March 31, 2025: Foolish Texts: A Fool’s Errand

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two inspiring layers to one of our most unique novels.

In this early post, I wrote about the life and career of Albion Tourgée, one of my favorite Americans for a wide variety of reasons (including but not limited to those I detailed in that post). I had a good bit to say there about his first novel A Fool’s Errand, by One of the Fools (1879), so I’d ask you to check out that post if you would and then come on back for some further thoughts.

Welcome back! As I discussed in that post, the title of Tourgée’s novel is not misleading, as it takes a consistently ironic and self-deprecating perspective on its autobiographical protagonist’s efforts to contribute positively to Reconstruction’s efforts. To be very clear, that doesn’t mean Tourgée is critical of Reconstruction’s goals when it comes to African Americans and equality (he dedicated his life to those goals, as I hope that prior post illustrated at length), but rather that he recognizes that his own youthful, lofty ambitions and sense of self-importance were severely punctured by his experiences during Reconstruction and his recognition of the limitations of both any individual’s reach and (more complicatedly to be sure) societal change. I remain less cynical and more optimistic than the tone of Fool’s Errand (yes, even in early 2025), but I nonetheless think being able to reflect thoughtfully and critically on our own ambitions and arc is an important and inspiring skill to model.

In both that prior post and the paragraph above I focused on the real-life elements of Tourgée’s book—the autobiographical echoes and the political and cultural contexts of Reconstruction. But while those are undoubtedly present and perhaps even paramount in the book, it’s important to add that it is a novel, a work of fiction, as was Tourgée’s follow-up second book about the Black experience of Reconstruction, Bricks Without Straw (1880). Which is to say, having spent years serving as a lawyer, politician, and journalist (careers he would continue fully and successfully for the rest of his life), at the age of 40 Tourgée turned his hand to creative writing and published not one but two novels in a two-year span. And they’re good, with really interesting creative choices (such as the distanced third-person narration of Fool’s) that engage his readers and get them thinking about those aforementioned personal and political contexts. As someone who’s own career and writing have evolved a good bit over the decades, and who hopes that trend continues for the rest of my life, I find this aspect of Tourgée’s not-at-all foolish books particularly inspiring as well.

Next foolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

March 29-30, 2025: March 2025 Recap

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

March 3: Hockey Histories: Origin Points: On the 150^th anniversary of the first organized hockey game, a series on the sport’s histories kicks off with three telling layers to that first game.

March 4: Hockey Histories: Fighting: The series continues with the way not to argue for the sport’s violent tradition, and a possible way to do so.

March 5: Hockey Histories: The Miracle on Ice: The symbolic role of sports in society, and the line between history and story, as the series skates on.

March 6: Hockey Histories: Black Players: Three groundbreaking players who together reflect the sport’s gradual evolution towards its more diverse 21^st century community.

March 7: Hockey Histories: Team Trans: The series concludes with two complicated and equally important ways to contextualize a groundbreaking hockey team.

March 8-9: Significant Sports Studiers: Following up my own SportsStudying, a special weekend post highlighting Bluesky Starter Packs of other SportsStudiers.

March 10: Spring Breaking at the Movies: Spring Break: A Spring Break series on cinematic representations of the college tradition starts with more and less destructive pop culture stereotypes in a 1983 non-classic.

March 11: Spring Breaking at the Movies: Spring Breakers: The series continues with the fine line between challenging and exploiting the objectification of female celebrities.

March 12: Spring Breaking at the Movies: From Justin to Kelly: What wasn’t new about a historic beach bomb, and what was, as the series parties on.

March 13: Spring Breaking at the Movies: Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise: American anti-intellectualism and the worse and better ways to challenge it.

March 14: Spring Breaking at the Movies: Baywatch: The series concludes with a repeat of one of my favorite posts, on why the beautiful beach bodies are also a body of evidence.

March 15-16: Reflections of a College Dad: As I near the end of my first year as a college dad (and the start of my first year with two young men in college…le sigh), three of the countless moments when I’ve been pleasantly reminded of my changed circumstances.

March 17: ScopesStudying: The Butler Act: For the 100^th anniversary of the anti-evolution Tennessee law, a series on it and its famous legal aftermath kicks off with three historical ironies.

March 18: ScopesStudying: John Scopes: The series continues with three interesting facts about the science teacher who became the center of one of our most famous trials.

March 19: ScopesStudying: Bryan and Darrow: Two ways to contextualize the trial’s most famous debate, as the series evolves on.

March 20: ScopesStudying: Three Plays: How three stage adaptations of the trial reflect the fraught relationship between art and history.

March 21: ScopesStudying: “Part Man, Part Monkey”: The series concludes with three layers to one of Springsteen’s funniest and most under-rated tracks (just ask my wife!).

March 22-23: 21^st Century Attacks on Educators: A special weekend post on what’s new about our horrifying spate of anti-education attacks, and what’s frustratingly not.

