May 5, 2025: The Works Progress Administration: EO 7034

[On May 6^th, 1935, Franklin Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration [WPA]. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of WPA histories, leading up to a weekend post on why we need a 21^st century revival!]

On three significant elements of the Executive Order that established WPA.

1)      Building on the Past: While EO 7034 did in many ways create a new government agency, it didn’t quite do so officially; instead the WPA explicitly took the place of an existing agency, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). Partly that shift was to make practical questions like leadership and funding for this new organization as smooth and straightforward as possible; the EO makes clear that “the Federal Emergency Relief Administrator shall serve also as Administrator of the Works Progress Administration,” for example. But I would argue that replacing FERA with WPA was also quite importantly symbolically, as it reflected the defining and important idea that these works projects—including, as we’ll see later in the week, artistic and cultural projects of all types—were part of the government’s Depression relief efforts.

2)      A Focus on Relief: That organizational shift was far from the only way in which the EO overtly and centrally linked the WPA to the concept of relief. Section 3a of the EO notes that one of the WPA’s “powers and duties” will be “to assure that as many of the persons employed on all work projects as is feasible shall be persons receiving relief.” For the prior two years, organizations like FERA and many other early New Deal programs had focused on precisely that mission, providing relief of many different kinds to Americans suffering from the Depression’s catastrophic and widespread effects. The WPA was one of many programs that became known as the “Second New Deal,” but details like the EO’s section 3a illustrate that despite this evolution, the New Deal would continue to focus on the goal of relief, even (if not especially) through these new projects.

3)      Wages and Working Conditions: Like most Executive Orders, 7034 didn’t go into great detail about specifics, leaving those for the follow-up work of the WPA (on layers to which, again, the rest of the week’s posts will focus). Which makes one particular specific section very telling: the fifth and final of the “powers and duties,” which authorizes the WPA “to investigate wages and working conditions and to make and submit to the President such findings as will aid the President in prescribing working conditions and rates of pay on projects.” That framing is ambiguous enough to allow in the abstract for less than ideal working conditions and wages, of course; but when we remember the FDR was considered in his own era and has been perceived ever since as one of the most pro-labor presidents in American history, it’s clear that this section was meant to give this federal program the ability to guarantee better working conditions and wages than might otherwise have been possible.

Next WPA post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 3-4, 2025: April 2025 Recap

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

March 31: Foolish Texts: A Fool’s Errand: For this year’s April Fool’s series, I AmericanStudied “fool”-ish cultural works, starting with Albion Tourgée’s ironic and powerful Reconstruction novel.

April 1: Foolish Texts: “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: The series continues with lessons and limits from an English classic rock anthem.

April 2: Foolish Texts: Nobody’s Fool: Two AmericanStudies takeaways from one of our quirkier and more affecting films, as the series fools on.

April 3: Foolish Texts: This Fool: Three Latino cultural works that can contextualize the recent sitcom about Los Angeles cholos.

April 4: Foolish Texts: Fool: The series concludes with a trio of pop culture adaptations of Shakespeare, inspired by Christopher Moore’s 2009 novel.

April 7: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Gatsby’s Pool: For the centennial of Fitzgerald’s novel, a tribute series kicks off with a tragic dip that’s as difficult to pin down as the man taking it.

April 8: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Three Phone Calls: The series continues with three calls that illustrates the novel’s portrayal of Modern technologies.

April 9: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Foshay Tower: The building and entrepreneur that bring an American icon to life, as the series reads on.

April 10: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Gatsby’s American Dreams: Two contrasting but also interconnected ways to analyze the novel’s ambiguous title character.

April 11: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Novelist-Narrators: The series concludes with a link to my 2011 American Literary Realism article on this innovative narrative technique.

April 12-13: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Fellow GatsbyStudiers: And here’s a special weekend post highlighting a ton of great work from fellow studiers of the novel!

April 14: Kyle Contexts: Younger Siblings: A series inspired by my awesome younger son’s 18^th birthday kicks off with prior posts on badass younger siblings in American history and culture.

April 15: Kyle Contexts: The ACLU: The series continues with three significant stages in the evolution of the nation’s preeminent civil rights organization.

April 16: Kyle Contexts: Musical Crossovers: A handful of examples of historic musical crossovers, as the series celebrates on.

