November 6, 2024: The 1924 Election: KKKonventions

[This has been a particularly crazy last year/decade/eternity, but it’s not the first nutty presidential campaign and election. 100 years ago was certainly another, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of 1924 election contexts, leading up to some reflections on this year’s electoral results!]

On the Klan’s influence on both 1924 Conventions, and a frustrating national parallel.

More than 8 years ago, I wrote for The American Prospect about the chaotic 1924 Democratic National Convention (to this day the longest continuously running convention in US history) and the frustratingly over-sized role that the Ku Klux Klan played there. I’d ask you to check out that column (at the first hyperlink above) if you would, and then come on back for more.

Welcome back! I’m always learning, and it’s important to note that I was apparently mistaken that the Convention was widely known as the “Klanbake”—that’s apparently a myth which developed after the fact, based on a single newspaper editorial. But nonetheless, the Klan was a prominent presence at that DNC in New York, and a driving force in the Convention’s inability to settle on a nominee until the 103^rd ballot. And it’s worth noting that the Klan was also prominently present at the RNC in Cleveland that year, leading another editorial writer to dub that one the Kleveland Konvention. Just as the DNC failed to censure or in any formal way call out the KKK, so too was an anti-KKK measure voted down at the RNC; eventually the Republican VP nominee Charles Dawes did publicly criticize the Klan, but with sufficient mixed signals toward the organization that, as New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia noted, “General Dawes praised the Klan with faint damn.” There’s no question that the Ku Klux Klan was a major political player for both parties in the 1924 campaign.

Moreover, whatever we call the conventions or say about the KKK’s role at and around them, I stand by the final arguments I made in that American Prospect column—that we can’t separate the Klan from the most significant legislation passed in 1924, and one of the most influential laws enacted in American history: the Johnson-Reed Act, better known as the Immigration Act of 1924. I said most of what I’d want to say about that horrific law in those two hyperlinked columns, as well as in those final paragraphs of the Prospect piece. The bottom line, to me, is that it wasn’t just the respective national conventions and political parties which were under the sway of the Ku Klux Klan in 1924—it was the entire nation, and in its immigration policy, its visions of diversity and inclusion/exclusion, and its definitions of American identity it would remain so for the next forty years.  

Next 1924 contexts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other crazy elections you’d highlight, or thoughts on this one you’d share?

November 5, 2024: The 1924 Election: Three VP Nominees

[This has been a particularly crazy last year/decade/eternity, but it’s not the first nutty presidential campaign and election. 100 years ago was certainly another, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of 1924 election contexts, leading up to some reflections on this year’s electoral results!]

On how three Republican nominees for the Vice Presidency exemplify electoral chaos.

1)      Frank Lowden: Up until the ratification of the 25^th Amendment in 1967, if wasn’t required for a former Vice President and newly sworn-in President like Calvin Coolidge to nominate a new Vice President, and so Coolidge didn’t do so when he ascended to the presidency in August 1923. That meant that for much of 1923 and 1924 Coolidge was seeking the Republican nomination and reelection to the presidency with no Vice Presidential nominee, and thus that the 1924 Republican National Convention in Cleveland needed to name such a nominee alongside Coolidge. Coolidge’s choice was Frank O. Lowden, a former U.S. Representative from and Governor of Illinois who had himself sought the presidency in 1920. But perhaps because he had lost that nomination to the Harding-Coolidge ticket, or perhaps because he had his own future presidential ambitions (and did run again in the 1928 Republican primaries), Lowden turned down the nomination.

2)      Charles Dawes: With Coolidge’s own choice for VP out of the running, the convention delegates as a whole settled on a new nominee, the lawyer and businessman, World War I officer, and Harding administration official (in the role of the first director of the Bureau of the Budget) Charles Dawes. During his time as Coolidge’s VP Dawes would become best known for drafting a WWI reparations plan, known as the Dawes Plan, for which he received the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize. But Coolidge clearly never warmed to Dawes as his VP, as illustrated by the president’s failure to support Dawes’ signature domestic achievement: Dawes championed the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Bill and helped it pass Congress, but Coolidge vetoed the bill not once but twice (in 1926 and 1927). And when Coolidge announced he would not seek reelection in 1928 and Dawes was rumored as a possible candidate, Coolidge told delegates that he would consider any nomination of Dawes as a personal insult.    

