September 30, 2022: Asian American Leaders: Michelle Wu

[On September 28^th, 2002 the great Patsy Mink passed away. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Mink and four other Asian American leaders, past and present!]

On one example of the worst of 2022 America and so much of the best when it comes to Boston’s exciting new mayor.

First things first: I’m never going to be able to write about Michelle Wu’s successful 2021 campaign for mayor of Boston with anything even vaguely approaching objectivity. Wu was the first political figure about whom my older son got really excited—his high school requires community service hours for graduation, and he’s a deeply committed young environmentalism and climate change activist so during the summer after 9^th grade he began volunteering with the Environmental League of Massachusetts (ELM). ELM had endorsed Wu’s campaign, and much of his volunteering thus became canvasing and manning tables for Wu for Boston; he even had the chance to meet and chat with her after one such event in Roslindale (the Boston neighborhood where she lives with her family). To say that the election of Wu as mayor was a big deal in the Railton household would thus to be significantly understate the case, and we haven’t been the slightest bit disappointed as she has begun her first term this past year.

I wish I could say the same for all Boston residents, however. One of the big stories of Wu’s first year in office were the seemingly constant, aggressively loud and angry anti-mask/anti-vaccine protests that took place outside of her Roslindale home. While I can’t say I have much understanding of or patience for anti-maskers or anti-vaxxers (two communities who together have unquestionably and frustratingly prolonged and worsened this pandemic), of course I support their fundamental, profoundly American rights to hold their own opinions and express their own points of view. I also believe that protest is not only a vital part of our American political and social life (and always has been), but in my book Of Thee I Sing I define it as one of the most consistent forms of both active and critical patriotism across our histories. But the protests outside of Wu’s house were expressly designed to intimidate her into giving in to their demands, and in so doing (indeed, as the main way of so doing) to bother her young children, her neighbors, the whole community with their purposefully excessive noise and disturbance. I’m not suggesting they shouldn’t be allowed to do so (until and unless they break any laws), but I find these protests a reflection of the worst of America in 2022 nonetheless.

Fortunately, Wu hasn’t let that small group of aggrieved assholes derail her goals and plans for Boston, and indeed she’s had an inordinately active and successful first year in office. In keeping with what got my son connected to her in the first place, much of that has been linked to environmental and climate change activism, from the launch of an overarching Green New Deal for the Boston Public Schools to groundbreaking specific proposals like eliminating the use of all fossil fuels in new construction projects for the city. But maybe my favorite Mayor Wu effort to date has been the successful piloting of free public transit in the city—the most prominent story about the MBTA this year has been a continuation of the longstanding clusterfuck (pardon my French, but it’s the only word that works here) that is the T; but Wu is looking not only to change that narrative, but to reframe our entire conversation around public transportation, a conversation that will be absolutely crucial if cities are going to help fight climate change as we move forward. I couldn’t be prouder that my son is so connected to this innovative and inspiring Asian American leader.

September Recap and a new Guest Post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Asian American lives or stories you’d highlight?

September 29, 2022: Asian American Leaders: Lisa Wong

[On September 28^th, 2002 the great Patsy Mink passed away. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Mink and four other Asian American leaders, past and present!]

On a telling story that reveals a lot more than just a leader’s initiative.

One of the cooler things that happened during my first few years as a faculty member at Fitchburg State University was the 2007 election of Lisa Wong as Mayor of Fitchburg. Only 28 at the time of her election (two years younger than me!), Wong was both the youngest woman and the first Asian American woman to be elected mayor anywhere in Massachusetts. A number of my FSU colleagues had worked on Wong’s campaign and/or been early supporters of it and her, which certainly made it feel that the election results were as much as about the campus community and future as they were those of the larger city—and indeed, some of Wong’s many achievements as mayor involved helping bridge the town-gown gap in ways that have continued to echo in the years since the last of her four mayoral terms ended in 2016. She also began the fraught and ongoing but crucial process of revitalizing the city’s downtown and cultural sectors, among other signature goals and achievements of her 8 years as Fitchburg Mayor.

I could write plenty more about what Wong did as mayor (and what she has done since), but the story on which I want to focus for the rest of this post concerns how she became mayor in the first place. In 2007 she was running against three-term incumbent Dan Mylott, a popular figure in the city from well before his time as mayor. As Wong tells it, those in the know told her that of the city’s just over 40,000 residents, about 5000 consistently voted in mayoral elections; Mylott was particularly, overwhelmingly popular with that community of voters, and Wong was advised that she would have to find a way to win over more than half of them if she were to win the election. But Wong’s response was: what about the other 35,000 residents? She focused much of her campaign on finding ways to reach out to and connect with those other Fitchburg residents, including going door to door to meet and talk with folks and families, and convinced enough of them to vote and vote for her specifically that she won the election quite easily (as I understand it).