April 17: Kyle Contexts: Track & Field Fighters: Five moments when track stars (like my younger son) dealt with and overcame challenges (like my younger son has).

April 18: Kyle Contexts: Chinchillas: The series concludes with three ways to contextualize my son’s favorite cute animal.

April 19-20: Kyle Railton’s Guest Post on the OJ Simpson Trial: And I couldn’t dedicate a series to Kyle without re-sharing his excellent Guest Post!

April 21: EarthquakeStudying: San Francisco in 1906: For Charles Richter’s 125^th birthday, an earthquake series kicks off with two distinct, equally inspiring responses to one of our most destructive disasters.

April 22: EarthquakeStudying: Three Other California Quakes: The series continues with one striking detail about each of three major 20^th century quakes.

April 23: EarthquakeStudying: The Indian Ocean in 2004: Three cultural works that can help us remember one of the most devastating natural disasters in history, as the series shakes on.

April 24: EarthquakeStudying: Haiti in 2010: Two interconnected ways to AmericanStudy a Caribbean disaster.

April 25: EarthquakeStudying: Movies: The series concludes with takeaways from three blockbuster films about catastrophic quakes.

April 26-27: EarthquakeStudying: Charles Richter: For his 125^th birthday, the very strange things I learned about Charles Richter, and what we do with such private details about public figures.

April 28: Ending the Vietnam War: The Mayaguez Incident: For the 50^th anniversary of the symbolic end of the Vietnam War, a series on cultural representations of that conclusion kicks off with a maritime crisis turned military incident.

April 29: Ending the Vietnam War: First Blood: The series continues with what an iconic film speech gets wrong about the end of the war, and what it gets very right.

April 30: Ending the Vietnam War: Miss Saigon: Two bravura sequences that reveal what a musical can and can’t do with history, as the series rolls on.

May 1: Ending the Vietnam War: “Galveston Bay”: Two ways an underrated Springsteen song importantly adds to his body of work about the war.

May 2: Ending the Vietnam War: Da 5 Bloods: The series concludes with one fraught and one vital meaning of “unfinished business” in Spike Lee’s recent film.

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!

May 2, 2025: Ending the Vietnam War: Da 5 Bloods

[On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon, a symbolic but significant moment to reflect the end of the war. That conclusion has been represented frequently & complicatedly in American media, so this week for its 50^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations!]

On one fraught and one crucial meaning of unfinished business in Spike Lee’s recent film.

In Da 5 Bloods (2020), one of Spike Lee’s more underrated joints (due at least in part to its release directly onto Netflix during Covid), four Black Vietnam vets (Norm Lewis, Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, and Isaiah Whitlock Jr.) return to Vietnam nearly half a century after the war (along with one of their sons, played by then up-and-coming, now-disgraced Jonathan Majors) in search of both the remains of their charismatic squad leader (the always-great Chadwick Boseman) and a buried cache of stolen gold that he helped them hide before he was killed. As he so often does, Lee combines multiple genres (in this case a war film, a heist film, and the “one last roadtrip with old friends” genre, among others), defying easy categorization and creating a sprawling and messy but always compelling and at times transcendent work that is well worth checking out if you haven’t had the chance.

In terms of its depiction of the end and aftermaths of the Vietnam War, I’d say that Lee’s film focuses on the idea of “unfinished business,” in two distinct ways. The more obvious is also to my mind more problematic, as the film’s premise echoes the narrative of the ubiquitous POW/MIA flags that have, at least at times over the last few decades, been used as cover for extremist anti-government rhetoric (seriously, check out that Rick Perlstein column if you aren’t familiar with that movement’s appropriation of the flag). In particular, Lee’s film gets dangerously close at times to stereotyping (if not downright racist) depictions of its Vietnamese secondary characters—of course Lee has never been shy about grappling with uncomfortable questions of prejudice between as well as toward various communities, but at its best in his works these themes implicate all the characters; whereas in Da 5 Bloods, the anti-Vietnamese prejudices sometimes expressed (or at the very least implied) by his protagonists are much more one-sided. The worst of the POW/MIA narratives implies that the war itself is “unfinished business,” and there are moments in Lee’s film where we feel the same.

