July 8, 2021: Work in American Literature: “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper?”

[Later this month I start teaching a new online class, a variation of my Ethnic American Lit course that will focus on representations of work in American literature. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations, leading up to a special weekend post on some of my favorite pop culture worker-characters!]

A quick but stunning literary representation of work today, Martín Espada’s magisterial poem “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper” (1993).

I love “Perfection” because it lays bare (literally as well as figuratively) the hidden labor that constructs and sustains our society, especially at its highest and most seemingly rarefied levels. I love it because it’s not a political treatise about those realities but a visceral engagement with them, through the lens of a single speaker’s journey, identity, and evolving perspective on himself and his worlds. And I love it because I’ve heard Espada read it, and can say (as proudly as possible) that I share the same public university system with this immensely talented poet.

Last literary work tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other representations of work you’d share?

July 7, 2021: Work in American Literature: Depression Novels

[Later this month I start teaching a new online class, a variation of my Ethnic American Lit course that will focus on representations of work in American literature. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations, leading up to a special weekend post on some of my favorite pop culture worker-characters!]

On two unique novels that together help us remember the Great Depression’s effects on America’s urban settings and workers.

To my mind, the most famous artistic works to emerge out of and chronicle the Great Depression are almost entirely focused on its impacts on rural American communities and lives: the Dust Bowl farmers of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and John Ford’s subsequent film version (1940); the sharecropping Southern farmers of James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941); the rural African American communities of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and even, if more symbolically and allegorically to be sure, the Kansas that Dorothy seeks to escape and then learns to value in (especially) the film version of The Wizard of Oz (1939). Even the most prominent voice in a musical soundtrack to the era, Woody Guthrie, focused much of his attention, as in “the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling” of “This Land is Your Land” (1940), on those kinds of rural settings.

I don’t begrudge any of those their spots in our national consciousness, and if anything I think that we could probably think more fully about most of them. But today I want to add two other late 1930s novels to the conversation, two books that, while entirely different in almost every way (from size, style, and structure to focus and themes), can combine to help us engage more fully with how both the decades leading up to the Depression and the era itself were also deeply felt in and connected to the nation’s urban centers and their working communities. Focusing on those preceding decades is John Dos Passos’ sprawling historical trilogy U.S.A. (1938; previously published as the individual novels The 42^nd Parallel [1930], 1919 [1932], and The Big Money [1936]), which narrates (in over 1300 pages) much of American history between 1900 and the Stock Market crash of 1929 through multiple stylistic lenses, including biographies of significant historical figures, “newsreel” collections of headlines for key events, “camera eye” portrayals of his own evolving identity, and the fictional narratives of a dozen representative characters (all of whose experiences unfold in major cities). Focusing on the Depression itself is Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1939), which tells the story (in about 200 pages) of one Italian American bricklayer (modeled on both Donato’s father and his own experiences in the profession from a very young age) whose struggle to provide for his family in 1930s New York ends tragically.

Again, two texts that are different in almost every way, but for both it is the cities—already home by the opening of the 20^th century to a huge range of ethnic, national, racial, and work and economic identities and communities—where both the Depression’s causes and its effects can be seen and narrated in all their scope and complexity. For at least the prior half-century numerous astute observers, from sociological reporters like Jacob Riis (in How the Other Half Lives [1890]) to social reformers like Jane Addams (as captured in her Twenty Years at Hull-House [1912]), had focused on America’s cities, and particularly the lives and communities of impoverished immigrant and ethnic city residents, as a key site in which to find, analyze, and attempt to strengthen the nation’s evolving and fragile social fabric. And while Dos Passos’ tone is largely cynical and Donato’s largely elegiac, and both books deeply biting in their portrayals of class and politics in America, their existence themselves serves precisely as an artistic attempt at such strengthening of our social fabric; both books, that is, demand that their audiences confront and attempt to understand the lives and experiences that they represent, and thus to recognize what has happened and is continuing to happen in the nation and most especially (in their lens) in its cities.

I don’t in any way want this to read like a blue-state/red-state, coasts vs. flyover kind of dichotomy—for lots of reasons, but mostly because, in this equation as in most every other one, it is in no way either-or. The Depression hit the Joads and the sharecroppers and the Janeys and Tea Cakes and the Auntie Ems just as hard as it did New Yorkers and Chicagoans and Pittsburghers and Angelinos. We should remember and read and engage with Dos Passos and Donato not in place of those other works, but alongside them, and in so doing, hopefully, come to a fuller and more layered sense of what the Depression was and meant, and how the era’s artists sought to capture and respond to those complex realities. Next literary work tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other representations of work you’d share?