March 24: Patriotic Speeches: Patrick Henry: A series for the 250^th anniversary of the “Give me liberty” speech kicks off with excerpts from book on the contested history of American patriotism.

March 25: Patriotic Speeches: Frederick Douglass: The series continues with the stunning critical patriotic speech that’s just as important 170 years later.

March 26: Patriotic Speeches: August Spies: The inspiring patriotic speech that concluded a farcical show trial, as the series orates on.

March 27: Patriotic Speeches: Margaret Chase Smith: Why we shouldn’t misrepresent a famous 1950 speech as apolitical, and why it’s well worth celebrating nevertheless.

March 28: Patriotic Speeches: Alexander Vindman: The series concludes with another excerpt from my book, this one on a crucial 21^st century moment of critical patriotism.

April Fools series starts Monday,

Ben

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

March 28, 2025: Patriotic Speeches: Alexander Vindman

[250 years ago this past Saturday, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech to the Virginia Assembly. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other patriotic speeches!]

Since I began this week’s series with an excerpt from Of Thee I Sing, I wanted to end it with another, the opening paragraphs of the book’s Introduction:

“On November 19th, 2019, Army Lt. Colonel and National Security Council (NSC) official Alexander Vindman testified before the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Vindman, who had first-hand knowledge of the telephone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, offered testimony that was highly damaging to the president, and so Trump’s defenders and allies went on the attack against Vindman. They did so in large part by using his story as a Ukrainian American immigrant to directly impugn his patriotism and implicitly accuse him of treason: after Fox News host Laura Ingraham highlighted Vindman’s background in relationship to his work as a Ukraine expert for the NSC, law professor and former Bush administration official John Yoo replied, “I find that astounding, and some people might call that espionage”; and the next morning CNN contributor and former Republican Congressman Sean Duffy went further, claiming, “I don’t know that he’s concerned about American policy, but his main mission was to make sure that the Ukraine got those weapons . . . He’s entitled to his opinion. He has an affinity for the Ukraine, he speaks Ukrainian, and he came from the country.” Unstated but clearly present in these responses is the idea that Vindman’s criticism of the president had marked him as unpatriotic and even un-American, opening up these broader questions about his affinities and allegiances.

Just over a century earlier, however, former president Teddy Roosevelt began his 1918 Metropolitan magazine article “Lincoln and Free Speech” with these lines: “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country . . . In either event it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth—whether about the President or anyone else.” And in the prepared statement with which he began his testimony, Alexander Vindman expresses his own vision of patriotism clearly. “I have dedicated my entire professional life to the United States of America,” he begins. “As a young man I decided that I wanted to spend my life serving the nation that gave my family refuge from authoritarian oppression, and for the last twenty years it has been an honor to represent and protect this great country.” He contextualizes his ability to offer such honest public testimony as part of “the privilege of being an American citizen and public servant.” And he ends with his father, whose “courageous decision” to leave the U.S.S.R. and move his family to the United States had, Vindman argues, “inspired a deep sense of gratitude in my brothers and myself and instilled in us a sense of duty and service.” Addressing his father directly with his closing words, Vindman makes a moving and compelling case for Roosevelt’s point about the essential patriotism of telling the truth: “Dad, my sitting here today . . . is proof that you made the right decision forty years ago to leave the Soviet Union and come here to the United States of America in search of a better life for our family. Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth.””

As I go on to trace there, and as has only become more evident in the years since, Vindman was not entirely fine, as he paid both a professional and a personal price for his truth-telling critical patriotism. Here in March 2025, a couple months into the second and even more radical and unhinged administration of the President whose allies and supporters levied those attacks on Vindman, it’s fair to say that critical patriotism has become one of the most fraught perspectives one can take on the U.S. government. But, as I hope every figure and speech in this week’s series has illustrated, critical patriotism has always been fraught and fragile, always put those who express and fight for it in danger, and always been an absolutely essential element of our nation’s ideals and identity. May we learn from and live up to the legacies of these figures, and of all our critical patriots, past and present.

March Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Speeches you’d highlight?

March 27, 2025: Patriotic Speeches: Margaret Chase Smith

[250 years ago this past Saturday, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech to the Virginia Assembly. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other patriotic speeches!]

On why we shouldn’t misrepresent a 1950 Senate speech, and why it’s well worth celebrating nonetheless.

Throughout her long and impressive life and political career, Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995) was two things in roughly equal measure: a groundbreaking woman in American politics, including the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress and the first to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency at a major party’s political convention; and a prominent figure and voice in the Republican Party, both in her home state of Maine and on the national landscape. There’s of course nothing wrong with her being associated with both of those histories, and indeed I would say the opposite—too much of the time we view our most pioneering figures as somehow outside of our politics, and reversing that trend would help us understand how everything in our history is political, even if (or rather especially because) it also has the potential to transcend politics.

