[On July 6th,
1963, President John F. Kennedy’s
Executive Order establishing the Presidential Medal of Freedom
went into effect. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of the Medals recipients,
leading up to a weekend post on the most recent, most controversial honoree
yet.]
On a striking,
telling pair of 1964 honorees.
After awarding
Kennedy’s initial Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients, Lyndon Johnson
immediately chose a whole bunch more of his own: four in December 1963
(including Kennedy himself, posthumously); and then 30 more in 1964. That
latter group included extensions of all the categories I discussed yesterday:
Cold War diplomats like Dean
Acheson and journalists like Walter
Lippman (who coined the term “Cold War”); Civil Rights leaders like A.
Philip Randolph; inspiring innovators like Helen Keller;
and artists of Americana like Aaron
Copland, Carl Sandburg, and John Steinbeck. Johnson also honored in 1964 a
couple of my favorite early American Studies scholars, cultural
critic Lewis Mumford and historian
Samuel Eliot Morison, which I highlight here just because I think it’s
pretty cool (as was their fellow 1964 honoree, theologian and President
Obama’s favorite philosopher Reinhold
Niebuhr). But by far the most interesting 1964 recipients, on their own
terms but even more so as a reflection of a fundamental duality at the heart of
the Medal, would have to be animator Walt Disney and poet and critic Thomas
Sterns “T.S.” Eliot.
Neither of those
men were particularly surprising choices for a 1964 Presidential Medal of
Freedom. By this time Disney’s
film studio had released many of its most beloved animated films, California’s
Disneyland was nearly a decade old (and Florida’s Disneyworld about to
begin development), and the company and its signature mascot Mickey Mouse were
already well established as defining American icons. Eliot was nearly five
decades into his acclaimed literary career (which began in earnest with 1915’s
“The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), and had received the 1948
Nobel Prize in Literature among countless other honors. But on the other
hand, I’d like to push back a bit on Eliot as an obvious selection (which I
know was my own framing, but I am large and I contain multitudes). Sure, he was
already by this time quite well-established in the canons of Modernist poetry specifically
and 20th century literary history overall; but this was an author
who had abandoned the U.S. for England, renouncing his American citizenship in
the process. While a few of the other early Medal honorees were not Americans
(like 1963 recipients Pablo Casals and Jean Monnet), I don’t think any others
were American ex-patriates. Not to mention: Eliot throughout his career painted
pretty darn bleak pictures of both the United States and the world.
Both of those
elements certainly distinguish Eliot from most of the other Medal nominees (in
those early years and ever since). But I would nonetheless make a broader case
that this striking pair of 1964 recipients reflect a central tension in how our
collective national conversations (the kind of zeitgeist that a Presidential
Medal of Freedom would always in one way or another reflect) engage with our
cultural figures and works. There’s a reason why we often describe a
cleaned-up, idealized narrative of American history and society as the “Disney
version”; as I wrote in many of the posts in my long-ago
Disneyworld series, that doesn’t mean that such spaces don’t include
compelling ideas or perspectives, but Walt Disney made children his primary
target audience, and then turned those kinds of childish stories (in the
best and worst senses) into a dominant cultural brand. T.S. Eliot, on the other
hand, consistently set out to upend his audience’s and communities’ idealistic
or optimistic narratives, as reflected with particular potency by “April
is the cruelest month” as the first line of a poem. While it’s fair to say
that artistic recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom have tended more
to fall into Disney territory, folks like Eliot (as well as Steinbeck and
Niebuhr in that same year) illustrate a collective willingness to recognize and
honor the darker side as well.
Next Medal post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other honorees you’d highlight?
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