September 23-25, 2011 [Scholarly Review 5]: Recommended Reading

I’m very busy for the next few days, but the timing works out here—the faculty reading and writing group at Fitchburg State of which I’m part had a great first meeting of the semester this past week, and it’s gotten me thinking about all the great scholarly work being done by colleagues, broadly and ideally defined, around the country. Much of that work can seem to vanish into the ether sometimes, which is frustrating not only because of how much of ourselves we put into it, but also and more importantly because of how much we do the work (in every case I’ve ever encountered) in the hopes of entering into conversations and getting feedback. So in that spirit, here are some engaging and interesting recent scholarly and AmericanStudies works, by colleagues and teachers and friends, that you should think about checking out (literally if you’ve got a good library nearby!):

1)      Mark Rennella’s The Boston Cosmopolitans: International Travel and American Arts and Letters (2008)

2)      Neal Dolan’s Emerson’s Liberalism (2009)

3)      Miles Orvell’s American Photography (2003)

4)      Carolyn Karcher’s edition of Albion Tourgée’s Bricks Without Straw (1880; 2009)

5)      Michael Hoberman’s How Strange It Seems: The Cultural Life of Jews in Small-town New England (2008)

6)      Christine Dee’s edited collection Ohio’s War: The Civil War in Documents (2006)

I could go on, but that’s a great half-dozen to start you out! More next week,

Ben

PS. Any recommendations to send back my way?

September 22, 2011 [Tribute Post 23]: Elizabeth Warren

There’s been a good bit of chatter on the news and politics front over the last few days about a forthcoming book on the Obama White House by political journalist Ron Suskind, and especially on the negative aspects of the tone and working environment in the administration that his book highlights. Front and center in those conversations, to the surprise of exactly nobody who has any familiarity or association with the guy, is former economic advisor Larry Summers; I’ve been a non-fan of Summers’ since his time as the president of Harvard, where I got to see first-hand his efforts to (among other delightful contributions) crush student support for a workers’ campaign for a living wage and advance an (at best) seriously faulty biological argument for women’s shrinking but still present achievement gap in fields like science and math. Whatever the value of his economic ideas (and folks who know a lot more about that than me have rigorously critiqued them as well), the guy is pretty clearly a bully and a jackass, the worst example of a stereotypical Harvard prig.

Fortunately for those of us who would like that stereotype not to be the only prominent image of Harvard in our contemporary culture, there’s another, and much more thoroughly admirable and impressive, noteworthy representative of the institution making a splash in our current moment as well: Elizabeth Warren, the former Obama nominee to direct the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and current Harvard Law Professor who has recently announced her campaign for the Massachusetts Senate seat held by Republican Scott Brown. One of my favorite moments in recent political life, in fact, came at an early Warren campaign stop in Springfield, when she responded to a question about whether her position at the (stereotypically elitist) academic institution might hurt her chances: “I grew up hanging on to the edge of the middle class by my fingernails,” she replied. “All I can say is I’ve been there. I've lived this. My family lived one pink slip, one bad diagnosis away from falling off the economic cliff. Yeah, I've got a fancy job at Harvard and I've gotta tell you, I'm proud of that job. I worked hard to get there. I wasn't born at Harvard. I was born to a family that had to work for everything it's got.” Not too many moments (outside of Braves baseball and my boys’ various successes) make me literally cheer out loud, but I’ll cop to doing so the first time I read those lines.

Much more important than her Harvard ties, of course, are Warren’s central, consistent, and (by all accounts) very genuine efforts on behalf of the American middle class. As those lines also illustrate, her own background and life story give her a clear and passionate appreciation for the dangers and obstacles confronted by that community, and she has spent the last few years in particular fighting hard against the forces (most notably on Wall Street, but increasingly in Washington as well of course) that have heightened those dangers and obstacles in so many ways. It’s of course fair to say that no one Senator or Congressperson or person period is going to be able to push back against all those efforts with any absolute success, but as an English professor and an AmericanStudier, I believe that words and rhetoric matter a great deal—and having somebody running for elected office who’s willing to put things that bluntly and strongly, as she does again in both the short video at the first link below and the campaign announcement at the second, who can and clearly will make the strongest possible case for the communal and social programs and perspectives of American progressivism and liberalism, has already made this pointy-headed academic very, very happy.