The single most famous moment in Smith’s political career, her June 1, 1950 “Declaration of Conscience” speech to the Senate, perfectly embodies both of those layers. It most definitely represented a Republican Senator’s perspective on both the Democratic Truman administration and the upcoming presidential election, as illustrated by lines like: “The Democratic administration has greatly lost the confidence of the American people by its complacency to the threat of communism here at home and the leak of vital secrets to Russia through key officials of the Democratic administration….Surely these are sufficient reasons to make it clear to the American people that it is time for a change and that a Republican victory is necessary to the security of the country.” Smith, a moderate Republican throughout her career, had previously been an ally of President Truman on various issues, and so these political and electoral statements were significant ones and can’t be overlooked when we remember Smith’s speech.

Yet Smith’s speech also and crucially transcended such partisan political concerns, offering one of the earliest public critiques of Senator Joe McCarthy and in the process making a critical patriotic case for a very different vision of the Senate, the US government, and American ideals. It did so through perhaps her most famous lines, “As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist….They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of our ourselves.” But it also did so through her argument for “some of the basic principles of Americanism,” including “The right to criticize,” “The right to hold unpopular beliefs,” and “The right to protest.” Throughout Of Thee I Sing I make the case for both criticism overall and protest specifically as core characteristics of critical patriotism, and I’m not sure anyone has made that case more potently in a political setting than did Margaret Chase Smith on the Senate floor.

Last SpeechStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Speeches you’d highlight?

March 26, 2025: Patriotic Speeches: August Spies

[250 years ago this past Saturday, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech to the Virginia Assembly. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other patriotic speeches!]

On the inspiring patriotic speech that concluded a farcical show trial.

From the outset, the arrest and trial of the Haymarket “bombers” was an overt case of presumed guilt, and not just (not really at all) for the Haymarket Square bombing. The media used the bombing to whip up xenophobic fears and violent exclusionary fantasies, as illustrated by a Chicago Times editorial that argued, “Let us whip these slavic wolves back to the European dens from which they issue, or in some way exterminate them.” The police followed suit, raiding the offices of the pro-labor newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung without a warrant and arresting its editors, and then doing the same with the residences of numerous known socialist and anarchist activists. While the eight men eventually charged with the bombing were indeed swept up during these widespread raids (including those two newspaper editors, August Spies and Michael Schwab), there is ample evidence to suggest that the raids were designed and executed to intimidate and destroy entire communities, and that picking scapegoats for the bombing from among those targets was simply a convenient side effect.

The trial itself was no more fair or legally sound. The eight defendants were charged not with the bombing itself, but with the broader and vaguer charge of conspiracy, which came to mean simply producing anarchist journalism and propaganda that might have inspired a bomb-thrower: as state’s attorney Julius Grinnell instructed the jury, “The question for you to determine is, having ascertained that a murder was committed, not only who did it, but who is responsible for it, who abetted it, assisted it, or encouraged it?” That jury was hand-picked from the jury pool by the court’s bailiff, a break from the normal random selection procedure; it included no immigrants or laborers. After presenting the jury with a long series of circumstancial and tangential details and accusations that only vaguely connected any of the defendants to the Haymarket violence, in his closing argument Grinnell made plain the trial’s true stakes: acquitting the defendants would mean more radicals on the city’s streets, “"like a lot of rats and vermin”; and only the jurors “stand between the living and the dead. You stand between law and violated law.”

Unsurprisingly, the jury convicted the defendants, with seven sentenced to death and one (labor organizer Oscar Neebe) to fifteen years in prison. Four were executed in November 1887, while three others had their sentences commuted to life in prison or otherwise were still in limbo when Illinois Governor John Altgeld pardoned them in 1893, his first year in office (due to his outrage at the farcical arrests and trial). That pardon (which cost Altgeld his political career) was one inspiring moment to emerge from this historic injustice, but to my mind even more inspiring was August Spies’s concluding statement to the judge and jury. “The contemplated murder of eight men,” Spies argued, “whose only crime is that they have dared to speak the truth, may open the eyes of these suffering millions; may wake them up.” Detailing the prosecutor and judge’s numerous inappropriate and likely illegal staetments, he added, “I will say that if I had not been an Anarchist at the beginning of this trial I would be one now.” And in his concluding paragraphs, he brilliantly reversed the concepts of patriotism and treason that had been used to condemn the defendants: “I can well understand why that man Grinnell did not urge upon the grand jury to charge us with treason. I can well understand it. You cannot try and convict a man for treason who has upheld the Constitution against those who trample it under their feet.” A moment of American ideals amidst a history that did indeed trample upon them.

Next SpeechStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Speeches you’d highlight?

March 25, 2025: Patriotic Speeches: Frederick Douglass

[250 years ago this past Saturday, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech to the Virginia Assembly. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other patriotic speeches!]

On the stunning critical patriotic speech that challenges us as much today as it did 173 years ago.

