July 7, 2016: Modeling Critical Patriotism: Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart

[I’ve written a good deal in the last few months about the topic of critical patriotism, a central focus of my recently completed fourth book. So for this year’s 4^th of July series I wanted to highlight a handful of distinct examples of perspectives and visions of such critical patriotism. Please share your own nominees for critical patriots, past and present, for a crowd-sourced weekend post full of fireworks!]

On an author and book that both introduce under-narrated histories and redefine American identity.

One of my bigger pet peeves with the dominant narratives of American history is the notion that multi-national and –ethnic immigration has been a relatively recent phenomenon, or at least that it has been most pronounced in the last few decades. It’s true that the 1965 Immigration Act, the first immigration law that opened up rather than closed down immigration for various groups and nationalities, led directly to certain significant waves, especially those from war-torn Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. And it is also true that certain ethnic groups represented particularly sizeable percentages of the immigrants in the last decades of the 20^th century: Asian Americans, again, and also Hispanic and West Indian immigrants. None of those facts are insignificant, and our understanding of America in the 1970s and 80s (for example) needs to include them in a prominent place. But my issue is with the very different notion that America prior to 1965 didn’t include immigrants from these nations (an idea advanced in its most overt form, for example, by Pat Buchanan in an editorial after the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007, which he blamed on the shooter’s status as the son of South Korean immigrants).

Multicultural historian Ronald Takaki notes this belief in the introduction to his magisterial A Different Mirror, recounting a conversation when a cab-driver asks him how long he has been in the US, and he has to reply that his family has been here for over 100 years. While the most obvious and widespread problem with this belief is that it makes it much easier to define members of these groups as less American than others, I would argue that another very significant downside is that it enables us to more easily forget or ignore the stories of earlier such immigrants; that group would include Yung Wing, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton , Sui Sin Far, and my focus for today, the Filipino-American migrant worker, novelist, poet, and labor activist Carlos Bulosan. Bulosan came to the United States in 1930 at the age of 17 (or so, his birthdate is a bit fuzzy), and only lived another 26 years, but in that time he worked literally hundreds of different jobs up and down the West Coast, agitated on behalf of migrant and impoverished laborers and citizens during and after the Depression, published various poems and short stories (and wrote many others that remained unpublished upon his far too early death), and wrote the autobiographical, complex, deeply moving, and critically patriotic novel America is in the Heart (1946).

For the most part the book—which is certainly very autobiographical but apparently includes many fictionalized characters, hence the designation of it as a novel (in the vein of something like On the Road or The Bell-Jar)—paints an incredibly bleak picture of its multiple, interconnected worlds: of migrant laborers; of the lower and working classes in the Depression; and of Filipino-American immigrants. In the first two focal points, and especially in its tone, which mixes bleak psychological realism with strident social criticism, Bulosan’s book certainly echoes (or at least parallels, since it is difficult to know if Bulosan had read the earlier work) and importantly complements The Grapes of Wrath. But despite that tone, Heart’s ultimate trajectory (like that of Steinbeck’s novel, which is why I have paired them in a chapter of my latest book project) is surprisingly and powerfully hopeful. That’s true partly because of the opening chapters, which are set in Bulosan’s native Philippines and make it much more difficult to see the book’s America as an entirely bleak place; but mostly because of the evocative concluding chapter, where Bulosan develops at length his title’s argument for the continuing and defining existence of a more ideal America, in the very hearts of all those seemingly least advantaged Americans on whom his book has focused. The idea might sound clichéd, but all I can say is “Read the book”; it works, and works beautifully, as a unique and potent literary model of critical patriotism.

Last critical patriot tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Critical patriots you’d nominate?

PPS. It's worth adding that Filipino communities had been part of America since the mid-18th century, and had for example taken part in the War of 1812's Battle of New Orleans among other foundational moments.

July 6, 2016: Modeling Critical Patriotism: Suffrage Activists at the Centennial Exposition

[I’ve written a good deal in the last few months about the topic of critical patriotism, a central focus of my recently completed fourth book. So for this year’s 4^th of July series I wanted to highlight a handful of distinct examples of perspectives and visions of such critical patriotism. Please share your own nominees for critical patriots, past and present, for a crowd-sourced weekend post full of fireworks!]

On national divisions and critical patriotism at America’s 100^th birthday celebration.

Birthday parties tend to bring out both the best and the worst in those being celebrated, so perhaps it should be no surprise that America’s 100^th birthday party, the Centennial Exposition held over the six months between May and November of 1876 in Philadelphia’s newly designed Fairmount Park, was nothing if not profoundly divided in all sorts of complex ways. I’ve written at length (in the Intro to my first book) about the most defining such division, between the Exposition’s ostensible purpose (to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and thus reflect on America’s historical origins and identity) and its central focus and tone (a thoroughly forward-looking celebration of the nation’s material and cultural prowess and possibilities for continued upward progress). But on any number of specific issues and themes the Exposition displayed similarly multiple personalities: for example, it featured the first American statue dedicated to an African American figure (African Methodist Episcopal Church founder Richard Allen) but also included a restaurant known as the Southern Restaurant where a group of “old-time darkies” continually serenaded patrons with happy songs of the antebellum South.