That’s quite a story, and reveals a lot about Wong’s innovative and forward-thinking perspective and politics (which I’m sure have likewise served her well in those subsequent town manager gigs). But I think it also and even more importantly reveals another side to a topic I’ve written about quite frequently (perhaps more frequently than any other), in this space and many many others: how we define who is fully, centrally a member of our collective communities, who is American. Voting isn’t the only way we develop such definitions, of course, but it is certainly a consistent and clear one—and, even more than voting itself, the question of who we see as voters and potential voters, on whom our political and social efforts focus, defines so much of politics, policy, and public conversations. As an Asian American, part of one of the communities that for centuries have been far too often ignored in those frames by our white supremacist power structure, Wong was in a particularly good position to help reframe those narratives toward a more inclusive vision—and she did so, for her first election and throughout her time as a Fitchburg and Massachusetts leader.

Last leader tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Asian American lives or stories you’d highlight?

September 28, 2022: Asian American Leaders: Patsy Mink

[On September 28^th, 2002 the great Patsy Mink passed away. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Mink and four other Asian American leaders, past and present!]

On three signature achievements across Mink’s truly groundbreaking career in Congress and government (which included seeking the Democratic nomination for President in 1972!):

1)      Educational Progress: After her historic election to Congress in 1964, it would have been understandable if Mink took a while to get her bearings; but instead she immediately began work on vital new legislation that truly reshaped federal education policy. That included two laws introduced in 1965 (her first year in office): the Early Childhood Education Act, which Mink herself introduced to Congress and became the first federal legislation to cover that crucial pre-school period; and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, on which Mink was an important co-sponsor and which made sure that educational progress would be included in the broader Great Society reforms and policies. Indeed, those laws represent some of the most enduring legacies of the Great Society programs, and bear the strong imprint of this first-time, first-year Congresswoman.

2)      Title IX: They’re probably not the most enduring and influential law that Mink co-authored, however. That title would have to go to the Title IX Amendment of the Higher Education Act, the 1972 bill which prohibited sex-based discrimination in any federally funded education program and thus guaranteed equal protection and support for women’s athletics (among other areas, but with athletics a particular point of emphasis). As we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of this hugely important law, one that in 2002 was officially renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act, we’ve been able to truly chart just how consistently and how much it has helped girls and women participate in and achieve (both in and beyond the world of sports). It’s one of the single most influential federal achievements of the last half-century, and it literally and figuratively has Mink’s name all over it.

3)      Environmental Stewardship: Education and women’s rights were thus two foundational and consistent issues on which Mink focused in her 24 total years in Congress (split between 1965-77 and 1990-2002). But as a representative from Hawai’i, Mink was also acutely aware of environmental issues related to the world’s oceans; and after leaving Congress for the first time in 1977, she had the chance to work directly on such issues as Jimmy Carter’s Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (a newly created role that Mink was the first to hold). While she only held that position for a brief time, she thus helped inaugurate a federal, Cabinet-level emphasis on not only those specific issues, but also a broader sense of the multiple layers to environmental conversation, stewardship, and activism. As with all of these achievements, the best way to honor Mink’s passing and her life alike will be to carry on those fights.

Next leader tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Asian American lives or stories you’d highlight?

September 27, 2022: Asian American Leaders: Yuri Kochiyama

[On September 28^th, 2002 the great Patsy Mink passed away. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Mink and four other Asian American leaders, past and present!]

On a few of the many reasons why we should better remember the influential activist and leader.

I’ve written multiple times previously in this space about Yuri Kochiyama, and wanted to keep this first paragraph short so you can check those posts out if you would.

Welcome back! Since I wrote those posts I researched Kochiyama more deeply in order to include her in the Japanese Internment chapter of We the People, and would now argue that she and her activism and leadership can help us better remember at least two important sides to the internment era. For one thing, she exemplifies multiple complex realities of the internment camps: not just their unconstitutional and horrific imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of Americans (a majority of them American citizens like the California-born Kochiyama), but also the stories of Japanese American soldiers who volunteered to serve while interned with their families (a roster that includes both Kochiyama’s twin brother Peter and her future husband Bill) and the complementary activism that took place within the camps. Kochiyama, for example, built on her college English degree to edit a newspaper at her Jerome, Arkansas camp, and within that newspaper published letters from and testimonials about Japanese American soldiers for her “Nisei in Khaki” column. Every interned individual deserves a place in our collective memories, but Kochiyama in particular illustrates those multi-layered histories quite strikingly.

Her lifelong activism after the war, about which I did write more fully in those prior posts (and which was often undertaken in partnership Bill, particularly their shared advocacy for collective memory of and reparations for internment), likewise helps us better remember the lives and legacies of interned Japanese Americans. But Kochiyama’s activism extended far beyond Japanese American causes, and included extensive experience with the Civil Rights Movement (including a friendship with Malcolm X that culminated in her presence in a famous photograph [CW for graphic imagery] of the aftermath of his assassination) and her participation in the October 1977 takeover of the Statue of Liberty by Puerto Rican nationalists. Better remembering that lifelong activism thus helps us engage both with the interconnected nature of many 20^th century social movements and with the complex but crucial concept of intersectionality, of how different identities and communities can pull together toward the common causes of equality and social justice. That’s a lesson we sorely still need.