I’ve written many times, in this space and elsewhere, about the inspiring history of Elizabeth Freeman, Quock Walker, and their Revolutionary-era peers. Freeman and Walker, and the abolitionist activists with whom they worked, used the language and ideas of the Declaration of Independence (along with the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution) in support of their anti-slavery petitions and legal victories, and in so doing contributed significantly to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. I’m hard-pressed to think of a more inspiring application of our national ideals, or of a more compelling example of my argument (made in this piece) that black history is American history. Yet at the same time, it would be disingenuous in the extreme for me to claim that Freeman and Walker’s cases were representative ones, either in their era or at any time in the more than two and a half centuries of American slavery; nor would I want to use Freeman and Walker’s successful legal victories as evidence that the Declaration’s “All men are created equal” sentiment did not in a slaveholding nation include (indeed, embody) a central strain of hypocrisy.

If I ever need reminding of that foundational American hypocrisy, I can turn to one of our most fiery texts: Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass’s speech is long and multi-layered, and I don’t want to reduce its historical and social visions to any one moment; but I would argue that it builds with particular power to this passage, one of the most trenchant in American oration and writing: “Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?” The subsequent second half of the speech sustains that perspective and passion, impugning every element of a nation still entirely defined by slavery and its effects. Despite having begun his speech by noting his “quailing sensation,” his feeling of appearing before the august gathering “shrinkingly,” Douglass thus builds instead to one of the most full-throated, confident critiques of American hypocrisy and failure ever articulated.

As an avowed and thoroughgoing optimist, it’s far easier for me to grapple with Freeman and Walker’s use of the Declaration and the 4^th of July than with Douglass’s—which, of course, makes it that much more important for me to include Douglass in my purview, and which is why I wanted to include Douglass's speech in this week’s series on patriotic speeches. There’s a reason, after all, why the most famous American enslaved person is undoubtedly Harriet Tubman—we like our histories overtly inspiring, and if we’re going to remember slavery at all, why not do so through the lens of someone who resisted it so successfully? Yet while Tubman, like Freeman and Walker, is certainly worth remembering, the overarching truth of slavery in America is captured far better by Douglass’s speech and its forceful attention to our national hypocrisies and flaws. And despite the ridiculous recent attacks on “too negative” histories or the concept of “apologizing for America,” there’s no way we can understand our nation or move forward collectively without a fuller engagement with precisely the critically patriotic lens provided by Douglass and his stunning speech.

Next SpeechStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Speeches you’d highlight?

March 24, 2025: Patriotic Speeches: Patrick Henry

[250 years ago this past Saturday, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech to the Virginia Assembly. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other patriotic speeches!]

For the anniversary of Henry’s speech, I wanted to share my three paragraphs on it at the start of Chapter 1 of Of Thee I Sing:

On March 23rd, 1775, a 38-year old attorney, planter, and delegate to the Vir[1]ginia House of Burgesses named Patrick Henry (1736–1799) rose to give a speech at the Second Virginia Convention. That convention, held from March 20^th–23^rd at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Richmond in order to maintain distance from the colony’s royal Governor Dunmore and his administration in Williamsburg, was the second in a series of meetings of delegates and other civic leaders to debate the question of independence for Virginia and the colonies. Henry had proposed that the colonists raise a militia that would exist separate from the English army and government, and some of the convention’s more moderate attendees had spoken out against that proposal as too belligerent and likely to increase the chances of war.

Henry’s speech became famous, and a rallying cry for the incipient revolution, due to his closing line: “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” But what’s particularly striking about the speech is that Henry frames his revolutionary sentiments through an initial lens not of liberty but of patriotism. He opens by making his disagreement with his fellow delegates about precisely that topic, his vision of patriotism in response to theirs: “No man thinks more highly than I do of the patriotism, as well as abilities, of the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the House. But different men often see the same subject in different lights; and, therefore, I hope it will not be thought disrespectful to those gentlemen if, entertaining as I do, opinions of a character very opposite to theirs, I shall speak forth my sentiments freely, and without reserve.”

Moreover, Henry makes clear that he sees his responsibility to offer such sentiments as itself an expression and exemplification of patriotism. “Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offence,” he admits, “I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country.” Given that Virginia (like all the colonies) was still part of England at this time, and Henry thus a subject of King George like every other Virginian, he here reframes the interconnected concepts of patriotism and treason in a particularly bold and crucial way. That is, while he goes on to argue that freedom is “the glorious object of our contest,” he frames the battle to attain that freedom, “the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged” and of which his own speech becomes a part, not just as an opposition to one nation, but also and especially as a patriotic embrace of another, new nation.

Next SpeechStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Speeches you’d highlight?

March 22-23, 2025: 21st Century Attacks on Educators

[100 years ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied that law and the famous trial it produced, leading up to this weekend post on current attacks on educators.]

On what’s new about our spate of anti-education attacks, and what’s not.