3)      Charles Curtis: Herbert Hoover ended up the Republican presidential nominee in 1928, and Dawes was likewise passed over as a Vice Presidential nominee despite his continued interest in the role. Instead, the Republican National Convention in Kansas City chose Kansas Senator Charles Curtis as Hoover’s VP nominee. The choice of Curtis reflected a second consecutive RNC with a contested vice presidential nomination process that was separate from, and perhaps even more combative than, the presidential nomination. But at the same time, Curtis was a hugely significant symbolic choice—as an enrolled member of the Kaw Nation, he was (and remains to this day) the only Native American ever to serve as Vice President. Another way that the chaos of these 1920s elections mirrors some of the factors that have made our own current campaign and election unusual and groundbreaking!

Next 1924 contexts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other crazy elections you’d highlight, or thoughts on this one you’d share?

November 4, 2024: The 1924 Election: Harding’s Shadow

[This has been a particularly crazy last year/decade/eternity, but it’s not the first nutty presidential campaign and election. 100 years ago was certainly another, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of 1924 election contexts, leading up to some reflections on this year’s electoral results!]

On how the Harding administration’s scandals expanded in the year after his death, and how they didn’t ultimately matter much in the election.

Beginning with the 1840 election and William Henry Harrison’s particularly abrupt death just one month after his inauguration, and continuing through the 1960 election and the Kennedy assassination, every twenty years the president who triumphed in that campaign ended up dying while still in office. The majority of those deaths were due to assassinations (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy), but there were also three who died of natural causes: Harrison in 1841, FDR in 1945, and, on August 2^nd, 1923, Warren Harding from what was likely cardiac arrest but was called at the time a cerebral hemorrhage that had followed an “acute gastrointestinal attack.” Harding was on a train and boat trip across the Western U.S. at the time (known by the evocative name the Voyage of Understanding), and apparently sometime in the course of the trip asked his Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover (who later wrote about the conversation) what a president should do if is he aware of a scandal inside his administration that has not yet come to light.

According to Hoover, he advised the president to publicize such a scandal; we’ll never know if Harding would have done so had he lived, but one thing is for certain: major scandals related to his administration did indeed emerge in the year after his death, amidst his former Vice President and newly sworn-in President Calvin Coolidge’s reelection campaign. The most prominent such scandal was Teapot Dome, which involved illicitly awarded leases to federal lands; investigations began two months after Harding’s death and continued into early 1924, with Harding’s Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall eventually serving prison time for his role. Just a couple months later, the Senate voted to open up another investigation, this time into Harding’s Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty; those investigations began in March 1924 and continued for the next few months, eventually resulting in the conviction of and prison time for another former Harding official, Alien Property Custodian Thomas W. Miller (although Daugherty escaped with a hung jury). Those weren’t even the only scandals, but they were more than enough to dominate headlines for much of 1924.  

You’d think that those election-year scandals would have affected Calvin Coolidge’s campaign—he had been part of the Harding administration (it’s second-highest ranking official, no less), had assumed the presidency upon Harding’s death and maintained much of the administration’s structure, and was running for reelection amidst all these stories about his former boss’s multi-layered corruption. At the very least, you’d think he’d have to constantly distance himself from Harding, as Al Gore did from Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal throughout the 2000 campaign. But from what I can tell, Harding’s scandals were largely treated by the press as separate from Coolidge and his campaign, and they don’t seem to have significantly shifted the eventual voting patterns (which closely mirrored the 1920 election, with a third-party thrown in about which I’ll write more in a couple days). Part of the reason is likely that the economy was in very good shape, which always benefits an incumbent seeking reelection. But I’d say it also reflects an early 20^th century reality that has changed drastically in the last 100 years—that vice presidents were seen as quite distinct from the president (as we'll see in tomorrow's post as well), and given space to define their own campaign as a result.  