But just to be clear: the things for which Warren is advocating are, or at least should be, no more limited to liberals or Democrats than they are to academics or Harvard. These are core American values and narratives, ideas that represent some of the very best of our national community, that transcend any particular political moment. Warren’s campaign has a chance, in a small way, to do that too, which makes it that much more worth our attention and support. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1)      Great short video of Warren’s blunt and pitch-perfect take on the whole “class warfare” idea: http://www.rumproast.com/index.php/site/comments/i_got_your_class_warfare_right_here/

2)      Warren’s campaign site: http://elizabethwarren.com/

3)      OPEN: Anybody or anything you’re excited about in the wilderness of our current politics?

September 21, 2011: Dead Certainty

I’ve linked a couple different times to my post on Steve Earle, Dead Man Walking, and the death penalty; I certainly still feel, as I wrote there, that the most (and perhaps to me the only) understandable support for the death penalty comes from an emotional place where people are responding to (whether actually or hypothetically) brutal crimes committed against those they love. Such a place is not, to reiterate one of that post’s ultimate points, an appropriate one from which to begin making or assessing legal policies; but it’s also fair to admit that, whatever our ideals about justice or the law, no one doing such making or assessing of laws does so in a vacuum, without engaging in some form with human emotions and perspectives. So when it comes to those criminals whose violent and brutal crimes are clearly beyond dispute, for whom the question is one of sentencing rather than of guilt or innocence, I can again understand—even if I still disagree with—those for whom the death penalty feels appropriate.

The problem, though, is that in many if not most death penalty cases, the question of guilt or innocence is less than crystal clear. The case of Cameron Willingham in Texas has drawn a great deal of recent attention, since Texas governor and now presidential candidate Rick Perry responded to some evidentiary and scientific doubts that were raised about Willingham’s guilt (and even about whether an actual crime had been committed) by disbanding the commission investigating those questions and overtly ramming through Willingham’s execution despite those growing doubts. But just as troubling, and entirely ongoing, is the case of Troy Davis, a Georgia man whose appeal for clemency was just rejected by the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles; as the post at the first link highlights, the case about Davis was based entirely on eyewitness testimony, and seven of the nine such testifiers have since recanted their testimony as (they argue) coerced and bullied by the police. Even if Davis did in fact kill the policeman for whose murder he was convicted, it seems impossible for any reasonable person to argue, under these circumstances, that the current case against him is certain enough to merit the final and irreversible punishment that is the death penalty.

And that’s really the ultimate issue here, for me, above and beyond any of the other objections that I could and on many occasions have raised against the death penalty. Precisely because the legal and justice systems are created and populated by humans, they have their share of errors—we all know the stories of innocent men and women released from prison after decades, of folks like “Hurricane” Carter and the Scottsboro boys and many others besides. As horrible as those stories are, though, they don’t end with prison, at least not necessarily (some of the Scottsboro boys did in fact die in prison), and so they include the possibility of wrongs being righted, of hope being restored, of genuine justice being, belatedly but not impossibly, done. When injustices are done in death penalty cases, though—and again, how can they not sometimes be, with human beings still doing all the work?—the very nature of the punishment makes such restitution, such righting of wrongs, impossible, and so to my mind guarantees that innocent people will sometimes be put to death. Davis again might or might not be one such (although very well-informed and hard-line voices, including former FBI director William Sessions, have argued for his innocence), but the responses and procedures in his case certainly make it that much more likely, even inevitable, that more innocent men and women will be executed.

At the end of the day, I’m dead certain about only one thing in all this: the death penalty is far closer to some of the worst aspects of American history and identity than to our highest ideals and possibilities. The Troy Davis case has only further convinced me that we can and must do better than this. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1)      A brief blog post that collects (in links) many good starting points for the Davis case and the issues surrounding it: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/09/troy-davis-to-be-executed

2)      The Sessions op-ed: http://www.ajc.com/opinion/should-davis-be-executed-1181530.html

3)      A hugely powerful piece that brings together the death penalty and family/kids in a very different way: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/explaining-the-death-penalty-to-my-children/245020/

4)      OPEN: What do you think?

