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Thursday, September 30, 2021

September 30, 2021: NEASA Guest Posts: Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello

[This past weekend was the 10th annual New England American Studies Association Colloquium, an event I founded a decade ago to share the voices and work of my awesome NEASA colleagues. I’ve also been able to do that in this space, so this week I’ll link to five great Guest Posts by folks I’ve met through NEASA!]

I initially met Liz Duclos-Orsello while planning the 2012 NEASA Colloquium at Salem’s House of the Seven Gables, a site which (like everything in Salem) has benefitted immensely from Liz’s perspective and work. She’s honestly one of the most exemplary AmericanStudiers I’ve ever met, and I was honored to share this February 2014 Guest Post on Salem, community, and more.

Last Guest Post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Colleagues or voices you’d share?

Wednesday, September 29, 2021

September 29, 2021: NEASA Guest Posts: Nancy Caronia

[This past weekend was the 10th annual New England American Studies Association Colloquium, an event I founded a decade ago to share the voices and work of my awesome NEASA colleagues. I’ve also been able to do that in this space, so this week I’ll link to five great Guest Posts by folks I’ve met through NEASA!]

I first met Nancy Caronia through NEASA, but we’ve gone on to work together in multiple settings, from NeMLA conferences to the URI Diversity week. She’s one of the best teachers and people I know, and her October 2017 Guest Post on Columbus Day and Italian Americans remains one of my favorites.

Next Guest Post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Colleagues or voices you’d share?

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

September 28, 2021: NEASA Guest Posts: Akeia Benard

[This past weekend was the 10th annual New England American Studies Association Colloquium, an event I founded a decade ago to share the voices and work of my awesome NEASA colleagues. I’ve also been able to do that in this space, so this week I’ll link to five great Guest Posts by folks I’ve met through NEASA!]

Like yesterday’s subject Elif Armbruster, Akeia Benard was one of the folks who followed me as NEASA President and helped keep the organization moving forward so successfully. She’s since moved on to a wonderful new job as the Curator of Social History for the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the role in which she wrote this October 2018 Guest Post.

Next Guest Post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Colleagues or voices you’d share?

Monday, September 27, 2021

September 27, 2021: NEASA Guest Posts: Elif Armbruster

[This past weekend was the 10th annual New England American Studies Association Colloquium, an event I founded a decade ago to share the voices and work of my awesome NEASA colleagues. I’ve also been able to do that in this space, so this week I’ll link to five great Guest Posts by folks I’ve met through NEASA!]

Elif Armbruster was one of the first connections I made through NEASA, and more than a decade later I’m proud to say she’s still a friend as well as an AmericanStudying colleague. Her January 2013 Guest Post was entitled “From Laura Esquivel to Suzan Colon: Food and Female Identity in Fact and Fiction.”

Next Guest Post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Colleagues or voices you’d share?

Friday, September 24, 2021

September 24, 2021: American Modernists: F. Scott Fitzgerald

[September 24th is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 125th birthday! So in honor of that quintessential Modernist author, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other exemplary such writers. Share your thoughts on any of them, and any other Modernist authors and texts you’d highlight, for an experimental crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On a short story that can help us revisit and revise our overly familiar narratives of a famous Modernist author.

I tried in this post to make the case for why, to my mind, The Great Gatsby is overrated—not bad by any means, but not anywhere close to the Great American Novel either. That might seem like a funny present with which to begin a happy 125th birthday post, but I would actually argue the opposite: that it’s to Fitzgerald’s disadvantage that he’s become so closely associated with this one novel and character. I mean, not in every way; obviously no author would pass up having a book ranked as the 2nd greatest novel of the 20th century, for example. But beyond the ways in which such close associations of an author with one work always limit our narratives and images of that author (and they really always do), in this particular case I think the problem is exacerbated by the not insignificant fact that Gatsby is the superficial asshole, obsessed with another superficial asshole, about whom I wrote in that hyperlinked post. Fitzgerald and his novelist-narrator Nick do an excellent job beautifying that dude and that obsession, to be sure, but at the end of the day I’m really not convinced that Gatsby was worth the whole damn bunch of them together—and I’m definitely convinced that linking F. Scott Fitzgerald too fully to this one novel does him no favors.

Luckily, there’s a very easy answer to that problem, which is to read one (or ideally all, but one’s a good start) of the many other complicated and compelling books and stories that Fitzgerald wrote across his 15-year publishing career. My personal favorite is probably the short story that I highlighted briefly in this post, “Babylon Revisited” (1931). For one thing, the six years between Gatsby and “Babylon” are so important to the depth and success of the latter story—not just because it’s written and set during the Great Depression, and so can flashback self-reflectively and thoughtfully to the Roaring ‘20s rather than being so consumed by the superficial excesses of that moment (as at times Gatsby certainly is, such as the multi-paragraph descriptions of Gatsby’s utterly meaningless parties); but also because for this reader at least Fitzgerald’s style had grown and deepened substantially over those six years, with the result being that “Babylon” complements the unquestionable beauty of Gatsby’s prose with many more layers of complex human identity than Nick can give his focal characters in that novel. (Another reason why the association of Fitzgerald with Gatsby is problematic—it was a pretty early text! Give the man space to grow!)

Perhaps the most telling such human layer to “Babylon” and its protagonist Charlie Wales is an emotion that is undoubtedly a factor of that time shift but also seems largely absent from most of Gatsby’s characters: regret. Toward the end of the novel Nick critiques Tom and Daisy Buchanan as people who cause messes and then leave others to deal with the consequences, but I’d say the same for pretty much all of the novel’s characters—I’m not sure any of the main characters spare a second thought for example for Myrtle Wilson, the most direct casualty (among a few!) of Gatsby’s and Daisy’s and Tom’s (and Nick’s) actions. Charlie, on the other hand, is consumed by regret, forced to deal day in and day out with the consequences of his actions during that decade of Roaring 20s excesses and errors—consequences that have most fully affected and limited his relationship to his daughter (which we might compare for example to Daisy and her young daughter, whom we see and hear about precisely once in the entirety of Gatsby). That emotion, those struggles, that relationship are all more profound and more powerfully human than any of the superficial games played by the novel’s characters, and they remind us of just what this Modernist author was capable of. For his 125th, let’s agree to start reading him beyond that most famous book, okay?

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Thoughts on these authors and texts, or any other Modernist ones, for the weekend post?

Thursday, September 23, 2021

September 23, 2021: American Modernists: Dos Passos and Wright

[September 24th is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 125th birthday! So in honor of that quintessential Modernist author, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other exemplary such writers. Share your thoughts on any of them, and any other Modernist authors and texts you’d highlight, for an experimental crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two strikingly parallel yet also importantly distinct 1930s to ‘50s Modernist arcs.

