November 22, 2024: AmericanTemperanceStudying: Prohibition

[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874 convention!]

On three great scholarly books that can help us analyze an incredibly multi-faceted historical period and its many legacies.

1)      Lisa McGirr’s The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (2015): Yesterday I argued that the Anti-Saloon League’s successful pressure politics were instrumental in finally achieving the movement’s longstanding goal of nationwide Prohibition. That was absolutely a factor, but it’s also far from a coincidence that the 18^th Amendment passed Congress in 1917 (the same year as the Espionage Act) and was ratified in 1919 (the same year that the post-WWI Palmer Raids began). As McGirr argues convincingly, World War I specifically and many wartime contexts more broadly were crucial to turning Prohibition from a movement priority into a nationwide policy—and while that particular policy ended with the amendment’s repeal in 1933, many of those wartime contexts have endured in the 90 years since.

2)      Stephen Moore’s Bootleggers and Borders: The Paradox of Prohibition on a Canada-U.S. Borderland (2014): Another crucial legacy of the Prohibition era was the creation of—and yes, I mean that precisely; not just newfound attention to, but in many ways the creation of—the U.S.-Canadian border as a space for law enforcement concerns and activity. My paternal grandfather and his parents moved across that border and into New Hampshire in the mid-1910s with no hassle or legal attention of any kind; but just a few years later, that would have been impossible, and as Moore argues Prohibition enforcement was the reason why. While the U.S.-Mexico border was not as much of a Prohibition focal point, it’s no coincidence that it was likewise during the 1920s that that border became genuinely patrolled. The end of Prohibition was only the start of U.S. border patrols, of course.

3)      Marni Davis’ Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (2012): I wrote a bit in yesterday’s post about the interconnections between white supremacy, race, and Prohibition, especially in the alliance between the Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan. The 1920s Klan focused equally on anti-Black and anti-immigrant domestic terrorisms, of course; and as Davis’ book traces powerfully, so too was Prohibition driven by anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic narratives. I’ve argued for many years in many different settings that the 1920s represented a nadir of American racism, xenophobia, and exclusion—and yes, I’m well aware that this is a very competitive contest; but the more I learn, the more convinced I am that this was indeed a stunning low point—and it’s crucially important that we include Prohibition in our understanding of those elements of 1920s America.

WCTU post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 21, 2024: AmericanTemperanceStudying: The Anti-Saloon League

[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874 convention!]

On one important innovation and one troubling interconnection for America’s most influential temperance organization.

Each of the posts in this series has moved between more individual and more collective and organizational temperance activisms, and I don’t think that’s just due to my own choices and focal points: it seems to me that any social movement that endures and achieves significant successes likely needs both groundbreaking leaders and widespread communal support. Similarly, the final push toward Prohibition (on which more in tomorrow’s concluding post) in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries relied on both the individual presence and prominence of yesterday’s subject Carrie Nation and the social and political connections of the Anti-Saloon League. Founded in 1893 in Oberlin, Ohio, the League certainly featured its share of impressive individual leaders, from founder Howard Hyde Russell to the hugely influential lawyer Wayne Bidwell Wheeler among others. But it was precisely the League’s organizational presence that made it so effective in shifting national conversations.

The League utilized a number of strategies to achieve those aims, including creating its own American Issue Publishing Company in 1909; that publisher produced and mailed so many pamphlets that its hometown of Westerville, Ohio became the smallest town to feature a first-class post office in the period. But by far the most influential element of the Anti-Saloon League’s activist efforts was a strategy that the organization seems to have created (and which was certainly related to those ubiquitous publications): pressure politics, the concept of using a variety of interconnected means, from mass media and communication to intimidation and threats, to pressure political leaders to support and pass particular legislation and policies. There’s no doubt that it was the successful application of such political pressure by the League and its allies (but most especially by the League) that convinced enough national and state politicians to support Prohibition (after well more than a half-century of unsuccessful temperance movement efforts toward that specific end), leading to the Congressional passage and state-level ratification of the 18^th Amendment in 1919.

I’ll have a lot more to say about that specific League legacy tomorrow. But it’s important to add a troubling layer and contemporary context, particularly to the application of pressure politics: the other organization which used that strategy with particular effectiveness in the 1920s was the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. Moreover, this wasn’t a coincidence or even just a parallel—as historian Howard Ball has discovered, in a setting like late 1910s and 1920s Birmingham the two organizations were closely connected, to the point that a local journalist wrote, “In Alabama, it is hard to tell where the Anti-Saloon League ends and the Klan begins.” And it wasn’t just Alabama—throughout the 1920s the two organizations became allies not only in enforcing Prohibition (although I’m sure the League would say that was their only goal) but in achieving their political and social goals on multiple levels. The ties between white supremacy and American social movements are far from unique to temperance, of course—but that doesn’t excuse in any way this most influential temperance organization’s symbiotic relationship with white supremacist domestic terrorists.

