May 31, 2024: Decoration Day Histories: So What?

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]

On three ways to argue for remembering Decoration Day as well as Memorial Day.

If someone (like, I dunno, an imaginary voice in my head to prompt this post…) were to ask me why we should better remember the histories I’ve traced in this week’s posts—were, that is, to respond with the “So what?” of today’s title—my first answer would be simple: because they happened. There are many things about history of which we can’t be sure, nuances or details that will always remain uncertain or in dispute. But there are many others that are in fact quite clear, and we just don’t remember them clearly: and the origins and initial meanings of Decoration Day are just such clear historical facts. Indeed, so clear were those Decoration Day starting points that most Southern states chose not to recognize the holiday at all in its early years. I can’t quite imagine a good-faith argument for not better remembering clear historical facts (especially when they’re as relevant as the origins of a holiday are on that holiday!), and I certainly don’t have any interest in engaging with such an argument.

But there are also other, broader arguments for better remembering these histories. For one thing, the changes in the meanings and commemorations of Decoration Day, and then the gradual shift to Memorial Day, offer a potent illustration of the longstanding role and power of white supremacist perspectives (not necessarily in the most discriminatory or violent senses of the concept, but rather as captured by that Nation editorial’s point about the negro “disappearing from the field of national politics”) in shaping our national narratives, histories, and collective memories. In much of my teaching, writing, and work over the last fifteen years I’ve argued for what I called a more inclusive vs. a more exclusive version of American history, one that overtly pushes back on those kinds of narrow, exclusionary, white supremacist historical narratives in favor of a broader and (to my mind) far more accurate sense of all the American communities that have contributed to and been part of our identity and story. Remembering Decoration Day as well as Memorial Day would represent precisely such an inclusive rather than more exclusive version of American history.

There’s also another way to think about and frame that argument. Throughout the last couple decades, conservatives have argued that the new Common Core and AP US History standards portray and teach a “negative” vision of American history, rather than the celebratory one for which these commentators argue instead (we saw the same argument made at length in the 1776 Commission report). As so many historians and scholars have noted in response, these arguments are at best oversimplified, at worst blatantly inaccurate. But it is fair to say that better remembering painful histories such as those of slavery, segregation, and lynching can be a difficult process, especially if we seek to make them more central to our collective national memories. So the more we can find inspiring moments and histories, voices and perspectives, that connect both to those painful histories and to more ideal visions of American identity and community, the more likely it is (I believe) that we will remember them. And I know of few American histories more inspiring than that of Decoration Day: its origins and purposes, its advocates like Frederick Douglass, and its strongest enduring meaning for the African American community—and, I would argue, for all of us.

May Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 30, 2024: Decoration Day Histories: “Rodman the Keeper”

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]

On the text that helps us remember a community for whom Decoration Day’s meanings didn’t shift.

In Monday’s post, I highlighted a brief but important scene in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short story “Rodman the Keeper” (1880). John Rodman, Woolson’s protagonist, is a (Union) Civil War veteran who has taken a job overseeing a Union cemetery in the South; and in this brief but important scene, he observes a group of African Americans (likely former slaves) commemorate Decoration Day by leaving tributes to those fallen Union soldiers. Woolson’s narrator describes the event in evocative but somewhat patronizing terms: “They knew dimly that the men who lay beneath those mounds had done something wonderful for them and for their children; and so they came bringing their blossoms, with little intelligence but with much love.” But she gives the last word in this striking scene to one of the celebrants himself: “we’s kep’ de day now two years, sah, befo’ you came, sah, an we’s teachin’ de chil’en to keep it, sah.”

“Rodman” is set sometime during Reconstruction—perhaps in 1870 specifically, since the first Decoration Day was celebrated in 1868 and the community has been keeping the day for two years—and, as I noted in yesterday’s post, by the 1876 end of that historical period the meaning of Decoration Day on the national level had begun to shift dramatically. But as historian David Blight has frequently noted, such as in this groundbreaking 2015 public scholarly column and then as quoted in this article on Blight’s magisterial book Race and Reunion (2002), the holiday always had a different meaning for African Americans than for other American communities, and that meaning continued to resonate for that community through those broader national shifts. Indeed, it’s possible to argue that as the national meaning shifted away from the kinds of remembrance for which Frederick Douglass argued in his 1871 speech, it became that much more necessary and vital for African Americans to practice that form of critical commemoration (one, to correct Woolson’s well-intended but patronizing description, that included just as much intelligence as love).

In an April 1877 editorial reflecting on the end of Reconstruction, the Nation magazine predicted happily that one effect of that shift would be that “the negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.” Besides representing one of the lowest points in that periodical’s long history, the editorial quite clearly illustrates why the post-Reconstruction national meaning of Decoration Day seems to have won out over the African American one (a shift that culminated, it could be argued, in the change of name to Memorial Day, which began being used as an alternative as early as 1882): because prominent, often white supremacist national voices wanted it to be so. Which is to say, it wasn’t inevitable that the shift would occur or the new meaning would win out—and while we can’t change what happened in our history, we nonetheless can (as I’ll argue at greater length tomorrow) push back and remember the original and, for the African American community, ongoing meaning of Decoration Day.

Last Decoration Day history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 29, 2024: Decoration Day Histories: Roger Pryor

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]

On the invitation and speech that mark two shifts in American attitudes.