Despite our longstanding collective national antagonism toward communism, one that precedes the Cold War but of course was greatly amplified during that half-century of global conflict, there have nonetheless been both moments and communities in which the political philosophy has had substantially broader and deeper appeal. In the 1930s, two such factors came together to help produce a sizeable and vocal cohort of Modernist American writers and intellectuals who embraced communism: the Depression’s heightening of wealth inequalities and social stratification seemed to highlight the limitations and even destructive capabilities of unchecked capitalism; and those economic woes, coupled with the continued destructive forces of segregation, lynching, and other communal ills and threats, led many African Americans similarly to seek an alternative to the dominant American systems.

Those responses happened within multiple communities, but they can be succinctly illustrated by two individuals, Modernist writers whose most significant novels bookend the 1930s in American literature and culture. John Dos Passos had been publishing fiction since the mid-1920s, but it was the trilogy that came to be collected as U.S.A. (1938)—The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)—that exemplified both his stylistic experimentation and his socialistic philosophies. Richard Wright launched his career with the short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) but truly entered the literary stratosphere two years later with Native Son (1940), a novel that features both one of American literature’s most eloquent defenders of communism (in the lawyer Max) and a character (protagonist Bigger Thomas) whose tragic and brutal arc makes numerous, ineloquent but compelling arguments for the philosophy.

In the 1940s to 50s, both writers famously broke with those philosophies and with the Communist Party: Wright in one pivotal moment, the essay “I Tried to Be a Communist” (1944); and Dos Passos more gradually, in a series of public statements and positions that culminated in his qualified support for Joseph McCarthy (among other turning points). Yet I would also argue that their shifts represent two quite distinct personal and national narratives in the post-Modernist era: Dos Passos genuinely seemed, in response to World War II, the Cold War, and other factors, to change in his political and social perspectives; whereas to my mind Wright’s perspectives remained largely unchanged, and he came instead to see, as does for example Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the Communist Party as an imperfect and indeed failed vehicle through which to seek such political and social change. Such a distinction would of course become even more important in the 1960s, when a new generation of African American activists found anew a compelling alternative in American socialism.

Fitzgerald post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these authors and texts, or any other Modernist ones, for the weekend post?

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

September 22, 2021: American Modernists: The Black Mountain Poets

[September 24th is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 125th birthday! So in honor of that quintessential Modernist author, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other exemplary such writers. Share your thoughts on any of them, and any other Modernist authors and texts you’d highlight, for an experimental crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On how context can amplify and enrich our analysis of individual authors and works.

I had a high school English teacher who really liked Robert Creeley, so we read a fair amount of his work as part of a poetry unit; I then read a good bit more Creeley as part of a college poetry course with the great Helen Vendler; and I returned to Creeley one more time as a supplemental author for a grad school paper I was writing on Robert Penn Warren’s poetry. I was of course a very different person and reader at each of those stages, but one thing remained the same: Creeley’s poetry did very little for me. I appreciated his potent, imagistic use of language, which reminded me a bit of William Carlos Williams; but for whatever reason, the depths that I have consistently found and appreciated in Williams’ poems eluded me when I read Creeley’s at each of those different moments.

My perspective on Creeley and his poetry has significantly evolved, however, and it has done so in large part through a better understanding of his principal literary and cultural communities: the Black Mountain Poets, and Asheville, NC’s Black Mountain College where they were located. It generally helps to have a sense of what goals and concepts infuse a poet’s work, for example, and reading Charles Olson’s seminal essay “Projective Verse” (1950), widely considered a manifesto for the Black Mountain Poets, gave me a much clearer sense of the use to which Creeley and his colleagues hoped to put their striking images. Olson writes of “Objectism, … a word to be taken to stand for the kind of relation of man to experience which a poet might state as the necessity of a line or a work to be as wood is, to be as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature, to be as shaped as wood can be when a man has had his hand to it.” A distinctly Appalachian as well as Modernist analogy to be sure, and one borne out by the careful shaping of Creeley and his peers.

Yet Black Mountain College was more than just home to this group of avant-garde poets; over its 23 years of existence (1933-1956), the experimental educational institution featured instruction from (among many others!) Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Duncan, and Olson and Creeley, as well as guest lectures by William Carlos Williams and a certain physicist by the name of Albert Einstein. The College’s influence on Modernist and Postmodernist American culture, as well as on society more broadly, was profound and lasting, and the Black Mountain Poets represent only one part of those widespread effects. But they were a part of it, and it a part of them--and the more we can see Creeley and his fellow poets as operating within that experimental, artistic but also social and educational, southern Appalachian space, the more we (no, I’ll speak for myself, the more I) can appreciate their Modernist and important works.

Next Modernists tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these authors and texts, or any other Modernist ones, for the weekend post?

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

September 21, 2021: American Modernists: Nella Larsen

[September 24th is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 125th birthday! So in honor of that quintessential Modernist author, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other exemplary such writers. Share your thoughts on any of them, and any other Modernist authors and texts you’d highlight, for an experimental crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On the brief but potent and important career of a Harlem Renaissance writer.

There are lots of different kinds of undeservedly forgotten or obscure writers—from those who published for decades without ever quite achieving the success that they deserved, as did personal favorite Charles Chesnutt; to those who were tremendously influential in their own era but should be better remembered and read in our own, as I argued in this post about Theodore Dreiser (and specifically Sister Carrie)—but to my mind the most mysterious and compelling are those with very short yet very successful careers, the writers who publish one or two great books and then vanish. Part of what makes those cases especially interesting are the aspects of their authors’ identities that contributed to their meteoric rise and fall, aspects that often appear in their fictional texts as well; and part is simply the opportunity that they present for focused attention, the way in which all that they had to say (or got to say, anyway) is to be found in an impressive work or two. And that’s definitely the case with the meteoric, mysterious, and compelling literary career of African American nurse, activist, and Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen.