In my post-Valentine’s non-favorites series two years ago, I included this post on “Non-Favorite Trends: Attacking Teachers & Librarians.” Such attacks have sadly not dissipated at all since that time—indeed, there seem to be even more of them over those subsequent two years—and so I’d ask you to check out that post if you would and then come on back with a couple further thoughts.

Welcome back! I don’t want in any significant way to echo recent voices (most notably a very frustrating Atlantic cover story published after the insurance CEO murder, to which I will not link here as I think it was as a-historical as anything I’ve read in a while) who have argued that contemporary America is more violent, or at least more accepting of violence, than in the past—I’m with Richard Slotkin when it comes to the foundational presence and role of violence in American history and identity. But I would agree with the author of this DailyKos post—our frustrating acceptance of right-wing violence, and indeed the endorsement of it by some of our most powerful political figures, is without question a deepening and terrifying trend in early 2025. No single day better reflects that trend than January 6^th, 2021, but the truth is that institutions like schools and libraries have been threatened more consistently than any other public spaces, both in the ostensible context of specific events like drag storytimes and just because, y’know, they have books and larnin’ and whatnot.

Like mass shootings and open carry and all sorts of other corollaries to our ever-more-ubiquitous gun culture, these right-wing threats do seem to have increased dramatically in recent years. But it’s really important to locate them as part of America’s longstanding, if not indeed foundational, legacy of attacks on educators and educational institutions from right-wing (and generally white supremacist) domestic terrorists. Up here in New England we’ve got one of the most overt such attacks, the 1835 destruction of Canaan, New Hampshire’s groundbreaking, abolitionist and co-educational Noyes Academy for African Americans. While I wouldn’t disagree with folks who would want to locate those histories as part of America’s overarching and equally foundational streak of anti-intellectualism, it doesn’t seem to me that anti-intellectualism alone would be enough to motivate people to physically and violently attack institutions—it takes the all-too-American marriage of anti-intellectualism with white supremacy to really produce this legacy, in which our own moment remains firmly located.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 21, 2025: ScopesStudying: “Part Man, Part Monkey”

[100 years ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famous trial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks on educators.]

On three layers to the monkey-centered content and tone in Bruce Springsteen’s under-appreciated gem (one of my wife’s favorite Boss songs):

1)      Humorous Intent: I don’t think Bruce has written a funnier verse than this song’s first: “They prosecuted some poor sucker in these United States/For teaching that man descended from the apes/They coudla settled that case without a fuss or a fight/If they’d seen me chasin’ you sugar through the jungle last night/They’da called in that jury and a one two three/Said part man, part monkey, definitely.” I have to believe that Bruce, who has a delightful sense of humor in and about his work (and in life in general), began writing this song with precisely that straightforward thought—that this was a really funny premise and twist on relationship songs (he apparently first wrote and recorded it during the Tunnel of Love sessions, when he was focused on such subjects). Plus, as my wife would insist I add, “these United States” is one of Bruce’s funnier individual turns of phrase in any song.

2)      Human Impulses: I can count on one hand the Bruce songs that don’t have multiple layers, though, and it’s the way in which each verse in this song takes us to a new place that makes it as great as it is. The opening lines of the second verse connect the song’s central image very fully to Tunnel’s raw, honest, and frequently dark portrayal of marriage: “Well the church bell rings from the corner steeple/Man in a monkey suit swears he’ll do no evil/Offers his lover’s prayer but his soul lies/Dark and driftin’ and unsatisfied.” When the song’s speaker then asks the “bartender” what he sees and the bartender responds, “Part man, part monkey, looks like to me,” that repeated titular image is no longer just a funny depiction of the quest for sex or love—it’s a reflection of some of the most natural yet most destructive human impulses, the most animal and unattractive parts of ourselves.

3)      The Heart of the Issue: After a very sexy bridge, the song’s final verse takes us to a logical but still I would argue unexpected place—back to the Scopes monkey trial, and to the heart of that trial’s debates. “Well did God make men in a breath of holy fire?/Or did he crawl on up out of the muck and fire?/The man on the street believes what the Bible tells him so/Well you can ask me, mister, because I know/Tell them soul-sucking preachers to come on down and see/Part man, part monkey, baby that’s me.” By the heart of the issue, I do mean in part questions of religion and evolution, of what we believe about where we come from. But I also and especially mean the question of whether we believe because of the myths we’re told by traditional “authorities,” or believe based on our own critical perspectives on and understandings of the world as it is. And I’m with Bruce’s speaker (and Clarence Darrow, and Scopes): to believe based on the myths we’re told is, ultimately, soul-sucking.

21^st century contexts this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 20, 2025: ScopesStudying: Three Plays

[100 years ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famous trial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks on educators.]

How three stage adaptations of the trial reflect the fraught relationship between art and history.