Next leader tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Asian American lives or stories you’d highlight?

September 26, 2022: Asian American Leaders: Pablo Manlapit

[On September 28^th, 2002 the great Patsy Mink passed away. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Mink and four other Asian American leaders, past and present!]

First, a couple paragraphs on the Filipino American labor leader from my book We the People:

“The concentration of many of these early-twentieth-century Filipino arrivals in western U.S. communities of migrant labor led to new forms of inspiring communal organization and activism, ones that also produced corresponding new forms of exclusionary prejudice. The story of Pablo Manlapit and the first Filipino Labor Union (FLU) is particularly striking on both those levels. Manlapit was eighteen when he immigrated from the Philippines to Hawaii in 1909, one of the nearly 120,000 Filipinos to arrive in Hawaii between 1900 and 1931; he worked for a few years on the Hamakua Mill Company’s sugarcane plantations, experiencing first-hand some of the discriminations and brutalities of that labor world. In 1912, he married a Hawaiian woman, Annie Kasby, and as they began a family he left the plantation world and began studying the law. By 1919, Manlapit had become a practicing labor lawyer, and he used his knowledge and connections to found the Filipino Labor Union on August 31, 1919; he was also elected the organization’s first president. The FLU would organize major strikes on Hawaiian plantations in both 1920 and 1924, as well as complementary campaigns such as the 1922 Filipino Higher Wage Movement; these efforts did lead to wage increases and other positive effects, but the 1924 strike also culminated in the infamous September 9 Hanapepe Massacre, when police attacked strikers, killing nine and wounding many more.

Manlapit was one of sixty Filipino activists arrested after the massacre; as a condition of his parole he was deported to California in an effort to cripple Hawaiian labor organizing, but Manlapit continued his efforts in California, and in 1932 returned to Hawaii and renewed his activism there, hoping to involve Japanese, indigenous, and other local labor communities alongside Filipino laborers. In 1935, Manlapit was permanently deported from Hawaii to the Philippines, ending his labor movement career and tragically separating him from his family, but his influence and legacy lived on, both in Hawaii and in California. In Hawaii, the Filipino American activist Antonio Fagel organized a new, similarly cross-ethnic union, the Vibora Luviminda; the group struck successfully for higher wages in 1937, and would become the inspiration for an even more sizeable and enduring 1940s Hawaiian labor union begun by Chinese American longshoreman Harry Kamoku and others. In California, a group of Filipino American labor leaders would, in 1933 in the Salinas Valley, create a second Filipino Labor Union (also known as the FLU), immediately organizing a lettuce pickers’ strike that received national media attention and significantly expanded the Depression-era conversation over Filipino and migrant laborers. In 1940, the American Federation of Labor chartered the Filipino-led Federal Agricultural Laborers Union, cementing these decades of activism into a formal and enduring labor organization.”

Just a quick addendum: there are many, many reasons to better remember Asian American figures and histories like Manlapit and the FLU. But high on the list is the way in which those stories and histories complicate, challenge, and change our broader narratives of topics like work, organized labor, and protest and social movements in America. Every one of those themes has been as diverse and multi-cultural as America itself, throughout our history just as much as in the present moment; and every one has included Asian Americans in all sorts of compelling and crucial ways.

Next leader tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Asian American lives or stories you’d highlight?

September 24-25, 2022: Faulkner at 125: Digital Yoknapatawpha

[September 25^th marks William Faulkner’s 125^th birthday. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Faulkner and other Southern storytellers, leading up to this special weekend tribute to a great new Faulkner website!]

I’ve already highlighted my Dad Stephen Railton’s newest web project, Digital Yoknapatawpha (which features many many collaborators and contributors, but was Dad’s idea so I’m gonna do my filial duty and call it his) in two prior posts:

--This one on all three of his scholarly websites;

--and this one focused on DY and my hopes for how it can be found and used by educators, students, and all interested readers.

Hopefully those posts make clear how unique and impressive this project is, and make all interested FaulknerStudiers (and all the rest of y’all too) ready to check it out for themselves. I could spend many more posts than this one highlighting all the very helpful and very cool specific elements to DY, so here’s just one: the temporal heatmaps that can help readers trace different places across both time and Faulkner’s texts. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a digital humanities tool that truly embodies both words in that phrase—using digital resources to capture a key element to the literary works being studied, and reveal new ways to read and understand them. Just the tip of the DY iceberg!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Faulkner resources or other Southern storytellers you’d share?

September 23, 2022: Southern Storytelling: Faulkner at the University

[September 25^th marks William Faulkner’s 125^th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Faulkner and other Southern storytellers, leading up to a special weekend tribute to a great new Faulkner website!]

On one ironic and one inspiring lesson to take away from the famous conversations.

For two years, between 1957 and 1958, William Faulkner served as the University of Virginia’s first Writer-in-Residence. He did quite a bit with his time in Charlottesville, but most famously and significantly he gave a series of public readings from and lectures on his career and works, including question and answer sessions with UVA students and members of the community. A few years ago, my Dad Stephen Railton and a team of digital scholars and designers produced an online, digitized archive of those public conversations, and I encourage any Faulkner fan—or anyone interested in American literature and culture and history, the craft of writing, or public performance, among other relevant topics—to spend some time losing yourself in that archive.