Last temperance histories tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 20, 2024: AmericanTemperanceStudying: Three Reformers

[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874 convention!]

On takeaways from a trio of temperance reformers across the 19^th century.

1)      Sylvester Graham (1794-1851): As that hyperlinked article argues, Graham’s temperance activism was just one small part of his truly multi-layered efforts for health and wellness reform. But my older son dressed up as and interpreted Graham for an APUSH project earlier this year, and in his honor (and in tribute to Graham’s most enduring legacy, the undeniably tasty Graham Cracker) I wanted to include the quirky and influential Graham in this post. Moreover, Graham did hold a position for years with one of the organizations I highlighted yesterday, the Philadelphia Temperance Society, so he did see alcohol abstinence as an important part of his overall health reforms. While analyzing the longitudinal history of the temperance movement over these 400 years is one important way to think about this issue, it’s equally worthwhile to connect each specific moment latitudinally to other elements of its era and society, as Graham’s multi-faceted efforts remind us.

2)      Neal Dow: But some reformers did laser-focus on temperance throughout their lives and careers, and while Portland, Maine’s Neal Dow (1804-1897) did other important work as well—including with the Underground Railroad and as a Civil War Brigadier General—temperance was the through-line, leading to his nickname as the “Father of Prohibition.” Active in the movement since his early 20s, it was with a pair of closely linked mid-century elections that he really took his efforts to the next level: he was elected president of the Maine Temperance Union in 1850 and then mayor of Portland in 1851. Dow saw his political role as an extension of his movement activism, to the point where in 1855 he ordered state militia members to open fire on rioters who opposed his “Maine Law,” the first in the nation to prohibit all alcohol. Dow even tried to take those political goals truly nationwide, running for President in 1880 as the nominee of the Prohibition Party. In those and other ways, the political history of prohibition is inseparable from the career of Neal Dow.

3)      Carrie (sometimes Carry) Nation (1846-1911): While Dow did order that moment of militia violence, his own activisms remained more on the organizational and legal levels, as was the case with the 19^th and early 20^th century temperance movement as a whole. But all social movements feature a variety of perspectives and tactics, and not long after Dow’s presidential run the temperance movement came to be dominated by a figure who preferred much more direct and violent action. Believing herself called from God to oppose all things alcohol—“a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like,” as she strikingly put it—Nation’s activist weapon of choice was neither words nor laws, but a literal weapon, the hatchet with which she attacked both liquor bottles and the businesses that served them (leading to the nickname “Hatchet Granny”). While Nation was part of the broader community of the Anti-Saloon League about which I’ll write tomorrow, she was also profoundly and powerfully individual, as were each of these influential temperance reformers.

Next temperance histories tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 19, 2024: AmericanTemperanceStudying: The Early Republic

[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874 convention!]

On three milestone moments in the movement’s early 19^th century evolutions.

1)      1813: While the issue and debate continued to simmer (to steep? Not sure of the best alcohol-based pun here) for the two centuries following the 1623 Virginia law, it was with the 1813 founding of the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance that a truly organized Temperance Movement began to develop in the Early Republic United States. To reiterate my last point in yesterday’s post, the Society did not initially advocate for total abstinence from alcohol, but rather opposed “the frequent use of ardent spirits and its kindred vices, profaneness and gaming.” But the more than 40 chapters founded in the Society’s first five years certainly reflects how broadly and passionately shared this perspective was in the first decades of the 19^th century.

2)      1826: As its name suggests, the Massachusetts Society was still somewhat local in its efforts; but a few years later, another Boston-based organization, the American Temperance Society (ATS) or American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, explicitly took the movement national. The ATS was also far more overtly committed to abstinence as a principal collective goal, with members signing a pledge to abstain from drinking distilled beverages. Moreover, while that pledge was of course voluntary, the ATS soon shifted its efforts to arguments for mandatory legal prohibition, reflecting a significant and lasting shift in the movement’s goals. The more than 1.25 million members who joined the ATS in its first decade of existence (about 10% of the total US population in the 1830s) makes clear that this was a truly communal such shift.

3)      Philadelphia: This developing national temperance movement also led to countless new local organizations—in Philadelphia alone there were 26 distinct Societies operating in 1841, and an entire building (Temperance Hall) dedicated for the movement’s meetings and rallies. Two of those Societies reflect the breadth of the movement’s inspirations and motivations: the Pennsylvania Catholic Total Abstinence Society was founded in 1840 by an Augustinian priest and focused on issues of religious and morality; while the Philadelphia Temperance Society was led by doctors and focused much more on reform narratives of health and wellness. While the movement was certainly coalescing around abstinence and prohibition in this prominent Early Republic period, it remained a broad and varied representation of the landscape of American reform, activism, and society.