Of the many such divisions and contradictions present on and around the Exposition grounds, though, I don’t know that any were as striking as those connected to women’s identities, perspectives, and issues. The Exposition was the first World’s Fair to include women’s voices in a central way, both in planning (through an all-female Women’s Centennial Executive Committee) and on the ground (through the Women’s Pavilion that was created as a result of that committee’s efforts and fundraising). The Pavilion was certainly a striking success in many respects, featuring work created and designed solely by women; yet it was equally striking for the near-complete absence of political perspectives or issues, including the most prominent such issue of the period, women’s suffrage. Since the inception of the Women’s Committee organizations such as the National Woman Suffrage Association had protested the absence of such perspectives and voices from the committee and in the planning process, not only from a representational standpoint but through the lens of a particularly salient irony: that women from around the country were asked to contribute money and support to this federal organization, but could not themselves vote in a federal (or any other kind of) election. The NWSA in fact scheduled their national meeting for Philadelphia in May, on the same day that the Exposition (including the Women’s Pavilion) opened, presenting another division within that city and moment for sure.

Yet the most overt and symbolic (yet also very real and critically patriotic) such division would be presented on July 4^th. On that day, for obvious reasons, the Exposition reached its fever pitch, with numerous activities and events focused around a main stage where impressive speakers and Americans gathered to lead the festivities. The NWSA asked if they could be a part of that stage and those festivities and were refused, but in truly American (and Revolutionary) fashion they created a second stage of their own elsewhere on the grounds. From that stage they read the full text of the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments of Women,” a text that had been initially composed for the 1848 women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY, and had become as much a founding document for this organization and cause as the Declaration of Independence was for the nation of which they were a complicated but vital part. Those contrasting stages were only one of many July 4^th, 1876 events that highlighted such complex national conversations and divisions—word was just reaching the East on this day of Custer’s defeat at  Little Big Horn; a group of parading black militiamen in Hamburg, South Carolina refused to cede the sidewalk to a white group, leading to a violent reprisal and the start of multiple days of anti-black violence in the town—but their location and proximity can drive home just how multivocal America was in this Centennial year, and in particular how much critical patriots like these suffrage activists were adding their voices to the mix.

Next critical patriot tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Critical patriots you’d nominate?

July 5, 2016: Modeling Critical Patriotism: William Apess’ “Eulogy on King Philip”

[I’ve written a good deal in the last few months about the topic of critical patriotism, a central focus of my recently completed fourth book. So for this year’s 4^th of July series I wanted to highlight a handful of distinct examples of perspectives and visions of such critical patriotism. Please share your own nominees for critical patriots, past and present, for a crowd-sourced weekend post full of fireworks!]

On one speech that offers two complementary models of critical patriotism.

Many of the ways I’d make the case for William Apess as an exemplary American critical patriot were summed up in this post. I don’t think it’s the slightest bit hyperbolic to describe Apess as the 19^th century’s Martin Luther King Jr.—a fiery preacher of supreme oratorical and rhetorical talents who dedicated his life to pursuing civil and human rights for his people and for all his fellow citizens of the world, one whose life was tragically cut short but who achieved a great deal in that time and has left a lasting legacy down into our own. If Apess’ era had had the technology to record and broadcast his speeches, or even to publish his writings in more mass-market ways, I have no doubt that we’d listen to and read his voice and words alongside those of King (and yesterday’s subject Frederick Douglass) and our other most potent orators. And however and wherever we encounter them, we consistently find in Apess’ works models of bitingly critical yet still patriotic visions of our shared American society, community, identity, and history.

In that prior post I focused on Apess’ 1833 essay/sermon “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” but I would argue that his critical patriotism is best illustrated by his January 1836 speech “Eulogy on King Philip.” Delivered at Boston’s Odeon lecture and concert hall, which had opened the year before and would go on to host speeches and readings by such luminaries as William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe, Apess’ stunning speech uses his own life story and mixed-race heritage (as scholar Patricia Bizzell traces at length in this excellent piece) to argue for his alternative vision of American history, community, and identity. While much of the speech is as righteously angry about both past injustices and present oppressions as was “Looking-Glass,” the final lines, addressed overtly to his (likely entirely non-native) audience, reflect the optimistic core of Apess’ critical patriotism: “You and I have to rejoice that we have not to answer for our fathers’ crimes; neither shall we do right to charge them one to another. We can only regret it, and flee from it; and from henceforth, let peace and righteousness be written upon our hearts and hands forever, is the wish of a poor Indian.”

While Apess thus ranges across a number of topics and themes in the course of his speech, its central focus is indeed King Philip (Metacomet), the 17^th century Wampanoag chief and distant ancestor of Apess’ mother who was and remains best known in American collective memory for the 1670s war that came to bear his name. Yet from the start of his speech, Apess presents a stunning shift in those narratives, arguing that this supposed enemy of the English should be collectively remembered instead as a revolutionary hero: “so will every patriot, especially in this enlightened age, respect the rude yet all accomplished son of the forest, that died a martyr to his cause, though unsuccessful, yet as glorious as the American Revolution.” Arguing for that vision of Philip, in the same 1830s Boston that was cementing its collective narratives of the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution, was as bold a rhetorical move as Douglass’ July 4^th speech. Yet if we can see the Massachusetts Puritans and the Wampanoags as two founding American cultures (as I’ve argued multiple times in this space), there’s no reason why we can’t see Philip as a revolutionary, critical patriot, one whose tragic end shouldn’t overshadow his work toward a collective American community.

Next critical patriot tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Critical patriots you’d nominate?