But there’s a second way to think about “unfinished business” in Da 5 Bloods, and I think it’s a significantly more meaningful as well as productive lens. More than 300,000 Black Americans served during the Vietnam War, comprising more than 16% of the armed forces (despite numbering less than 12% of the US population at the time), yet I would argue that our collective memories and representations of Vietnam vets have not done anything like justice to that community. To do so would also require us to put them in conversation with Black soldiers during WWI and WWII, and the broader question of African American military service—itself a frustrating bit of national “unfinished business” to be sure. But such complementary broader frames shouldn’t overshadow the specific stories of Black Vietnam War soldiers, casualties (like Boseman’s character), and veterans (like the other four main characters), stories that, despite our consistent cultural focus on the war and its aftermaths, remain largely untold. Lee’s film represents a crucial starting point for rectifying that omission.  

April Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations of the war you’d highlight?

May 1, 2025: Ending the Vietnam War: “Galveston Bay”

[On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon, a symbolic but significant moment to reflect the end of the war. That conclusion has been represented frequently & complicatedly in American media, so this week for its 50^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations!]

On two important ways that one of The Boss’s most underrated songs adds to his body of work.

The novelist Tim O’Brien is certainly in contention, but I don’t believe any American artist has created more cultural works depicting the Vietnam War overall, and definitely not its aftermaths in the United States specifically, than Bruce Springsteen. “Born in the U.S.A.” is without question the most famous (and the most famously misunderstood), but I could dedicate an entire week’s series to other Bruce songs about Vietnam vets, from “Shut Out the Light” to “The Wall” to “Brothers Under the Bridge (95)” and more. Springsteen has been working with vets for almost half a century now, and I think it shows; despite his own lack of experience with the war (compared to O’Brien for example, himself a Vietnam vet), Bruce has consistently depicted this community and its experiences with nuance, sensitivity, and impressive attention to detail. Taken together these songs constitute an important body of late 20^th century cultural and historical texts.

We have to be willing to be analytical and critical about such texts, though—yes, even if they’re by Bruce Springsteen—and it’s fair to say that they’re pretty thoroughly white, or at least that they elide any questions of race and culture for and around the community of Vietnam vets. That’s one reason why I think Springsteen’s moving and beautiful song “Galveston Bay” (1995) is one of his most frustratingly underrated songs: it depicts two Vietnam vets from two distinct races and cultures, white U.S. soldier Billy Sutter and South Vietnamese soldier Lee Bin Son; and, more complicatedly and importantly still, it portrays Billy as joining the Ku Klux Klan’s efforts to attack South Vietnamese immigrants as, after “the South fell/And the communist rolled into Saigon,” “the refugees came/Settled on the same streets/And worked the coast they’d grew up on.” By this point in the song Billy has been well developed as a multi-dimensional human character, so he’s not a caricatured racist, and that’s precisely the point—any white Americans, even those who’ve served their country honorably as Billy and the vast majority of Vietnam vets (white and otherwise) did, are susceptible to these white supremacist narratives and the violence that they can produce.

That’s one important way that “Galveston Bay” complicates, challenges, and ultimately adds to Springsteen’s body of Vietnam War songs. But the second is more significant still: it reminds us that even in the United States (that is, not just in Vietnam), the war connects to the Vietnamese community, a seemingly obvious point but one that is missing from many, many depictions of the war, Vietnam vets, and related histories. Of course Vietnamese American artists can tell that story in particularly meaningful ways, a long list that includes such recent masterpieces as Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) and Eric Nguyen’s Things We Lost to the Water (2021), among many others as I highlighted in this post. But as I hope this blog has always illustrated, American culture (like our identity, community, history) is additive, and Springsteen’s song likewise engages in thoughtful and compelling ways with the Vietnamese American experience in the aftermath of the war, including Lee’s impressive resistance to the KKK’s racial terrorism—and how those actions and Lee himself, in the song’s surprising and amazing climactic moment, change Billy Sutter for the better.

Last portrayal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations of the war you’d highlight?

April 30, 2025: Ending the Vietnam War: Miss Saigon

[On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon, a symbolic but significant moment to reflect the end of the war. That conclusion has been represented frequently & complicatedly in American media, so this week for its 50^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations!]

On two bravura sequences which reveal what a musical can do with history, and one definite limitation.