In May 1876, New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music invited Confederate veteran, lawyer, and Democratic politician Roger A. Pryor to deliver its annual Decoration Day address. As Pryor noted in his remarks, the invitation was most definitely an “overture of reconciliation,” one that I would pair with the choice (earlier that same month) of Confederate veteran and poet Sidney Lanier to write and deliver the opening Cantata at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Indeed, reunion and reconciliation were very much the themes of 1876, threads that culminated in the contested presidential election and the end of Federal Reconstruction that immediately followed it (and perhaps, although historians have different perspectives on this point, stemmed from that election’s controversial results). In any case, this was a year in which the overtures of reconciliation were consistently heard, and we could locate Pryor’s address among the rest.

Yet the remarks that Pryor delivered in his Decoration Day speech could not be accurately described as reconciliatory—unless we shift the meaning to “trying to reconcile his Northern audiences with his Confederate perspective on the war, its causes and effects, and both regions.” Pryor was still waiting, he argued, for “an impartial history” to be told, one that more accurately depicted both “the cause of secession” and Civil War and the subsequent, “dismal period” of Reconstruction. While he could not by any measure be categorized as impartial, he nonetheless attempted to offer his own version of those histories and issues throughout the speech—one designed explicitly, I would argue, to convert his Northern audience to that version of both past and present. Indeed, as I argue at length in my first book, narratives of reunion and reconciliation were quickly supplanted in this period by ones of conversion, attempts—much of the time, as Reconstruction lawyer and novelist Albion Tourgée noted in an 1888 article, very successful attempts at that—to convert the North and the nation as a whole to this pro-Southern standpoint.

In my book’s analysis I argued for a chronological shift: that reunion/reconciliation was a first national stage in this period, and conversion a second. But Pryor’s Decoration Day speech reflects how the two attitudes could go hand-in-hand: the Northern invitation to Pryor could reflect, as he noted, that attitude of reunion on the part of Northern leaders; and Pryor’s remarks and their effects (which we cannot know for certain in this individual case, but which were, as Tourgée noted, quite clear in the nation as a whole) could both comprise and contribute to the attitudes of conversion to the Southern perspective. And in any case, it’s important to add that both reconciliation and conversion differ dramatically from the original purpose of Decoration Day, as delineated so bluntly and powerfully by Frederick Douglass in his 1871 speech: remembrance, of the Northern soldiers who died in the war and of the cause for which they did so. By 1876, it seems clear, that purpose was shifting, toward a combination of amnesia and propaganda, of forgetting the war’s realities and remembering a propagandistic version of them created by voices like Pryor’s.

Next Decoration Day history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 28, 2024: Decoration Day Histories: Frederick Douglass

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]

On one of the great American speeches, and why it’d be so important to add to our collective memories.

In a long-ago guest post on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Atlantic blog, Civil War historian Andy Hall highlighted Frederick Douglass’s amazing 1871 Decoration Day speech (full text available at the first hyperlink in this sentence). Delivered at Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery, then as now the single largest resting place of U.S. soldiers, Douglass’s short but incredibly (if not surprisingly) eloquent and pointed speech has to be ranked as one of the most impressive in American history. I’m going to end this first paragraph here so you can read the speech in full (again, it’s at the first hyperlink above), and I’ll see you in a few.

Welcome back! If I were to close-read Douglass’s speech, I could find choices worth extended attention in every paragraph and every line. But I agree with Hall’s final point, that the start of Douglass’s concluding paragraph—“But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause. We must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic”—is particularly noteworthy and striking. Granted, this was not yet the era that would come to be dominated by narratives of reunion and reconciliation between the regions, and then by ones of conversation to the Southern perspective (on all of which, see tomorrow’s post); an era in which Douglass’s ideas would be no less true, nor in which (I believe) he would have hesitated to share them, but in which a Decoration Day organizing committee might well have chosen not to invite a speaker who would articulate such a clear and convincing take on the causes and meanings of the Civil War. Yet even in 1871, to put that position so bluntly and powerfully at such an occasion would have been impressive for even a white speaker, much less an African American one.

If we were to better remember Douglass’s Decoration Day speech, that would be one overt and important effect: to push back on so many of the narratives of the Civil War that have developed in the subsequent century and a half. One of the most frequent such narratives is that there was bravery and sacrifice on both sides, as if to produce a leveling effect on our perspective on the war—but as Douglass notes in the paragraph before that conclusion, recognizing individual bravery in combat is not at all the same as remembering a war: “The essence and significance of our devotions here today are not to be found in the fact that the men whose remains fill these graves were brave in battle.” I believe Douglass here can be connected to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and its own concluding notion of honoring the dead through completing “the unfinished work”: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.” That work and task remained unfinished and great long after the Civil War’s end, after all—and indeed remain so to this day in many ways. Just another reason to better remember Frederick Douglass’s Decoration Day speech.

Next Decoration Day history tomorrow,

BenI

PS. What do you think?

May 27, 2024: Better Remembering Memorial and Decoration Day

[Before a series on DecorationDay, the holiday that preceded and evolved into Memorial Day, a special post on shifting our collective memories of the holiday’s histories.]

On what we don’t remember about Memorial Day, and why we should.

In one of my earliest posts, on the Statue of Liberty, I made the case for remembering and engaging much more fully with what the Statue was originally intended, by its French abolitionist creator, to symbolize: the legacy of slavery and abolitionism in both America and France, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the memories of what he had done to advance that cause, and so on. I tried there, hopefully with some success, to leave ample room for what the Statue has come to mean, both for America as a whole and, more significantly still, for generation upon generation of immigrant arrivals to the nation. I think those meanings, especially when tied to Emma Lazarus’ poem and its radically democratic and inclusive vision of our national identity, are beautiful and important in their own right. But how much more profound and meaningful, if certainly more complicated, would they be if they were linked to our nation’s own troubled but also inspiring histories of slavery and abolitionism, of sectional strife and Civil War, of racial divisions and those who have worked for centuries to transcend and bridge them?

