: Bryan and Darrow

[100 years ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famous trial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks on educators.]

On two ways to contextualize the Scopes trial’s (and one of America’s) most famous debate.

Prominent trials can frequently morph into something different from and more than their explicit legal focus, but I’m not sure any trial in American history did so more clearly than did the Scopes trial (certainly the OJ trial is a contender for that title as well). Given that Scopes was recruited to stand trial as I discussed in yesterday’s post, perhaps the trial was always destined to become focused on much more than just this one teacher’s case or even the Butler Act specifically. But it truly evolved thanks to the involvement of two of the nation’s most famous legal and political figures, on the trial’s two respective sides: for the prosecution, “The Great Commoner” himself William Jennings Bryan; and for the defense, without question the nation’s most prominent lawyer in the period, just a year past his celebrated closing in the trial of Leopold & Loeb, Clarence Darrow. The battle between the two men and their respective positions on evolution, religion, and society became the story of the trial, and culminated in Darrow’s two-hour questioning of Bryan on the courthouse lawn (so a larger audience could hear it) on July 20, 1925.

The excellent pieces at those last two hyperlinks tell the story of that debate, and of the two men’s overall involvement in the trial, at length, and I encourage you to read both of them to learn more about this famous, fraught, and fascinating moment in American legal and social history. Here I want to offer two different but interconnected ways to contextualize the Bryan-Darrow showdown. The more obvious, and certainly not an inaccurate one, is that it exemplified a series of ongoing cultural and national clashes in early 20^th century America: between the 19^th and 20^th centuries, between a more traditional and more modern perspective, between rural and urban communities, between (most obviously of all I suppose) conservatism and progressivism. The breakdown of those categories is nowhere near as straightforward or simple as they might suggest, not in 1925 and not at any other point—21^st century conservatives have pegged Woodrow Wilson as a progressive icon, for example; let’s just say I would strenuously disagree—but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t particularly striking moments of overt conflict between them, and the Bryan-Darrow debate definitely qualifies as such.

But I would add that the debate also reflected another defining duality, one that is at the heart of my most recent book and likewise of many of my analyses of our current moment: the conflict between mythic and critical patriotisms. It might seem that it was the Bible on which that conflict between the two men was focused: Bryan had delivered a famous speech in Tennessee not long before the trial began entitled “Is the Bible True?”; and Darrow grilled him at length, and from the general consensus of the audience to great success (as one commentator put it, “As a man and as a legend, Bryan was destroyed by his testimony that day”), on many Biblical stories that could not possibly be literally true. But I believe their respective perspectives also embody mythic and critical patriotism as I’ve tried to defined them over the last few years. At one point Bryan answered Darrow, “I do not think about things I don’t think about,” which sure captures mythic patriotism’s narrow and exclusionary focus. Whereas Darrow’s probing and critical perspective, expressed throughout this debate and the trial as a whole, reflects his overarching view that “True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”

Next Scopes context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?