I haven’t had the chance to see a lot of musicals live (Rent is the most notable exception, and remains to this day one of my favorite experiences of live art in any genre/medium), but I did see and enjoy Miss Saigon on Broadway in the mid-1990s. I can’t say I have particularly specific memories of much of it these three decades down the road, but one moment definitely still stands out (as it did at the time as well): the end of Act I, when an actual helicopter (or what sure seemed like one to those of us in the audience) lands on stage at the culmination of a dream sequence about the evacuation from U.S. troops and personnel from South Vietnam in 1975. That was without doubt the most extreme and chaotic thing I’ve seen in a live performance, and I’d say those tones were exactly right for a depiction of what had to be a profoundly chaotic situation on the ground, for the evacuees to be sure but even more so for all those being left behind (like the musical’s heroine Kim, in whose dream about the moment the audience is located).

Nothing else in Miss Saigon was as striking as that helicopter moment, but the second Act does feature its own bravura sequence, one depicting a victory parade of North Vietnamese forces and leaders through the streets of Saigon (juxtaposed with significant and eventually tragic developments for the musical’s South Vietnamese main characters, including Kim and her young son). I don’t remember this moment as clearly by any means, but I do recall a very full stage with its own chaotic cacophony of tones—the celebratory mode of the parade, mixed feelings on behalf of its South Vietnamese audience overall, and an unfolding violent encounter for Kim and those close to her. And that too to my mind captures the multiple layers of the aftermath of the war in South Vietnam and Vietnam as a whole, the varied and contradictory emotions among different communities and even within individuals in such a place and time. Too much of our focus in the U.S. has been on the war and its aftermath from our perspective (understandably, but nonetheless), so there’s a great deal to be said for the musical’s extended focus on Vietnam after the evacuation and fall of Saigon.

A number of late 20^th and early 21^st century musicals have been adaptations of earlier works (Rent is an update of Puccini’s La Bohéme, for example), so it’s not particularly surprising that Miss Saigon was too, in this case an adaptation of another Puccini opera, Madame Butterfly (1904). But I would say that fact reveals a significant problem with Miss Saigon, and not just the obvious that Puccini’s turn of the 20^th century vision of Asia (through his titular Japanese heroine and the opera’s settings alike) is quite outdated at best and Orientalist at worst. After all, even if it weren’t, it’s set in Japan around 1900, not Vietnam in 1975, and there’s simply no way that an adaptation of a work about the former could ever be as specific to the histories of the latter as would be ideal for any work of historical fiction. I don’t know that a central goal of Miss Saigon is doing complex justice to those histories necessarily—but given how much better we still need to remember the end and aftermath of the Vietnam War, I’m glad for the ways this musical can help us do so, and frustrated by its storytelling limitations.  

Next portrayal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations of the war you’d highlight?

April 29, 2025: Ending the Vietnam War: First Blood

[On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon, a symbolic but significant moment to reflect the end of the war. That conclusion has been represented frequently & complicatedly in American media, so this week for its 50^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations!]

On what an iconic film speech gets wrong about the end of the war, and what it gets very right.

I’ve written a few times previously in this space about First Blood (1982), and specifically about John Rambo’s final speech to his Vietnam War Colonel about his experiences during and after that conflict. I’d ask you to check out both that prior post and that clip of Rambo’s speech (if you don’t already know it), and then come on back for a couple more thoughts.

Welcome back! One frustrating part of Rambo’s speech is his reference to the myth of spitting protesters, which as I discuss at length in that hyperlinked post (quoting Jerry Lembcke’s excellent book The Spitting Image) seems pretty clearly to have been invented long after the fact (around the time of First Blood, in fact). But in terms of the end of the war, I think his angry assertion that “I did what I had to do to win, but somebody wouldn’t let us win!” is equally inaccurate and dangerous. I have to imagine that he’s referring to ideas like that of the controversial General Curtis LeMay, who wanted to “bomb [North Vietnam] back into the Stone Age.” I don’t think many (if any) military strategists or historians believe such actions would have “won” the war, but rather would have just caused infinitely more death and destruction while turning the Vietnamese people even more fully against the United States. And in any case, to my mind the Vietnam War’s trajectory and ending weren’t in the slightest about what “somebody” would or wouldn’t “let” the U.S. forces do—and defining the war as such both removes all agency from the Vietnamese and suggests that mass death and destruction would have been preferable.

