April 4, 2016: Remembering Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Bureau

[This weekend marks the 150^th anniversary of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1866, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennials over the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five Reconstruction histories, leading up to a special weekend post on the Civil Rights Act.]

On a major and telling reason why the Bureau failed, and two lasting legacies nonetheless.

The March 3, 1865 legislation which established the federal Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (better known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) includes a stunning detail that reflects just how ill prepared the nation was for the realities of Reconstruction: the Bureau was initially intended to exist for only one year. As a result, when the Congressional Republicans supporting Reconstruction passed a bill to renew the Bureau’s charter one year later, in February 1866, President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill (one more example in the long list of “What if Lincoln had lived?” hypotheticals), and over the subsequent few years the Bureau became increasingly under-funded, -staffed, and –supported. By 1869 the Bureau was operating only a skeleton staff; by 1872 the Bureau’s director, former Union General Oliver Howard, had been transferred to the West to handle Native American policy, and the Bureau ceased operations entirely. Yet in truth, this seemingly essential Reconstruction program only experienced one year of full support, a telling representation of how significantly hamstrung Reconstruction efforts were from their very outset.

Despite those significant limitations, however, and despite the intense opposition it faced during and after 1865-66 from discriminatory Black Codes, the terrors of the Ku Klux Klan, and so many other aspects of postbellum Southern society, the Bureau achieved a number of impressive, lasting results. The most prominent such effects were those related to education, and they took hold very quickly and potently: by the end of 1865, nearly 100,000 former slaves were enrolled in public schools run by or in conjunction with the Bureau, and despite all the obstacles confronting those students attendance rates apparently remained steady around 80%. When the post-1866 cuts in funding and staffing made it nearly impossible to run all these schools (church groups and other communities fortunately stepped in to keep many running), the Bureau shifted its focus to creating institutions of higher education: nearly 25 such colleges were created between 1865 and 1872, and many of them (such as Howard University, Fisk University, and Tougaloo College) remain in service today as historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In and of themselves those colleges and universities represent a potent legacy of the Bureau’s educational efforts.

Far more intimate and thus more difficult to quantify, but at least as significant, were the Bureau’s efforts to assist freed people’s families, including working to reunite separate family members and performing marriages. Marriages during slavery were neither legal nor binding, and that reality both made family reunification that much more difficult and presented a host of other legal and social problems in the postbellum world. By not only performing but legalizing marriages between former slaves, then, the Bureau was able to fundamentally alter the legal and social as well as familial realities for these freed men and women, and for their families, descendents, and communities. Charles Chesnutt’s stunning short story “The Wife of His Youth” (1898) highlights how complicated but also how crucial were ideas of marriage and family for those who had experienced the fragility and absence of those core human experiences under slavery. In helping counter those horrific past realities and offer freed men and women a much different set of marital and family possibilities, the Bureau performed both a human and historical service whose legacies cannot be overstated.

Next Reconstruction remembrance tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?

April 2-3, 2016: March 2016 Recap

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

February 29: Montreal Memories: The McCord Museum: A series on how Montreal remembers kicks off with a great, complicatedly located cultural history exhibit.

March 1: Montreal Memories: Pointe-à-Callière: The series continues with the limitations and possibilities of archaeological history.

March 2: Montreal Memories: The Museum of Fine Arts: The artistic and historical pavilion that complements my prior two museums, as the series rolls on.

March 3: Montreal Memories: Vieux Montréal: Three telling spots that capture the complex past and present of Old Montreal.

March 4: Montreal Memories: Anglais and French: The series concludes with two ways Montreal’s bilingualism can serve as a model for America.

March 5-6: Canadian Colleagues: Wrapping up a Canadian series by highlighting some of the many great Canadian colleagues I’ve worked with!

March 7: Puerto Rican Posts: West Side Story: A Boricua series starts with the musical’s surprising history and its limits and strengths as a cultural text.

March 8: Puerto Rican Posts: Martín Espada: The series continues with a few complementary ways the Puerto Rican poet portrays his heritage.

March 9: Puerto Rican Posts: Raúl Julía: AmericanStudying three iconic performances from the talented birthday boy, as the series rolls on.

March 10: Puerto Rican Posts: J. Lo and Marc Anthony: The linked but divergent paths of two of the most famous Puerto Rican American musicians.

March 11: Puerto Rican Posts: Sotomayor’s Story: The series concludes with what’s profoundly cultural about the Supreme Court Justice’s autobiography, and what’s not.

March 12-13: Puerto Rican Posts: The Statehood Debate: A weekend special on five historical moments that have brought the debate over Puerto Rican statehood up to the present.