Next temperance histories tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 18, 2024: AmericanTemperanceStudying: A 1623 Origin Point

[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874 convention!]

On a couple historical and movement lessons from the 400^th anniversary of a foundational law.

As with many things early 1600s, it’s difficult to find too much specific information about the groundbreaking temperance law enacted in Virginia on March 5^th, 1623. The colony’s first royal governor Francis Wyatt and the recently-established colonial legislature deemed that date Temperance Day in an attempt to prohibit, as the law put it, “public intoxication.” That was just the first public and political step in a century-long debate in the colony over alcohol and its effects, as traced at length in Kendra Bonnett’s 1976 PhD dissertation Attitudes toward Drinking and Drunkenness in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (I’ll admit to having only briefly skimmed the beginning of that thesis for this post, but it’s linked there for anyone who wants to read more!). While those specific Virginia and 17^th century contexts are of course important to understanding this law, I want to use that 1623 moment to introduce a couple key lessons about temperance in America for this entire weeklong blog series.

For one thing, it’s crucial to understand how longstanding, widespread, and indeed foundational American temperance debates have been. Much of the narrative around this issue links it to early 19^th century reform movements, which were certainly influential and about which I’ll have a lot more to say in tomorrow’s post. But it’s pretty striking and telling that one of the very first laws passed in collaboration by two of the first European American political entities—both Virginia’s royal governor and its colonial legislature were only four years old at the time—addressed the issues of alcohol, drunkenness, and temperance. Moreover, while we might expect that the other principal English colony at the time, Puritan Massachusetts, would enact such a law—and while the Puritans most definitely had strong opinions on strong drink, but similarly more in opposition to public drunkenness than alcohol itself—this took place in the far less overtly religious (or at least religiously governed) Virginia colony. Clearly the issue was consuming across the new colonies from their outset.

But it’s just as important to note what this groundbreaking law specifically did and didn’t do. The temperance movement is often closely associated in our collective memories with—if not directly defined by—the goal of prohibition, an understandable connection given that particular, prominent early 20^th century Constitutional amendment and 13-year period (with which I’ll end the week’s series). Indeed, the association is so strong that one definition of “temperance” has come to be “abstinence from strong drink.” But I would argue that that definition emerged because of the association of the movement with prohibition, and that another definition—“the quality of moderation or self-restraint”—is more foundational to the word and movement alike. Virginia’ Temperance Day didn’t ban or even legally restrict alcohol, just “public intoxication”—a demonstrable lack of moderation or restraint in the consumption of such drinks. There’s at least a spectrum in play here, and one that would continue to shape the movement’s goals and laws throughout the subsequent 400 years.

Next temperance histories tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 16-17, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Thankful Tributes

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now, leading up to these special weekend tributes!]

Along with the obvious, AKA my favorite people in the world—my sons, my wife, and my folks—here are a handful of people who have helped make this blog a favorite of mine as well.

1)      Irene Martyniuk: One of my very first Guest Posters, my colleague and friend Irene has also become my most consistent reader, and one who frequently takes the time to share thoughtful responses as well (some of which I’ve gotten to feature in Crowd-Sourced Posts). We all want to know we’re being read and read well, and nobody has helped me feel that better than Irene!

2)      Rob Velella: I wrote in that hyperlinked post about what Rob’s blog and work have meant to me. But I’m not sure I said clearly enough how much it helped to have an existing public scholarly blogger, one whose blog was a model for what I was hoping to create, be so supportive and collaborative from the jump. I hope I’ve paid that forward!

3)      Heather Cox Richardson: I likewise wrote in that hyperlinked post about how much it meant to have Heather and her excellent Historical Society website support and share my blog at any early point (and I could say the same about her even more excellent We’re History website, for which I was able to write many times). Now that Heather has become one of the most prominent and successful public scholars in American history, I can add, “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person!”

4)      Robin Field: That Guest Post of Robin’s was impressive and inspiring, as was the 2023 NeMLA paper of hers I highlighted in this post (and as is all of her work). But Robin has also connected me with a number of her students over the last few years, all of whom have contributed phenomenal Guest Posts in their own right (and who collectively have largely kept the Guest Post layer to the blog going). Am I suggesting that you all should connect me to awesome students who also might want to Guest Post on this blog? Yes, yes I am.