1)      Inherit the Wind (1955): Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s play, which has been itself adapted into multiple films for both screen and TV, is in many ways the most well-known representation of the Scopes trial. Which is quite ironic, since in their “Playwrights’ Note” before the text Lawrence and Lee explicitly argue that the play “is not history,” that “it is not 1925,” and that “the stage directions set the time as ‘Not long ago.’ It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow.” To my mind both the play and the 1960 film adaptation are profoundly focused on contexts and questions from the age of McCarthy, making Inherit very much a counterpart to The Crucible (1953) and far more interesting as a 1950s text than a portrayal of the 1920s.

2)      Inherit the Truth (1987): As that article traces at length, Dayton playwright’s Gale Johnson’s 1980s play was overtly and entirely intended as a rebuttal to Inherit the Wind, but not so much in terms of historical inaccuracies about the trial per se. Instead, Johnson believed that the prior play had badly misrepresented both William Jennings Bryan and the town of Dayton, and sought to correct those errors with a play that is hugely laudatory toward both the man and the community (or at least its conservative Christians). I haven’t read Johnson’s play so I can’t speak to its specifics, and in any case it’s important to note that her goals are no more (or less) problematic than those of any playwright. But I’d say her use of the word “Truth” in her title is deeply problematic, and indeed extends Bryan’s embrace of mythic patriotism about which I wrote in yesterday’s post.

3)      The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial (1993): Whatever its flaws, though, Johnson’s play seems to have had at least one important positive effect: it helped encourage playwright Peter Goodchild to write a play based far more explicitly on the trial’s transcripts and histories than either of the Inherits had been. In awarding Goodchild’s play its Earphones Award, Audiofile magazine noted that, “Because there are no recordings of the actual trial, this production is certainly the next best thing.” I hear that, and using transcripts is definitely a way to guarantee a significant degree of historical accuracy. But at the same time, any actor who performs Goodchild’s roles is an actor who’s performing, not (for example) Bryan or Darrow themselves. So the relationship of art and history remains at least a bit complicated here, if certainly distinct than with either of those prior stage adaptations.

Last Scopes context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 19, 2025: ScopesStudying: Bryan and Darrow

[100 years ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famous trial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks on educators.]

On two ways to contextualize the Scopes trial’s (and one of America’s) most famous debate.

Prominent trials can frequently morph into something different from and more than their explicit legal focus, but I’m not sure any trial in American history did so more clearly than did the Scopes trial (certainly the OJ trial is a contender for that title as well). Given that Scopes was recruited to stand trial as I discussed in yesterday’s post, perhaps the trial was always destined to become focused on much more than just this one teacher’s case or even the Butler Act specifically. But it truly evolved thanks to the involvement of two of the nation’s most famous legal and political figures, on the trial’s two respective sides: for the prosecution, “The Great Commoner” himself William Jennings Bryan; and for the defense, without question the nation’s most prominent lawyer in the period, just a year past his celebrated closing in the trial of Leopold & Loeb, Clarence Darrow. The battle between the two men and their respective positions on evolution, religion, and society became the story of the trial, and culminated in Darrow’s two-hour questioning of Bryan on the courthouse lawn (so a larger audience could hear it) on July 20, 1925.

The excellent pieces at those last two hyperlinks tell the story of that debate, and of the two men’s overall involvement in the trial, at length, and I encourage you to read both of them to learn more about this famous, fraught, and fascinating moment in American legal and social history. Here I want to offer two different but interconnected ways to contextualize the Bryan-Darrow showdown. The more obvious, and certainly not an inaccurate one, is that it exemplified a series of ongoing cultural and national clashes in early 20^th century America: between the 19^th and 20^th centuries, between a more traditional and more modern perspective, between rural and urban communities, between (most obviously of all I suppose) conservatism and progressivism. The breakdown of those categories is nowhere near as straightforward or simple as they might suggest, not in 1925 and not at any other point—21^st century conservatives have pegged Woodrow Wilson as a progressive icon, for example; let’s just say I would strenuously disagree—but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t particularly striking moments of overt conflict between them, and the Bryan-Darrow debate definitely qualifies as such.

But I would add that the debate also reflected another defining duality, one that is at the heart of my most recent book and likewise of many of my analyses of our current moment: the conflict between mythic and critical patriotisms. It might seem that it was the Bible on which that conflict between the two men was focused: Bryan had delivered a famous speech in Tennessee not long before the trial began entitled “Is the Bible True?”; and Darrow grilled him at length, and from the general consensus of the audience to great success (as one commentator put it, “As a man and as a legend, Bryan was destroyed by his testimony that day”), on many Biblical stories that could not possibly be literally true. But I believe their respective perspectives also embody mythic and critical patriotism as I’ve tried to defined them over the last few years. At one point Bryan answered Darrow, “I do not think about things I don’t think about,” which sure captures mythic patriotism’s narrow and exclusionary focus. Whereas Darrow’s probing and critical perspective, expressed throughout this debate and the trial as a whole, reflects his overarching view that “True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”

Next Scopes context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 18, 2025: ScopesStudying: John Scopes

[100 years ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famous trial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks on educators.]

