April 30, 2024: Communist Culture: Dos Passos and Wright

[In honor of May Day/International Workers’ Day, a series on some compelling cultural representations of communism in American history and identity. Leading up to a special weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]

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

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, despite our longstanding collective national antagonism toward communism there have 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 writers and intellectuals who embraced communism: the Great Depression’s heightening of wealth inequalities and social stratification seemed to highlight the limitations and even destructive capabilities of unchecked capitalism, leading a number of American writers and artists to imagine and depict alternative social and communal ways of living; 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 (and thus differed) within multiple communities, but they can be succinctly illustrated by two individuals, 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 42^nd 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), the best-selling and hugely controversial 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, purposefully ineloquent but nonetheless 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: 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.

Next cultural communism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?

April 29, 2024: Communist Culture: “The Palace-Burner”

[In honor of May Day/International Workers’ Day, a series on some compelling cultural representations of communism in American history and identity. Leading up to a special weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]

On the masterpiece of a poem that destroys easy “us vs. them” narratives.

I made the case for my favorite American poet, Sarah Piatt, in one of my first posts, and did so in large part through her best poem, “The Palace-Burner” (1873). There are a lot of factors that make “Palace-Burner” one of the great American poems, including its exemplification of Piatt’s frequent use of a unique and multi-layered perspective that I named in my first book the dialogic lyric, an individual speaker’s perspective filtered through conversation and the shifts and evolutions it always produces. But at the top of the list for me would be Piatt’s incredibly sophisticated representation—through the lens of a mother and young son discussing a newspaper picture of a female rebel from the 1871 Paris Commune—of what I called in this post three crucial and interconnected levels to empathy: “connecting to seemingly distant others, working to understand those to whom we’re close, and examining our own identities through those lenses.”

This wasn’t necessarily the case in the 1870s (although given the immense popularity of Horatio Alger novels in the period, maybe it was), but over the century and a half since I would say that there have been few world communities with which Americans have had, collectively, a more difficult time empathizing than communists. Of course there are significant exceptions, both in terms of time periods during which that philosophy has seemed more appealing (such as the Great Depression, about which more in tomorrow’s post) and in terms of American communities who have been sufficiently disenfranchised from our dominant national narratives to see the wisdom of such alternatives (such as African Americans in the mid-20^th century, on whom likewise more tomorrow). But when it comes to our overarching, dominant narratives, communism has been one of the most consistent “them’s” to our constructed “us” for a long while; we can see both sides of that equation, for example, in our consistent need to define the Soviet Union as “godless” in contrast to equally constructed images of the United States as a “Christian nation.”

There would be various possible ways to complicate and revise that kind of “us vs. them” narrative, including highlighting the many originating and influential forms and moments of American socialism and communism. But Piatt takes another, and to my mind particularly compelling, tack: creating in her poetic speaker a woman who seems thoroughly removed from not only communism but political conversations in general (especially in the “separate spheres” mentality that continued to reign for most middle-class American families in the period); and then giving that speaker the opportunity to consider whether and how she and a foreign communist woman might have anything in common. Neither the speaker nor the poem come to any easy or comfortable answers—empathy is neither of those things in any case—but they ask the questions, and that seems to me to an impressive model for all of us.

Next cultural communism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?

April 27-28, 2024: April 2024 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

April 1: Satire Studying: African American Satire: An April Fool’s series on satire starts with a link to my recent Saturday Evening Post Black History Month column.

April 2: Satire Studying: Innocents Abroad: The series continues with the double-edged satire at the heart of Mark Twain’s first big hit.

April 3: Satire Studying: The Interview: What’s problematic, and what’s important, about a hugely controversial cinematic comedy, as the series pokes on.

April 4: Satire Studying: TV Satires: Four news and sketch comedy shows from which we can learn a lot (but which I originally posted in 2017, so add more recent nominations please!).

April 5: Satire Studying: The Big Short and Vice: The series concludes with value and limits of satire when it comes to contemporary, contested events.

April 6-7: Emily Lauer on Comics Analysis & Editing as Public-Facing Scholarship: My newest Guest Post from a familiar friend of the blog—Emily Lauer with her record-setting 4^th Guest Post!

April 8: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Vaughn Joy on No Way Out: A series on the 60^th anniversary of Poitier’s groundbreaking Oscar win kicks off with a FilmStudier I really love on Poitier’s cinematic debut.

April 9: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: The Blackboard Jungle: The series continues with a Poitier character who’s very similar to a 1980s favorite, and one important distinction.

April 10: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: The Defiant Ones: Two different genres through which to contextualize Poitier’s 1958 prison break film, as the series roles on.

April 11: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Two 1967 Classics: Standout speeches and sweet sendoffs in Poitier’s pair of pitch-perfect 1967 films.

April 12: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Lillies of the Field: The series concludes with what was historic about Poitier’s Oscar-winning role, what wasn’t quite, and what’s importantly outside that framing.

