May 7, 2018: Hap & Leonard Studying: ‘60s Legacies

[One of the best parts of my 2018 so far has been discovering SundanceTV’s Hap & Leonard. Based on the series of novels by Joe Lansdale, and starring James Purefoy and Michael K. Williams, the series has completed two wonderful 6-episode seasons and as I write this is in the midst of Season 3. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Hap & Leonard contexts, leading to a special weekend post on the unique career to date of Michael K. Williams!]

On three layers to the show’s portrayal of ‘60s legacies in its ‘80s setting.

The plot of Hap & Leonard’s Season 1, based on Lansdale’s first novel about the characters Savage Season (1990), focuses closely on the question of whether and how the 1960s can be extended into the 1980s. Hap (Purefoy) and Leonard (Williams) are connected by Hap’s ex-wife Trudy (played wonderfully by Christina Hendricks) to a group of former ‘60s radicals (one a member of a Weathermen-like domestic terrorist organization) who are searching for a lost cache of stolen money in order to fund radical initiatives once more. As anyone with a passing knowledge of film noir or crime fiction would expect, things don’t go as planned, and most of the ex-hippies abandon their ideals and morals in favor of greed and self-interest. But the historical cynicism of those shifts is balanced by the character of Trudy, herself a former ‘60s radical who remains consistently true to those ideals and the ‘80s plans that seek to extend them. Although she seems at times to fill the femme fatale role, I would argue that Trudy is instead Season 1’s most honorable and inspiring character.

Yet that present role and image are complicated by what we learn about Trudy and Hap’s past, and specifically about Hap’s own ‘60s legacy. We know from the beginning of the show that Hap is an ex-con, but it’s only gradually that we learn why he was in prison: for resisting the Vietnam War draft, at Trudy’s urging. Yet while Hap was serving his two-year sentence, Trudy left him, unable to wait through this necessary consequence of her husband’s (and her) radicalism. We get the sense that Hap has never quite recovered from either the time in prison or the marital betrayal, and that both his former radicalism and his enduring love for Trudy are at least as strong forces in his 1980s life as any actually present factors. This is a very different image of a lingering ‘60s perspective than those we see in Trudy and the other conspirators—while they are actively pursuing ‘60s objectives in the present, Hap is held back, or at least constrained, by ‘60s legacies that he can neither escape nor quite ever achieve. Such a personal situation is not limited to any particular decade or time period, of course, but the extremes of the ‘60s do give it a particular urgency and potency.

And then there’s Leonard. Everything about Leonard, a gay conservative African American country music fan and wannabe cowboy living in rural East Texas, is unique, compelling, and deeply human (like all of Williams’s characters, on whom more this weekend). But it’s Leonard’s service in the Marines during the Vietnam War, and thus his status as a Vietnam Vet, that links him to these first season questions of ‘60s legacies and effects. Leonard is not obviously suffering from PTSD or the like, but he clearly carries his Vietnam service with him constantly, most especially in an understandable feeling that he has served his country and deserves to be treated with respect as a result. That perspective necessarily clashes with racist treatment he receives at various points throughout the show, but in Season 1 it also leads to consistent conflict with the ex-radicals, whom Leonard believes to be both naïve about the world and utterly unable to comprehend his far different and (to his mind) far more real experience of the ‘60s and their aftermath. Those conflicts aren’t resolved any more neatly or definitively than any in Hap & Leonard, and instead serve as one more layer to the show’s nuanced, messy, and utterly compelling portrayal of the ongoing legacies of the 1960s.

Next context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on H&L, or other shows you’d highlight?

May 5-6, 2018: Scholarly Tribute: Erik Loomis

[On May 4^th, 1886, a labor protest and rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in support of a nationwide strike turned into a confusing, bloody mess. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of contexts for the Haymarket Affair, leading up to this special weekend post on one of our most important current scholarly voices on labor.]

On three ways to read the vital voice of labor historian and professor Erik Loomis.

1)      Lawyers, Guns, & Money: I first encountered Erik’s work through the LGM blog, for which he’s written countless important posts (including the ongoing “This Day in Labor History” series) for many years now. LGM has been a model of a community of academics engaging with public issues and conversations since its May 2004 founding, and remains one of the best (and ever-more necessary) such spaces in 2018.