Next 1924 contexts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other elections you’d highlight, or thoughts on this one you’d share?

November 2-3, 2024: October 2024 Recap

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

September 30: 19^th Century Baseball: A Contested Origin: Inspired by a bicentennial birthday and connected to my new podcast, a series on 19C baseball kicked off with two interesting details about the contested story of the sport’s origins.

October 1: 19^th Century Baseball: Henry Chadwick: For his 200^th birthday, the series continues with three ways the “Father of Baseball” helped shape the sport and its stories.

October 2: 19^th Century Baseball: The Massachusetts Game: Three places that can help us better remember an alternative form of baseball, as the series plays on.

October 3: 19^th Century Baseball: The First Professionals: Four figures who together help us chart the evolution of professional baseball in the late 19^th century.

October 4: 19^th Century Baseball: The Celestials: The series concludes with two 19^th century baseball context for the 1870s team at the heart of my podcast.

October 5-6: My New Podcast!: And speaking of that podcast, a special weekend post on three takeaways from my first experience with the medium!

October 7: Contested Holidays: Memorial/Decoration Day: Ahead of Columbus/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a series on contested holidays kicks off with a couple additional thoughts on my annual Memorial and Decoration Day post.

October 8: Contested Holidays: The 4^th of July: The series continues with whether and how there’s a place for celebratory patriotism in our national commemorations.

October 9: Contested Holidays: Labor Day: The bare minimum for how we should celebrate Labor Day and a couple steps beyond, as the series parties on.

October 10: Contested Holidays: Thanksgiving/Day of Mourning: With Thanksgiving just a few weeks away, two ways we can be thankful while mourning.

October 11: Contested Holidays: “The War on Christmas”: The series concludes with three voices who can help us see through the “War on Christmas” canard.

October 12-13: Contested Holidays: Columbus/Indigenous Peoples Day: And for the holiday, a special weekend post on how my thinking on it has evolved over the last decade, and one thing I’d still emphasize.

October 14: Famous Phone Calls: The Great Gatsby: For the 75^th anniversary of a key stage in the technology, a series on American phone calls kicks off with three phone calls at the heart of Fitzgerald’s portrayal of early 20C America.  

October 15: Famous Phone Calls: The Scream Films: The series continues with one thing that’s really changed since the first of these phone-focused films, and one that hasn’t.

October 16: Famous Phone Calls: Phone Songs: Five pop songs that call upon this technology, as the series rings on.

October 17: Famous Phone Calls: “Madam and the Phone Bill”: A funny and fun poetic character, and the layers of meaning she reveals.

October 18: Famous Phone Calls: The 2024 Election: With the election now just days away, the series concludes with how phone calls symbolize the striking contrast at the heart of this campaign.

October 19-20: An AmericanStudier Tribute to the Phone: And on a more fully positive note, what the phone has meant to me over the last decade of my life and relationships.

October 21: Prison Stories: Dorothea Dix: For the 30^th anniversary of a sobering statistic, a PrisonStudying series kicks off with the activist from whom we still have a lot to learn.

October 22: Prison Stories: Alcatraz: The series continues with why it’s okay to turn a prison into a tourist attraction, and what we can remember instead.

October 23: Prison Stories: Ian Williams and Teaching in Prisons: Re-sharing one of my earliest posts, on a colleague and friend doing vital work in our prisons.

October 24: Prison Stories: Johnny Cash: The message the Man in Black still has for us, if we can ever start to hear it, as the series rolls on.

October 25: Prison Stories: The Inside Literary Prize: The series concludes with three quotes that together sum up why one of our newest prizes is also one of the most important ever.

October 26-27: A PrisonStudying Reading List: And speaking of writing and reading, a weekend reminder that there’s always more we can read and learn.

October 28: The Politics of Horror: Psycho and The Birds: We all know this year’s Halloween is interconnected with a very scary political season, so a series on the politics of horror films kicks off with defamiliarization and prejudice in Hitchcock.