April 13-14: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: 21C Heirs: A special weekend follow-up on noteworthy performances from five of our best contemporary Black actors (not including Denzel and Morgan who could each get whole posts for their work alone).

April 15: Mythic Patriotisms: The 1776 Project: For Patriots’ Day this year I wanted to trace some histories and layers to one of the main categories in my book Of Thee I Sing, starting with a post on how a project dedicated to “patriotic education” embodies the worst of mythic patriotism.

April 16: Mythic Patriotisms: The National Anthem: The series continues with two layers of mythic patriotism found in the lesser-known later verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

April 17: Mythic Patriotisms: “Self-Made”: How an iconic American narrative is mythic patriotic in both meanings and effects, as the series pledges on.

April 18: Mythic Patriotisms: Defining America’s Origins: The multiple mythic patriotic layers to an origin story that centers on the Pilgrims/Puritans.

April 19: Mythic Patriotisms: Love It or Leave It: The series concludes with the 1960s constructions of a phrase that sums up mythic patriotism’s exclusions.

April 20-21: Mythic Patriotisms in 2024: There’s never been a moment with more overt mythic patriotism than our own, and for this weekend follow-up I both analyzed that presence and asked for connections to chances to talk more about these topics!

April 22: Climate Culture: Cli Fi: An Earth Day series on cultural works about the climate crisis kicks off with a stunning recent novel that extends the long legacy of cli fi.

April 23: Climate Culture: The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up: The series continues with the necessity but limitations of disaster movies, and an important recent variation on the genre.

April 24: Climate Culture: “The Tradition”: Two complementary ways to read a climate change moment in Jericho Brown’s powerful 21^st century sonnet, as the series rolls on.

April 25: Climate Culture: “The Ghost Birds”: What’s specific and what’s universal in Karen Russell’s amazing 2021 short story.

April 26: Climate Culture: Climate Songs: The series and month conclude with five examples of pop music perspectives on the climate crisis, including Midnight Oil’s great album Resist (2022).

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

April 26, 2024: Climate Culture: Climate Songs

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On five examples of pop music perspectives on the climate crisis.

1)      Don Henley, “Goodbye to a River” (2000): As I highlighted in this post featuring Henley’s successful efforts to preserve Walden Woods, the former Eagle has become one of our most prominent and dedicated environmental activists. So it makes sense that he penned an early and excellent climate crisis song, from his wonderfully political yet deeply personal album Inside Job. That album was hugely prescient about the nascent 21^st century, and never more so than its fears for a changing planet.

2)      Common, “Trouble in the Water” (2014): If Henley’s song is a lament, Common’s track (featuring a ton of guest contributors) is a righteously enraged banger. Many of its targets are human forces, like the corporate fuckery called out in bars such as “Everything was people/Until you showed up on the land to fuck the people/Contaminate the ocean/Now the water is lethal/Four bucks for two liters/That should be illegal.” But as Common’s anthem depicts all too potently, it’s on our environment that such man-made trouble will have the most damaging effects.

3)      Childish Gambino, “Feels like Summer” (2018): This song (from actor Donald Glover’s rap persona Childish Gambino) occupies a third genre, a sweet summer ballad—yet one that asks us to look closer and think deeper while we bop along. Never more so than in the second verse: “Every day gets hotter than the one before/Running out of water, it’s about to go down/Air that kills the bees that we depend upon/Birds were made for singing, waking up to no sound.” I don’t know if Karen Russell listened to “Feels like Summer” before imagining a future with no birds in the short story I wrote about in yesterday’s post, but I know her story and Gambino’s song make for a particularly powerful pairing.

4)      Billie Eilish, “All the Good Girls Go to Hell” (2019): As I’ve blogged about many times (and even included as an example of critical patriotism in the 1980s chapter of my most recent book), rap has a long tradition of social commentary. I don’t know that pop music has the same legacy necessarily, and of course social commentary isn’t the only thing music can or should do in any case; but there certainly is plenty of socially conscious pop music, and singer-songwriter Billie Eilish’s amazing 2019 track is a great recent example. I’m not sure there’s a more hard-hitting nor better three-line verse from the last decade of pop music than “Hills burn in California/My turn to ignore ya/Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.” Whew.

5)      Midnight Oil, Resist (2022): I blogged for my Valentine’s series last year about one of the many great songs on Midnight’s Oil latest album. The whole album is deeply connected to the climate crisis, but it’s the first song, “Rising Seas,” which is a particularly bracing and vital example of where climate change music is here in the 2020s. Listen, get mad, and recognize that, as Oil puts it in the final lines of the impassioned “At the Time of Writing,” “At the time of writing we were on the brink/At the time of writing we still had time to think.”

April Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

April 25, 2024: Climate Culture: “The Ghost Birds”

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On what’s specific and what’s universal in Karen Russell’s amazing story.