On three interesting facts about the Tennessee science teacher and football coach who became the center of one of America’s most famous trials.

1)      Innocence?: I think it’s become relatively well known (at least compared to many historical realities) that Scopes was recruited (by geologist George Rappleyea and other scientists and businessmen in the town of Dayton where Scopes taught) to stand trial for violating the Butler Act. But what I didn’t realize until researching this series was that even by the letter of that restrictive law, Scopes might have been innocent—it’s true that the textbook he and all state biology teachers in that era were required to use, George William Hunter’s Civic Biology, included a chapter on evolution; but Scopes later admitted to local reporter William Kinsey Hutchinson that he had omitted that chapter from his lessons. Hutchinson didn’t publish his story until after the trial’s verdict, or perhaps this famous trial would have ended differently.

2)      A Socialist Campaign: In any case, Scopes was found guilty on July 21, 1925, and his conviction was upheld by the Tennessee Supreme Court a year later (although they vacated his $100 fine because the judge, rather than the jury, had determined the amount). The trial and verdict would linger with Scopes for the rest of his life, only becoming somewhat more of a positive presence decades later as I’ll highlight below. But of course they’re not the whole story, and one distinct and particularly interesting detail is that in 1932 he ran an at-large campaign for a U.S. House of Representatives seat from Kentucky (his childhood home, to which he and his family had relocated after the trial) as a Socialist Party candidate. Probably wouldn’t help his case with conservative Tennessee neighbors if they knew that fact, but it makes clear that he wasn’t just recruited or forced into political conversations.

3)      A Late-Life Embrace: Again, for a long time Scopes saw the trial and verdict as an albatross, but in the decade before his 1970 death he began to change his perspective. That shift is particularly clear in a trio of 1960 events: attending the July U.S. premiere of the film Inherit the Wind (on which more in Thursday’s post), telling the story of the trial on an October episode of the TV game show To Tell the Truth, and taking part in that year’s celebrations of John T. Scopes Day in Dayton. Scopes would lean into those associations with the trial for the rest of his life, culminating in his emphasis on that story in his 1967 autobiography Center of the Storm: Memoirs of John T. Scopes—the first edition of which, as you can see at that hyperlink, features a monkey on the cover, natch.

Next Scopes context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 17, 2025: ScopesStudying: The Butler Act

[100 years ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famous trial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks on educators.]

For the law’s 100^th anniversary, on three interesting historical ironies around it.

1)      John Washington Butler’s Beliefs: The state representative who introduced the Act (and for whom it was nicknamed thereafter) was mostly known as a farmer, but had worked as a teacher as a young man. That’s an interesting detail, but the irony I want to highlight is that, by his own admission, Butler had no knowledge of evolution when he introduced the bill. As he noted, “No, I didn’t know anything about evolution when I introduced it. I’d read in the papers that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense.” Perhaps it not an irony so much as a very telling, and frustratingly American, detail that the author of the nation’s most famous anti-evolution educational law was poorly educated about evolution.

2)      Austin Peay’s Advocacy: Butler’s bill passed the Tennessee House in January 1925 and the Tennessee Senate in March, and then was signed into law on March 21 by Governor Austin Peay. Peay, was serving the first of what would be three terms as Governor (he tragically died in office in October 1927), was an influential political figure in the state on multiple levels (he was ranked the state’s best governor by historians in a 1981 poll, for example). But the irony here is that the most significant level seems to have been his educational reforms—when he took office the state’s education system was worst in the country by several measures, and he worked to change that, building new schools, lengthening the school year, increasing teacher pay and benefits, and more. Guess those pro-teacher policies didn’t extend to academic freedom, though.

3)      An Overdue, Immediate Repeal: The famous trial about which I’ll have much more to say this week was the Act’s most prominent as well as immediate legacy—but the law stayed on the books for more than four decades, greatly influencing generations of Tennessee schoolkids (and thus the entire state) in the process. The irony, though, is how suddenly that changed—when teacher Gary Scott, who had been fired for violating the Act, successfully sued for reinstatement under the First Amendment, it took just three days for both legislative houses to pass (and Governor Buford Ellington to sign) a bill repealing the Butler Act. A state legislature acting swiftly and decisively to do away with an outdated, prejudiced law and help the state move forward into a more progressive future? Not just ironic but, here in 2025, ideal.

Next Scopes context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 15-16, 2025: Reflections of a College Dad

[With one son in college and another about to be, Spring Break is a lot more than just a concept or a professional reality for this AmericanStudier. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of cinematic portrayals of Spring Break, leading up to these weekend reflections on being a college Dad!]

On three of the countless moments across this year (to date) that I’ve been pleasantly reminded of my changed circumstances (I’ll spare y’all the sadder reminders).