I would say almost exactly the same thing when it comes to the history of Memorial Day. For the last century or so, at least since the end of World War I, the holiday has meant something broadly national and communal, an opportunity to remember and celebrate those Americans who have given their lives as members of our armed forces. While I certainly feel that some of the narratives associated with that idea are as simplifying and mythologizing and meaningless as many others I’ve analyzed here—“they died for our freedom” chief among them; the world would be a vastly different, and almost certainly less free, place had the Axis powers won World War II (for example), but I have yet to hear any convincing case that the world would be even the slightest bit worse off were it not for the more than 50,000 American troops who lives were wasted in the Vietnam War (for another)—those narratives are much more about politics and propaganda, and don’t change at all the absolutely real and tragic and profound meaning of service and loss for those who have done so and all those who know and love them. One of the most pitch-perfect statements of my position on such losses can be found in a song by (surprisingly) Bruce Springsteen; his “Gypsy Biker,” from Magic (2007), certainly includes a strident critique of the Bush Administration and Iraq War, as seen in lines like “To those who threw you away / You ain’t nothing but gone,” but mostly reflects a brother’s and family’s range of emotions and responses to the death of a young soldier in that war.

Yet as with the Statue, Memorial Day’s original meanings and narratives are significantly different from, and would add a great deal of complexity and power to, these contemporary images. The holiday was first known as Decoration Day, and was (at least per the thorough histories of it by scholars like David Blight) originated in 1865 by a group of freed slaves in Charleston, South Carolina; the slaves visited a cemetery for Union soldiers on May 1^st of that year and decorated their graves, a quiet but very sincere tribute to what those soldiers have given and what it had meant to the lives of these freedmen and –women. The holiday quickly spread to many other communities, and just as quickly came to focus more on the less potentially divisive, or at least less complex as reminders of slavery and division and the ongoing controversies of Reconstruction and so on, perspectives of former soldiers—first fellow Union ones, but by the 1870s veterans from both sides. Yet former slaves continued to honor the holiday in their own way, as evidenced by a powerful scene from Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Rodman the Keeper” (1880), in which the protagonist observes a group of ex-slaves leaving their decorations on the graves of the Union dead at the cemetery where he works. On the one hand, these ex-slave memorials are parallel to the family memories that now dominate Memorial Day, and serve as a beautiful reminder that the American family extends to blood relations of very different and perhaps even more genuine kinds. But on the other hand, the ex-slave memorials represent far more complex and in many ways (I believe) significant American stories and perspectives than a simple familial memory; these acts were a continuing acknowledgment both of some of our darkest moments and of the ways in which we had, at great but necessary cost, defeated them.

Again, I’m not trying to suggest that any current aspects or celebrations of Memorial Day are anything other than genuine and powerful; having heard some eloquent words about what my Granddad’s experiences with his fellow soldiers had meant to him (he even commandeered an abandoned bunker and hand-wrote a history of the Company after the war!), I share those perspectives. But as with the Statue and with so many of our national histories, what we’ve forgotten is just as genuine and powerful, and a lot more telling about who we’ve been and thus who and where we are. The more we can remember those histories too, the more complex and meaningful our holidays, our celebrations, our memories, and our futures will be. Next Decoration Day post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 25-26, 2024: Laura Franey’s Guest Post on The Keepers & True Crime

[100 years ago this week, the criminal duo who came to be known as Leopold & Loeb set their murderous plan in motion. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied L&L and four other criminal duos, leading up to this repeat Guest Post on the genre of true crime!]

[Laura E. Franey is Associate Professor of English at Millsaps College, where she teaches Victorian literature, Communication Studies, writing, and much else. She’s the author of Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence: British Writing on Africa, 1855-1902 (2003) and the editor of the first scholarly edition of the first novel published in the United States by someone of Japanese descent—Yone Noguchi’s The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (originally published in 1902).]

On Serial Killing and Netflix’s The Keepers: An Unexplained Absence

Law enforcement officers sometimes wrongly consider a set of individual murders the work of a serial killer. A strong incentive exists for such a misinterpretation: Find the guy (and, yes, serial killers are almost exclusively men) who committed one of the horrible crimes, and you’ve caught the guy who committed all of them. On the other hand, could there be an incentive for someone to downplay or ignore the possibility that a set of murders could be the work of a serial killer? The way femicides (the killing of women, specifically) are treated in The Keepers, a seven-part true-crime series directed by Ryan White and released in May 2017, suggests there may be. Here I’ll explore the way that ideological fervor against patriarchal institutions may have encouraged White to ignore the possibility that a serial killer was responsible for the two murders investigated in the series. 