September 20, 2011: Creative Histories

In the brief prefatory note to Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1826), about which I blogged here, Sedgwick positions herself, and more exactly her work in the novel to follow, as roughly equivalent to the efforts of Native American “historians or poets.” The moment speaks directly to her revisionist goals for this work of historical fiction (about which I focused in that earlier blog), but at the same time it more implicitly but just as importantly reflects an era in American writing when the genres of historical and creative writing were not at all separate, and often in fact coexisted in the careers of prominent individual writers. After all, the nation’s first professional creative writer, Washington Irving, was also at least as well known as a biographer of George Washington, a historian of both the American Revolution and medieval Spain (among other interests), and the author of a work of historiographic satire and criticism, A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809).

I don’t want to glorify that pre-specialized era, either as a time when writers chose not to limit their interests (it wasn’t a choice since such specialized genres simply hadn’t been developed) or as a time when better work was produced (I could blog daily about the number of amazing works of American history writing produced by more specialized academic historians and not run out of topics any time soon). But as someone with an obvious interest in interdisciplinary work, and a lifelong passion for historical literature to boot, I have to admit that many of what I’d call the richest American works—whether creative or scholarly or, y’know, some complicated combination of the two—defy any obvious categorization, or at least bring many elements of other genres and types of writing into their own most central forms. Even when the writer in question is not necessarily in the upper echelon of American talents, the very nature of these combinatory texts makes them, to me, significantly more compelling than might otherwise be the case, yields works that embody some of the best AmericanStudies questions and ideas.

A perfect case in point would be the early 19^th century poet Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791-1865). One of the era’s most popular poets, Sigourney’s works can seem from our 21^st century vantage point far too traditional, in both form and theme, when compared with the era’s true innovators, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson; less politically potent than James Russell Lowell at his best; less catchy and engaged with American myths than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; less spiritually potent than William Cullen Bryant; and so on. But whatever Sigourney might lack in those areas, I believe she makes up for in her strikingly historical poetic style and themes; works like “The Indian’s Welcome to the Pilgrim Fathers” and “Indian Names” (both available at the first link) may be written in rhymed and metered stanzas, but they engage with founding and ongoing national histories and narratives very centrally and successfully. And in a book such as Scenes in My Native Land (1844; full text at the second link), Sigourney does away with generic boundaries even more fully, intermingling prose and poetry freely and smoothly in her powerful and compelling reflections on national sites and symbols as varied as Connecticut’s Charter Oak, Niagara Falls, and the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb (in Hartford, Sigourney’s hometown).

As is the case with virtually every topic about which I write here, I don’t want to replace our current emphasis on distinct genres and modes of writing; instead I’m suggesting that there’s significant value in complementing such valuable distinctions with a sense of what authors and texts that blur or erase the generic boundaries also have to offer. In the case of writers like Sedgwick and Sigourney, their creative histories bring our national narratives and stories to life with compelling success, a contribution to AmericanStudies that renders absolute categorization very much a moot point. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1)      Some of Sigourney’s best-known and best poems, including “Welcome” and “Names”: http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/sigour01.html

2)      The full text of Scenes: http://www.merrycoz.org/voices/scenes/SCENES.HTM

3)      OPEN: Any genre-busting authors or works you’d highlight?

September 19, 2011: Still Fresh

Many of my favorite American novels are explicitly historical novels, texts that are centrally interested in creating stories and images of the past; that interest, whatever else it might mean, tends to make the texts feel particularly distant or distinct from our own, 21^st century moment. To me that’s one of their selling points—what Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition can reveal about the turn of the 20^th century and the aftermaths of slavery and Reconstruction in it; what Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! constructs as the 1930s South and its fraught relationship to its own past; how Silko’s Ceremony engages with the spiritual rebirths of the Native American Renaissance while reflecting the continued impacts of histories as diverse as the Indian Wars and post-World War II trauma—but there’s no question that it can also make it tougher to sell them to a group of contemporary students, to argue for why these themes and questions still resonate just as fully in our own moment and world. Needless to say, I try very hard to do just that, but I likewise try to balance such explicitly historical (in every sense) texts with ones that, whenever they were published, feel in some crucial ways as if they could have been released just yesterday.