I first encountered “The Ghost Birds” in the Best American Short Stories 2022 anthology (well worth getting your hands on as those collections always are), but it originally appeared in The New Yorker in October 2021. Whether you’re a subscriber or not you should be able to read it as one of your free articles for the month, so in lieu of a full first paragraph here I’ll recommend that you read this phenomenal short story and then come on back for a couple of my thoughts.

Welcome back! At the heart of Russell’s story is a depiction of a very real natural phenomenon: the annual flight of Vaux’s Swifts, migratory birds who settle in spaces like (most famously) the chimney of a Portland (Oregon) elementary school. Most of the cultural works about climate change that I’ve encountered focus on its effects for human characters and communities, which is of course understandable (these are texts created by human artists, after all) but also both limited and ironic given the role that humans have played in creating this crisis. Russell’s text certainly still features central human characters as I’ll discuss in a moment, but from its title on it is also deeply concerned with what a climate crisis future might look like for the natural world, including the dystopian yet frustratingly realistic concept of a world from which birds have almost entirely disappeared. I really don’t like to think about that possibility, which is precisely what makes Russell’s story so important, both as a unique work of climate culture and as an intervention in our own moment.

But that’s not what made Russell’s story hit me so hard the first time I read it. Her narrator and protagonist Jasper is a single father, one who is trying desperately to reconnect with his teenage daughter Starling (he’s a birder through and through) through a shared trip to try to find those titular ghost birds. It’s not just that I’m a divorced single father too, but also and especially that I think all the time about the climate crisis as it connects to my sons and their futures (not least because they have become very dedicated activists for that cause on a variety of fronts). Concerns about what the future will hold for our kids are of course one of the most universal human perspectives and experiences, and yet one that needs to be depicted through specific moments and emotions if a cultural work centered on that perspective is going to ring true. And for this reader, Russell’s story, despite its setting in a dystopian future, rings as story as any I’ve read in a while.

Last climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

April 24, 2024: Climate Culture: “The Tradition”

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On two complementary ways to read a climate change moment in a 21^st century sonnet.

I’ve written about the great contemporary poet Jericho Brown in multiple posts here, including this one on his wonderful TED talk and this one on a few different ways and settings in which he engages his audiences. As part of the latter post, I mentioned his poem “The Tradition” (2015), which was the first work of Brown’s I encountered (as the epigraph for Jesmyn Ward’s phenomenal 2016 collection The Fire This Time) and which I’ve had the chance to teach many times since. “The Tradition” is a particularly interesting poem from a contemporary poet in that it’s technically a sonnet, both in 14-line length and in terms of elements like the final rhyming couplet (an aspect of the Shakespearean sonnet in particular); but Brown also purposefully plays with that poetic tradition very fully, creating line and section structures that utilize yet also deconstruct the classical form, just as he brings into his diction both Latin words and deeply 21^st century details and names.

One of those 21^st century details is the poem’s allusion to climate change in its middle third (lines 5-8), where Brown writes (in between the names of flowers that are the poem’s most consistent throughline), “Summer seemed to bloom against the will/Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter/On this planet than when our dead fathers/Wiped sweat from their necks.” In a poem that’s so much defined by the relationships between tradition and change in all the ways I just highlighted, this moment certainly reflects how climate change functions as an overt disruption to even the most seemingly consistent cycles: how familiar, even indeed unchanging, elements like the sun and the seasons have become different as a result of this new reality. “News reports claimed” might make it seem that the poem’s speaker isn’t himself sure of the veracity of that reality, but the poem’s final couplet includes the phrase “Where the world ends,” so I’d argue that he is well aware of at least the possibility of those genuine changes leading to catastrophe.

On the other hand, the catastrophic losses with which “The Tradition” ends are due not to climate change or natural disaster but racist and institutional violence, as illustrated by the final line’s names of three young Black men killed by the police (“John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.”). And seen through that lens, the poem’s climate change lines read a bit differently: as not a radical shift so much as yet another unfolding history (not unlike the systems like slavery and sharecropping alluded to with “dead fathers/Wiped sweat from their necks”) that targets people of color and the disadvantaged far more consistently and destructively than it does the planet’s more privileged communities. That kind of discriminatory targeting is its own American (and really global, but this is AmericanStudier) tradition, after all, and one that doesn’t disappear with the emergence of new 21^st century issues. All of which makes Brown’s poem an even more multilayered and meaningful work of climate culture to add into this week’s series.

Next climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

April 23, 2024: Climate Culture: The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On the necessity but limitations of disaster movies, and an important variation.