July 6, 2021: Work in American Literature: Phelps’ “Tenth of January”

[Later this month I start teaching a new online class, a variation of my Ethnic American Lit course that will focus on representations of work in American literature. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations, leading up to a special weekend post on some of my favorite pop culture worker-characters!]

On a short story that combines local color and sentimental fiction—and becomes much more.

I’ve written two posts about one of my favorite 19^th century authors, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: this one on the overall arc and significance of her multi-faceted literary career; and this one on her best novel, the feminist, realist, and powerfully affecting The Story of Avis (1877). Throughout her career, Phelps wed sentimental writing (as in her spiritual Gates trilogy) to local color fiction (as in the New England regionalism of Avis), focusing consistently on the experiences of women within those different frames and settings; she also published a number of young adult and juvenile works, including the very popular Gypsy Brenton books (published when she was only in her early 20s). In the course of that long and successful career, she became one of the century’s best-selling novelists, inspired prominent subsequent writers like William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edith Wharton, and deserves to be far better remembered and more widely read in our own era.

Yet with all of that said, it’s quite possible that Phelps’ most interesting and important piece of writing was her first published work of fiction for adults: “The Tenth of January,” a short story published in the Atlantic Monthly’s March 1868 volume (when Phelps was only twenty-three years old). “Tenth” fictionalizes one of the worst industrial and workplace disasters in American history, the January 10^th, 1860 collapse of the Pemberton Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts. That famous and horrific historical event offered Phelps a perfect chance to combine her two most consistent literary genres in this debut short story, and she does so to great success—opening with an extended portrayal of this Massachusetts mill town and its unique culture and community (“it would be difficult to find Lawrence’s equal,” the narrator notes), and then gradually building a sentimental and highly emotional story about a particular young female worker (nearly all those killed in the collapse fit that description, with most of them recent immigrants), Del Ivory, whose tragic fate (along with those of many other characters, some only children) becomes intertwined with that of the mill.

Those elements alone, in the hands of a master like Phelps, would be enough to create a compelling and moving story out of this striking historical material. But in the voice of her narrator, at once a detached observer and a fiery critic, Phelps adds another complex and vital layer to her story. Consider these back to back moments in the story’s introductory section. First the narrator concludes a descriptive paragraph on Lawrence with these angry lines, “Of these ten thousand [workers] two thirds are girls: voluntary captives, indeed; but what is the practical difference? It is an old story—that of going to jail for want of bread.” And then she transitions into the body of her story with this elegiac paragraph: “My story is written as one sets a bit of marble to mark a mound. I linger over it as we linger beside the grave of one who sleeps well: half sadly, half gladly—more gladly than sadly—but hushed.” This narrative voice is not unlike that of another Atlantic Monthly story from earlier in the decade, Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861)—but by wedding this engaging narrator and her multi-faceted literary genres to a real and horrific historical event, Phelps add yet another layer of power and pathos to this unique short story.

Next literary work tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other representations of work you’d share?

July 5, 2021: Work in American Literature: Melville and the Lowell Offering

[Later this month I start teaching a new online class, a variation of my Ethnic American Lit course that will focus on representations of work in American literature. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations, leading up to a special weekend post on some of my favorite pop culture worker-characters!]

On two distinct but complementary ways to give literary voice to working women.

One of the most unique and effective American short stories has to be Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (originally published in Harper’s in 1855; Tartarus is a hellish underworld in Greek mythology). Melville’s story features two seemingly distinct and unconnected halves in which the unnamed first-person speaker visits, and describes at great length, the two titular communities: in the first half he attends a refined and luxurious dinner party in the London club of a group of wealthy and unmarried male lawyers; and in the second his business pursuits lead him to the hellish gorge that houses a paper mill and the community of pale and silent young women who work there. As my parallel summaries have probably already highlighted, the story’s overall structure, as well as a number of specific choices and phrases in each, brings these two disparate worlds together in very clear and provocative ways, forcing Melville’s readers to confront the realities of their new industrial age; such realities include not only the conditions and environments necessary to produce in bulk the items used by the London bachelors, but also the differences in class and gender and identity that accompany such distinct settings. It’s a great story, much more explicitly social than many of Melville’s works without sacrificing any of his stylistic strengths, and well worth a read.