The Keepers offers an intriguing blend of two storylines that have been popular in documentary storytelling in the last ten or fifteen years. The first storyline is the unsolved-murder investigation (á la Someone Knows Something, a podcast, or Disappeared, a television series). The second storyline is the discovery of a cover-up of sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests (examples include Deliver Us From Evil [dir. Amy Berg, 2006] and Mea Maxima Culpa [dir. Alex Gibney, 2012]). However, The Keepers does not bring together the two types of storylines all that smoothly. Brian Lowry laments that the series “splinters off in several directions,” and New York Times critic Mike Hale says that the “shifts back and forth” between the two plots “can be jarring.” This failed intertwining may arise from the fact that the potential link between the two types of crimes explored in the series, the murder of two young women and the continuous sexual assault of high school girls, is tenuous, resting almost exclusively on the statements of one woman, Jean Hargadon Wehner, who came forward (as a “Jane Doe”) in the 1990s to tell police and the Archdiocese of Baltimore that she was now remembering having been raped and sodomized repeatedly at her Catholic all-girls’ high school, Archbishop Keough High School, between 1968 and 1972. She also communicated to them that she was now remembering having been taken by one of the abusive priests to see the dead body of Sister Cathy Cesnik, a former teacher at the school who had disappeared on Nov. 7, 1969, and whose dead body was found on January 3, 1970, thrown on a kind of makeshift dump site. Wehner said the priest, Rev. A. Joseph Maskell, leaned down close to her as she knelt next to the dead Sister Cathy and said “See what happens when you say bad things about people?”

You are likely wondering at this point what serial killers have to do with any of this. Isn’t this clearly a case of motivated killing by someone who wished to keep their own abuse from getting exposed? Well, maybe—or maybe not. The first episode had already informed viewers that Sister Cathy was not the only young woman abducted and killed in the Baltimore area in November 1969. Only five days after the 26-year-old Cathy disappeared, a 20-year-old woman, Joyce Malecki, was also abducted. Her body was found the next day, face-down in a stream out by Fort Meade, with her hands tied behind her back with a knapsack cord. The Keepers makes a somewhat weak attempt to link the two murders, but not through a serial killer, as those who consume a lot of true crime media might expect. Instead, the series links them, tenuously, through what one commentator has called a “serial perpetrator”—the abusive priest, Maskell. Though Malecki never attended Keough High School and did not seem to have known Rev. Maskell personally, White pushes a conspiracy theory that has her death being orchestrated by Maskell. The proof? Maskell’s name was printed with two other priests’ names on the sympathy card that St. Clement Parish sent to Joyce Malecki’s parents after her death.

What makes more sense, especially if we explore the simplest explanations of crime first, would be to see a serial killer behind the deaths of the two women. The phrase “serial killer” is never uttered in the series, however, and the idea of a murderer attacking and killing women he had never met before is dismissed. One of the two amateur investigators featured in the series, Abbie Schaub, a former Keough student who enjoyed Sister Cathy’s English classes, says that random killing seems unlikely. “Back then,” Abbie Schaub says, “random abductions and murders of young women were almost unheard of.” While it is true that the term “serial killer” had not yet been coined when these two murders happened, it is true that kidnappings and murders of young women did happen in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, each fall for two years after these unnatural deaths saw another young female Baltimorean disappear and  was wind up dead, with her body not concealed particularly well. In October 1970, the body of sixteen-year-old Pamela Conyers was found in a wooded area, after she was last seen at Harundale Mall. (Both Sister Cathy and Joyce were likely shopping when they were abducted.) In September 1971, the body of a 16-year-old girl, Grace (Gay) Montayne, was found in a vacant lot in South Baltimore. It does not seem unreasonable to think today that a serial killer may have been responsible for all four of these deaths.

But Ryan White’s series never mentions this possibility, because White is, ultimately, less interested in exploring all possible angles on the deaths of the two women than he is in telling a story of corruption and cover-up by a patriarchal institution, the Catholic Church, that in his eyes sacrifices women’s and children’s well-being for power, money, and the continuation of all-male authority. This theme continues his politically-themed work in his previous documentary, The Case Against 8, which chronicled the story of same-sex couples and their lawyers struggling for the right to marriage against the combined power of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the Catholic Church. White crusades to change systems and to advocate for the individual’s freedom vis-à-vis institutions; he’s not interested in going down the true-crime path of chasing a serial killer who may have killed a few women he randomly met at a shopping mall. Of course, though, Cesnik’s and Malecki’s deaths almost certainly emerged out of misogyny, whether that misogyny was the kind that would allow a Church to cover-up the rapes of a priest or the kind that pushed a man to kidnap, assault and murder girls and young women he didn’t know. No matter who killed them, Cathy and Joyce and Gay and Pamela suffered terror, pain, and death because they were women in a society that didn’t care a whole lot about their lives.

[Memorial Day series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? True crime stories you’d highlight?]

May 24, 2024: Criminal Duos: Sacco & Vanzetti

[100 years ago this week, the criminal duo who came to be known as Leopold & Loeb set their murderous plan in motion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy L&L and four other criminal duos, leading up to a repeat Guest Post on the genre of true crime!]

On three contexts for the controversial trial and execution of a pair of Italian American radicals (who were almost certainly not guilty, so “criminal duo” in this case is particularly fraught of course).

1)      Anti-Anarchism: As I highlighted in this post on the Haymarket trial, for nearly a half-century prior to the 1920s the threat of anarchism had been sufficient to accuse (and often convict) Americans of a variety of offenses, including ones unrelated to political activism of any kind. But that trend had been greatly accelerated in the 1910s by President Woodrow Wilson’s arguments for the need for the Espionage and Sedition Acts, and by the extreme and ongoing effects of those federal laws including the Palmer Raids, ideological deportations, and more. All of that was the political, social, and legal climate for the 1920 arrest and 1921 trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a pair of Italian immigrant laborers in Massachusetts who had long espoused radical political positions (leading them for example to temporarily flee to Mexico to avoid the draft during WWI).