It makes perfect sense that the first climate change film would have been a disaster movie. By far the most consistent type of disaster on which that longstanding genre focuses (although not the only one of course, and thank goodness or there’d be no Airplane!) is the natural disaster: whether relatively everyday ones like fires and floods, more extreme ones like mega-earthquakes and –tsunamis, or thoroughly extreme ones like volcanoes and asteroids, it’s very often nature that is creating the catastrophic conditions which jumpstart these movies. Which makes The Day After Tomorrow (2004), a film in which rapidly worsening climate change causes a huge number and variety of natural disasters (including pretty much all of those referenced above, among others) to strike Earth all at once, just about the most iconic disaster film of all time. In 2004 that premise seemed like dystopian science fiction; twenty years later, it hits a whole lot closer to home. But either way, I don’t know that there could be climate change cinema without the genre of the disaster film.

But here’s the thing about disaster films: they have to find their way to some sort of a happy ending. Of course there’s been plenty of destruction and death along the way, so things won’t simply return to the way they were; but for at least some of our characters, usually the protagonists natch, there’s got to be a sense at the film’s conclusion that they will be okay moving forward. (There are of course, as with every rule, exceptions.) The Day After Tomorrow certainly doesn’t try to pretend that the world hasn’t changed—indeed, one of its final moments involves astronauts on the International Space Station looking down upon a profoundly changed planet—but nonetheless, much of the film’s conclusion focuses on our main characters, who have survived the catastrophic events and are reunited with loved ones to uplifting notes on the musical score and so on. As realistic as disaster movies can (at least at times) be, that is, there’s still a layer of melodramatic storytelling that makes the genre somewhat less well-equipped to really confront the worst possibilities of the climate crisis.

And then there’s Don’t Look Up (2021). In many ways Don’t Look Up seems to be another classic disaster film, with the impending disaster this time a comet with the potential to destroy all life on Earth, the usual scientist characters who figure out the disaster before everyone else, and so on. But Don’t Look Up turns out to be a satire instead, and so all the folks in that “everyone else” don’t pay any attention to the scientists and the disaster continues unabated—right up to (SPOILERS) an ending in which apparently no one, not our protagonists or anyone else, escapes the disaster with their lives. That might seem pretty bleak, and in some ways it certainly is—but as you can see from that hyperlinked clip, there’s also a remarkable degree of tenderness and shared humanity in that ending, and I find those emotions more realistic and moving than a more typical happy ending could possibly be. As a subgenre, the climate disaster movie might just have to evolve from the familiar tropes, and if so Don’t Look Up offers at least one model for how to do so.

Next climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

April 22, 2024: Climate Culture: Cli Fi

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On the long legacy of cli fi, and a stunning recent novel that reveals the genre’s true potential.

The term “cli fi” (for “climate fiction”) has only been around for the last 10 years or so; it was apparently first coined in 2011 by activist and author Dan Bloom to describe Jim Laughter’s novel Polar City Red, and then gradually picked up by various media voices and stories around 2013-2014. But as with so many literary genres, there are numerous earlier authors and works that can productively be classified within this frame, including Jules Verne’s The Purchase of the North Pole (1889), Laurence Manning’s The Man Who Awoke (1933), multiple novels by J.G. Ballard, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), among others. While all of those works are distinct and specific, I’d say that all of them fall under the broad umbrella of science fiction, wedding as they do their realistic depictions of science and the natural world to imagined futures in which (generally) worst-case climate and environmental scenarios have come to pass and humans (individually and/or collectively) are dealing with the aftermaths.

Sci fi cli fi (say that five times fast) has continued to be a prominent sub-genre here in the 21^st century, as exemplified particularly clearly by science fiction legend Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitol trilogy (comprising the novels Forty Signs of Rain [2004], Fifty Degrees Below [2005], and Sixty Days and Counting [2007]). But as we’ve moved further and further into a world where climate change is not an imagined future scenario but a very, very real present reality, we’ve concurrently seen authors begin to produce as well cli fi novels and stories that depict, respond to, and engage in more socially realistic ways that present world. That list includes, among others, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure (2018), a number of the stories in John Joseph Adams’ edited anthology Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction (2015), and one of the most acclaimed and powerful American novels in recent memory, Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory (2018).

Yet in truth, to classify The Overstory as an example of more contemporary and/or socially realistic fiction is no more accurate than to describe it as science fiction. Powers’ book does trace the individual yet ultimately interconnected stories of nine realistic fictional characters, all Americans living in our early 21^st century moment, all descended from family and communal histories involving trees in central ways. But through that shared theme, and through his structural and narrative choices as well, Powers ultimately produces a work that I would call a historical novel in which the history (as well as the present and future) of the world is viewed through the lens of trees and forests, rather than through the perspectives or experiences of humans (individual or collective, fictional or real). Which is to say, Powers’ first cli fi novel (his latest, 2021’s Bewilderment, has been described that way as well, but I haven’t had the chance to read it) isn’t just about climate change or environmentalism—it makes the environment, and specifically trees, its main character, main narrative perspective, and ultimately main emphasis, above (in every sense) and beyond us transient humans.

Next climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

April 20-21, 2024: Mythic Patriotisms in 2024

[Up here in New England, the third Monday in April is a holiday, Patriots’ Day. But as I argue in my most recent book, patriotism is a very complex concept, and so this week I’ve highlighted a handful of examples of the worst of what it has meant for how we remember our histories. Leading up to this special weekend post on the state of mythic patriotism in 2024!]