1)      Stadium Spotting: As I’ve mentioned here a couple times, my older son is a first-year at Vanderbilt, where he’s been having a truly phenomenal time on all counts. One of the most unexpected and delightful of those counts was the football team’s surprisingly successful season, which included a truly historic upset win over Alabama. My son was able to be in the student section for that win and most every other of their home games this year, which led to a new favorite pastime for his brother and me: seeing if we could find him amidst the student section hordes when they were shown on the TV broadcasts. I can’t lie, my son’s younger eyes were much better at that game than his Dad’s, but we both did eventually manage to spot him each and every time—and for a Dad missing his son acutely, those were certainly moving moments indeed.

2)      Professorial Props: My son is a Civil Engineering Major, so many of his classes during this first year have been quite different from any that I teach (or took back in the day). But as part of his Fall semester, he did take a Literature and the Environment course that was one of his favorites of the year (I genuinely believe that’s the case, biased as I might also be), and indeed has helped convince him to add an Environmental Studies Minor. Moreover, the class even taught his AmericanStudying Dad a thing or two, including introducing me to a contemporary indigenous poet I had never previously know about (Tommy Pico). So once the semester was done and grades were in and there was hopefully no danger of being perceived as one of “those parents,” I shot the professor a quick note to let her know how much both my son and I had enjoyed this class (she was as appreciative as I would have been to get such a note). Felt very much like multiple layers of my identity connecting at once in the best possible ways.

3)      Country Concert: I hope it goes without saying, for a young person embarking on their college career in Nashville, that my son has gotten to lots of concerts this year. But I can’t lie, I’m most excited about a concert that’s coming up in just over a month—thanks to my wife and me (mainly her, as it was her awesome idea), his brother will be flying down for the weekend and the two of them will be seeing one of our recent favs, the great Kane Brown, perform in the city in which he and my son both live. I’m not ready to say goodbye to my younger son yet (or, well, ever), but if this is going to be a preview of a world in which they both are in college, then it might as well be such a fun preview!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think, fellow college parents and all?

March 14, 2025: Spring Breaking at the Movies: Baywatch

[With one son in college and another about to be, Spring Break is a lot more than just a concept or a professional reality for this AmericanStudier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of cinematic portrayals of Spring Break, leading up to some weekend reflections on being a college Dad!]

[NB. Yes, I know Baywatch is neither a Spring Break film nor a film at all (I’m writing about the TV show, not the film adaptation, here). But this is one of my favorite posts of all time and I couldn’t resist a chance to share it once more!]

On why those beautiful beach bodies are also a body of evidence.

Back in the blog’s early days, I humorously but also earnestly noted that to a dedicated AmericanStudier, any text, even Baywatch, is a possible site of complex analysis. I stand by that possibility, and will momentarily offer proof of same. But before I do, it’s important to foreground the basic but crucial reason for Baywatch’s existence and popularity, one succinctly highlighted by Friends’ Joey and Chandler: pretty people running in slow-motion in bathing suits. While I plan to make a bit more of the show and its contexts and meanings than that, it’d be just plain cray-cray to pretend that either the show’s intent or its audience didn’t focus very fully on those beautiful bodies. Moreover, such an appeal was nothing new or unique—while the beach setting differentiated Baywatch a bit, I would argue that most prime-time soap operas have similarly depended on the attractiveness of their casts to keep their audiences tuning in.

If Baywatch was partly a prime-time soap opera, however, it would also be possible to define the show’s genre differently: in relationship to both the police and medical dramas that were beginning to dominate the TV landscape in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Baywatch debuted in 1989). After all, the show’s plotlines typically included both rescues and crimes; while the lifeguards often dealt with romantic and interpersonal drama as well, so too did the docs of ER or the cops of Miami Vice (to name two of the era’s many entries in these genres). Seen in this light, and particularly when compared to the period’s police dramas, Baywatch was relatively progressive in the gender balance of its protagonists—compared to another California show, CHiPs, for example, which similarly featured pretty people solving promised land problems but which focused almost entirely on male protagonists. Yes, the women of Baywatch were beautiful and dressed skimpily—but the same could be said of the men, and both genders were equally heroic as well.

The creators of Baywatch tried to make the cop show parallel overt with the ill-fated detective spinoff Baywatch Nights, about which the less said the better (even AmericanStudiers have their limits). But the problem with Baywatch Nights wasn’t just its awfulness (Baywatch itself wasn’t exactly The Wire, after all), it was that it missed a crucial element to the original show’s success: the beach. And no, I’m not talking about the bathing suits. I would argue that the most prominent 1970s and 1980s cultural images of the beach were Jaws and its many sequels and imitators, a set of images that made it seem increasingly less safe to go back in the water. And then along came David Hasselhoff, Pam Anderson, and company, all determined to take back the beaches and shift our cultural images to something far more pleasant and attractive than Bruce munching on tourists. Whatever you think of the show, is there any doubt that they succeeded, forever inserting themselves and their slow-mo running into our cultural narratives of the beach?

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses to this show or other Spring Break texts you’d share?