December 7, 2015: Circles of Friends: Revolutionary Circles

[December 12^th will mark the 100^th anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s birth, and since Sinatra was as well-known for his famous group of friends as for his individual achievements, I wanted to spend the week AmericanStudying such circles of friends. Leading up to a special weekend post on the Rat Pack!]

Three tight-knit communities that helped create the Revolution—and the nation it produced.

1)      The Junto: Ever precocious and forward-thinking, Ben Franklin was only 21 years old when he organized this “club of mutual improvement” in Philadelphia in 1727. This group of philosophically and civically minded men would go on not only to debate questions of morality, theology, and social responsibility, but also to help found the Library Company of Philadelphia (the nation’s first public library), among other communal efforts. Moreover, I would argue that it was precisely from the Junto’s model of shared philosophical and civic engagement among friends that Franklin developed his sense of the crucial role played by conversation, ideas, and collegiality in producing communal change—a role that he himself would embody throughout the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary period.

2)      Hamilton and Friends: As dramatized in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton and a group of fellow young military officers became very close in the early years of the Revolution. The letters between Hamilton, French emigrant the Marquis de Lafayette, and South Carolinian and abolitionist John Laurens (among others in this cohort) offer an intimate glimpse into both the Revolution and the role played by homosocial male relationships in this late 18^th century moment (so intimate, indeed, that one historian has argued that these relationships were gay love affairs). Given the crucial role that Lafayette played in the Revolution’s successful conclusion, and the role that American friends like Hamilton played in maintaining the connection with Lafayette, it’s fair to say that these letters did no less than help win independence.

3)      Stockton’s Circles: Also helping win independence was one of the close-knit communities in which Annis Boudinot Stockton played a significant role: Stockton (wife of Declaration signer Richard Stockton) was the only woman elected to the secretive American Whig Society, and safeguarded the group’s documents at her New Jersey home (where she also hosted George Washington and many other leaders) throughout the Revolution. But if this community of Stockton’s helped argue for and win the Revolution, another, the Mid-Atlantic Writing Circle, helped create in literature and culture the new nation birthed by that event. Writing Circle members Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge would write some of the “Prospect Poems” that helped provide history, mythos, and imagined futures for the new nation. And female members Stockton, Susanna Wright, and Hannah Griffits (among others) made sure that women’s voices, perspectives, and rights would be part of that evolving national conversation as well.  

Next friend circle tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 5-6, 2015: AmendmentStudying: On Not Taking the 13th Amendment for Granted

[December 6^th marks the 150^th anniversary of the ratification of perhaps the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 13^th. This week I’ve AmericanStudied some contexts for five other amendments, leading up to this special weekend post on the 13^th!]

Given how much all rational 21^st century Americans agree that slavery was a dark stain on America’s identity, it might seem to have been inevitable that, with the Civil War concluded, slavery would be permanently abolished with a Constitutional Amendment. But here are three reasons why we should most definitely not see that amendment as a given:

1)      How it happened: Steven Spielberg’s historical drama Lincoln (2012) is not without its flaws, but the film does an excellent job portraying the tense, difficult, extremely uncertain process by which Lincoln and his Congressional allies secured passage of the 13^th Amendment. I don’t want to suggest for even a moment that the Civil War was not centrally about the issue of slavery—it was, full stop—but that didn’t mean that most Northerners, nor most political leaders, shared the same idea of what should happen with that issue as the war concluded. That what happened was a Constitutional amendment was thus anything but inevitable, and the process by which the amendment passed reflects both that uncertainty and the heroic lengths to which Lincoln and many others went to make it happen.

2)      What happened next: The 13^th Amendment was in many ways the most straightforward of the three so-called Reconstruction Amendments, and that fact, along with the many ways that the 14^th and 15^th Amendments have been extended, deepened, and (unfortunately) challenged in the 150 years since, might lead to it seeming the least significant of the three. But among the many ways (such as the rest of this post) that I would push back on that idea, I would note that neither the 14^th nor the 15^th Amendment would likely have been imaginable, much less possible, had the 13^th not been passed. It’s not just that slavery might well have returned (on which see #3 in a moment), but that in any case there would have been no Constitutional or federal law defining African Americans as anything other than slaves. Without that first step, the rest of the path, fraught and incomplete as it has been, could not have existed.

3)      What might have happened otherwise: I don’t actually believe that slavery could have returned in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War—but I absolutely believe it might have a couple decades later. I wrote at length in my first book, and have written in many places since, about the process by which American culture and society became by the 1880s (as Albion Tourgée succinctly put it) “distinctly Confederate in sympathy.” Indeed, as early as 1877 an editorial in the progressive magazine The Nation opined that with the end of Reconstruction, “the negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.” If (in the absence of a 13^th Amendment) Southern states had wished to re-implement a slave system in the late 19^th century, it’s very possible that neither law nor mainstream white society would have objected. And while segregation and its attendant histories have been called, with justice, “slavery by another name,” the truth is that they were, at least, not slavery—and we have the 13^th Amendment to thank for it.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 4, 2015: AmendmentStudying: Prohibition Culture

[December 6^th marks the 150^th anniversary of the ratification of perhaps the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 13^th. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for five other amendments, leading up to a special weekend post on the 13^th!]

Three texts that help us understand the world that the 18^th Amendment made (and the 21^st unmade).

1)      The Great Gatsby (1925): One of the most ambiguous elements in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is the nature (indeed, the existence) of Jay Gatsby’s criminal activities. His association with stereotyped Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim (one of Fitzgerald’s lowest points), among other factors, seems to suggest that he is indeed involved in organized crime. Yet at the same time, “organized crime” in the 1920s often meant the bootlegging of illegal alcohol, a crime that would become not a crime less than a decade later and that even in the era of Prohibition was widely practiced and accepted. However we read this element of the novel, Gatsby is deeply tied to and reflective of Prohibition.

2)      The Untouchables: If Gatsby offers a vision into the permissive culture of alcohol that remained (if it was not indeed deepened) during Prohibition, Eliot Ness’s 1957 memoir and the 1959-63 TV show and 1987 Brian DePalma film based on it give us instead the law enforcement perspective on the era. Al Capone was of course involved in numerous criminal enterprises, but as this clip from the film illustrates, The Untouchables in all its forms focuses explicitly on his bootlegging activities. Which is to say, if some Prohibition-created criminals were probably as ambiguous and in many ways harmless as Jay Gatsby, others were certainly as evil as Al Capone—and the story of both Prohibition and the justice system throughout this period must include the latter figures and histories as well.

3)      Spirits of Defiance: National Prohibition and Jazz Age Literature (2006): As Fitzgerald’s novel illustrates, Prohibition didn’t just produce new versions of crime and law enforcement, of course—it also produced literature and culture, and a great deal of it. Indeed, I think the case could be made that jazz itself wouldn’t have emerged in the ways it did without the era’s clubs and speakeasies, and they wouldn’t have existed in the forms they took without Prohibition. All these and many other historical and cultural questions are engaged with in depth by Kathleen Drowne’s impressive book, a must-read for anyone interested in not only Jazz Age literature and culture, but the world the 18^th Amendment made.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?