On two ways that mythic patriotism can help us understand this year, and one related request.

I’ll start with the request: Of Thee I Sing came out in March 2021, just two months after the January 6^th insurrection (I gave my first book talk on the project on January 7^th, which was, well, a whole lot); but I believe that the contested history of American patriotism is if anything even more relevant to 2024 than it was in that moment. I’ve had the chance to talk about the book and those subjects a lot over the last three years, but I nonetheless believe we’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to those conversations, and would hugely appreciate any and all connections to opportunities and communities to keep the conversation going. That includes classes/students (high school as well as higher ed), book clubs and discussion groups, organizations and institutions of all kinds, podcasts, whatever you got! (I’m also very willing to travel within reason, so I’m not talking just virtual by any means.) Feel free to email with any ideas, and thanks very much in advance!

There’s no doubt that the MAGA movement has leaned as heavily into the rhetoric and symbolism of patriotism as any political community in my lifetime. I don’t disagree with Jon Stewart’s recent Daily Show rant that a movement defined so completely by allegiance to an individual, and a dictatorial one at that, really doesn’t embody any recognizable form of American patriotism. But I do think the concept of mythic patriotism in particular can help us understand some of the essence of this movement’s ideologies, some of what they mean by phrases like “Make America Great Again” (or its telling predecessor “I want my country back!”). Or, relatedly, why this movement, like Donald Trump’s own political ascendance, began so clearly with Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, one of the most blatant symbolic challenges to white supremacist visions of American politics, society, community, and identity as in any way homogeneously or essentially white. Birtherism was perhaps the first defining conspiracy theory for a movement that is more or less entirely defined by conspiracy theories, and it was a mythic patriotic conspiracy theory if ever there’s been one.

If MAGA has been the defining political force of the last decade or so, the last few years have been especially defined by anti-education efforts (and related trends like book bans and attacks on libraries), and it seems clear that such culture wars debates will play a significant role throughout this election year as well. As I discussed in Monday’s post on the 1776 Project, it’s difficult for me to overstate how central mythic patriotism is to these attacks on educators, curricula, books, and any and all other forces that challenge this specific vision of American history and identity. Moms for Liberty and all the others behind these efforts can talk all they want about threats to children or “grooming” or whatever other justifications they’re advancing, but the essential truth is that these educational elements are dangerous to these groups and this perspective precisely inasmuch as they offer challenges and alternatives to white-centered (and often overtly white supremacist) visions of America. And that’s the thing with mythic patriotism, as I’ve highlighted throughout this series—it not only excludes many Americans from its vision of our history, it also excludes all those who would challenge and counter that vision. Identifying and responding to such mythic patriotism is thus a crucial 2024 goal.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

April 19, 2024: Mythic Patriotisms: Love It or Leave It

[Up here in New England, the third Monday in April is a holiday, Patriots’ Day. But as I argue in my most recent book, patriotism is a very complex concept, and so this week I’ll highlight a handful of examples of the worst of what it has meant for how we remember our histories. Leading up to a weekend post on the state of mythic patriotism in 2024!]

First, here are two paragraphs from Chapter 7 of Of Thee I Sing:

“In a telling sentence in his statement, John Warner did admit another part of the Bicentennial’s contexts: that it ‘comes after a particularly difficult decade.’ One of the most divisive elements of that decade, the Vietnam War, had come to a definitive close just a year before the Bicentennial, with the July 1975 reunification of the nations of North and South Vietnam as a new country, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. As has been the case with wars throughout American history, this one featured celebratory patriotic views through which Americans sought unity in response to this military conflict. But one of the most prominent such Vietnam era celebratory patriotisms, the ubiquitous phrase ‘Love it or leave it,’ represented a far more aggressive and divisive tone than did the Bicentennial preparations and celebrations. That phrase appeared on bumper stickers and billboards throughout this period, as well as in such cultural works as country artist Ernest Tubb’s ‘It’s America (Love it or Leave it)’ (1970) and his country colleague Merle Haggard’s ‘The Fightin’ Side of Me’ (1970), which begins, ‘I hear people talkin’ bad,/About the way they have to live here in this country,’ and then argues, ‘They’re running down a way of life/Our fightin’ men have fought and died to keep/ If you don’t love it, leave it.’ This phrase’s version of celebratory patriotism was one overtly defined in opposition to criticisms of the nation, and indeed one that portrayed an idealized celebratory patriotism as a necessary element to being part of the United States at all.

