July 31, 2019: SiblingStudying: The Wright Brothers

[On August 2^nd, this AmericanStudier’s amazing younger sister celebrates her birthday. So this week in her honor I’ll AmericanStudy interesting American siblings!]

Three lesser-known stories of the brothers who helped change transportation and the world.

1)      A Printing Press: In 1888, fifteen years before their pioneering flight and when Orville was still just a junior in high school, the brothers developed their first technological innovation, a printing press that they built themselves. They used it not only to publish their own newspapers in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio (first a weekly [West Side News] and then briefly a daily [The Evening Item]), but also produced publications for other friends and locals. One of them was a high school classmate of Orville’s and a blossoming young writer and poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar; the brothers’ printed his newspaper the Dayton Tattler for a time. Such personal and historical details not only remind us that the Wright Brothers moved through many stages of invention and profession before their aviation pinnacles, but also help situate them in their settings, both of place and time.

2)      A Bicycle Shop: Like many talented inventors, the Wright Brothers were never satisfied to stay in one stage or field for long; just four years after they opened their press, they had moved on, opening their bicycle repair and sales shop the Wright Cycle Exchange in 1892. As detailed at wonderful length in Kate Milford’s historical YA novel The Boneshaker (which features a Wright Brothers bicycle in a prominent role), bicycles had become something of a craze in this period, and the brothers quickly realized that they could turn their technological prowess to designing new and improved bikes. By 1896, the Wright Cycle Company was producing its own brand of bikes, machines which would of course also feature prominently in their later aeronautical efforts. But while this business and pursuit offer a direct throughline toward the machine that would propel the brothers into the air at Kitty Hawk, it also links them to a transportation trend and history that were far more widespread and influential throughout the 1890s and well into the early 1900s.

3)      A Museum Feud: The interesting and complex histories didn’t stop with that 1903 flight in Kitty Hawk, of course. One of the most compelling was the brothers’ multi-decade feud with the Smithsonian Institution, thanks to a rivalry with the institution’s secretary Samuel Langley over whose manned flying machine should be considered the first successful model. The museum chose to display Langley’s Aerodrome (which he had never gotten off the ground) much more prominently than the Wright Brothers’ model, and the brothers (especially Orville, as Wilbur died far too young in 1912) retaliated by lending their invention to the London Science Museum in 1928. There it remained until Orville’s death in 1948, when a long-negotiated truce allowed the Smithsonian to purchase the flyer and return it to the United States for the first time in decades. Among the many salient lessons from this controversial history is a reminder that museums are living and evolving spaces, reflecting the conflicts and struggles of their societies as much as their ideals and innovations. It’s hard to imagine an American Air & Space Museum without the Wright Brothers—but for a long time, thanks to the tangled history of aviation, that was precisely the case.

Next siblings tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Sibling stories you’d highlight?

July 30, 2019: SiblingStudying: The Grimké Sisters

[On August 2^nd, this AmericanStudier’s amazing younger sister celebrates her birthday. So this week in her honor I’ll AmericanStudy interesting American siblings!]

On the two sisters who exemplified the courage and power of American abolitionism.

As I’ve argued before in this space, it might seem from our 21^st century perspective as if it were relatively easy or at least didn’t take a great deal of courage to be an abolitionist in mid-19^th century America, but that perception would be entirely wrong. William Lloyd Garrison being dragged through the streets of Boston is only the most overt of many similar examples of just how unpopular and even hated abolitionists and abolitionism were by many Americans (from every region). Yet even within a community defined by its courage and impressiveness, certain individuals and voices can still stand out, can truly exemplify the kinds of impassioned and heroic activism that represent the best of what Americans can be and do. And within the abolitionist community, two such individuals were the Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah.

Virtually every detail and stage of the sisters’ lives defines their courage. Born to a prominent Charleston, South Carolina judge and his wife, part of an established and comfortable Southern family—and thus by definition in the period a slaveholding family—both sisters by their mid-20s had come to see the institution of slavery as a moral and national disgrace, and both chose self-exile (first to Philadelphia and then to many other Northern cities) from their family and home. Told repeatedly that women could and should not speak in public, particularly not to “promiscuous” (mixed-gender) audiences, the sisters gave shared speaking engagements throughout the north nonetheless; Sarah also wrote a series of “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes” to protest such gender biases. Notified that she could never return to Charleston or risk imprisonment and arrest, Angelina wrote an Appeal to the Christian Women of the South to make her case in that way. When she learned that educator and abolitionist Catherine Beecher supported colonization for freed slaves and other American blacks, Angelina wrote Letters to Catherine Beecher, calling out the colonization idea as just another kind of racism. And this all before they had lived in the North for ten years!