5)      You: Whether you connect me to students or not, I’m so damn thankful for y’all. And not just in the colloquial Southern 2^nd-person sense—for each and every one of you all. I try not to dwell on blog stats, as they’re outside my control and can and do fluctuate and in any case are just numbers. But I get somewhere in the range of 30,000 discrete views each month, and I really am profoundly grateful for each and every one of those folks who finds their way to this blog. So thanks, and here’s to the next 14 years!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 15, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Communal Crowd-Sourcing

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

If you click on the tab for Crowd-Sourced Posts in the list of “Labels” to the right on the blog’s homepage, you’ll notice that there haven’t been any in 2024 and were only four each in 2023 and 2022, compared to the average of about ten each year prior to that. There are all kinds of reasons for that shift, including the growth of my #ScholarSunday threads (first on Twitter, now on their own newsletter) which have become a powerful form of crowd-sourcing in their own right (both in terms of sharing others’ voices and because many of the things I feature there have been shared with me). But even if I never feature another crowd-sourced post—and I hope and believe I will, at the very least for next year’s non-favorites series!—I don’t think I can overstate how much those posts have meant to me over the course of my blogging career. Scholarly blogging, like most every other part of scholarly work, can feel individual and isolated at times; some degree of that is likely inevitable, but I’ve still spent my whole career seeking ways and places to challenge that feeling and offer a communal alternative. I love that my blog has featured precisely such an alternative, and hope it always feels like it can.

Tribute post this weekend,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 14, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Great Guests

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

Two years ago, I dedicated my entire anniversary series to sharing my 25 most recent (at that time) Guest Posts, a tribute as I noted to how much such connections to others, and the opportunity to share their words and ideas, has helped me keep the blog going. In recent years the roster of Guest Posters has included a growing number of Fitchburg State students as well as both of my sons, making this aspect of the blog even more meaningful than ever (although the very first Guest Post was written by Mom, so they’ve always been plenty meaningful!). But even with the many Guest Posters whom I’ve never met in person—and in some ways especially with that cohort, to whom I would never have become connected without the blog—the chance to feature their work here has been a true privilege as well as a pleasure. When I ask y’all to consider Guest Posting, it’s at least as much for me as it is (I hope) an opportunity for you—and in any case, it’s one of the things that most definitely keeps me coming back.

Last post on posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 13, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Teaching Thoughts

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

In mid-May 2011, almost exactly six months into my blogging career, I decided to end the Spring 2011 semester with a few consecutive posts (starting with that hyperlinked one) reflecting on that semester’s classes, teaching, and other work in my roles at Fitchburg State. I won’t pretend to remember if I planned at that time to make such end-of-semester reflections a consistent part of the blog, nor exactly when I decided to complement them with beginning of semester posts (I featured one individual such post in September 2011, but featured the first full pre-semester series in January 2012, and likewise featured a weeklong end of semester series that May). All I know is, it’s been a long time since I’ve started or ended a semester without blogging about it, and I really love how much the two go hand-in-hand for me: the promise of a new semester and the opportunity to express those hopes in this space; the culminating moments of a semester and the chance to think about takeaways from that work here. Other than my sons, teaching and blogging have been my two true constants over the last 14 years, and I love that they’re so intertwined.

Next post on posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 12, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Lifelong Learning

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

For some time in the blog’s early days (and really its early years), I’d say my posts tended to focus on the kinds of familiar topics I highlighted yesterday—sometimes favorites, sometimes frustrations, but most of the time subjects about which I knew a decent amount before I began planning and writing. It was really when I began planning weekly series around a particular topic that I likewise started creating posts—not all of them, but at least a couple in each series, let’s say—from an initially less well-informed place, and thus needing to research before (and while) writing. As a result, there’s absolutely no doubt that I have learned a great deal from this blog, about an unbelievably wide variety of topics: including, to cite just a few from my early moves into such weekly series, San Diego, satire, and Sendak. I hope I’ve modeled lifelong learning as a collective goal in the process, but in any case that goal has kept the blog fresh for its author, and thus without question kept me going.

Next post on posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 11, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Foregrounding Favorites

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

For folks who know me, it’s likely no surprise that the first month of this blog included posts that featured The Marrow of Tradition, Thunderheart, Boston’s Shaw/54^th Massachusetts Memorial, The Grandissimes and The Squatter and the Don, The Best Years of Our Lives, and the Chinese Educational Mission and its Celestials baseball team. That is, all of those things are favorites of mine in their respective cultural and historical categories, and I can’t imagine creating a daily blog without getting the chance to share such favorites with y’all (I’m honestly just surprised I didn’t get to Springsteen or Sayles for as long as I did, although I’ve more than made up for it since). While I got a lot of those favorites into the mix very quickly, I’ve certainly returned to favs every month and year since, including further attention to those but also to other subjects such as (to name just a few from this past year) Kane Brown, House of Leaves, Deadwood and Justified, and many many more. I’m still doing this 14 years down the road for lots of reasons, as I hope this series will illustrate, but high on the list is that I’m having a lot of fun, and favorites help make it so.