2)      Xenophobia: Just about everything I wrote in that prior paragraph was likewise connected to overarching anti-immigrant narratives, including the prosecutor’s attacks on the Haymarket defendants as “like a lot of rats and vermin” and President Wilson’s description of immigrants as “pour[ing] the poison of disloyalty into the arteries of national life.” Italian immigrants and Italian Americans had also been a specific target of xenophobic hate and violence for decades, including most prominently the March 1891 mass lynching of eleven Italian Americans in New Orleans. And 1921 was the year when such anti-immigrant sentiments became fully codified in national law, with the passage of the Emergency Quota Act that greatly limited arrivals from Italy along with countless other nations. For too many turn-of-the-century Americans, “Italian” was a term that did roughly the same psychological work as “anarchist,” and the combination of those two likely made a fair trial for Sacco & Vanzetti impossible.

3)      Literary Advocates: Efforts to highlight those prejudices and make the case for the two men came from a variety of 1920s voices, including future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in an Atlantic Monthly article that he revised into a groundbreaking book The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis of Lawyers and Laymen (1927). But for this English Professor, perhaps the most compelling came from two literary figures: the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was arrested while picketing the Massachusetts State House and then wrote a poetic yet political plea to Governor Alvan Fuller for clemency; and the journalist and novelist John Dos Passos, who published about the pair in both the contemporary pamphlet Facing the Chair (1927) and then in multiple sections of his experimental historical novel U.S.A. (1937). Although they did not succeed in stopping the execution, these advocates importantly foreshadowed (and perhaps helped create) the 1930s rise of political and protest literature.

Guest Post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other duos you’d highlight?

May 23, 2024: Criminal Duos: Butch & Sundance

[100 years ago this week, the criminal duo who came to be known as Leopold & Loeb set their murderous plan in motion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy L&L and four other criminal duos, leading up to a repeat Guest Post on the genre of true crime!]

On beautifying ugly men and deeds, and why we shouldn’t.

In George Roy Hill’s film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), birthday boy Butch (the nickname of Robert Leroy Parker, one of the late 19^th century’s most infamous bank and train robbers) was famously played by Paul Newman; Robert Redford played his partner, Harry “The Sundance Kid” Longabaugh. Newman and Redford were, while unquestionably talented and interesting actors, also two of their respective generations’ most attractive stars, charismatic heartthrobs with marquee movie-star good looks. The same could be said for many of the young men featured in the Young Guns films, of course, from the first film’s Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland, and Lou Diamond Phillips to the second film’s additions such as Christian Slater and Balthazar Getty. And in recent years the trend continued with the casting of matinee idol Brad Pitt as Jesse James in Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007).

Such casting choices can no doubt be explained in part by the simple realities that movie stars tend to be good looking, that some of the most famous are also some of the best looking, and that the most famous are often good box-office draws. But if we consider the example of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid specifically, it’s worth noting that it’s not only the titular characters’ physical appearances that have been beautified. The film’s entire tone is light and comic, mostly in the vein of a buddy comedy with (in the famous, ground-breaking musical interlude in particular) the occasional interruption of a romantic comedy as well. There are of course moments of violence and darker turns, but even in the darkest of them—such as (SPOILER alert) the two men’s gun-blazing demise that concludes the film—Hill takes a more upbeat and cheery tone than we might expect. That lightness becomes even more striking when we compare Butch to a film released in the same year and featuring many of the same characters and events: Sam Peckinpah’s dark, hyper-violent The Wild Bunch (1969).

The stylization of violence in Peckinpah’s film isn’t necessarily realistic, and certainly could be seen as exploitative (in a similar critique to that which has been leveled at a filmmaker who learned a lot from Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino). But at the same time, it’s difficult to watch The Wild Bunch and not remember that Butch, Sundance, and their outlaw peers were by and large hardened criminals for whom violence and the threat of it were principal tools and daily realities; a lesson that it’s far easier to forget when we’re watching Newman and Redford smile their movie-star smiles. Similarly, while the casting of Pitt as Jesse James allows the film to make some interesting points about the aging outlaw as a celebrity, it also depicts a man who has survived decades of violent crime and still looks like, well, Brad Pitt. If we’re going to keep telling the stories of American outlaws in our popular culture—and it seems likely that we will—it would help to find ways to include in our portrayals the darkness and ugliness that were central parts of those stories.

Last duo tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other duos you’d highlight?

May 22, 2024: Criminal Duos: Bonnie & Clyde

[100 years ago this week, the criminal duo who came to be known as Leopold & Loeb set their murderous plan in motion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy L&L and four other criminal duos, leading up to a repeat Guest Post on the genre of true crime!]

On how images can reflect and shape but also distort our histories.

Arthur Penn’s film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) might seem to fit perfectly into my argument in this Billy the Kid post about pop culture beautifications of outlaw stories: the film’s leading man Warren Beatty (as Clyde Barrow) was one of the few 1960s stars who could rival Paul Newman and Robert Redford in matinee idol appeal, and his co-star Faye Dunaway (as Bonnie Parker) was just as stunning. Yet in this case, the casting of beautiful Hollywood stars made particular sense, on a couple of significant levels. For one thing, Bonnie and Clyde’s early 1930s heyday (what came to be known as the Public Enemy era) was a period defined by famously attractive criminals: John Dillinger was said to be strikingly handsome, and the nickname Pretty Boy Floyd pretty much speaks for itself. And for another, even more specific thing, Bonnie and Clyde’s 1930s fame and narrative came to be thoroughly associated with a set of carefully posed images disseminated through mass media.