The May 8^th, 1970 ‘Hard Hat Riot’ in New York City illustrated with stark clarity the effects of that aggressive celebratory stance. Hundreds of college and high school students had gathered at an early morning anti-war protest and memorial for the four Kent State University students who had been killed by National Guardsman on May 4^th. Around noon, a group of around 200 construction workers, many carrying American flags and signs with slogans like ‘America, love it or leave it’ and ‘All the way, USA’ at­tacked the protesters with clubs, steel-toed boots, and other weapons. Hours of violent clashes left nearly 100 protesters injured and made clear the mythic logic behind and endpoint of the ‘love it or leave it’ celebratory patriotic sentiment.”

I said much of what I’d want to say about this phrase and concept in those paragraphs, but would add one more thing: it’s not just that I find this to be perhaps the most overt expression of mythic patriotism’s exclusion of any voices/perspectives that would criticize those myths (although it is that to be sure). It’s that “love it or leave it” so explicitly contrasts with my favorite expression of critical patriotism (and the epigraph to my book), from James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” The question I would ask anyone who subscribes to the “love it or leave it” mantra is whether they would say the same about other forms of love: does loving a person mean we can never criticize them? Or does it require that we do so when we see them falling short, in an effort to help them be their best? I know which one I’d argue for, and it’s not the mythic patriotic concept.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

April 18, 2024: Mythic Patriotisms: Defining America’s Origins

[Up here in New England, the third Monday in April is a holiday, Patriots’ Day. But as I argue in my most recent book, patriotism is a very complex concept, and so this week I’ll highlight a handful of examples of the worst of what it has meant for how we remember our histories. Leading up to a weekend post on the state of mythic patriotism in 2024!]

On the multiple mythic patriotic layers to a Puritan-centered American origin story.

In the introduction to Of Thee I Sing, I define my book’s four types of American patriotism using the four verses of Katharine Lee Bates’ “America the Beautiful” (1893). While I hadn’t overtly created my terms for them yet when I wrote that hyperlinked 2019 blog post, everything I said there about the song’s second verse and its emphasis on the Pilgrims/Puritans as an American origin point exemplifies mythic patriotism as I would now define it. It’s not just that Bates’ verse celebrates the Pilgrims as part of the nation’s past, after all—it’s that she describes them as “beating” a “thoroughfare for freedom” into a “wilderness,” and thus as originating American ideals in a place that was apparently devoid of other communities until their arrival. Connecting the Pilgrims/Puritans to “freedom” is a fraught endeavor to be sure, but doing so by eliminating the indigenous peoples who were already present in New England (and everywhere else on the continent) is an explicitly exclusionary and white supremacist one.

Over the course of the century following Bates’ composition, moreover, multiple exclusionary and white supremacist narratives were created that depended upon that mythic patriotic vision of America’s origins. None was more blatant than South Carolina Senator Ellison DuRant Smith’s use of that vision to argue for the discriminatory Immigration Act of 1924 in a xenophobic speech on the Senate floor. Smith argues, “Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock…It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries, but a country to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood.” “That splendid stock that has characterized us” is a particularly clear vision of an Anglo origin point for the United States, and the entirety of Smith’s speech—as well as the development of national immigration laws overall—makes clear the potential white supremacist use of that vision.

Far more subtle, but ultimately quite problematic in its own right, is the longstanding vision, one really created as a 20^th century tourist narrative, of Plymouth, Massachusetts as “America’s hometown” (NB. That site and project seem even more overtly problematic still, so my link is for evidence only, not in any way endorsement). Would it be possible to include indigenous communities like the Wampanoag tribe in that vision of Plymouth? Maybe, but in practice that tribe has been portrayed as at best a historical predecessor to the Pilgrims, and at worst one of the challenges that they overcame to establish this American origin point. It was to counter those white-centered and exclusionary practices and narratives that Native American activist Wamsutta James delivered his 1970 speech in Plymouth making the case to reframe Thanksgiving as a “National Day of Mourning.” As readers of this blog know well, I’m all about an additive vision of our history, and I’m not trying to suggest that the Pilgrims/Puritans weren’t part of America’s 17^th century origins—but any narrative that treats them as isolated or elides indigenous communities in any way is simply perpetuating these mythic patriotic visions.

Last patriotism post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

April 17, 2024: Mythic Patriotisms: “Self-Made”

[Up here in New England, the third Monday in April is a holiday, Patriots’ Day. But as I argue in my most recent book, patriotism is a very complex concept, and so this week I’ll highlight a handful of examples of the worst of what it has meant for how we remember our histories. Leading up to a weekend post on the state of mythic patriotism in 2024!]

On how an iconic American image is mythic patriotic in both meanings and effects.

I’ve written at length in this space about the mythic but ubiquitous American narrative of the “self-made man”: first for one of my earliest posts in October 2011 (man I’ve been writing this blog for a long time!); and then in a February 2021 follow-up as part of my annual non-favorites series. Before I dive into a couple ways to connect that mythic narrative to the concept of mythic patriotism, I’d ask you to check out those two posts if you would.