Next post on posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 9-10, 2024: 2024 Election Reflections

So that happened. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years thinking and writing about the worst and best of America, and somehow I’m still surprised and saddened when we lean into our worst. We can try to understand and analyze these results in all sorts of ways, but the bottom line is that more than 70 million of my fellow Americans voted for a candidate who expresses and embodies not just the worst attributes of human behavior and the worst impulses toward fascism, but also (and most relevantly to this blog) the worst of our shared histories and national identity.

The only other thing I want to say here is this: over the last few days, I’ve started to work hard to lean in myself, into the people and things I love, into the best in my life, from the biggest (my younger son as he moves through his senior year, my older son as he continues to rock his freshman year in college, my parents, my wife) to the smallest (a Reese’s ice cream cake for no reason other than all the reasons). And one of the things I love most is the best of the work I get to do—in the classroom, on my podcast, in this blog, everywhere I get to do this AmericanStudying thing. La lucha continua, and as ever I’m very proud to be in it with y’all.

Blog anniversary series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 8, 2024: The 1924 Election: Foreshadowing the Future

[This has been a particularly crazy last year/decade/eternity, but it’s not the first nutty presidential campaign and election. 100 years ago was certainly another, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of 1924 election contexts, leading up to some reflections on this year’s electoral results!]

Three ways that the 1924 election foreshadowed future political events.

1)      Progressive programs: I don’t want to repeat too much of where I ended yesterday’s post, but I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the significance of La Follette’s third-party run and success. Coolidge’s win was due in large part to perceptions that the economy was booming—but five years before the stock market crash, La Follette’s success reflected a sizeable contingent of Americans for whom things weren’t going so well, and a desire for a government that could support and help those folks. Less than a decade later, the federal government would dedicate itself to doing so in ways that would extend into at least the 1960s and in many ways the rest of the century.

2)      Catholic candidates: A major reason for the ridiculous deadlock at the 1924 Democratic National Convention was that one of the two leading contenders for the nomination, New York Governor Al Smith, was Catholic, and thus the target of the same longstanding anti-Catholic prejudices I highlighted in this post a couple months back. If Smith did not ultimately break through those prejudices in 1924, however, he was able to do so just four years later, winning the Democratic nomination at the also-contested 1928 Democratic National Convention in Houston. Smith lost to Herbert Hoover in November, and there’s no doubt that his Catholicism played a role; but progress is progress, and I believe Smith’s progress in the 1920s absolutely foreshadowed Kennedy’s election in 1960 (as well as the non-issue that Biden’s Catholicism has been in our current moment).

3)      Right-wing extremism in New York: Both of those were genuine and positive legacies of the 1924 election, and I don’t want to minimize them by ending on a darker note. But the presence and influence of the Ku Klux Klan at the Democratic Convention in New York City was a powerful moment of foreshadowing in its own right, and I’m not talking here about the immigration restrictions and exclusions I highlighted in Wednesday’s post. Instead, I’m thinking about another, even more extreme right-wing gathering in Madison Square Garden fifteen years later, one that truly reflected the presence of such American extremists. I think it’s fair to say we’re still dealing with that presence lo these 100 years later.  

2024 election reflections this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other crazy elections you’d highlight, or thoughts on this one you’d share?

November 7, 2024: The 1924 Election: La Follette’s 3rd Party

[This has been a particularly crazy last year/decade/eternity, but it’s not the first nutty presidential campaign and election. 100 years ago was certainly another, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of 1924 election contexts, leading up to some reflections on this year’s electoral results!]

For one of the most successful third-party candidates in American history, on three ways to analyze why such candidates exist.

1)      Splintered Parties: Dissatisfied with the increasingly conservative, isolationist, pro-business and anti-labor stance of the Republican Party in the 1920s, Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the most famous political figure in the history of Wisconsin and an ardent supporter of labor unions, progressive taxation and wealth distribution, and other liberal causes, decided not long before the 1924 campaign began to leave that party and form his own, the Progressive Party. Many of the most successful third-party candidates and campaigns in American history have started in similar ways, with a schism in one of the major parties; I’d say that defines these particular third-party candidates as well-established political players, part of the existing system, yet with a new perspective that challenges that system’s current duality and offers voters a somewhat familiar but still new alternative.