In April 1933, police officers raided a Joplin, Missouri apartment that had been serving as a hideout for Bonnie and Clyde, as well as other gang members including Clyde’s older brother Buck, Buck’s wife Blanche, and William Daniel Jones. After a shootout that left two officers dead the criminals escaped, but among the possessions they left behind was a set of posed photographs of the gang, including a picture of Bonnie chomping a cigar and flaunting a gun that would become (and has remained) synonymous with her public image. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that Bonnie and Clyde intended for the pictures to be found and made public, as they seem overtly created in response to and amplification of the evolving narratives of the two as daredevil lovers. Even if the pictures were originally intended for their own personal use and enjoyment, they likewise reflect how much the pair were aware of and excited by those public narratives. And art went on to imitate life imitating art, as many of the moments and images in Penn’s film are drawn directly from those famous photos.

Photographs are of course not the same as film recreations or historical fictions—even if they’re posed or staged, photographs capture aspects of reality (at least in the pre-Photoshop era) and in so doing become part of the real world as well. Yet at the same time, when photographs become a primary way in which we remember history (as they have so often in the 150 years since the development of the form), they risk distorting as much as reflecting or illuminating those histories. And that seems to be the case for the aforementioned iconic image of Bonnie Parker: per the FBI testimony of fellow gang member William Daniel Jones, as well as subsequent stories provided by Jones and other gang members, Bonnie neither smoked cigars nor (far more importantly) ever shot at a police officer. Even if we do not take Jones’s memories and perspective as authoritative, his statements remind us that neither can we see these posed photographs as necessarily illustrative of the duo’s identities or actions. As with so many American outlaws, the real Bonnie and Clyde reside alongside, but not quite within, such public images and narratives.

Next duo tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other duos you’d highlight?

May 21, 2024: Criminal Duos: Leopold & Loeb

[100 years ago this week, the criminal duo who came to be known as Leopold & Loeb set their murderous plan in motion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy L&L and four other criminal duos, leading up to a repeat Guest Post on the genre of true crime!]

On three broader issues to which the pair of “perfect criminals” can be connected (from the most straightforward to the most complex).

1)      The Death Penalty: Once Leopold & Loeb had been arrested for and confessed to the murder of 14 year-old Bobby Franks, the central remaining question was whether they would be sentenced to death (the famous trial was much more of a sentencing hearing, as both men had already pled guilty). It was directly to address that question that Loeb’s family retained Clarence Darrow, the nation’s most famous trial lawyer and an avowed opponent of the death penalty; Darrow’s twelve-hour summation on the subject is considered one of the most important speeches in American legal history. His speech convinced the judge to give the two young killers life in prison instead, and while that didn’t end up mattering for Loeb (who was murdered by a fellow inmate a dozen years later), it did for Leopold who was paroled in 1958 and lived the last 8 years of his life as a free man. This isn’t nearly enough space for me to get into all that I feel about the death penalty, but I’ll just note that to my mind 19 and 18 year olds are far too young for such absolute punishments.

2)      Sexuality: Not that the death penalty isn’t plenty complicated, but (when it comes to these figures and this crime) this subject is a great deal more thorny still. Not the basic fact, which is that Leopold & Loeb seem to have been in a sexual relationship with each other (although only for a few months before the murder). But the ways in which that fact became a sensationalized part of the story, not only for example by the press in the aftermath of Loeb’s murder in prison (when it was reported, with no evidence, that he had made sexual advances on the killer), but also by Darrow himself during the trial. Darrow brought in psychiatric experts to claim that the pair were abnormal, with their sexuality front and center in that defense. I wrote in this post about how the first edition of the DSM, published in 1952, classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance”; obviously those ideas went far beyond this one trial and case, but I can’t say that they helped the cause any.

3)      School Shootings: This subject definitely represents a far more tenuous connection than my first two, and I want to be clear that there are plenty of differences between L&L and school shooters. But I would also suggest that there are at least parallels between this criminal pair and (for example) the Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—a sense of superiority to all their peers, a willingness to take the lives of young people (something shared by all school shooters of course), and of course a sociopathic separation from the layers of community that bind most of us to one another. But fortunately for Leopold & Loeb’s peers, guns were both far less powerful and destructive and far more difficult to come by in the 1920s, and so they could senselessly take the life of only one young person in their act of mutual criminality.

Next duo tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other duos you’d highlight?

May 20, 2024: Criminal Duos: Pecos Bill & Joaquin Murrieta

[100 years ago this week, the criminal duo who came to be known as Leopold & Loeb set their murderous plan in motion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy L&L and four other criminal duos, leading up to a repeat Guest Post on the genre of true crime!]

On two folk heroes, and the competing frontier histories they reveal.

Even as a kid, encountering his stories in a compilation of tall tales, I could tell that Pecos Bill was a bit of a Paul Bunyan knockoff—an outlandish origin story (Bill fell out of his family’s wagon as a baby and was raised by a pack of wolves as one of their own), similarly larger-than-life animal companions (his otherwise un-rideable horse Widow-Maker, the rattlesnake Shake that he used as a lasso), an equally mythic love interest (Slue-Foot Sue, who rode a giant catfish down the Rio Grande). So I wasn’t surprised to learn that Bill was a late addition to the “big man” school of tall tales, likely created in 1916 by Edward O’Reilly and shoehorned back into the mythos of Westward expansion, the frontier, and the Wild West, one more addition to the roster of lawless heroes who had by the early 20^th century come to define that American mythos so fully.