2)      His Books: Erik has published two ground-breaking books and has at least two more in progress, and among other things they model a back-and-forth between more academic and more public styles and audiences. His first book, Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe (2015), was more publicly oriented; his second, Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (2016), more academic. He’s now at work on a similar pair: the publicly focused No Retreat, No Surrender: American History in Ten Strikes; and the academically oriented Soil and Steel: The New Deal Roots of Labor-Environmental Coalitions. I can’t recommend his first two highly enough, and greatly look forward to this next pair!

3)      His Public Scholarly Presence: I know about those works in progress primarily because of Erik’s public scholarly online and social media presences: on Twitter and and on Facebook, for example, where Erik both traces his own evolving work and career and responds thoughtfully yet sarcastically (both entirely warranted responses, of course) to the world around us. He also recently co-authored an excellent op ed for the Washington Post, one more step in his path to digital domination. Online and otherwise, when it comes to the kinds of labor histories about which I wrote this week (among many other subjects), there’s no one we should all be reading and learning from more than Erik.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Other scholarly voices or works you’d highlight?

May 4, 2018: Haymarket Histories: Remembering Haymarket

[On May 4^th, 1886, a labor protest and rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in support of a nationwide strike turned into a confusing, bloody mess. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for the Haymarket Affair, leading up to a special weekend post on one of our most important current scholarly voices on labor.]

On two existing ways to better remember Haymarket, and one I’d love to see.

One way to remember the Haymarket Square protest and rally, bombing and violence, and trial more fully and accurately would be, quite simply but crucially, to engage with all the primary texts and contexts to which I’ve hyperlinked throughout the week’s series. While there are and will remain the unanswered questions and ambiguities about which I wrote on Wednesday, the fact of the matter is that there are many many texts and resources through which we can learn a great deal about the lead-up to May 4^th, the events of that day, and all its aftermaths and legacies. One of the blessings and curses of my principal public scholarly goal—adding to our collective memories—is that there is a literally endless supply of histories and stories, figures and texts, that can and should be better remembered, and I know it can be difficult for any one American (much less all of us) to engage with them at length or in depth. But we don’t have to do it all day every day to make it part of our collective communal experience, and even an occasional dip into the primary sources and resources would help us think about Haymarket and its contexts and meanings.

Public memorials offer another set of resources for collective memory, although with Haymarket, as is so often the case, there are competing memorials that demand nuanced response and engagement. Sculptor Johannes Gelert created a memorial to the fallen policemen in 1889, and it stood in Haymarket Square for nearly a century before being moved to Chicago Police Headquarters in 1972. Sculptor Albert Weinert created the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument in 1893 to honor the anarchists convicted and executed for the bombing; it stands in Forest Home Cemetery (originally the German Waldheim Cemetery) where the men are buried. To some degree bridging the gap between these two competing memorials is the most recent work, artist Mary Brogger’s 2004 sculpture of a fifteen-foot wagon meant to commemorate the impromptu stage from which the Haymarket rally speakers delivered their remarks. The September 2004 ceremony that unveiled Brogger’s monument featured both labor activists and the president of Chicago’s police union, suggesting the possibility at least of a shared communal history that does not pit the subjects of Gelert’s and Weinert’s memorials against each other quite so overtly or necessarily.

Popular culture has its own role to play in our collective memories, and on that level I have to admit being disappointed with (from what I’ve seen) the lack of Haymarket stories in our cultural works. For example, the life of convicted anarchist August Spies, whose concluding statement to the judge and jury I quoted in yesterday’s post, would make for a wonderful TV miniseries. Born in 1855 in a ruined mountain castle in Germany to a forestry official and his wife, Spies immigrated to the US in 1872 as a teenager (after his father’s death), worked as an upholdsterer while gradually becoming more and more deeply involved with radical labor and socialist activism and journalism, and spoke at the May 4^th Haymarket Square rally. While in prison awaiting execution Spies met and married the young journalist and labor activist Nina van Zandt. Moments before his November 11^th, 1887 hanging, he cried out, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today,” some of the most compelling last words in American history. His is only one of many Haymarket stories, of course, but telling it would open up those other stories and histories as well. Just another potential screenplay I’ll add to the imaginary pile, I suppose!

Special tribute post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Haymarket histories or contexts you’d highlight?