Welcome back! Obviously it would be possible for any person to be described as “self-made,” but I believe it’s quite telling that almost all of the figures most commonly associated with this narrative have been white men: Ben Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Andrew Carnegie (something about those Andrews, I dunno), pretty much all of Horatio Alger’s protagonists, Jay Gatsby, contemporary folks like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, etc. While the self-made man narrative is ostensibly a celebration of  such individuals and their achievements, it is at least as much a rejection of the presence and influence of communities—or even a direct attack on them as an obstacle to be transcended in pursuit of the American Dream. I’d certainly call that vision of American identities mythic in general, but I would also add that it is a myth which specifically and overtly privileges white men, who for most if not all of American history have had a greater degree of autonomy and mobility than any other group. To be clear, even those iconic individual white men have depended on communal support, so the image is mythic in their cases too—but its rejection of the need for community does exclude most other Americans, past and present.

The problems with mythic patriotic narratives aren’t just due to their inaccuracies and exclusions, though—it’s also in the ways they can contribute to or even help create other, sometimes even more overtly exclusionary, narratives. For example, I would say it’s far from coincidental that the late 19^th century in America was both an era in which the self-made man narrative proliferated and a period of intensifying attacks on the nascent labor movement as un- and anti-American. After all, at the heart of that evolving labor movement was an emphasis on workers’ communities in at least two key ways: that supposedly “self-made” individuals like the Gilded Age Robber Barons were instead achieving their successes on the backs of those communities; and that it would thus take communal solidarity to resist and challenge and change those realities. In my early 20^th century chapter of Of Thee I Sing I argue that 1910s and 1920s attacks on the labor movement constituted a potent form of mythic patriotism, but I would add that those trends really began in the late 19^th century, right alongside the resurgence of the self-made man narrative.

Next patriotism post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? 

April 16, 2024: Mythic Patriotisms: The National Anthem

[Up here in New England, the third Monday in April is a holiday, Patriots’ Day. But as I argue in my most recent book, patriotism is a very complex concept, and so this week I’ll highlight a handful of examples of the worst of what it has meant for how we remember our histories. Leading up to a weekend post on the state of mythic patriotism in 2024!]

On two layers of mythic patriotism found in the later verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

There are multiple reasons why I decided to put Francis Scott Key conceiving of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Colin Kaepernick kneeling during a performance of it on the cover of Of Thee I Sing, and none of them make Key look particularly good. I wrote about some of those layers in this 2019 post on the anthem (and especially on its much less frequently performed later verses), and so once again would ask you to check out that prior post and then come on back for a couple further thoughts on this complex national text.

Welcome back! In the opening paragraph of that prior post, I highlighted a particular couplet in the anthem’s generally overlooked third verse: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” As I mentioned there, Key himself was both a slaveowner and a lawyer who opposed abolition and fought for the rights of other slaveowners, making his use of that particular word especially fraught if not overtly hypocritical. But I would argue that the entire phrase also plays into a specific mythic patriotic narrative of both the War of 1812 and the American Revolution: that enslaved people were adversaries of the American cause in both cases, allied with the English and thus suffering defeat (flight, the grave, etc.) at the hands of the U.S. The realities of those histories are multilayered, as I traced in this column; but as I argued in yesterday’s post, many of the Revolution’s most inspiring patriots were enslaved people, a trend that continue into the Early Republic and that Key’s phrase and verse entirely and frustratingly elide.

The anthem’s third verse is thus particularly fraught with mythic patriotic ideas, but I would add that the fourth verse likewise includes its own form of mythic patriotism. Key writes there, “O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand/Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!” and adds, “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,/And this be our motto—‘In God is our trust.’” He’s alluding there to a narrative of the War of 1812 as a defensive conflict, one in which the United States was invaded by England and fought back to protect and preserve its homes and homeland. That’s certainly one way to understand the war’s origin points; but as I wrote in this column, that narrative entirely minimizes the concurrent ways in which the war was both caused and defined by U.S. aggression, particularly towards both Canada and indigenous communities. Indeed, the United States did seek to “conquer” as part of the war, to conquer and annex a great deal of territory from those other sovereign nations—and whether we see that “cause” as “just” or not, it’s unquestionably a distinct one from self-defense. One more way in which Key’s anthem views our history through an overtly mythic patriotic lens.

Next patriotism post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

April 15, 2024: Mythic Patriotisms: The 1776 Project

[Up here in New England, the third Monday in April is a holiday, Patriots’ Day. But as I argue in my most recent book, patriotism is a very complex concept, and so this week I’ll highlight a handful of examples of the worst of what it has meant for how we remember our histories. Leading up to a weekend post on the state of mythic patriotism in 2024!]

On two ways that a project dedicated to “patriotic education” embodies the worst of mythic patriotism.

In a brief post as part of last year’s July 4^th series, I highlighted the Trump administration’s now-defunct but still influential 1776 Project, and the ways that its concept of “patriotic education” have informed ongoing attacks on public education, educators and librarians, the discipline of history, and more. I’d ask you to check out that quick post if you would, and then come on back here for a couple additional connections of the 1776 Project to my own concept of mythic patriotism.