That Bill didn’t come into existence until a few decades after the closing of the frontier doesn’t lessen his symbolic status, however—if anything, it highlights just how much the mythos of the American West was and remains just that, a consciously created set of myths that have served to delineate after the fact a messy, dynamic, often dark, always complex region and history. Moreover, that mythos was as multi-cultural as the West itself, as illustrated by Mexican American folk hero Joaquin Murrieta, “the Robin Hood of El Dorado”: Murrieta, a California 49er from northern Mexico, first came to national prominence in a popular dime novel, John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854); the tales of his charming banditry have been a part of the region’s folk history ever since, including a cameo as Zorro’s older brother in the Antonio Banderas film The Mask of Zorro (1998).

Yet however much Murrieta’s story has been fictionalized and mythologized, it did originate with an actual historical figure—and that distinction can help us see past the myths to some of the frontier’s messier, darker, and more defining realities. For one thing, Murrieta apparently began his outlaw career after he and his family were violently dispossessed of a land claim, events which connect to the social and legal aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. For another, his gang’s victims included not only Anglo settlers but also Chinese laborers, revealing California’s genuinely and often painfully multicultural community as of the mid-19^th century. A fuller engagement with these histories would in part force Americans to confront the centuries of conflict and violence that have so frequently comprised the world of the frontier—but it would also allow us to push beyond tall tales of larger-than-life individuals and to recognize just how collective and communal are both the myths and realities of the Southwest, and of America.

Next duo tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other duos you’d highlight?

May 18-19, 2024: American(Studier) Wedding!

No post this weekend for a very good reason—I’m marrying my best friend and soulmate! See you on Monday, and much love in the meantime,

Ben

May 17, 2024: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Special Guests!

[Another semester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semester reflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes. Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]

Yesterday I wrote about my favorite discussion in one of my First-Year Writing II sections—but when it comes to my favorite day in Writing II this semester, and indeed in any course this semester, and quite possibly in any course ever, it’s a tie between two other moments that complemented each other quite beautifully and movingly:

--In February, my sons were able to come to campus with me for the first time since Spring 2019, and probably the last time together as my older son will be headed off to his own first year of college in a few short (so, so short) months. Taking no names at the all-you-can-eat dining hall was definitely the highlight for them, but for me seeing them seated at a desk in the back of my afternoon Writing II section, and flashing back to all the times they’ve come to campus and classes with me since I rocked my older son in his car carrier at the first meeting of my Summer 2006 Grad class, was just about the most beautiful thing I could imagine.

--But pretty darn close was my other special guest in that same section, just a few weeks later: my fiancé. We’re not online/on social media with our relationship, so I haven’t talked much about us in this space. But she’s my favorite (non-offspring) person and my partner in everything I do and am, including my teaching, and it was so good to have her there, most especially in the same room where my sons had been with me as well. The past and the future, right there in my Spring 2024 present—that’s some stand-out stuff!

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?

May 16, 2024: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Cereal in Composition

[Another semester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semester reflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes. Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]

When you’ve been doing this as long as I have—finishing year 19 at FSU and 24 of teaching overall this week—you can often see stand-out moments coming; that was definitely the case with the Larsen and Zhang conversations I wrote about in the last two posts, for example. But if I ever find myself entirely unable to be taken by surprise, I’ll know it’s time to retire. Fortunately that definitely isn’t the case yet, and of the many moments and days that surprised me this semester, none stands out more than a phenomenal discussion in one of my First-Year Writing II sections about this 1960s Post Honeycomb Cereal ad. I found that ad at the last minute, looking through an archive I had shared with the students and hoping to find a text that seemed targeted toward kids (the subject of one of our scholarly article readings in that unit), and—get ready for some pedagogical inside baseball—had not watched it in full prior to sharing it with the students. And then it became the source of the best discussion we had all semester in that section, with more than half of the 18 students sharing thoughtful takes on choices and details in the ad. Surprise stand-outs ftw!

Last stand-out tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?

May 15, 2024: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Gold in Grad Historical Fiction

[Another semester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semester reflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes. Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]

My American Historical Fiction Grad class was the first course I got to teach for our MA program (back in Summer 2006, at the end of my first year at FSU), and is the one I’ve returned to the most often by far. Certain aspects have stayed the same across those nearly twenty years and half-dozen sections, but one thing that keeps it fresh is that I always end with a 21^st century text, and have chosen a different one each time. They’ve consistently been great and led to excellent class conversations, but I was especially happy with my choice this time, C. Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold (2020). Zhang’s novel is one of my favorites in recent years, but (as I discussed in that hyperlinked post) it’s also an incredibly complex vision not just of American history, but of historical fiction as a genre. All those layers made it a particularly phenomenal text with which to close out this class, and one to which the students (most of them fellow educators, and all of them awesome as our MA students always are) responded with thoughtful and impassioned takes that made this conversation a truly stand-out one.

Next stand-out tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?

May 14, 2024: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Ambiguity in Am Lit

[Another semester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semester reflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes. Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]

As I highlighted and contextualized in this December 2020 semester reflections post, and as has continued to be the case a good bit of the time, in the semesters and years since Covid I’ve frequently moved away from longer readings in favor of multiple shorter ones. A lot of the time I think that can achieve my and the course’s goals equally well, but I’m also committed to not abandoning longer works altogether, and more exactly to making the choice in each specific instance rather than having a blanket policy or perspective. And this semester offered a perfect illustration of something that can only happen with a longer work we’ve read and discussed across multiple class meetings: our final day with Nella Larsen’s stunning novella Passing (1929), where we had one of our liveliest discussions of the semester about what we make of that book’s shocking and ambiguous ending (no SPOILERS here). We couldn’t have had that stand-out conversation if we hadn’t built to it across multiple days of work with Larsen, and that was a great reminder of the importance of continuing to find ways to make longer texts part of my classes.