October 29: The Politics of Horror: Last House on the Left: The series continues with a horror film that’s more disturbing in what it makes us cheer for.

October 30: The Politics of Horror: Hostel and Taken: The horrifying xenophobia at the heart of two of the 21^st century’s biggest hits, as the series screams on.

October 31: The Politics of Horror: The Saw Series: Different visions of morality in horror films and franchises, and whether they matter.

November 1: The Politics of Horror: Recent Films: The series and month conclude with quick political takeaways from five new horror classics.

Election series starts Monday,

Ben

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

November 1, 2024: The Politics of Horror: Recent Films

[For this year’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thought I’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’s inescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations in comments, please!]

Quick political takeaways for five horror films from the last decade.

1)      It Follows (2014): As at least a couple of the earliest posts in this series have illustrated, sex and horror have always been intertwined in this genre. But I’m not sure any horror film has been quite so explicit, and yet quite so ambiguous, about the links between those two elements. I’m not here to tell you how to interpret this film’s themes in social or political ways—but you can’t watch it and not try to do so, and that’s a great case for horror’s political echoes regardless of your perspective.

2)      Get Out (2017): In that hyperlinked post I framed a trio of other films that provide contexts and perhaps inspirations for Jordan Peele’s modern horror classic. Here I’ll simply add that Peele’s choice in a 2017 film to make white supremacy the truest source of horror has to be among the single most prescient cultural decisions in our history.

3)      Midsommar (2019): That smart hyperlinked analysis says a great deal of what I’d want to say about Ari Aster’s cult classic and themes of toxic masculinity. A lot of horror film killers and villains seem to hate women with a particular vengeance, so I’d say it was long past time we had a horror film in which men are the specific target instead. Maybe that’s a reductive reading of Midsommar, though, which is plenty divisive in its interpretations as well as its reviews. As with every film here, check it out for yourself and share your thoughts!  

4)      Prey (2022): This latest installments in the long-running Predators franchise is a lot less ambiguous than the others in this list, and a lot more badass, with young Comanche warrior Naru (Amber Midthunder) more than up to the challenge of taking on the alien predator (at least as much as was Ahnold back in the day, I’d argue). Here the politics aren’t in the film’s content so much as in its existence as cultural representation, and (as the above hyperlinked piece also argues) it’s really excellent for that.

5)      MaXXXine (2024): I don’t know either this particular film or the trilogy it concludes very well, so I’ll mostly hand things over to my favorite contemporary reviewer Vern in that hyperlinked review (which engages with all three films, and certainly includes their social and political themes as Vern always does). I’ll just add that, as with Prey, these films seem to continue a trend of foregrounding badass young women in contemporary horror, and that in and of itself is a powerful social and political stance.

October Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?

October 31, 2024: The Politics of Horror: The Saw Series

[For this year’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thought I’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’s inescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations in comments, please!]

On different visions of morality in horror films, and whether they matter.

There’s an easy and somewhat stereotypical, although certainly not inaccurate, way to read the morality or lessons of horror films: to emphasize how they seem consistently to punish characters, and especially female characters, who are too sexually promiscuous, drink or do drugs, or otherwise act in immoral ways; and how they seem to reward characters, especially the “final girl,” who are not only tough and resourceful but also virgins and otherwise resistant to such immoral temptations. Film scholar Carol Clover reiterates but also to a degree challenges those interpretations in her seminal Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992); Clover agrees with arguments about the “final girl,” but makes the case that by asking viewers to identify with this female character, the films are indeed pushing our communal perspectives on gender in provocative new directions.

It’s important to add, however, that whether conventional slasher films are reiterating or challenging traditional moralities, they’re certainly not prioritizing those moral purposes—jump scares and gory deaths are much higher on the list of priorities. On the other hand, one of the most successful and influential horror series of the last decade, the Saw films (which began with 2004’s Saw and continued annually through the 7^th and supposedly final installment, 2010’s Saw 3D), has made its world’s and killer’s moral philosophy and objectives central to the series’ purposes. The films’ villain, John Kramer, generally known only as Jigsaw, has been called a “deranged philanthropist,” as his puzzles and tortures are generally designed to test, alter, and ultimately strengthen his victims’ identities and beliefs (if they survive, of course). That is, not only is it possible to find moral messages in both the films and which characters do and do not survive in them, but deciphering and living up to that morality becomes the means by which those characters can survive their tortures.