So I don’t think Rambo’s final speech gets the end of the war right, and I think it likewise gives into mythic us-vs.-them depictions of anti-war protesters. But one thing this scene (and certainly Stallone’s excellent performance in it) captures quite powerfully is the PTSD that so many returning Vietnam vets suffered from, the impact of their experiences and memories on their (already challenging and fraught) lives back on the homefront. The speech’s tearful final lines, including such phrases as “I can’t get it out of my head,” “sometimes I wake up and I dunno where I am,” and “I dream of it every day for seven years,” puts a profoundly human face and voice to those veterans’ issues—and the fact that that face and voice belong to the badass physician specimen and warrior-type that was the young Sylvester Stallone only adds to our recognition that these challenges can and did happen to everyone. While the end of the Vietnam War meant many things, here in the U.S. that’s what it truly meant, what all these vets brought home with them—and First Blood gets that note very right.

Next portrayal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations of the war you’d highlight?

April 28, 2025: Ending the Vietnam War: The Mayaguez Incident

[On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon, a symbolic but significant moment to reflect the end of the war. That conclusion has been represented frequently & complicatedly in American media, so this week for its 50^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations!]

On how a maritime crisis turned military conflict can be connected to the war’s end, and how it should be separated from it.

Each of the other posts in this week’s series will focus on a cultural work—two films, a musical, and a song, although not in that order so you’ll have to keep reading I suppose!—that depicts the historical events around the end of the Vietnam War, but today’s subject was a very real historical event in its own right. On May 12^th, 1975, the American merchant ship the SS Mayaguez was seized in disputed Southeast Asian waters by forces of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian junta that had taken control of that nation’s government less than a month before (toppling the US-supported Khmer Republic in the process). The U.S. Marines mounted a rescue operation, retook the ship, and besieged the nearby island of Koh Tang where the hostages were wrongly believed to be held, but were met with intense resistance by Khmer Rouge forces. After extensive and destructive battles with the Khmer Rouge that left dozens of Americans dead and many more wounded, the Marines were evacuated on May 15; the Khmer Rouge would themselves release the unharmed hostages.

While the initial seizure of the ship didn’t necessarily have to do with the end of the Vietnam War a couple weeks before (the Mayaguez was apparently much closer to Cambodian/Khmer-controlled waters than it should have been), it’s impossible to say that the timing of the incident overall was coincidental. In his book The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War (2002), historian Ralph Wetterhahn traces just how focused President Gerald Ford and his National Security Council were on perceptions of the U.S. military and America as a whole in the immediate aftermath of the withdrawal of troops from not only South Vietnam, but also Cambodia (which had been its own evacuation operation but one closely tied to the Vietnam evacuation). In his book The Mayaguez Crisis, Mission Command, and Civil-Military Relations (2018), military historian Christopher Lamb quotes Vice President Nelson Rockefeller as arguing, “this will be seen as a test case,” and adding, “I think a violent response is in order.” There can be no doubt that the administration saw the incident as a chance to rewrite the narrative of the Vietnam War’s conclusion—nor that the rescue’s failures would instead amplify those images.

If that’s how the Mayaguez incident was perceived in its own moment, it certainly has to be part of how we remember this history. But the main reason why I wanted to include this real historical event in a weeklong series focused on cultural texts is that I think it’s important to add that this vision of the Mayaguez is likewise a narrative frame, rather than an intrinsic layer to the events themselves. While the U.S. had attacked Cambodia in the course of the Vietnam War (illegally attacked, I should add), the two nations were of course in actuality entirely distinct, and moreover the Khmer Rouge saw the North Vietnamese (as of April 1975 just the Vietnamese) regime as an enemy (and the two nations would in fact go to war a few years later, contributing to the end of the Khmer Rouge’s rule). Moreover, while it’s questionable at best whether the North Vietnamese regime were “the bad guys” in the Vietnam War (I’d personally put Henry Kissinger at the top of that list), the Khmer Rouge were quite simply one of the most brutal regimes of the 20^th century, making the U.S. conflict with them quite distinct from the morass that was the Vietnam War. All reminders that our narratives for historical events are often, if not always, just that.

Next portrayal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations of the war you’d highlight?