Before you listen to or read those lectures and conversations, however, it’s important to note that one of the ironic but central ideas I would take away from them is that artists cannot be entirely trusted when it comes to talking about their own works. Time and again, Faulkner says things about his works and career that, at best, feel drastically over-simplified, and at times feel (to this reader and FaulknerStudier, at least) blatantly inaccurate. That’s perhaps most true of his famous statements about The Sound and the Fury (1929), a novel that’s already plenty difficult enough to read and interpret without having to contend with some serious authorly misdirection. To be more generous to Faulkner, he was making those statements thirty years after publishing Sound, and so at the very least we have to treat all of his 1950s perspectives and ideas as just as another collection of primary texts to analyze, no more authoritative and certainly no more absolute than the complex works about which he’s talking.

But if we step back from the content of the conversations—which again is very interesting and well worth your time—and consider the basic fact of their existence, it’s hard not to be hugely inspired. Here was one of America and the world’s most famous artists, a Nobel Prize winner toward the end of his legendary career, coming to a university not just for the recognition or a stipend or the like, but instead to engage, deeply and extensively, with members of its community—including, indeed especially, some of its youngest members. That Faulkner did so at all is extremely impressive; that he did so numerous times over the course of two full years is unique and striking; that we now have so many ways to access, engage with, and become part of those conversations is a bit of a 21^st century miracle.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Southern storytellers you’d share?

September 22, 2022: Southern Storytelling: Representing Katrina

[September 25^th marks William Faulkner’s 125^th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Faulkner and other Southern storytellers, leading up to a special weekend tribute to a great new Faulkner website!]

On three exemplary stages of artistic depictions of the controversial 21^st century tragedy.

1)      Documenting: Released less than a year after Katrina hit, Spike Lee’s gripping documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) is required viewing for anyone seeking to understand the hurricance and its many complex contexts and effects; but it’s only one of many impressive documentary films on those topics released in the years after the storm. Among them I would especially highlight Trouble the Water (2008), an immersive account of the storm filmed by a local family and featuring some of the most stunning and devastating on the ground footage of a hurricance ever captured. Taken together, Levees and Trouble offer crucial complementary lenses through which to document Katrina, and on a broader level exemplify what documentary storytelling can do in representing such histories and communicating them to audiences.

2)      Rebuilding: There are likewise important documentaries about the multi-layered, ongoing efforts to rebuild New Orleans in the post-storm era. But I believe that the best artistic representation of that process is Treme, David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s four-season HBO show about music, food, race, culture, relationships, and the residents of that New Orleans neighborhood (and of the city overall) in the storm’s aftermath. Simon is a master television storyteller, and one of our culture’s most impressive depictors of urban communities and stories, but I would also argue that a TV show was the perfect artistic vehicle to chronicle the rebuilding process. Being able to follow the show’s numerous characters across multiple episodes and seasons provided a gradual, nuanced, contradictory, and always compelling perspective on whether and how the city could find its way again after the destructions and traumas of the storm.

3)      Remembering: Both those documentaries and a show like Treme continue to have vital roles to play as New Orleans and the nation continue to document and rebuild, but nearly a dozen years after the storm, the complexities and meanings of remembering have also taken on a more prominent place in our collective narratives of Katrina. I don’t know of any artistic texts about Katrina that represent those complexities and meanings more successfully and powerfully than does Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning novel Salvage the Bones (2011). Ward’s immersive, lyrical novel of a Mississippi family before, during, and after the storm is in many ways singular, but I would nonetheless argue that it also exemplifies what novels can do as representations of dark and potentially divisive histories. By focusing so fully and deeply on her central characters and family, Ward’s novel illustrates how fiction can produce empathy with the individual experiences and perspectives that are at the heart of any historical event—and thus can reshape our collective memories of those histories through such intimate, individual voices and stories.

Last storytelling studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Southern storytellers you’d share?

September 21, 2022: Southern Storytelling: Carson McCullers

[September 25^th marks William Faulkner’s 125^th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Faulkner and other Southern storytellers, leading up to a special weekend tribute to a great new Faulkner website!]

On three compelling works by the precocious, hugely talented Southern writer lost far too soon.

1)      The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940): McCullers published three phenomenal novels before she turned 30, and her masterpiece might well be the first, published when she was just 23 years old. Heart is one of the more unique American novels, assembling a cast of Sherwood Anderson-inspired “grotesques” and exploring both the universal human themes reflected by the book’s title and many specific social and cultural layers to life in a 1930s Georgia mill town. There are many reasons to read beyond the Southern Renaissance authors on whom I’ve focused earlier in this series, including questions of inclusion and diversity to be sure; but high on the list as well is the very different early 20^th century Souths to which an author like McCullers and work like Heart help us connect.