That’s the films and the characters—but what about the audience? It’s long been assumed (and I would generally agree) that audiences look to horror films not only to be scared (a universal human desire) but also to enjoy the unique and gory deaths (a more troubling argument, but again one I would generally support). So it’d be fair, and important, to ask whether that remains the case for Saw’s audiences—whether, that is, they’re in fact rooting not for characters to survive and grow, but instead to fail and be killed in Jigsaw’s inventive ways. And if most or even many of them are, whether that response—and its contribution to the series’ popularity and box office success and thus its ability to continue across seven years and movies—renders the films’ sense of morality irrelevant (it would certainly make it ironic at the very least). To put it bluntly: it seems to make a big difference whether we see the Saw films as distinct in the inventiveness of their tortures/deaths or the morality of their killer. As with any post and topic, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Last political horror tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?

October 30, 2024: The Politics of Horror: Hostel and Taken

[For this year’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thought I’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’s inescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations in comments, please!]

On the horrifying xenophobia at the heart of two of the 21^st century biggest hits.

It’s hard to argue with success, and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008) are by many measures two of the most unexpectedly successful films of the 21^st century’s first two decades. Hostel made more than $80 million worldwide (on a budget of $4.5 million), led to a sequel two years later, and contributed significantly to the rise of an entirely new sub-gerne (the horror sub-genre generally known as “torture porn”). Taken cost a lot more to make (budget of $25 million) but also made a lot more at the box office (worldwide gross of over $225 million), spawned multiple sequels and imitations, and fundamentally changed the career arc and general perception of its star Liam Neeson. Neither film was aiming for any Oscars or to make the Sight and Sound list, but clearly both did what they were trying to do well enough to please their audiences and hit all the notes in their generic (in the literal sense) formulas.

What the two films were trying to do is, of course, a matter of interpretation and debate (although Eli Roth is more than happy to tell us his take on what his film is about); moreover, they’re clearly very different from each other, in genre and goal and many other ways, and I don’t intend to conflate them in this post. Yet they both share an uncannily similar basic plot: naïve and fun-loving young American travelers are abducted and tortured by evil European captors, against whom the travelers themselves (in Hostel) or the traveler’s badass special forces type Dad (in Taken; young Maggie Grace gets to fight some of her own fights against additional Euro-types in the sequel) have to fight in order to escape. While it’s possible to argue that the travelers in Roth’s film help bring on their own torture as a result of their chauvinistic attitudes toward European women (in the sequel Roth made his protagonists young women, and much more explicitly innocent ones at that), there’s no question that the true forces of evil in each film are distinctly European. Moreover, since all of the young travelers are explicitly constructed as tourists, hoping to experience the different world of Europe, the films can’t help but seem like cautionary tales about that world’s dangerous and destructive underbelly.

It’s that last point which I’d really want to emphasize here. After all, bad guys in both horror and action films can and do come from everywhere, and that doesn’t necessarily serve as a blanket indictment of those places; if anything, I would argue that the multi-national and multi-ethnic villainy of (for example) James Bond films is a thematic strength, making clear that evil can and will be found everywhere.  Yet both Hostel and Taken are precisely about, or at least originate with, the relationship between American travelers and Europeans, about the naïve ideals of cultural tourism and about creating plots that depend on very frightening and torturous realities within these foreign worlds. “Don’t travel to Europe, young people,” they seem to argue; and if you do, well, be prepared either to kill a ton of ugly Europeans (or have your Daddy do it) or to be killed by them. Not exactly the travel narrative I’d argue for, and indeed a terrifying contribution to our 21^st century American worldview.

Next political horror tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?