2)      Self-Confidence: While third parties are thus generally responding to evolving realities within the existing parties and system, as well as to voting blocs that are no longer represented by those parties, they have also almost always depended on a famous individual around whom the new party can be organized. And from William Jennings Bryan to Teddy Roosevelt to Ross Perot to Ralph Nader to RFK Jr. (not providing a hyperlink for that mofo, sorry), most of those individuals have been, shall we say, very fond of the sound of their own voices. It’s understandable—to run a campaign that challenges the major parties is an act of striking self-confidence, if not indeed hubris. Quite likely that’s necessary in our political system; but at the same time, it can make these third parties dangerously close to cults of personality. From what I can tell, La Follette was genuinely more focused on the people than himself; but it’s always a fine line with third-party candidates, is what I’m saying.

3)      Setting the Stage: However we parse their motivations, there’s no doubt that third parties can have a real effect on elections, and at times that effect has been a very frustrating one (looking at you, Ralph). It doesn’t seem like La Follette’s presence in 1924 necessarily did so, since he probably gained votes from more liberal voters in both parties. And in any case, there’s another, longer-term potential effect of third-party campaigns, especially those that reach a certain level of success as La Follette’s definitely did: they can help reshape political conversations, setting the stage for future evolutions of the parties and the system as well as the nation overall. It was nearly a decade before Franklin Roosevelt would begin creating the New Deal, and of course the onset of the Great Depression was the most significant factor in that sweeping transformation of American politics and society. But I would argue that La Follette’s campaign proved that there was a substantial public appetite for (among other reforms) support for workers and taking care of the most vulnerable, all of which helped make the New Deal possible.

Last 1924 contexts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other crazy elections you’d highlight, or thoughts on this one you’d share?

November 6, 2024: The 1924 Election: KKKonventions

[This has been a particularly crazy last year/decade/eternity, but it’s not the first nutty presidential campaign and election. 100 years ago was certainly another, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of 1924 election contexts, leading up to some reflections on this year’s electoral results!]

On the Klan’s influence on both 1924 Conventions, and a frustrating national parallel.

More than 8 years ago, I wrote for The American Prospect about the chaotic 1924 Democratic National Convention (to this day the longest continuously running convention in US history) and the frustratingly over-sized role that the Ku Klux Klan played there. I’d ask you to check out that column (at the first hyperlink above) if you would, and then come on back for more.

Welcome back! I’m always learning, and it’s important to note that I was apparently mistaken that the Convention was widely known as the “Klanbake”—that’s apparently a myth which developed after the fact, based on a single newspaper editorial. But nonetheless, the Klan was a prominent presence at that DNC in New York, and a driving force in the Convention’s inability to settle on a nominee until the 103^rd ballot. And it’s worth noting that the Klan was also prominently present at the RNC in Cleveland that year, leading another editorial writer to dub that one the Kleveland Konvention. Just as the DNC failed to censure or in any formal way call out the KKK, so too was an anti-KKK measure voted down at the RNC; eventually the Republican VP nominee Charles Dawes did publicly criticize the Klan, but with sufficient mixed signals toward the organization that, as New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia noted, “General Dawes praised the Klan with faint damn.” There’s no question that the Ku Klux Klan was a major political player for both parties in the 1924 campaign.

Moreover, whatever we call the conventions or say about the KKK’s role at and around them, I stand by the final arguments I made in that American Prospect column—that we can’t separate the Klan from the most significant legislation passed in 1924, and one of the most influential laws enacted in American history: the Johnson-Reed Act, better known as the Immigration Act of 1924. I said most of what I’d want to say about that horrific law in those two hyperlinked columns, as well as in those final paragraphs of the Prospect piece. The bottom line, to me, is that it wasn’t just the respective national conventions and political parties which were under the sway of the Ku Klux Klan in 1924—it was the entire nation, and in its immigration policy, its visions of diversity and inclusion/exclusion, and its definitions of American identity it would remain so for the next forty years.  

Next 1924 contexts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other crazy elections you’d highlight, or thoughts on this one you’d share?

November 5, 2024: The 1924 Election: Three VP Nominees

[This has been a particularly crazy last year/decade/eternity, but it’s not the first nutty presidential campaign and election. 100 years ago was certainly another, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of 1924 election contexts, leading up to some reflections on this year’s electoral results!]

On how three Republican nominees for the Vice Presidency exemplify electoral chaos.

1)      Frank Lowden: Up until the ratification of the 25^th Amendment in 1967, if wasn’t required for a former Vice President and newly sworn-in President like Calvin Coolidge to nominate a new Vice President, and so Coolidge didn’t do so when he ascended to the presidency in August 1923. That meant that for much of 1923 and 1924 Coolidge was seeking the Republican nomination and reelection to the presidency with no Vice Presidential nominee, and thus that the 1924 Republican National Convention in Cleveland needed to name such a nominee alongside Coolidge. Coolidge’s choice was Frank O. Lowden, a former U.S. Representative from and Governor of Illinois who had himself sought the presidency in 1920. But perhaps because he had lost that nomination to the Harding-Coolidge ticket, or perhaps because he had his own future presidential ambitions (and did run again in the 1928 Republican primaries), Lowden turned down the nomination.

