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?