2)      The Member of the Wedding (1946): As I mentioned in this post, McCullers’ third novel (although she began it immediately after publishing Heart) offers a coming of age story that complements but also contrasts with the far more well-known To Kill a Mockingbird. Featuring slightly more familiar characters than the true originals in Heart, Member has been frequently adapted, including by McCullers herself for the 1950 Broadway show that ran for 501 performances and spawned an acclaimed 1952 film adaptation featuring many of the same actors as the play. So there are lots of ways to connect with this story, but I still highly recommend the novel, and agree with McCullers when she wrote to her husband Reeves that it is “one of those works that the least slip can ruin. It must be beautifully done,” and it most definitely was.

3)      Illumination and Night Glare (1999): Perhaps sensing the end of her far too short life was approaching, McCullers dictated her autobiography over her final months in 1967; but it was left unfinished, and only published (in that unfinished form) 32 years later. As that New York Times review suggests, Illumination is a short and at times frustratingly opaque book, perhaps because of its unfinished state, certainly because of McCullers’ own reticence to write at length about her many struggles and challenges. But what the book does capture is what its title suggests: the moments of epiphany that pierce through the darkness of those struggles and challenges and provide a writer with inspiration to go with the precocious talent. For anyone interested in learning more about the writing process and life, I highly recommend McCullers’ autobiography.

Next storytelling studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Southern storytellers you’d share?

September 20, 2022: Southern Storytelling: Thomas Wolfe

[September 25^th marks William Faulkner’s 125^th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Faulkner and other Southern storytellers, leading up to a special weekend tribute to a great new Faulkner website!]

On the largely, ironically forgotten author who deserves to be remembered and read.

A decade ago I wrote a weeklong series on AmericanStudies connections found in a US Airways Magazine. Just after a feature on Charlottes, the magazine included a briefer piece on various historic sites elsewhere in North Carolina. A few of them are connected to Asheville, the Western North Carolina, mountain city that has provided hotel stays and getaways for many prominent Americans (including multiple presidents at George Vanderbilt’s enormous Biltmore House) over the last century and more. Unmentioned among those references, however, is the modernist American novelist who grew up in Asheville and whose mother made her living in the city’s booming early 20^th century real estate and boarding businesses: Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe’s absence from the article is unsurprising, as he has I would argue largely been forgotten in the 65 years since his tragically early death; but it’s also both ironic and unfortunate.

The irony of Wolfe’s elision, both from our collective memories and from an article on North Carolina, is that he was, as much as any American author, deeply concerned with the question of how and whether an artist—or anyone—can both remain part of and escape from his home and past. The original subtitle of his novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929) was A Story of the Buried Life, and the novel begins with a fragmented quote that includes the lines “Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language” and “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.” Throughout, Wolfe’s hugely autobiographical novel engages both backwards—into his own, his family’s, his city’s, and the national pasts—and forwards, wondering whether its protagonist can unearth those pasts, will become himself buried in the process, should instead move on into a more separate future, and so on. Five years later, Wolfe would explore those same themes again, from some of the same yet also very distinct angles, in You Can’t Go Home Again (1934). For this author to be absent from most of our national narratives of modernist writers, American literature, or even his home state is, again, powerfully ironic.

But it’s more than that: it’s a shame. Even in his own lifetime, Wolfe struggled with his editors over his sprawling and difficult style, and found limited (or at least more limited than he otherwise might have) audiences and successes as a result. Yet it seems to me that Wolfe’s style is as entirely interconnected with his content and themes as were those of his fellow modernists Hemingway and Faulkner; while it’s fair to say that Wolfe’s was not as influential as either of theirs, I would also argue that the experience of reading his can be just as rewarding and meaningful on its own terms. Moreover, while some of Hemingway’s characters and stories feel more focused on European experiences and some of Faulkner’s more specific to the South, Wolfe’s works are, to my mind, profoundly representative of shared American (and perhaps human) questions, both from that early twentieth century moment and from across all our generations and communities. Time to put him back on the map, I’d say.

Next storytelling studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Southern storytellers you’d share?

September 19, 2022: Southern Storytelling: Fathers and Sons

[September 25^th marks William Faulkner’s 125^th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Faulkner and other Southern storytellers, leading up to a special weekend tribute to a great new Faulkner website!]

On the complex generational relationship that helps explain the Southern Renaissance.

It’s easy enough, and certainly not inaccurate, to characterize the group of Southern intellectuals and writers who formed the vanguard of the 1920s and 30s Southern Renaissance as profoundly conservative, as a community rebelling against radical and future-driven national and international movements and trends such as modernism, urbanization, and (eventually) the New Deal. This was the group, after all, who called themselves first the Fugitives and then the Agrarians, and whose collective writings culminated in the unquestionably conservative (and at times unfortunately racist) manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930). No AmericanStudiers worthy of the name could fail to take such historical and cultural contexts into consideration when analyzing why these young men (mostly) and women came together at this moment, and why they wrote and thought the things they did.