Larsen was born in 1891 and died in 1964, which means that her life began at what has been called the nadir of African American existence, just before the height of the lynching epidemic and the Supreme Court’s endorsement of Jim Crow segregation, spanned the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance (and Larsen herself moved to New York City in 1914 to attend nursing school and lived there for much of her life), and ended with the Civil Rights movement in full swing. She also attended historically black Fisk University for two years, worked for a time at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, and married Elmer Imes, the second African American to receive a PhD in Physics. Yet alongside that roster of links between Larsen and the broader African American community must be put some other, far from simple facts of her identity: that her mother was a Danish immigrant and her father an African Caribbean immigrant from St. Croix who abandoned her (and her mother) at a young age; that she took the surname Larsen from her mother’s Scandinavian second husband; and that she spent a few of her formative years in Denmark with maternal relatives. Since Larsen lived in almost total obscurity for more than 65 of her 72 years, it is nearly impossible to know with any certainty what any of these experiences and heritages meant for her perspective and identity (although biographers have worked hard to ascertain what can be known); what we do have instead are the two unique and profoundly American (in every sense) Modernist novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), that constitute her literary identity and legacy very fully and successfully.

I teach both novels in my second-half American literature survey (they’re both very short, really novellas), and their differences make for an interesting and productive pairing. Quicksand is extremely autobiographical, focusing very intimately on the identity and perspective of its protagonist Helga Crane, a half-Danish half-West Indian young woman who moves between the South, New York, and Denmark in search of home, community, romantic connection, and self. Passing is a multi-character study of that titular and very complex racial topic, focusing in particular on two light-skinned African American women and childhood friends (Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry) who have made drastically different life choices (Clare has passed and married a racist white businessman who does not know her racial heritage, Irene has not passed and married a race-obsessed black doctor) and yet whose lives and trajectories intersect fully and tragically in the novella’s events. While both thus likely reveal different aspects of Larsen’s own identity and perspective, the elements that they share are just as significant: a lyrical and powerful style; an extremely impressive ability to create and communicate the perspectives through which the stories are told (Helga and Irene, respectively); and an effortless but crucial concurrent skill at constructing the communities (from a Southern black school to a Harlem party, a whites-only Chicago rooftop restaurant to a fundamentalist black church, and many others) through which these and many other rich and three-dimensional characters move. There are plenty of complex issues to keep literary critics (and survey class students) busy, including central focuses on gender and sexuality, but both books are also and just as importantly readable and engaging stories.

Larsen was (falsely, it seems) accused of plagiarism in regard to the short story, “Sanctuary” (1930), with which she followed Passing, and those accusations along with the failure of her marriage seem to have combined to drive her both to Europe for a time and away from writing (and back to nursing) for the remainder of her life. Reading these two novels is thus, again, partly a way into a long and complex American life, one that connects to a great many historical and cultural issues and changes and to which we would otherwise have precious little access. But it’s also a chance to discover a Modernist writer who can speak to questions of identity and community, of the searches for self and home, that cut across any culture or period and cut to the heart of what defines all of our American lives. For all those reasons, Larsen has been passed by for long enough. Next Modernists tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these authors and texts, or any other Modernist ones, for the weekend post?

Monday, September 20, 2021

September 20, 2021: American Modernists: Antin and Yezierska

[September 24th is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 125th birthday! So in honor of that quintessential Modernist author, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other exemplary such writers. Share your thoughts on any of them, and any other Modernist authors and texts you’d highlight, for an experimental crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On the many distinctions and telling similarity in two compelling Jewish American books.

One evening about a decade ago, my younger son taught me more about the Jewish holiday of Purim, in a couple-minute, mostly understandable and criminally cute narrative based on stories they learned in their Jewish Community Center preschool, than I had learned in my prior thirty-plus years of life. There are various ironies of my personal and familial identity illustrated by that anecdote, including the reason for all eight of my maternal great-grandparents’ immigrations to America (to escape anti-Semitic pogroms in late 19th century Eastern Europe), the complicated religious and cultural continuities and changes across my maternal grandparents’ lives and then especially my Mom’s, my own relationship to this Jewish American heritage, and, most ironically and yet most tellingly of 21st century America, the simple fact that my sons, who are a quarter Jewish American and a quarter English-German American and half Chinese American, have (as attendees of that JCC preschool for a few early years) already learned and engaged with and performed more of Jewish culture and story in their first couple decades of life than I ever have and likely ever will.

While all of that is, of course, first and foremost about myself and my multi-generational American family and identity, past, present, and future, it can also connect to an interesting pair of youthful literary characters—one real and autobiographical, one invented and fictional, but both Jewish American children whose lives and voices have a great deal to tell us about family, faith, and our national identities and stories—created by talented Modernist writers in the early 20th century. Young Mary Antin is the protagonist of Antin’s cultural autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), a book that takes its readers from the Pale of a Russian village to a nearly unequivocal celebration of the American Dream as this particular family and narrator find and live it; young Sara Smolinsky is the narrator and heroine of Anzia Yezierska’s realistic and modernist novel Bread Givers (1925), a work which begins with its ten year old narrator and her family already in New York and chronicles especially the cross-generational struggle between Sara and her domineering scholarly father Reb. Like their works and tones, the two writers seem in many ways fully distinct: Yezierska published half a dozen novels and multiple collections of short stories in a long and successful literary career that led her to Hollywood and a romantic relationship with John Dewey; Antin’s few published works, including the autobiography and one other book, They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914), a political argument for tolerant immigration policies, appeared within a few years of each other, after which she traveled for a few more years giving speeches about immigration before largely disappearing from the public eye.

They are indeed two very different Jewish American women and authors, and these books, like their others, certainly deserve to be read and analyzed on their own terms. Yet one very interesting and telling similarity lies in the emphasis that both authors and texts place on the wisdom and awareness possessed by their very young protagonists. (A feature shared by another, slightly later Jewish American Modernist novel, Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep [1934].) These young women are, of course, being created by older authors, and yet I would argue that neither the thirty-something Antin nor the forty-something Yezierska implies that young Mary’s or Sara’s perception and prescience are creations of their older selves. Instead, it is precisely these protagonists’ youth, and concurrent their explicitly hybrid Jewish American identities, when contrasted with the older voices and more static identities illustrated by both their more Old World-centered family members and their initial encounters with native Americans, that seems to give Mary and Sara their unique and impression perspectives, their visions (whether, again, more positively or negatively) of the communities (familial, spiritual, cultural, and national) in which they are growing up. A compelling lesson for all Americans, and one more reason to read these unique works by two hugely talented Modernist writers.

Next Modernists tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these authors and texts, or any other Modernist ones, for the weekend post?

Saturday, September 18, 2021

September 18-19, 2021: Domestic Terrorism: 9/11 and 1/6

[This past weekend marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a terrorist attack that occurred on American soil and was perpetrated by attackers who had lived in the US for months if not longer. Whether and how it qualifies as domestic terrorism is a topic I’ll focus on in this weekend post, after a week spent AmericanStudying a handful of other domestic terrorist histories and contexts.]