March 14: Political Thrillers: Tom Clancy: A thrilling series kicks off with the guilty pleasures of my childhood favorite novelist.

March 15: Political Thrillers: Ripley and Bourne: The series continues with two complex, thrilling, and very American characters.

March 16: Political Thrillers: The Pelican Brief: What’s not particularly political about the John Grisham thriller and what is, as the series rolls on.

March 17: Political Thrillers: Enemy of the State: The underrated political thriller that’s as prescient as it is paranoid.

March 18: Political Thrillers: Manchurian Candidates: The series concludes with political thrillers on page and screen, and how reality might trump both of them.

March 19-20: Crowd-sourced Thrillers: Really interesting responses and arguments from one fellow ThrillerStudier—please add your own in comments!

March 21: NeMLA Recaps: Public School Visits: A series recapping the 2016 Northeast MLA convention in Hartford starts with Thursday’s first steps toward connecting NeMLA to public schools.

March 22: NeMLA Recaps: The Public Humanities: The series continues with highlights from Friday’s presidential sessions on public humanities, leading up to Jelani Cobb’s keynote address!

March 23: NeMLA Recaps: Creative Readings: Takeaways from three impressive creative writers featured at the conference, as the series rolls on.

March 24: NeMLA Recaps: The State of the Academy: Three distinct but interconnected issues that came up in Saturday’s presidential sessions on higher ed.

March 25: NeMLA Recaps: Many Thanks: The series concludes with a few of the many thanks I have to express to all those who made the conference so successful.

March 26-27: What’s Next for NeMLA: Three ways you can get involved in next year’s NeMLA Convention in Baltimore and with the great organization as we move forward.

March 28: 19^th Century Humor: Irving’s Knickerbocker: An April Fool’s series starts with Washington Irving’s ahead-of-its-time satire.

March 29: 19^th Century Humor: Fanny Fern: The series continues with the very serious side to one of our most talented humorists.

March 30: 19^th Century Humor: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: The New England regional writer and story that are funny, wise, and anything but narrow, as the series continues.

March 31: 19^th Century Humor: Melville’s Chimney: The deeply strange story that proves that ambiguity and allegory can be funny.

April 1: 19^th Century Humor: Ah Sin: The series concludes with Mark Twain and Bret Harte’s play and the fine line between satire and stereotypes.

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 1, 2016: 19th Century Humor: Ah Sin

[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19^th century humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. I’m serious!]

On the fine line between satire and stereotypes.

First and foremost, it’d be foolish of me not to link to this piece by my dad Stephen Railton, part of his award-winning website Mark Twain in His Times, on Mark Twain and Bret Harte’s play Ah Sin, a Play in Four Acts (1877). Dad has far more in-depth knowledge of the play than I, and a great deal to say in that piece about the play’s complex relationship to the era’s anti-Chinese prejudices (on which I focused a good bit of my third book), as well as both the two authors’ public roles and reputations as prominent humorists and the often razor-sharp line between the satirical and the stereotypical (or, to quote one of the funniest works of all time, between clever and stupid) when it comes to humorous engagements with social issues.

That line is a seemingly eternal element within humor, and one not limited to ethnic or racial comedy. Take Amy Schumer’s sketches about gender, sexuality, and rape—is she satirizing our culture’s problems with those issues, or using stereotypes to gain laughs and ratings (or, as always, some combination of the two, one dependent in no small measure on the knowledge and perspective an audience member brings with her or him)? But at the same time, ethnic and racial humorists seem particularly prone to walking the fine line between satire and stereotype, and to prompting passionate debate about where on that spectrum they fall. From Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy to Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, and up to contemporary works like Key & Peele and Blackish, African American humorists have been at the center of many of those debates in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. But the same questions apply to any and all cultures and identities, and Asian American comics and performers such as Margaret Cho and Ken Jeong have faced the same responses and critiques.

Of course, Ah Sin represents another side to the issue—a satirical yet stereotypical work about Asian American identities created by two white artists, if ones who (as my Dad’s piece notes) were already on the record in support of Chinese Americans (especially relative to their very xenophobic moment). Yet while there’s no doubt that outsiders to a culture or community have to tread the line even more carefully if they choose to create humorous works about that group (and have to recognize that they’re opening themselves up to justified critiques in the process, regardless of their specific choices and work), I would argue not only that they have the right to do so, but that doing so represents an important part of humor’s role in a society and culture. Indeed, no other artistic genre can highlight in the same ways the absurdities and myths that surround us—and humorous works can do so whether they satirize those elements, deploy them as stereotypes, or, as is so often the case and was for Twain and Harte’s play, do both at the same time.

March Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other humorists you’d highlight?