Welcome back! As I define it, mythic patriotism has two main layers, both of which we can see quite clearly in the 1776 Project. The more overt is a vision of American history and identity which relies on mythic narratives, ones that are at the very least centered on white communities and are all too often explicitly white supremacist. The 1776 Commission Report develops particularly mythic such visions of history and identity when it comes to the American Revolution and founding, and most especially the Framers—making the case, for example, that while many of them owned enslaved people they opposed and sought to end the system of slavery. Besides being inaccurate to the flawed realities of this group of men, this historical narrative likewise and even more frustratingly makes it nearly impossible to focus on a far more genuinely revolutionary community of American founders: the enslaved men and women who sought to use the era’s ideals to argue for their own freedom and equality. Idolizing a simplistic vision of the Framers in a way that overtly makes it more difficult to remember the presence and contributions of their inspiring African American peers exemplifies a white-centered, if not blatantly white supremacist, mythic patriotism.

Mythic patriotism doesn’t just rely on such visions of the past and nation, however—it also defines any Americans who critique and challenge those visions as unpatriotic and even un-American. The 1776 Commission Report does that most explicitly in its portrayal of “Universities in the United States” as “hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country.” The authors add that “Colleges peddle resentment and contempt for American principles and history alike, in the process weakening attachment to our shared heritage.” To tie together this post’s two points, I would highlight the word “our” in that final phrase, which to my mind subtly but unquestionably refers to a white-centered vision of American history, heritage, and identity. Besides being, once again, inaccurate to the realities of our foundational and diverse community, that vision is also entirely wrong when it comes to the potential effects, for students and for all Americans, of better remembering Revolutionary stories and histories far beyond those of the Framers. Eliding those histories in favor of simplistic myths about the Founding, and describing any scholars or educators who challenge those myths as “anti-American,” is the real peddling of resentment and contempt.

Next patriotism post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

April 13-14, 2024: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: 21C Heirs

[This coming weekend marks the 60^th anniversary of Sidney Poitier becoming the first Black actor to win a Best Actor Oscar. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of Poitier performances, leading up to this special weekend post on a handful of 21C actors carrying his legacy forward!]

On five noteworthy performances from five of our best contemporary Black actors (not including Denzel or Morgan, who to my mind are Poitier’s genuine equals as screen legends and could each get their own full post very easily).

1)      Don Cheadle, Hotel Rwanda (2004): Cheadle has been a favorite of mine since he grabbed every filmgoer’s attention with his supporting role in Denzel’s Walter Mosely adaptation Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), but I worry a little that he’s one of those Marvel actors who has become for some audiences synonymous with his superhero character. And that would be a shame, because as his truly multilayered, heartbreaking, and vital performance as Paul Rusesabagina reflects, Cheadle is quite simply one of the most talented actors we’ve got.

2)      Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave (2012): First of all, I know Ejiofor is British—but a) Sidney Poitier grew up in the Bahamas; and b) more importantly, some of the best performances in 21^st century American films (and TV shows) have come from Black British actors. None better than Ejiofor’s as Solomon Northup in Steve McQueen’s film, to my mind the single best cultural work ever produced about slavery in America. If you haven’t seen it, you really really should—but in the meantime, here are two of the best minutes of acting you’ll ever see.

3)      Mahershala Ali, Moonlight (2015): My favorite Mahershala Ali performance is also my single favorite TV performance I’ve ever seen—as Detective Wayne Hays (across three very distinct time periods and stages of life, as he discusses in that hyperlinked video) in True Detective Season 3. But since Poitier was a film actor, I’m highlighting here one of Ali’s many standout film performances, and one where in just a few minutes of total screentime he creates one of the most unique and compelling characters in 21^st century cinema.

4)      Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2019): Before his tragically early passing in 2020 at the age of 43, Chadwick Boseman gave a trio of truly great performances as iconic 20^th century historical figures: as Jackie Robinson in 42 (2013), James Brown in Get On Up (2014), and Thurgood Marshall in Marshall (2017). All three helped cement Boseman as a worthy heir to Sidney Poitier’s Civil Rights-era films, but to my mind his performance as Levee Green in the 2019 adaptation of August Wilson’s 1982 play is even better, and perhaps even more significant as a representation of America’s hardest histories.

5)      Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction (2023): Like Don Cheadle, Jeffrey Wright has been giving stunning film performances since the 1990s; I have a soft spot for his recurring role as Felix Leiter opposite Daniel Craig’s James Bond. But like Cheadle and Poitier and all the greats, Wright has continued to hone his craft, and I’m not sure he’s given a more deeply human and nuanced performance than he does as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison in American Fiction. Every one of these actors is part of the legacy of Sidney Poitier (and so many other greats), but I’m not sure there’s a more talented heir than Jeffrey Wright.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other actors you’d add?