Yet there are of course other kinds of contexts that also inform any and every writer’s (and person’s) identity, perspective, and works, and I believe a biographical one is particularly important when it comes to analyzing the Southern Renaissance figures. They were born around the turn of the 20^th century, which meant that their parents had been born, in most cases, just after the end of the Civil War; those parents were thus the children of both Civil War veterans and of the incredibly complex and fraught post-war period, the children of (among other things) both the Lost Cause and the New South. To take the Renaissance’s most enduring literary figure, for example: William Faulkner was born in 1897, to parents born in 1870 and 1871; his father Murry both tried to build the family’s railroad company and to carry on the legacy of his own grandfather, a writer and Civil War hero known as “The Old Colonel.” Is it any wonder, then, that young Quentin Compson is so obsessed with the voice and perspective of his father, Jason Compson, and of the familial and Southern pasts about which he learns from Jason?

If we move beyond Faulkner, and into the works of the Fugitive and Agrarian writers who even more overtly self-identified as part of the Renaissance, we likewise find works and characters centered on—obsessed with, even—the legacies of their fathers. Perhaps no work better exemplifies that trend than Allen Tate’s historical and autobiographical novel The Fathers (1938), a text that engages in every tortured word with the legacies of the Civil War and its aftermath and of the familial and cultural issues raised therein. Far more ambiguous and complex, but perhaps even more telling of this father-centered trend, is Robert Penn Warren’s poem “Mortmain” (1960), a five-section elegy for Warren’s father; the first section is entitled “After Night Flight Son Reaches Bedside of Already Unconscious Father, Whose Right Hand Lifts in a Spasmodic Gesture, as Though Trying to Make Contact: 1955,” and while the subsequent four sections range far beyond that man and moment, they do so precisely to ground many other historical and cultural questions in that profoundly autobiographical starting point. As Warren’s life and career illustrate, the Southern Renaissance figures were not circumscribed by such generational relationships—but they were certainly influenced, and in many ways defined, by them.

Next storytelling studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Southern storytellers you’d share?

September 17-18, 2022: War is Hella Funny: M*A*S*H

[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ve AmericanStudied wartime comedies in various media, leading up to this special post on M*A*S*H itself!]

On AmericanStudies takeaways from each of the three iterations of M*A*S*H.

1)      The Novel: I can’t be alone (at least among us born post-1970) in not having been aware that the entire MASH franchise originated with a book, Richard Hooker’s (a pseudonym for military surgeon H. Richard Hornberger) MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors (1968). That was just the beginning of the literary franchise, as Hooker followed it up with two sequels over the next decade, M*A*S*H Goes to Maine (1972) and M*A*S*H Mania (1977). When we remember that Monday’s subject, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, was published just seven years before Hooker’s book, the two novels become part of a longer conversation (along with Wednesday’s subject Dr. Strangelove) about 1960s wartime comedies and satires. Interestingly none of those works focuses on the decade’s ongoing war in Vietnam, but of course all of them were at least implicitly in conversation with that contemporary event.

2)      The Film: Just two years after the publication of Hooker’s novel, journalist and screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. adapted it into a screenplay that was then directed by the young filmmaker Robert Altman as M*A*S*H (1970). Both Lardner Jr. (in tandem with his dad Ring Lardner Sr.) and Altman have plenty to tell us about American culture and pop culture across the 20^th century, as does the fact that the film is apparently the first studio movie to feature audibly the word “fuck.” But what’s particularly interesting to me is the way in which the film’s main changes from Hooker’s novel involve the two characters of color: in the book the main Black character is known as “Spearchucker” Jones and is the target of significant stereotyping, whereas he gets a more three-dimensional portrayal in the film; and in the book the young Korean soldier Ho-Jon is killed off, whereas in the film (and later the TV show) he survives. Close in time, but quite distinct in tone, are these two texts.

3)      The TV Show: Just two years after that film (and thus only four years after the novel—this franchise exploded very fast), on September 17, 1972, that hyperlinked opening scene of the pilot episode aired on CBS, launching what would become one of the most successful TV shows in history by the time its hugely prominent finale aired in February 1983. Of course a show that ran for 256 episodes across 11 seasons diverged in all sorts of big and small ways from the book and film alike; but the core characters remained the same, a striking testimony to their appeal across all these genres and media. But one thing that’s specific to the show’s more than a decade-long timeline is how much the world changed across those years—from the Vietnam War ending to the changes in the Cold War between 1972 to 1983, and with many concurrent changes to the medium of television itself, a show like M*A*S*H can help us track and analyze contexts well beyond its characters and plots.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?

September 16, 2022: War is Hella Funny: Tropic Thunder

[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ll AmericanStudy wartime comedies in various media, leading up to a special post on M*A*S*H!]

On whether and how the Hollywood meta-comedy is also a wartime meta-comedy.