I just got done teaching one novel that fits that description perfectly: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), about which I blogged at length here. Carrie’s contemporaneity is at least somewhat ironic, since Dreiser goes to great lengths from his opening paragraphs to highlight the fact that he is setting his novel about a decade prior to its release, and to trace many of the elements that have already changed in those intervening years (aspects of the blossoming city of Chicago, particular social character types, broad Gilded Age emphases, and so on). Yet this most recent experience with the novel, and particularly seeing once again (as I had in each prior instance) how fully the students connected to Carrie, to Hurstwood, to the themes of ambition and wealth, class and status, dreams and disasters, to the seemingly clichéd (country girl comes to the city, older man overtaken and eventually destroyed by his infatuation with younger woman, realizing your dreams but paying a price to do so) but still resonant plot threads. Like another novel that has consistently worked for my students, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, what Dreiser’s book does best is just force us to think about how we define success, what the American Dream is and should be, whether it’s possible to be happy in our society and what that happiness entails and costs, and other questions that it’s vital for every American (and especially every young American) to consider, whatever his or her answers might be.

Tomorrow, in another of my classes, we start two weeks of conversations on another hugely resonant and timeless American classic, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). As with Dreiser’s book, Miller’s play can be read at least partly as marking the passing of an era, the changes of one world into another, and its title character as thus already historical in his moment, much less half a century later. Miller’s play is also more overtly and at times troublingly dated than Dreiser’s (despite its later publication) when it comes to gender—Willy Loman’s wife Linda is not a terrible character but is to my mind a lot flatter than the three men in her family, and the complex and interesting supporting characters are entirely male (with the most explicitly “bad” character known only as “The Woman”). But those historical or dated qualities ultimately cannot compete with the play’s absolutely perfect and still completely resonant themes, its engagement with not only many of the same questions to which I connected Dreiser’s novel, but also its extension of them to a vital question that Dreiser entirely elides: how fully our own answers to all those questions are influenced by our parents, by the lives and identities and experiences and dreams that they inhabit and give (consciously and unconsciously) to us. Willy is certainly the best character in Miller’s play, and one of the best in American drama and literature period—but he wouldn’t be nearly as great without his son Biff, and it’s the dynamic between them that is to me the play’s most powerful and most timeless element.

Should be a fun couple weeks! More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1)      Great scene from Dustin Hoffman’s take on Willy (with, I believe, Chinese subtitles!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY-FyfpELfg

2)      Interesting and informative 2001 interview with Miller: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ABEd-xkAAY

3)      OPEN: Any books (American or otherwise) that you’d highlight as still fresh after (however many) years?

September 17-18, 2011 [Guest Post of Sorts]: Life Support

Much has been made, to my mind rightly so, of one particular moment from the most recent Republican presidential debate, when it seems as if the audience was making light of, even cheering for, the death of a hypothetical fellow American due to his or her inability or unwillingness to pay for health insurance. As the difference between inability and unwillingness suggests, there are various points of disagreement about what exactly was asked (and to what contexts the question and moment could be connected) and thus what exactly the audience was cheering for. I’ll link to some video of the moment below, in the interest of fairness (and of course it would probably be ideal for you to watch it before reading any of these thoughts, including my own). But my main goal here is to highlight the exceptionally brave and powerful, tragic and terrible, and most of all righteously angry DailyKos diary that was written by the sister of a man (Steve Patience) who died in similar circumstances. Please consider it a guest post and check it out:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/13/1016557/-That-was-my-brothers-death-you-were-cheering,-you-a$$holes

This Balloon Juice post in response to the diary also includes a MoveOn.org ad that features both some video from the debate and interview footage of the diarist herself (Susan Grigsby):

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/09/16/for-rage-and-sorrow/

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to separate this debate moment from an even more unequivocally appalling moment in the prior Republican presidential debate, where the audience cheered for the extremely high number of executions that have taken place in Rick Perry’s Texas. And why should we separate the two? Both reflect a callous disregard for the sanctity of American and human lives, a disregard that not only reveals the hypocrisy of a party that defines itself as pro-life, but that also reflects a stunning lack of empathy and compassion. It’s one thing to support the death penalty (a complex topic to be sure, as I wrote in this post) or to believe that universal health insurance is impossible or etc; it’s quite another to celebrate the deaths that such beliefs and policies ultimately and inevitably produce.