On what distinguishes and what connects two 21st century terrorist attacks.

First of all, I need to open this post by being very clear that I’m not seeking to minimize in any way the horrors and tragedies, nor indeed any of the realities, of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. Not by thinking about them in relationship to domestic terrorism (that is, I’m not even vaguely gesturing at Trutherism or any other such bullshit), and not in any other way either. I certainly agree with this 2012 Kevin Levin article that over time it is important to step back from the most personal and emotional forms of commemoration and to remember even the most tragic events (like the Civil War in his article, or like Pearl Harbor in this prior post of mine) with more nuance and thoughtfulness, and that’s a big part of what I hope to do in this post. But doing so does not require minimizing the tragedies, not for any of those thousands of lives and families and communities affected by the attacks, and not for any and all of the rest of us. Full stop.

So with all that said, the first couple decades of the 21st century have been bookended by two terrorist attacks on the heart of American society and community: the 9/11 attacks (which of course included not just the most famous Manhattan planes but also attacks aimed at the Pentagon and another DC site, either the White House or Capitol); and then this past January’s insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. It’s easy, and important, to differentiate those two attacks in all sorts of ways, not only their drastically different casualty numbers (an important distinction to be sure) but also the very significant difference of the role of an international terrorist organization in planning and orchestrating 9/11. While the U.S. had a complicated but undeniable role in the creation of Al Qaeda, as I wrote about at length in this post (and as could be said of most every international entity of the last century), that doesn’t change the fact that it was a foreign organization, committing what has to be described as an overt act of war against the United States. (Which doesn’t make our military responses to the attacks, nor the broader framework of the “War on Terror” that we have found so hard to leave behind, any smarter or more successful, necessarily; but which is an important context nonetheless.)

But at the same time, I think there is significant value in linking both of these attacks under the umbrella of terrorist attacks on American soil. After all, both of them targeted American political and social institutions with the overt goal of changing the nation’s politics and policies; if anything, the January 6th insurrection did so even more fully, since it targeted an ongoing political action (the authentication of the 2020 presidential election) and sought to disrupt and reverse that Constitutional event through violence. Which is to say, the concept of domestic terrorism isn’t, to my mind, just about who’s committing the actions, although that’s certainly part of it (and doesn’t make the 1/6 attacks look any better, to be sure). It’s also, and equally importantly, about how terrorist attacks can strike at the heart of a nation, at some of its core communities and institutions, at its shared identity and ideals. As we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it’s worth considering how the 21st century has been dominated by such terrorisms here in the United States, and thinking about what links the far-right movements behind them (at least as much as what differentiates them).

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Friday, September 17, 2021

September 17, 2021: Domestic Terrorism: Cultural Representations

[This past weekend marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a terrorist attack that occurred on American soil and was perpetrated by attackers who had lived in the US for months if not longer. Whether and how it qualifies as domestic terrorism is a topic I’ll focus on in the weekend post, after AmericanStudying a handful of other domestic terrorist histories and contexts.]

On three cultural texts that reflect three different visions of domestic terrorists (some SPOILERS in what follows).

1)      The Dark Knight Rises (2012): The villains in many action films (or at least their sinister plans) could be described as domestic terrorists, but that’s never been more accurate than it is for Tom Hardy’s Bane in the final film in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. Bane doesn’t just start his culminating attacks on Gotham City with a series of domestic terrorist bombings; he also weds those attacks to an anarchist philosophy that makes clear that he sees himself as a terrorist in the most overtly political senses of the term. While Hardy’s talents, combined with the usual depiction of Gotham as a deeply troubled place in need of serious reform, make his perspective (if not his famously muffled voice) at least somewhat understandable, he is still clearly a villain—and, we eventually learn, one whose domestic terrorist acts are actually undertaken for the benefit of a greater villain who cares nothing for his philosophies. This is what we might call the 21st century comic book film vision of domestic terrorism: somewhat thoughtful and purposeful, but ultimately villainous and in need of heroic opposition.

2)      Fight Club (1999): David Fincher’s film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel features many twists and turns (most of which I’ll try not to spoil here for the few who don’t yet know them), but its culmination is an elaborate, highly orchestrated act of interconnected, domestic terrorist bombings against the city in which its characters reside. Like everything else in the film, and doubly so given the stunning revelations about those protagonists that have immediately preceded it, that set piece is ambiguous in tone—but in my reading, there’s no question that we are meant to watch and appreciate the bombings more as a beautiful crescendo (as our hero and heroine do) than as a disturbing or villainous act of destruction and mass murder. At the end of the day, Fight Club is the story of a boring, constrained everyman in desperate need of shaking free from those shackles—and those bombings, like the character of Tyler Durden who orchestrates them, represent the potent culmination of his successful escape. That’s a heroic, or at the very least an entirely sympathetic, vision of domestic terrorism.

3)      American Pastoral (1997): As I hope this week’s series has made clear, somewhere in the shades of gray between villainous and heroic lie most of the acts of domestic terrorism in our nation’s history: sometimes more toward the villainous side (such as Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing), sometimes a bit more toward the heroic (as with the environmental terrorists I highlighted yesterday), but always part of the fraught and contingent realities of political, social, individual, and cultural contexts. As I trace in that hyperlinked blog post above, few literary works engage those complex contexts with more depth and power than Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, a novel with a Weather Underground-like domestic terrorist bombing at the center of its multi-layered narration, structure, chronology, plot, family, and depiction of 20th century American history. As I wrote in this post, I agree with the critiques of Roth around themes of gender (among others); but at his best, he’s one of our greats, and American Pastoral is his best novel and one of our best cultural representations of domestic terrorism.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories of domestic terrorism you’d highlight?

Thursday, September 16, 2021

September 16, 2021: Domestic Terrorism: Edward Abbey and Environmental Terrorism

[This past weekend marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a terrorist attack that occurred on American soil and was perpetrated by attackers who had lived in the US for months if not longer. Whether and how it qualifies as domestic terrorism is a topic I’ll focus on in the weekend post, after AmericanStudying a handful of other domestic terrorist histories and contexts.]

On three distinct and even contrasting ways to contribute to environmental activism.