I could write a whole different weekly series about Hollywood meta-comedies and satires, and to a significant degree director and co-writer Ben Stiller’s very funny (and quite frequently offensive) Tropic Thunder (2008) would fit better in that series than it does in this one. The main characters (including Stiller alongside Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Jay Baruchel, and Brandon T. Jackson) are all actors making a film that goes terribly wrong; the supporting characters include the film’s director (Steve Coogan) and its special effects man (Danny McBride), the author of the book being adapted into the film (Nick Nolte), the overbearing studio head (Tom Cruise), and the sleazy agent (Matthew McConaughey) for one of the actors. Add in the fact that each of those characters is played by a talented comic actor giving an extremely exaggerated performance—yes, I do mean extremely exaggerated—and you’ve got all the makings of a very funny Hollywood meta-satire.

As I imagine you already know, and as each and every one of those hyperlinked clips reflects, the movie that all those characters are making is a war movie, the Vietnam War-set Tropic Thunder. That means without question that the satirical, meta-comic elements are consistently directed at other war and Vietnam War films—it’s not a coincidence for example that the film’s trailer begins with the uber-familiar notes of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” (probably the second most consistently used track in Vietnam War- and 1960s-set films, after “Fortunate Son”). Many of the film’s other central elements, such as the team’s diverse collection of personalities who butt heads constantly but have to come together to achieve their mission, are drawn from the traditions and stereotypes of war films more generally, making this a comedy that parodies that longstanding cultural genre on multiple successful levels.

But beyond those two successful and funny levels of film meta-comedy—a satire of Hollywood and a parody of war films—is Tropic Thunder a film about war in any way? I’m not entirely sure that it is, but I would say that there’s one interesting and easily overlooked layer which qualifies: the mythologized source material on which the film-within-the-film is based. It turns out that the wartime memoir written by “Four Leaf” Tayback (Nick Nolte) was entirely invented—he served in the Coast Guard during the Vietnam War and never left the U.S., and his hook hands are also fake, an affectation to amplify his faux-authenticity as a vet. Partly that adds yet more to the meta-commentary, since it turns out that however far down we dig, Tropic Thunder (the same of Tayback’s memoir as well as the film-within-the-film and, yes, the actual film) is an invented, fake story. But I’d say this telling details also reminds us of just how many of the narratives around war are always similarly invented, revealing more about our need to believe in them than about the histories they purport to portray. That ain’t so funny, but it’s a lesson worth learning to be sure.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?

September 15, 2022: War is Hella Funny: Good Morning, Vietnam

[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ll AmericanStudy wartime comedies in various media, leading up to a special post on M*A*S*H!]

On three competing yet ultimately intersecting layers to the hit 1980s wartime comedy.

The origin point for Barry Levinson’s film Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) was a pitch for a sitcom very much in the vein of (and likely even inspired by) M*A*S*H. In 1979, former Armed Forces Radio Service DJ Adrian Cronauer pitched a sitcom based on his experiences during the Vietnam War; no network picked it up, so he turned it into a TV movie script which became the basis for the feature film’s screenplay (if with significant revisions by screenwriter Mitch Markowitz, who had in fact worked as a writer on M*A*S*H). The whirlwind known as Robin Williams (on whom more momentarily) certainly shifted things from there, but there’s a reason why the character name was and remained Adrian Cronauer—this is a story intended to be grounded in reality, in a historical figure’s actual experiences at the interesting and fraught intersections of DJ and soldier, American rock music and Southeast Asian warzone, comedy and tragedy. That history and humanity alike come through at key moments, and I’d argue constitute the film’s most successful elements.

They’re not the most famous one, though. Cronauer once said of the film’s central casting that Williams “was playing a character named Adrian Cronauer who shared a lot of my experiences. But actually, he was playing Robin Williams.” Partly that seems to me an understandable critique of Williams’ tendency to ham it up and treat film roles like excuses for stand-up comedy, a problem that to my mind severely affects a film like Dead Poets Society (1989). But at the same time, there’s no doubt that Williams was a profoundly talented actor as well as comedian, and he brings both layers to his performance in Good Morning, Vietnam—infusing the justifiably famous radio sequences with humor and energy to spare (selling the audience entirely on why this DJ would have become so beloved among his soldier-listeners); but gradually and impressively making his Cronauer into a complicated and conflicted human being whose mistakes and morals alike influence the film’s events. Williams was right in the upward arc of his explosion into full movie-stardom in 1987, and there’s no doubt that this performance and film both reflected and amplified that trajectory.

That 1987 moment was also amidst another striking Hollywood trend—the explosion of late 80s Vietnam War films that I discussed as part of this post, and which also of course included another 1987 film from yesterday’s focal director Stanley Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket. Good Morning, Vietnam is of course by far the funniest of those films, which might also make it seem like the least serious and/or the least focused on the war—but I hope this whole series would offer a clear counterpoint to those ideas and a clear reflection of the role that humor can play in cultural portrayals of wartime histories and themes. The film has some overtly tragic events, particularly those connected to Cronauer’s fraught friendship with the Vietnamese young man Tuan (played movingly by Tung Thanh Tran). But I would add that its humor is likewise an element of its portrayal of the Vietnam War, both in the necessity of Cronauer’s broadcasts and in the challenge they present to official narratives of the conflict. Just one more layer to this complex, compelling wartime comedy.

Last wartime comedy tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?