More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Two links to start with:

1)      This post contains Andrew Sullivan’s thoughts on the moment as well as the 70-second video of (some of) it, but of course you can watch the video and draw your own conclusions before reading Sullivan (or me or anybody else): http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/09/indecent.html

2)      OPEN: What do you think?

September 16, 2011: Get Out the Vote

Many of the most passionate and committed activists in American history have dedicated their efforts to extending the franchise, to giving the vote, to those who did not already have it. Those three young Civil Rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—who were lynched near Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964 were taking part in the “Freedom Summer,” a period focused explicitly on voter registration among officially enfranchised but practically disenfranchised African Americans. While their story exemplifies the most extreme sacrifice, it’s fair to say that they were taking part in a long tradition of suffragist activism, one extending back to those who worked to enfranchise non-landed white men in the early 19^th century, to those who created and supported the 15^th Amendment after the Civil War, to the generations of women (and men) who fought for female suffrage in the second half of the 19^th and first decades of the 20^th century, and to many other such advocates—and extending forward to the ongoing efforts of organizations like ACORN (about whom more below) to aid impoverished and other less fortunate Americans in exercising their own franchise.

Many of the most hateful and violent acts of domestic terrorism in American history have been undertaken in order to deny the franchise, to take away the vote, from those who were legally entitled to it. The 1898 Wilmington (North Carolina) coup d’etat and massacre, about which I wrote in my first post, took place on election day in that city in order to capitalize explicitly on local white fears and anger about African Americans and the ballot box; similarly, the Reconstruction-era rise of the Ku Klux Klan was predicated in no small measure on precisely that issue, as were many of Jim Crow’s first laws (including the infamous grandfather clause and other backdoor disenfranchising measures). While the female suffragettes did not meet with that level of violent response, many of their marches and efforts were counter-protested in aggressive and ugly ways; both of those words would also describe much of the rhetoric about the movement and its activists in the media and in national conversations. Those most interested in maintaining hierarchies of power and privilege in America, in short, have always recognized the threat posed to their status quo by the ability of their fellow citizens to gain and then exercise their franchise, and have taken every conceivable measure to oppose those steps.

Much was made in the immediate build-up to the 2008 presidential election, at least on Fox News and in the conservative media more generally, about ACORN and the potential for a fraudulent election; much has of course continued to be made about that organization in particular, and the idea of voter fraud more generally, in the years since. But the truth is that even if the narratives about ACORN’s fraud were accurate—and they have been instead, not surprisingly, largely fabricated and entirely exaggerated—the accusations are that the organization is trying to allow people to vote who might not be legally able to do so for one reason or another. On the other hand, conservative activists have for many years worked diligently to deny the franchise to millions of their fellow Americans: the most overt example would have to be the almost certainly illegal disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of African Americans in Florida prior to the 2000 presidential election (which hinged, of course, on the very tight Florida results), but the truth is that in many states similar efforts to restrict voting rights and opportunities (including for example requiring photographic identification, something that many poorer Americans who lack a driver’s license do not possess) have been undertaken in recent years by Republican legislators and activists.

I suppose it’s possible to make logical cases for at least some of those efforts. But given the broader and more defining American histories on either side of this issue, the crucial question has to be this: why on earth would an entire political movement seek to associate itself with efforts to restrict voting rights and opportunities? And, even more significantly, why have we focused so much in recent years on ACORN and its ilk and so little on these much more troubling activists on the other side of the issue? More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Four links to start with:

1)      An image of Norman Rockwell’s lesser-known but very powerful painting Murder in Mississippi (1965): http://detroit.about.com/od/museums/ss/Norman_Rockwell_4.htm

2)      Images both from and against the women’s suffrage movement: http://www.edb.utexas.edu/resources/team/lesson_4.html

3)      The Commission on Civil Rights’ report on Florida’s extensive disenfranchisement controversy and the 2000 election: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/ccrdraft060401.htm

4)      OPEN: What do you think?

UPDATE) Great piece by political blogger Digby on this history of voter intimidation: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/201191883753799660.html