Edward Abbey is perhaps best known for his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which depicts a group of heroic anarchists and environmental terrorists using every means at their disposal (including, if not especially, criminal ones) to fight for the environment against corporate and governmental forces. Abbey’s book directly inspired the eco-terrorist (or eco-revolutionary, depending on who you ask) organization Earth First!, which was founded in 1980 and the members of which frequently referred to (and still to this day call) their acts of eco-sabotage as “monkeywrenching.” While Abbey did not become an official member of Earth First!, he did both write for them and take direct action with them on occasion, and thus seems to have been more than fine with his fictional ideas being turned into radical activism in this way. As with other radical leftist groups such as the Weathermen, it’s important to try to maintain a sense of the line between inspiring activism and destructive terrorism; but it’s also important not to let any one perspective, and certainly not a corporate or authoritative one, be the sole arbiter of that spectrum. And to read Abbey’s book is to recognize the complexity of such issues when it comes to environmental extremism.

Abbey published more than twenty books in his three-plus decade long writing career, however, and thus engaged with environmental issues in far more varied ways than that one most famous novel would indicate. For example, his first non-fiction book, 1968’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, presents a far more individual and reflective form of environmental advocacy and activism. An autobiographical account of Abbey’s time spent living alone in Southeastern Utah’s spectacular Arches National Park (he lived there from 1956-1957 as a backcountry park ranger), Desert Solitaire is in many ways a 20th century Walden, equal parts memoir and personal reflection, environmental and scientific journal, and social and philosophical commentary. As did Thoreau, Abbey offers his personal experiences and perspective as a model for his readers and all of us, suggesting the intense and important value of this kind of isolated immersion in the natural world. At the height of 1960s social and political debates, such a book and project might seem like a retreat or at least a separation from those shared concerns, but I believe Desert Solitaire is better seen as a complement to them, an argument for how and why environmental activism should be part of that broader spectrum of social change (if a form that perhaps does at times require more individual and, yes, solitary pursuits).

As that year in Arches National Park reflects, Abbey also worked for a number of years, particularly in the early part of his writing career, as a park ranger. He did so not only there but at many other parks and sites in the late 1950s and 1960s: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (in Arizona near the Mexican border); the Everglades in Florida; and Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California among others. These efforts partly embodied Desert Solitaire’s ethos of individuals immersing themselves in natural worlds, of the advice Abbey gave in a September 1976 speech to environmental activists: “It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here.” But I would argue that working as a park ranger also represents a contribution to communal experiences of nature and the environment as well as a form of fighting for the land that differs from eco-terrorism. That is, I think Abbey’s service as a ranger represents a third form of environmental activism, one that recognizes that we’re all in it together and seeks to defend the environment in more positive ways. There’s a place for all these forms in our conversations and efforts, but as a devotee of our National Park system, I’m especially inspired by this third form.

Last domestic terrorists tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories of domestic terrorism you’d highlight?

Wednesday, September 15, 2021

September 15, 2021: Domestic Terrorism: McVeigh and Militias

[This past weekend marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a terrorist attack that occurred on American soil and was perpetrated by attackers who had lived in the US for months if not longer. Whether and how it qualifies as domestic terrorism is a topic I’ll focus on in the weekend post, after AmericanStudying a handful of other domestic terrorist histories and contexts.]

On how to see the Oklahoma City domestic terrorist as a lone wolf, and why not to.

In many ways, Timothy McVeigh’s story and identity would seem to echo those of many other “lone wolf” killers and domestic terrorists. Like Lee Harvey Oswald and others, McVeigh was a military veteran who came unhinged and turned elements of that martial training (and a lifelong obsession with weapons and war) to an act of domestic terror. And like so many of our current crop of mass shooters, McVeigh was a youthful loner with a passion for computers (in his case, specifically for computer programming and hacking) who would eventually find an outlet and encouragement in technological and virtual spaces for his radical perspectives and ideas. Seeing McVeigh as a lone wolf not only seems to fit those and other aspects of his profile, but also in a broader sense helps us see any public shooting (from the assassination of a specific individual to a mass shooting of random people) as at least potentially an act of domestic terrorism. It also reminds us of one of war’s most destructive effects, the further radicalization and destabilization of individuals like McVeigh (who bragged in a documentary about decapitating an Iraqi soldier during the Gulf War).

But there are significant, telling problems with thinking about McVeigh as a lone wolf, or really as an individual actor in any meaningful sense. I don’t just mean the danger of our forgetting how much he was inspired by a prior incident, the 1993 standoff in Waco (TX) between Branch Davidian cult members and federal authorities; although McVeigh did see his domestic terrorist bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City so fully as a response to those earlier histories (which he had partially witnessed, as he traveled to Waco in support of the cult members) that he committed his horrific crime on the two-year anniversary of the Waco standoff’s April 19th concluding events. That’s all true and important to remember, but it’s still fair to say that an individual shooter or terrorist can be inspired by prior events (indeed, almost inevitably is in one way or another) and still ultimately act as individually, as what we might call a “lone wolf.” Nor is McVeigh working with co-conspirators (Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, both convicted for their roles in planning the bombing) sufficient, as shooters like the Columbine high schoolers can work together and still act as “lone wolves.”

No, I’m thinking instead about the ways that both McVeigh’s perspective and his terrorism paralleled and were linked to broader, hugely influential trends throughout the 1990s. As part of a conspiracy theories series a few years back, I wrote this post on the 90s fears of “black helicopters,” and how those conspiratorial narratives of international threats and takeovers foreshadowed many aspects of our current moment and society. I think it’s fair to say that those legacies have become even clearer in the years since that series, and indeed that in many ways Donald Trump was (if he was any kind of leader at all) the Conspiracy Theorist-in-Chief. The driving force behind those 90s conspiracy theories was the rise of right-wing “militias,” groups of well-armed, white supremacist fanatics who saw themselves as “Patriots” (their most consistent self-identification) already and perhaps always at war with enemies both federal and global. From what I’ve seen, McVeigh did not belong to any of those militias, and I’m not trying to imply any direct association. But the fundamental fact is that his narratives of the U.S. government as an enemy to be opposed with military weapons and tactics (he later admitted that sniper-style shootings would have been even more ideal than a bombing) jibed quite closely with militia perspectives—and with those of mass shooters and domestic terrorists in the 2020s as well.

Next domestic terrorists tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories of domestic terrorism you’d highlight?

Tuesday, September 14, 2021

September 14, 2021: Domestic Terrorism: The Weathermen

[This past weekend marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a terrorist attack that occurred on American soil and was perpetrated by attackers who had lived in the US for months if not longer. Whether and how it qualifies as domestic terrorism is a topic I’ll focus on in the weekend post, after AmericanStudying a handful of other domestic terrorist histories and contexts.]

[NB. This post originally appeared on the blog in the fall of 2019, which is why some of the dates are out of whack. But it’s too relevant to this week’s series not to include here.]

On the difficulty, and the importance, of writing about domestic terrorists with whom we agree.