Next stand-out tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?

May 13, 2024: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Salvatore in Sci Fi/Fantasy

[Another semester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semester reflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes. Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]

I’ve had the chance to connect my students with folks on our syllabus a few times: when Kevin Gannon Zoomed into my English Studies Capstone after we read Radical Hope; and when Monique Truong and Eric Nguyen generously answered questions about their books The Sweetest Fruits and Things We Lost to the Water for other sections of that same course. Each and every one of those experiences was exceptional, but this semester featured a next level moment: when hugely prolific and popular author (and Fitchburg State alum!) R.A. Salvatore visited my Intro to Science Fiction & Fantasy course. Whether he was thoughtfully considering the similarities and differences between sci fi and fantasy worldbuilding, sharing advice from his own four decades in the field, or just casually discussing the day he visited Skywalker Ranch to talk with George Lucas about writing Star Wars novels, Salvatore not only engrossed us all from start to finish, but really brought the course’s texts, ideas, and conversations to vivid life. That’s a stand-out day for sure!

Next stand-out tomorrow

Ben

PS. What do you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?

May 11-12, 2024: Beach Blogging: Guest Posts from Elsa Devienne and Jamie Hirami

[Released on May 11, 1964, “I Get Around” would go on to become the first #1 hit for The Beach Boys. To celebrate that sunny anniversary, this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of beachtastic texts, leading up to this multi-part Guest Post featuring two of our up-and-coming BeachStudiers!]

First, I can't BeachStudy in 2024 without highlighting Elsa Devienne's awesome new book, Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in 20th-Century Los Angeles. You shouldn't need anything more than that title to make you seek it out, but just in case, Elsa shares:

"Think of this book as the Beach Boys meets Chinatown meets Blade Runner meets Baywatch. There's real estate battles, presidents strolling on the sand, beatniks playing the bongo drum, black bathing beauties, evil Malibu beach homeowners and, of course, climate change coming to ruin the fun of everyone!"

Second, I wanted to re-share a great prior BeachStudying Guest Post from Jamie Hirami:

[Jamie Hirami is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the amazing Penn State Harrisburg program, where she’s writing a dissertation on Venice Beach which promises to break significantly new ground in American material culture and cultural studies. This Guest Post is just a glimpse of what’s to come!]

[NB. I wrote that bio when this post originally aired in 2014; I’m not sure what Jamie is up to these days, but I’m willing to bet it’s impressive!]

Freak Beach.  Muscle Beach.  Silicon Beach.  Coney Island of the Pacific.  Slum by the Sea.  Venice Beach, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, goes by many monikers.  None of those nicknames reference the original plan that founder Abbot Kinney, heir to a tobacco fortune, envisioned in 1898 when he bought out his real estate partners for the southern portion land that also originally encompassed Santa Monica: a resplendent, middle-class seaside resort and town, which would cater to its clientele with Chautauqua’s and other elements of high culture.  Ultimately, mass and popular cultures shaped its direction as an amusement destination while the counter cultures of the mid-twentieth century influenced its modern reputation as bohemian community. 

Modeled after Venice, Italy, Kinney transformed the marshy land into a series of navigable canals along which, early visitors could buy real estate for single-family home development. Venice-of-America officially opened on July 4, 1905 to a crowd of about 40,000 people.  Kinney’s grand cultural intentions culminated in a 3,400 seat auditorium built for educational lectures and cultural performances, which closed after one season.  Instead, visitors flocked to the pier, bathhouse, beach and other amusements.  In fact, rides and games proved to be so much more popular than the Chautauqua experience, that in January 1906, he opened the hugely popular midway plaisance, which included exhibits and freak shows from the world’s fairs in Portland and St. Louis.

By the time Kinney died in October 1920, Venice’s original luster had greatly diminished.  The canals did not drain properly, creating murky and dirty waterways, and the national trend for boardwalk amusements, in general, faded.  Years of opposition by the growing permanent residents and clergy to boxing matches, alcohol, dancing, and more sordid amusements was capped by a hugely destructive fire that caused over a $1 million in damages.  In 1925, the City of Los Angeles annexed Venice, filling its famous canals in 1929 to make room for roads. 

Over the next forty years, Venice remained an outwardly run-down version of its former self, but in its place, a vibrant counter-culture fomented cultural growth.  It became a Southern California hotbed for the Beats; a hippie commune during the Sixties; and it embraced transients, hustlers, artists, and performers. 

Today, Venice’s increasingly gentrified neighborhoods have put homeless and homeowners, hustlers and shop-owners, and low-income versus high-income residents at odds, but it still maintains a fierce stance against the mainstream.  In 2007, Abbot Kinney Blvd. (the main commercial thoroughfare) opened its first chain store—Pinkberry—causing an uproar among residents and local shop owners who petitioned people to boycott the chain.  Three years later, it closed because it was underperforming.  More importantly, Venice still maintains ties to its popular culture beginnings with numerous sidewalk performers, a freak show along the boardwalk, and a voyeuristic outdoor gym among other diversions.  Venice Beach, through its varied history, remains, at heart, a destination that caters to popular amusements.

[Next series starts Mondy,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other beach histories or stories, or BeachStudiers, you’d highlight?]