2)      Charles Dawes: With Coolidge’s own choice for VP out of the running, the convention delegates as a whole settled on a new nominee, the lawyer and businessman, World War I officer, and Harding administration official (in the role of the first director of the Bureau of the Budget) Charles Dawes. During his time as Coolidge’s VP Dawes would become best known for drafting a WWI reparations plan, known as the Dawes Plan, for which he received the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize. But Coolidge clearly never warmed to Dawes as his VP, as illustrated by the president’s failure to support Dawes’ signature domestic achievement: Dawes championed the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Bill and helped it pass Congress, but Coolidge vetoed the bill not once but twice (in 1926 and 1927). And when Coolidge announced he would not seek reelection in 1928 and Dawes was rumored as a possible candidate, Coolidge told delegates that he would consider any nomination of Dawes as a personal insult.    

3)      Charles Curtis: Herbert Hoover ended up the Republican presidential nominee in 1928, and Dawes was likewise passed over as a Vice Presidential nominee despite his continued interest in the role. Instead, the Republican National Convention in Kansas City chose Kansas Senator Charles Curtis as Hoover’s VP nominee. The choice of Curtis reflected a second consecutive RNC with a contested vice presidential nomination process that was separate from, and perhaps even more combative than, the presidential nomination. But at the same time, Curtis was a hugely significant symbolic choice—as an enrolled member of the Kaw Nation, he was (and remains to this day) the only Native American ever to serve as Vice President. Another way that the chaos of these 1920s elections mirrors some of the factors that have made our own current campaign and election unusual and groundbreaking!

Next 1924 contexts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other crazy elections you’d highlight, or thoughts on this one you’d share?

November 4, 2024: The 1924 Election: Harding’s Shadow

[This has been a particularly crazy last year/decade/eternity, but it’s not the first nutty presidential campaign and election. 100 years ago was certainly another, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of 1924 election contexts, leading up to some reflections on this year’s electoral results!]

On how the Harding administration’s scandals expanded in the year after his death, and how they didn’t ultimately matter much in the election.

Beginning with the 1840 election and William Henry Harrison’s particularly abrupt death just one month after his inauguration, and continuing through the 1960 election and the Kennedy assassination, every twenty years the president who triumphed in that campaign ended up dying while still in office. The majority of those deaths were due to assassinations (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy), but there were also three who died of natural causes: Harrison in 1841, FDR in 1945, and, on August 2^nd, 1923, Warren Harding from what was likely cardiac arrest but was called at the time a cerebral hemorrhage that had followed an “acute gastrointestinal attack.” Harding was on a train and boat trip across the Western U.S. at the time (known by the evocative name the Voyage of Understanding), and apparently sometime in the course of the trip asked his Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover (who later wrote about the conversation) what a president should do if is he aware of a scandal inside his administration that has not yet come to light.

According to Hoover, he advised the president to publicize such a scandal; we’ll never know if Harding would have done so had he lived, but one thing is for certain: major scandals related to his administration did indeed emerge in the year after his death, amidst his former Vice President and newly sworn-in President Calvin Coolidge’s reelection campaign. The most prominent such scandal was Teapot Dome, which involved illicitly awarded leases to federal lands; investigations began two months after Harding’s death and continued into early 1924, with Harding’s Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall eventually serving prison time for his role. Just a couple months later, the Senate voted to open up another investigation, this time into Harding’s Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty; those investigations began in March 1924 and continued for the next few months, eventually resulting in the conviction of and prison time for another former Harding official, Alien Property Custodian Thomas W. Miller (although Daugherty escaped with a hung jury). Those weren’t even the only scandals, but they were more than enough to dominate headlines for much of 1924.  

You’d think that those election-year scandals would have affected Calvin Coolidge’s campaign—he had been part of the Harding administration (it’s second-highest ranking official, no less), had assumed the presidency upon Harding’s death and maintained much of the administration’s structure, and was running for reelection amidst all these stories about his former boss’s multi-layered corruption. At the very least, you’d think he’d have to constantly distance himself from Harding, as Al Gore did from Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal throughout the 2000 campaign. But from what I can tell, Harding’s scandals were largely treated by the press as separate from Coolidge and his campaign, and they don’t seem to have significantly shifted the eventual voting patterns (which closely mirrored the 1920 election, with a third-party thrown in about which I’ll write more in a couple days). Part of the reason is likely that the economy was in very good shape, which always benefits an incumbent seeking reelection. But I’d say it also reflects an early 20^th century reality that has changed drastically in the last 100 years—that vice presidents were seen as quite distinct from the president (as we'll see in tomorrow's post as well), and given space to define their own campaign as a result.  