September 14, 2022: War is Hella Funny: Dr. Strangelove

[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ll AmericanStudy wartime comedies in various media, leading up to a special post on M*A*S*H!]

On how a film can sometimes offer more historical clarity than, y’know, history.

Obviously this is a very competitive category, but I think President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address has to be on the short list of the most under-remembered 20^th century speeches. I wrote at some length in that hyperlinked post about that speech and its crucial coinage of the phrase and concept “military-industrial complex,” so will ask you to check out that post and then come on back here for today’s thoughts if you would.

Welcome back! While of course Eisenhower’s phrase has certainly endured in our collective conversations, I don’t know that the specifics of his concerns and critiques have stayed with us in the same ways—and I certainly would argue that far too few Americans know of (much less are concerned about) the absolutely stunning growth of that military-industrial complex in the six decades since Eisenhower’s speech. There are various reasons for that, including the often much too sanctified way that we approach the military in our conversations about government, spending, priorities, and policies. But without question one reason is that the topic can seem dry and boring (as illustrated by the very phrase itself—nothing with either a hyphen or the word “complex” is likely to grab our attention), a discussion of budgets and allocations and contractors and lobbyists and so on. And as much as I value Eisenhower’s speech, I think it’s fair to say that a presidential address is not generally the kind of compelling cultural text that’s going to cut through such dryness and boringness.

Or, at the very least, speeches and other more overtly “historical” texts can and should be complemented by more pop cultural ones (that is the AmericanStudier’s Credo, after all). And when it comes to the Cold War-era growth of the military-industrial complex, I don’t know any pop culture texts that have more to offer than Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). The film’s most famous quote, and one of the single most famous quotes in 20^th century American film overall, is “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!,” a funny and telling moment that nicely sums up not just the wartime absurdities I discussed in Monday’s Catch-22 post, but also the very contradictions inherent in the phrase military-industrial complex. But I would argue that an even more telling detail is the fact that Kubrick cast the actor and comic genius Peter Sellers to play both the U.S. President and the title character (an ex-Nazi turned military expert/advisor to the government, itself a key Cold War historical element). The question of how deeply intertwined the military-industrial complex has become with our government is a thorny yet vital one—and one a black comic film can cut through pitch-perfectly with one inspired casting choice.

Next wartime comedy tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?

September 13, 2022: War is Hella Funny: Hogan’s Heroes

[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ll AmericanStudy wartime comedies in various media, leading up to a special post on M*A*S*H!]

On the vital importance of not judging a book by its cover (or a sitcom by its premise).

Maybe starting each post in this week’s series with some blog inside baseball is going to be a thing, because I have to do the same for today’s subject (if in a very different way than I did for Catch-22 yesterday). Despite reruns of the show playing on Nick at Nite quite a bit during my childhood, I’ve never seen a single episode of the long-running hit sitcom Hogan’s Heroes (1965-71), and that’s not an accident: I always found the premise, the very idea of a comedy set at a Nazi POW camp, to be one I just couldn’t wrap my head around (I have a similar feeling about the film Life is Beautiful, which I’ve also never seen). I’m not saying that there are topics which should be absolutely off-limits to comedy, necessarily—part of the whole thrust of this series is that there shouldn’t be, that comedy has a role to play in how we engage with even our hardest and darkest histories and themes—but that doesn’t mean that every comedy is for me, and this one quite simply felt like it wasn’t.

Can’t say I had given the show a single further thought since those childhood days until I sat down to research this post. And, well, let me quote at length from the “Casting” section of its Wikipedia page: “The actors who played the four major German roles—Werner Klemperer (Klink), John Banner (Schultz), Leon Askin (General Burkhalter), and Howard Caine (Major Hochstetter)—were all Jewish. Furthermore, Klemperer, Banner, and Askin had all fled the Nazis during World War II (Caine, whose birth name was Cohen, was an American). Further, Robert Clary, a French Jew who played LeBeau, spent three years in a concentration camp (with an identity tattoo from the camp on his arm, ‘A-5714’); his parents and other family members were killed there. Likewise, Banner had been held in a (pre-war) concentration camp and his family was killed during the war. Askin was also in a pre-war French internment camp and his parents were killed at Treblinka. Other Jewish actors, including Harold Gould and Harold J. Stone, made multiple appearances playing German generals. As a teenager, Klemperer, the son of conductor Otto Klemperer, fled Hitler's Germany with his family in 1933. During the show's production, he insisted that Hogan always win against his Nazi captors, or else he would not take the part of Klink. He defended his role by claiming, ‘I am an actor. If I can play Richard III, I can play a Nazi.’ Banner attempted to sum up the paradox of his role by saying, ‘Who can play Nazis better than us Jews?’”

I’m not sure I need to say much more, but I will add this: how freaking cool is that? There’s no doubt that this casting trend was intentional and purposeful, and it honestly makes me rethink the show’s very genre; seems to me that it should be described not only as a sitcom, but also and especially as continued resistance to the narratives of Nazism, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and more. Heroic indeed.

Next wartime comedy tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?