On four
Americans who share August 11th birthdays.
On
August 11th, 1833, Robert
Ingersoll was born in upstate New York, the son of a prominent local
Abolitionist preacher. Like many of the inspiring 19th century
Americans about whom I’ve written here, Ingersoll certainly qualifies as a
Renaissance American: a practicing lawyer for his whole adult life, Ingersoll
also raised and commanded his own Union Army regiment (the 11th
Illinois Volunteer Cavalry) which saw action at Shiloh, served as the
Republican Attorney General of Illinois after the war, became one of the
era’s most famous orators (his “Plumed Knight” speech,
advocating for the 1876 presidential nomination of James Blaine, remains
well-known today), and befriended Walt Whitman. But Ingersoll was perhaps best
known, and is most inspiring to this AmericanStudier, as a vocal and eloquent
defender of religious agnosticism (he came to be known as “The Great
Agnostic”) in a period when such views (at least when made overt) usually
spelled political disaster. As he often did, Whitman put Ingersoll’s inspiring
qualities best (in an interview with journalist Horace Traubel): “He lives,
embodies, the individuality I preach. I see in Bob the noblest
specimen—American-flavored—pure out of the soil, spreading, giving, demanding
light.”
On
August 11th, 1921, Alex
Haley was born in Ithaca, New York (not far from Ingersoll’s birthplace of
Dresden), the son of an Alabama A&M professor of agriculture (in an era
when African American college professors were still pretty rare). Haley
enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1939 and served not only throughout World War II
but for the next twenty years, and only began writing professionally after his
retirement at the end of the 1950s. That writing career can be divided into
three distinct stages, with each both contributing significantly to our
national narratives and in its own way controversial. He conducted the
first interviews for Playboy in
the early 1960s, and over the course of the decade interviewed such luminaries
as Miles Davis (the first subject), Martin Luther King, Jr., and Muhammad Ali.
A series of conversations with Malcolm X led to Haley’s first book, The
Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which remains to this day both one
of America’s most important texts and one of its most ambiguously authored ones
(it was published after Malcolm’s assassination and has always been dogged by
questions of how much was truly Malcolm’s voice and how much Haley’s authorly
license). For the next decade Haley researched his family’s and American
history, culminating in the publication of Roots (1976), which even before the
groundbreaking TV miniseries represented one of the century’s most successful
books. It too has been dogged by controversy, particularly about the
authenticity and accuracy of Haley’s family details and discoveries; but even
if the book’s stories were proven literally fictional, it would remain no less
compelling and powerful as an autobiographical and historical novel of slavery and race in America.
On
August 11th, 1933, Jerry
Falwell was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, the son of a local businessman and
bootlegger (and agnostic!). Although he founded and began serving as pastor of Lynchburg’s Thomas Road Baptist Church at the age
of 22, it was really in the 1970s that Falwell helped originate and greatly
influenced three of the most significant religious, political, and cultural
shifts of late 20th century America: gradually turning that local church
into one of the nation’s first mega-churches; founding Liberty University (in
1971), perhaps the first Christian institution of higher learning to gain
national prominence (and certainly one at the forefront of the rise in
Christian education as part of a pushback against multiculturalism); and founding
the
Moral Majority (in 1979), one of the organizations that most fully
contributed to the shift in evangelical and fundamentalist Christian Americans’
perspectives and goals toward explicit political activism and power. There’s no
question that many of the most significant American political developments of
the last three decades were heavily influenced by Falwell and his cohort, from
the election of Ronald Reagan to the many-faceted campaign to destroy Bill
Clinton, and certainly to the presidency and policies of George W. Bush. It’s
fair to say that Falwell might be best known, however, for controversies of his
own: his unsuccessful lawsuits against
Hustler magazine and Larry Flynt,
his “outing” of the “gay”
Teletubby Tinky Winky, his horrific post-9/11 attempts to
blame the tragedy on gay and other culturally liberal Americans. Given how
divisive and heated the cultural wars have become, thanks in no small measure
to Falwell’s own efforts, it would be perfectly appropriate if heated
controversies did indeed constitute his truest legacy.
On
August 11th, 1948, Stephen
Railton was born in Elgin, Illinois, the son of a World War II veteran and Popular Mechanics automotive journalist
(about whom more here
and here)
and an equally impressive college-educated homemaker. Like Ingersoll, Steve
Railton can give a great lecture (as generations of University of Virginia
students will attest); like Haley, he can research and write a great book (see here
and here);
unlike Falwell, he’s a deeply accepting and progressive-in-the-best-sense
thinker and person. And I wouldn’t be here, literally and in every other way,
without him.
Next bday
special tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
Anything you’d add (bday wishes or otherwise)?
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