I apologize for getting into serious inside baseball territory with the opening of this post, but I think it helps me introduce the central point I want to consider here. I’ve been writing this daily blog for nearly nine years now, and for much of that time I’ve been scheduling posts (and then weekly series when I shifted to that format) quite a while in advance. But I’m drafting this post only one week out, on Tuesday October 1st, which I believe is the closest I’ve gotten to running out of scheduled posts in at least the last six years. And the reason isn’t just that I’ve been enjoying a sabbatical full of lots of time with my sons and the first book talks of a schedule full of them, although both those things are true and very nice indeed (I’ll have more to say about those ongoing talks in next week’s series). Nor is it that the absolutely insane news of the last couple weeks has distracted me and made it difficult to write, although that is unquestionably true and not nearly so nice (if long overdue and entirely warranted, as my recent blog post on threats to the Constitution made clear).

No, my delay in working on this post (it was at least three weeks between scheduling yesterday’s and finally starting to write today’s, to add one additional, telling inside blogging detail into the mix) has a lot to do with a fraught pair of interconnected facts: my perspective closely aligns with many of the positions held and advocated by the leftists who formed the Weather Underground; and yet it’s impossible to describe many of that group’s activities as anything other than domestic terrorism. That’s true of a good deal of what transpired in the course of the four days of 1969 protests, although those acts of vandalism and destruction could possibly be seen as aftereffects (or at least side effects) of the 1969 activities, rather than central elements of them. But as the Weathermen continued to develop as an organization over the subsequent eight years, they turned their attention more and more fully to overt acts of domestic terrorism, such as the May 1970 bombing of the National Guard Association building in Washington, DC, the June 1970 bombing of the New York City police headquarters, and the March 1971 bombing of the US Capitol building, among many other attacks. One can argue that many of their bombings were designed to avoid injuring people, but they often did so nonetheless, and in any case bombings of domestic targets are acts of domestic terrorism, full stop.

I don’t have any difficulty naming them as such, but in writing about the Weather Underground I do find myself in a somewhat similar predicament to the one I addressed in this post on Nat Turner’s slave revolt: the need to critique an act of domestic terrorism while recognizing that it served a cause with which I agree. I don’t mean in any way to critique histories like those of the Vietnam War and the military industrial complex and the Nixon Administration (all targets of the Weather Underground’s political protests and violence) with those of slavery; even the horrific Kent State shootings, which prompted the May 1970 National Guard building bombing, shouldn’t be equated to the horrors of slavery. But nevertheless, just as Turner and his fellow rebels committed their acts of violent terrorism in opposition to systemic wrongs and abuses, so too did the Weathermen oppose many systems and histories that I likewise would critique and hope to dismantle. Which means I have to condemn their acts of domestic terrorism (which I do) while at the same time recognizing the legitimacy of their perspective, a difficult balance which, among other things, can lead to some serious writer’s block.

Next domestic terrorists tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories of domestic terrorism you’d highlight?

Monday, September 13, 2021

September 13, 2021: Domestic Terrorism: The KKK

[This past weekend marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a terrorist attack that occurred on American soil and was perpetrated by attackers who had lived in the US for months if not longer. Whether and how it qualifies as domestic terrorism is a topic I’ll focus on in the weekend post, after AmericanStudying a handful of other domestic terrorist histories and contexts.]

On two under-remembered stages to the early histories of our oldest domestic terrorist organization.

I could probably focus the first paragraph of every post on this blog on the books, articles, and work of other scholars that have informed my own thinking about that particular subject. I generally try at least to highlight them through hyperlinks, but sometimes I know the scholars in question themselves as well as their work, and know that they are equally awesome. In that case, and especially when they are women (whose work, as has been illustrated too often in recent years, is often particularly under-cited), I will try to dedicate some blog space to sharing those scholarly texts. So: if you want to learn about the Ku Klux Klan’s Reconstruction origins, check out Elaine Frantz Parsons’s Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (2015); and if you want to follow the Klan’s evolution into the early 20th century, check out Kelly J. Baker’s Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (2011). Both those books expand greatly and in more far depth and analytical nuance on the histories and ideas about which I’ll write briefly in this post; for those in my last paragraph in particular, I also greatly look forward to Cynthia Lynn Lyerly’s forthcoming Thomas Dixon, Jr.: Apostle of Hate.

One of the histories that Parsons’s book helps us remember is just how contested and controversial the Klan was in its early years. As Parsons traced in this 2014 We’re History post (which was a partial excerpt from and certainly foreshadowed her book), in the late 1860s and early 1870s the Grant Administration and federal government conducted a series of investigations into the Klan, leading to famous Congressional hearings among many other political and legal responses. I can’t agree (and I don’t think Parsons would either, per the end of that We’re History piece) with Grant biographer Ron Chernow, however, when he writes that Grant and these federal inquiries helped destroy the Reconstruction-era Klan; as Parson notes, even those Klan members convicted of crimes as a result of these new laws were generally pardoned by Grant after the 1872 election. So better remembering these Reconstruction debates not only helps us recognize the conflicts over the Klan, but also offers a frustrating glimpse into how that domestic terrorist organization and its violent activities were normalized, even (perhaps especially) in precisely the same moments when it was being treated as the criminal enterprise it always was (and remains to this day).

As I argued in my own We’re History piece on the subject, and as Baker’s book details and (I’m quite sure) Lyerly’s book will as well, popular culture comprised one central vehicle through which that normalization of the Klan took place. One of the first such cultural normalizations was created as a direct response to the Congressional hearings themselves: Mississippi lawyer and white supremacist James D. Lynch’s epic poem Redpath, or, the Ku Klux Tribunal (1877), which depicts a fictional Northern political aide who journeys to the South to investigate the Klan and ends up converting to its cause based on what he finds there. Texts like Lynch’s poem helped create the conditions in which Thomas Dixon’s Klan trilogy could become bestselling “historical” novels, in which the film adaptation of those novels The Birth of a Nation could become one of the most influential American movies of all time, and in which Gone with the Wind (written by a woman, Margaret Mitchell, who would respond to Dixon’s praise of the novel by telling him that she was “practically raised on” his books) remains one of the most successful American novels. All those texts, most released during the years (1872-1915) when the KKK was officially not active, remind us that even a domestic terrorist mainstay like the Klan is not a given, that its arc and influence were constructed over time, and can, crucially, be engaged, challenged, and destroyed in our own era.

Next domestic terrorists tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories of domestic terrorism you’d highlight?