Next 1924 contexts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other elections you’d highlight, or thoughts on this one you’d share?

November 2-3, 2024: October 2024 Recap

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

September 30: 19^th Century Baseball: A Contested Origin: Inspired by a bicentennial birthday and connected to my new podcast, a series on 19C baseball kicked off with two interesting details about the contested story of the sport’s origins.

October 1: 19^th Century Baseball: Henry Chadwick: For his 200^th birthday, the series continues with three ways the “Father of Baseball” helped shape the sport and its stories.

October 2: 19^th Century Baseball: The Massachusetts Game: Three places that can help us better remember an alternative form of baseball, as the series plays on.

October 3: 19^th Century Baseball: The First Professionals: Four figures who together help us chart the evolution of professional baseball in the late 19^th century.

October 4: 19^th Century Baseball: The Celestials: The series concludes with two 19^th century baseball context for the 1870s team at the heart of my podcast.

October 5-6: My New Podcast!: And speaking of that podcast, a special weekend post on three takeaways from my first experience with the medium!

October 7: Contested Holidays: Memorial/Decoration Day: Ahead of Columbus/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a series on contested holidays kicks off with a couple additional thoughts on my annual Memorial and Decoration Day post.

October 8: Contested Holidays: The 4^th of July: The series continues with whether and how there’s a place for celebratory patriotism in our national commemorations.

October 9: Contested Holidays: Labor Day: The bare minimum for how we should celebrate Labor Day and a couple steps beyond, as the series parties on.

October 10: Contested Holidays: Thanksgiving/Day of Mourning: With Thanksgiving just a few weeks away, two ways we can be thankful while mourning.

October 11: Contested Holidays: “The War on Christmas”: The series concludes with three voices who can help us see through the “War on Christmas” canard.

October 12-13: Contested Holidays: Columbus/Indigenous Peoples Day: And for the holiday, a special weekend post on how my thinking on it has evolved over the last decade, and one thing I’d still emphasize.

October 14: Famous Phone Calls: The Great Gatsby: For the 75^th anniversary of a key stage in the technology, a series on American phone calls kicks off with three phone calls at the heart of Fitzgerald’s portrayal of early 20C America.  

October 15: Famous Phone Calls: The Scream Films: The series continues with one thing that’s really changed since the first of these phone-focused films, and one that hasn’t.

October 16: Famous Phone Calls: Phone Songs: Five pop songs that call upon this technology, as the series rings on.

October 17: Famous Phone Calls: “Madam and the Phone Bill”: A funny and fun poetic character, and the layers of meaning she reveals.

October 18: Famous Phone Calls: The 2024 Election: With the election now just days away, the series concludes with how phone calls symbolize the striking contrast at the heart of this campaign.

October 19-20: An AmericanStudier Tribute to the Phone: And on a more fully positive note, what the phone has meant to me over the last decade of my life and relationships.

October 21: Prison Stories: Dorothea Dix: For the 30^th anniversary of a sobering statistic, a PrisonStudying series kicks off with the activist from whom we still have a lot to learn.

October 22: Prison Stories: Alcatraz: The series continues with why it’s okay to turn a prison into a tourist attraction, and what we can remember instead.

October 23: Prison Stories: Ian Williams and Teaching in Prisons: Re-sharing one of my earliest posts, on a colleague and friend doing vital work in our prisons.

October 24: Prison Stories: Johnny Cash: The message the Man in Black still has for us, if we can ever start to hear it, as the series rolls on.

October 25: Prison Stories: The Inside Literary Prize: The series concludes with three quotes that together sum up why one of our newest prizes is also one of the most important ever.

October 26-27: A PrisonStudying Reading List: And speaking of writing and reading, a weekend reminder that there’s always more we can read and learn.

October 28: The Politics of Horror: Psycho and The Birds: We all know this year’s Halloween is interconnected with a very scary political season, so a series on the politics of horror films kicks off with defamiliarization and prejudice in Hitchcock.

October 29: The Politics of Horror: Last House on the Left: The series continues with a horror film that’s more disturbing in what it makes us cheer for.

October 30: The Politics of Horror: Hostel and Taken: The horrifying xenophobia at the heart of two of the 21^st century’s biggest hits, as the series screams on.

October 31: The Politics of Horror: The Saw Series: Different visions of morality in horror films and franchises, and whether they matter.

November 1: The Politics of Horror: Recent Films: The series and month conclude with quick political takeaways from five new horror classics.

Election series starts Monday,

Ben

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