Perhaps a single 1838 event best sums up the sisters’ courageous activism; I’ll quote the above-linked Gilder Lehrman Institute article on it: “Two days after their wedding, Angelina and Theodore [Weld] attended the anti-slavery convention in Philadelphia. Feelings ran high in the city as rumors spread of whites and blacks parading arm in arm down city streets, and by the first evening of the event, a hostile crowd had gathered outside the convention hall. Sounds of objects being thrown against the walls reverberated inside. But Angelina Grimke rose to speak out against slavery. ‘I have seen it! I have seen it!’ she told her audience. ‘I know it has horrors that can never be described.’ Stones hit the windows, but Angelina continued. For an hour more, she held the audience’s rapt attention for the last public speech she would give. The next morning, an angry mob again surrounded the hall, and that evening, set fire to the building, ransacked the anti-slavery offices inside, and destroyed all records and books that were found.” The sisters and Weld, like Garrison and many other abolitionists, continued their efforts for many decades—but an individual moment like this can make clear both the forces against which they strove and their determination to share their voices and arguments nonetheless.

Next siblings tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Sibling stories you’d highlight?

July 29, 2019: SiblingStudying: The Marx Brothers and the Stooges

[On August 2^nd, this AmericanStudier’s amazing younger sister celebrates her birthday. So this week in her honor I’ll AmericanStudy interesting American siblings!]

On the two groups of siblings at the heart of mid-20^th century American comedy and popular culture.

From the Booths to the Barrymores, the Douglas’s to the Bridges, on down to Will and Jada Pinkett Smith and their increasingly visible young ‘uns, multi-generational families have long been a staple in American popular culture (I’m setting aside the most famous such multi-generational pop culture family in 2019 America, the Kardashians, as a subject for another time). Whether you read the trend as one of many signs that American society is not nearly as class-less as we like to believe, as a symbol of our hankering for an equivalent to the British royal family, or as simply a reflection that it’s easier to get ahead if you know the right people, there’s no doubt that our cultural icons have often come as part of family units. Yet I’m not sure that any other cultural medium or any other historical moment have been dominated by competing families of entertainers as were the 1930s and 40s by the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges.

The two families (which is a slightly inaccurate word for the Stooges, since Moe, Shemp, and Curly were brothers but Larry was unrelated to them) have interestingly parallel biographies: each group of brothers was born to Jewish American immigrant families in late 19^th century New York; members of each began to perform in Vaudeville-type acts for the first time in 1912, and achieved their first real breakthrough successes about a decade later; and the similarly-titled films that truly launched each group both appeared within a year of each other, the Marx’s The Cocoanuts (1929) and the Stooges’ Soup to Nuts (1930). The families even feature individual brothers who helped originate the act but left the group at a relatively early point, Zeppo Marx and Shemp Howard. Yet despite these parallels, in my experience it’s very rare to find passionate fans of both the Marx Brothers and the Stooges—they seem today, as perhaps they did in their own era, to have found pretty distinct fan bases.

It’d be easy to attribute that divide to the highbrow/lowbrow dichotomy, and certainly there’s no doubt that the two groups tended to employ very different kinds of comedy: the Marx’s using their scripts and wordplay first and foremost, the Stooges their physical comedy and violence (although certainly Harpo Marx was entirely a physical comic, and in other ways too this division would break down upon close examination). Yet I would say that the two groups also exemplify two very distinct directions for American comedy and popular culture after Vaudeville, both employing developing technologies but in quite different ways: Cocoanuts was one of the first sound films, and throughout their career the Marx Brothers used this new medium of sound film to great effect; whereas most of the Stooges’ classic works were shorts, and while such pieces were often featured before or with other films they were also tailor-made for the new medium of television as it developed in the decades to come. Both films and television remain central media for American comedy, of course, but they work and connect to audiences in fundamentally different ways, and the Marx’s and Stooges can help us analyze those trends at their earlier moments.

Next siblings tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Sibling stories you’d highlight?