Saturday, September 11, 2021

September 11-12, 2021: Tanya Roth’s Guest Post on “The Real Miss America”

[Tanya Roth is a writer, historian, and high school educator with whom I’ve been very fortunate to connect through the #twitterstorians community over the last few months. This Guest Post is an excerpt from her forthcoming book Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945-1980, which is due out September 30th!]


[Ad from the National Archives, Record Group 330, stored in a Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS) member's folder.]

Excerpt from Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945-1980 by Tanya L. Roth

 

Chapter 2: The Real Miss America: Recruiting Womanpower 

 

Four years after the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act passed, someone in recruiting decided that the first all-out campaign for womanpower should take place with the 1952 Miss America pageant. It must have seemed like the perfect pairing: the pageant highlighted the best young American women from around the nation, perfectly poised, beautiful, talented, and educated. Recruiters dreamed of signing just these types of young ladies for service in the armed forces. Military publicity officers secured a presence for servicewomen throughout the pageant, ensuring visibility whenever possible. The goal was simple: get Americans to associate servicewomen with the excellent reputation Miss America contestants had at that time and to impart a sense of glamour into Americans’ ideas of women in uniform...

From the beginning...concerns about appearances framed woman power recruiting efforts. Recruiters followed the philosophy that familiarity and femininity would be the most practical and effective ways to entice women to military careers. Military service became advertised as an avenue by which women could become not just ideal American women, but respectable ladies. This approach helped make women’s service acceptable to Americans both inside and outside the armed forces. If military service— especially in wartime—could transform boys into men, then military service could also turn girls into proper ladies. Women belonged in national defense in part because military and government officials saw them as partners in service with men, doing things women did best and capitalizing on their identities as women to do so. In these regards, staging the women’s recruiting drive in conjunction with the 1952 Miss America pageant made sense. The pageant was about thirty years old, and community service was— and still is—an important element of holding the title “Miss America.”  During World War II, the crowned Miss Americas all performed war service activities such as visiting troops and selling war bonds, their version  of supporting national defense.5 Scholar Mary Anne Schofield argues that  during wartime, such efforts “supported the propaganda machine that said  that femininity and war work went together.” In the process, the pageant itself solidified the image of Miss America as “the ideal American woman.” By 1952, if military leaders wanted a venue that would showcase servicewomen as the very best of American womanhood and service, the Miss America pageant was the place to be.

[9/11 series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other pageant histories, stories, or contexts you’d share?]

Friday, September 10, 2021

September 10, 2021: PageantStudying: Santana Jayde Young Man Afraid of His Horses

[September 7-8 marks the 100th anniversary of the first Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy histories and stories of pageants, leading up to a special Guest Post on a pageant story from a forthcoming book!]

[Most of my posts this week have been pretty negative, so I wanted to end on a more positive note, with this repeat of a 2016 post on a very inspiring pageant winner!]

On a young tribal emissary who embodies 21st century communal activism.

Most everything I know about Santana Jayde Young Man Afraid of His Horses, who in late 2015 at the 30th Annual Oglala Lakota Nation Wacipi (Pow Wow) was crowned Miss Oglala Lakota Nation 2015-2016, I learned from this article. I could paraphrase the article’s details and quotes in this paragraph, but instead I’ll ask you to check out that story about the amazing work and voice of this inspiring young activist, and then come back here when you’re done!

Welcome back! I’m not sure I can imagine a more fitting moniker than Santana’s Lakota name, When She Speaks They Listen. In the series of testimonials with which late 19th century Paiute leader and activist Sarah Winnemucca concludes her autoethnographic book Life among the Piutes (1886), a friend of Winnemucca’s notes that “she deserves the attention of our best ears.” Indeed she did, and so too do Santana and her work, both to raise awareness of reservation issues such as domestic violence and teen suicide (among many others) and to “celebrate life,” deserve as wide a hearing and response as possible. To read the quotes of Santana’s in that article, to see the many layers to her community, tribal, and national activisms (while she’s attending college, serving as the president of the Oglala Lakota College Center, and preparing for law school applications), can’t help but inspire renewed commitment from all of us to do our part to better the communities and world we share.

None of us can do it alone, of course, and Santana’s story also illustrates how truly communal are these activist efforts. Of particular note is the article’s recounting of her visit to the innovative and successful Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where students from kindergarten through high school all study the Lakota language as a central part of their curriculum. The school’s Lakota language teacher, Waniya Locke, articulates succinctly the connections of language to identity and community: “I invited Miss Oglala Lakota Nation into my classroom to show my students that outside my classroom, people really do care about our language. She encouraged them to continue to speak and grow in the Lakota Language.” Genuine patriotism takes impressive individual voices and leaders like Santana to be sure, but it also takes generations and communities of activists and leaders, like those being educated at Red Cloud. There’s nothing more inspiring and significant, nor more American in the best sense, than that combination.

Guest Post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Pageant histories, stories, or contexts you’d share?

Thursday, September 9, 2021

September 9, 2021: PageantStudying: Trump

[September 7-8 marks the 100th anniversary of the first Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy histories and stories of pageants!]

On two uncomfortable realities that the Former Occupant forces us to confront.

One of my happier recent accomplishments is that I’ve managed to write more than 8 months’ worth of 2021 blog posts with very few mentions of the Orange Boil upon Satan’s Buttocks. While I’m breaking that trend a bit today, I don’t want to dwell on the Trumptastic details themselves any more than is necessary. So if you need a refresher on the deeply disturbing stories about Trump’s time as the owner of the Miss Universe pageant (across nearly two decades until he was forced to sell in 2015), here’s a link that covers many of those stories; then come on back for some broader and hopefully less Trump-centric contexts and takeaways.

Probably the most disturbing of those stories is Trump’s consistent references (confirmed by other pageant employees) to his going backstage to ogle (“inspect,” as he oh-so-cleverly put it) the contestants in various stages of undress. That would be disturbing no matter what, but it becomes significantly more so when we learn that many of those contestants were underage—as, of course, was that first 1921 Miss America about whom I wrote in Monday’s post, 16 year old Margaret Gorman. While as far as we know the Atlantic City businessmen who invented that 1921 pageant didn’t blatantly and purposefully walk in on Gorman and her peers while they were changing (although I’m honestly not sure if we would know if they had done so; we know about Trump’s behavior because he was crass enough to admit it and then it was confirmed by others, not because it was initially reported anywhere else), the entire premise of the pageant—and of every such pageant about which I’ve ever read—was to ogle these young women, to examine and judge their “beauty.” Worth noting that many of them, in the past and in the present, have been extremely young if not, indeed, legally underage.

That’s by far the grossest story from Trump’s Miss Universe days; but the story of how the 2013 Miss Universe pageant ended up hosted in Vladimir Putin’s Russia is in many ways just as disturbing. It’s of course disturbing for all that it meant about future candidate and President Trump’s ongoing relationship to Putin, the overt subject of that hyperlinked article. It’s certainly disturbing as a reflection of how many American businesses, businesspeople, and other power players have cozied up to Putin’s autocratic and murderous regime over the years. But in terms of this week’s topics, it’s also quite disturbing to realize how much pageants such as Miss Universe are bought and owned—not only by their literal owners/CEOs like Trump, but also by those who pay for the right to host the events. Which is to say, to follow up my prior paragraph, for the right to ogle these young women—quite possibly backstage (this was a Trump pageant, after all), but most definitely on stage and likely at multiple other events and moments throughout the pageant. As with so many societal ills, Trump’s version might be more blatantly gross, but it reflects broader and deeper realities to be sure.

Last PageantStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Pageant histories, stories, or contexts you’d share?

Wednesday, September 8, 2021

September 8, 2021: PageantStudying: American Pastoral

[September 7-8 marks the 100th anniversary of the first Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy histories and stories of pageants!]

On a superficial but still strikingly symbolic fictional character.

I wrote about one central thread and theme in Philip Roth’s historical novel American Pastoral (1997) in this post, and in lieu of my opening paragraph here would ask you to check that one out if you would and then come on back here.

Welcome back! If the character of Merry Levov is one complex female protagonist of Roth’s novel, the Swede’s wife Dawn Dwyer Levov is another. As is so often (if not indeed always) the case in Roth’s works, these women are filtered through multiple male lenses: that of the Swede himself, the perspective character for the novel’s 3rd-person section; and that of Nathan Zuckerman, the novelist-narrator for the framing 1st-person section. And indeed Dawn, a former Miss New Jersey and Miss America contestant, is consistently portrayed through various superficial or physical elements that appeal in stereotypical but unquestionable ways to these male characters: her beauty; her allure to the Swede and his entire Jewish American community as a “shiksa” (a non-Jewish woman; “He’d done it,” Zuckerman writes of the moment when the community learns that the Swede had married a shiksa); her multiple plastic surgeries through which she attempts to maintain those elements over the years, dragging the Swede with her to exotic European clinics in the process; and her sex appeal, both in extended sex scenes with the Swede and then in (SPOILERS) the adulterous sex scene which comprises one of the novel’s final moments.

But while Dawn might not be successful as a three-dimensional character, she is nonetheless a strikingly successful representation of the novel’s historical, cultural, and national themes (on which I touched a bit in that prior post). The three generations of the Levov family reflect the myths and realities of the American Dream (and its flipside, what Zuckerman calls the “American berserk”), both for immigrant and ethnic communities and for all Americans. The most overt symbolic representation of those themes is the Swede and Dawn’s home in Old Rimrock, the fictional New Jersey community (with a history dating back to the Revolution) where they move to raise their all-American (in every sense) daughter Merry. But I would argue that it’s easy and wrong to overlook Dawn’s starting point as a Miss America contestant, not only in terms of what she represents to the Swede and his community, but also and even more importantly in terms of that event as a goal for Dawn herself. Indeed, that early flashback section of the novel is the place where Dawn’s character is most fully developed, and where we get a sense of what “Miss America” means for young Dawn Dwyer and her family and community, at least as much as it does for young Seymour Levov and his.  

Next PageantStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Pageant histories, stories, or contexts you’d share?

Tuesday, September 7, 2021

September 7, 2021: PageantStudying: Vanessa Williams

[September 7-8 marks the 100th anniversary of the first Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy histories and stories of pageants!]

On what’s deeply frustrating about a 1980s scandal, and how its subject transcended it nonetheless.

As all of this week’s posts will no doubt reveal, I have a number of issues with both beauty pageants in general and the Miss America pageant in particular. But with that said, there’s no denying the fact that 1984 Miss America winner Vanessa Williams comprised a striking and inspiring story. The descendant of one of the first African American state legislators in post-Civil War Tennessee (William A. Feilds), and the daughter of two elementary school music teachers (Helen Tinch and Milton Augustine Williams Jr.), Williams’ March 1963 birth announcement actually read “Here she is: Miss America.” When she won the September 1983 pageant as Miss New York (making her the 1984 Miss America, as the reign lasts for a full year), fulfilling that prescient prediction and bringing all that history and heritage to the stage with her, she became the first African American Miss America, a long-overdue and important step toward diversifying what had for too long been a profoundly white event.

Which makes the following year’s scandal all the more frustrating. In September 1984 (just a few weeks before Williams’ reign would have concluded at the next pageant) Penthouse magazine acquired private nude photos that a young Williams had taken and chose to publish them in the September issue, and Williams was pressured by the pageant organization to relinquish her title to the runner-up, Miss New Jersey Suzette Charles. This “scandal” was frustrating in part because of the false dichotomy between amateur and professional contestants about which I wrote in yesterday’s post—if we acknowledged that all contestants are in one way or another already professional models, I believe the photos would have been far less controversial. But it’s especially frustrating because of the stunning hypocrisy: the entire ethos of the Miss America pageant (like all beauty pageants) is to ogle the contestants, to treat them as objects to be scrutinized in every conceivable way (including while wearing very little in the swimsuit portion); so I have to think that the real problem with Williams’ photos was that they weren’t part of the pageant, not able to be controlled within that objectifying environment.

The Miss America folks seem to have belatedly recognized that fact as well, and at the September 2015 pageant CEO Sam Haskell offered an overdue public apology to both Williams and her mother. But in truth, it was all that Williams had done and accomplished over those intervening 32 years that truly reflected how far beyond Miss America she had gone (and perhaps had always been): eight studio albums to date that have included a #1 hit (“Save the Best for Last”) and multiple Grammy nominations; performances in more than 25 films, with NAACP and Harlem Film Festival awards for two of them (1997’s Soul Food and 2007’s My Brother); three Primetime Emmy nominations and one win for her role on Ugly Betty, one of countless TV shows of which she’s been part; a Tony nomination for her performance in a 2002 revival of Into the Woods; a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; and all sorts of work as an entrepreneur, spokesperson, and philanthropist. If the Miss America pageant truly seeks to celebrate the most impressive and inspiring American women, there couldn’t possibly be a more deserving winner than Vanessa Williams; and if, as the scandal indicates, the pageant has a far too narrow and conservative view of that identity, then Williams makes plain how silly and superficial that perspective is.

Next PageantStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Pageant histories, stories, or contexts you’d share?