In order to make his comparisons and contrasts work, though, Melville does have to render the mill’s working women overtly and fully silent; and while that makes for a compelling metaphor, it also elides one of the more interesting (if relatively brief) literary experiments in American history. In 1840, fifteen years before Melville published his story, Abel Charles Thomas, pastor of the First Univeralist (Unitarian) Church in Lowell, Massachusetts and a mentor to many of the young women who had come to work in Lowell’s textile mills, founded and began editing The Lowell Offering, a literary magazine consisting entirely of contributions (in a wide variety of genres) from mill workers. Although Thomas had a strong hand in the magazine’s first four issues (published between October 1840 and March 1841), not only as editor but in soliciting contributions from the improvement and reading circles that he organized and ran, by April 1841 it had begun to receive numerous unsolicited pieces (enough to require the monthly publication schedule that would continue from then on), and in 1842 Thomas turned over the editorship to two of the women themselves, Harriot Curtis and Harriet Farley; they served in that role until the magazine ceased publication in 1845 (not for lack of success, but for what Curtis and Farley called “reasons of a private nature … in which the public is not interested”), and Farley later collected some of the magazine’s best pieces in the book Shells from the Strand of the Sea of Genius (1847).

There are lots of such great pieces waiting to be discovered, both in the complete issues from 1840-1841 that are collected at this online database and in these two Google books versions of the Offering; as is often the case with literary magazines, it helps to read them in context and in connection to one another, to look through an issue or two and see the interconnected identities of the magazine and the mills begin to emerge. But it’s worth noting that the first piece in the first (October 1840) issue, “History of a Hemlock Broom: Written by Itself,” exemplifies many of the magazine’s great strengths. The piece is witty and touching, with the broom (speaking through its “amanuensis” Hannah because it “cannot hold a pen”) guiding us through its tumultuous life, from its “first distinct recollections” as “the lowest branch” of a tree through its service to multiple masters and mistresses (but especially the aforementioned and supportive Hannah) in a house down the hill to its final retirement in the backyard, with a “full prospect of [its] former companions on the hill beyond.” But it also engages, subtly but clearly, with the kinds of broad and significant issues of work and identity, of the ways in which we define ourselves and how those definitions evolve in relation to our personal and professional roles and the settings and controlling forces that influence them, that would be at the heart of the Offering throughout its run.

Life in the mills was indeed far from paradise, and the writers in the Offering didn’t hesitate to engage with the most dark and difficult sides to their world and experiences there. The fact that they did so through their impressive and eloquent voices makes their work, to my mind, less a contrast and more a complement to Melville’s story; together, these unique and rich American Renaissance texts can help reveal the new world of industrialization in all its complexity—and, for our 21^st century world of sweatshops and high-end retailers, migrant labor and billions in bonuses, its ongoing relevance. Next literary work tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other representations of work you’d share?

July 3-4, 2021: Of Thee I Sing and Patriotism in 2021

[Over the last few months, I’ve had the chance to talk about my new book in a number of settings, and as always every such talk has led to distinct and interesting follow-up questions and ideas. So this week I’ve reflected on those continuing conversations, leading up to this special July 4^th weekend post on debates over patriotism, history, and education in 2021!]

On education, history, and patriotism.

A few weeks back, I had the chance to chat (mine is Episode 3) with Kelly Therese on her excellent new Unsung History podcast. We mostly talked about the episode’s specific focus, the amazing and inspiring Susie King Taylor. But toward the end of the conversation, Kelly generously asked me to talk a bit about Of Thee I Sing, and I couldn’t help but start with the ongoing June (and very much still July) 2021 debates over whether and how to teach difficult American histories. The case I made there is similar to the one from this HNN piece of mine: that in our current debates, teaching history and teaching patriotism are too often framed as distinct and opposed emphases. The 1776 Commission Report articulated this black-and-white perspective succinctly: “Universities in the US are often today hotbeds of anti-Americanism…that generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country”; and instead the Commission sought to “restore patriotic education that teaches the truth about America.”

Obviously I understand where folks like those on the 1776 Commission are coming from in advancing this dichotomy: they exemplify mythic patriotism; and as I argue throughout the book, that form of patriotism features both an exclusionary vision of American history and a complementary narrative that anyone who disagrees with that vision is unpatriotic. But I’ll admit to being frustrated that so many critics and opponents of said mythic patriotism still uphold the dichotomy, just from the other side of the equation: that is, that for many scholars and educators (at least as they express their perspective on social media and in other public scholarly forums), teaching our hardest histories does indeed mean not teaching patriotism. This narrative equates patriotism with mythic patriotism, not only in its argument that America’s more difficult (and often excluded) histories are incommensurate with a patriotic perspective, but also and even more tellingly in its argument that to teach patriotism would mean to teach unquestioning obedience to the national mythos (which is a core element to mythic patriotism to be sure).

Just as mythic patriotism isn’t the only form of American patriotism, however, mythic patriotic education is far from the only way to link patriotism to historical education. As Mark Rice articulates so powerfully in this USIH blog post, it’s quite possible—although certainly not easy, but what important thing ever is?—to teach critical patriotism. Indeed, I would go further: teaching critical patriotism as part of American history (and literature, and studies) classrooms links one of the most important skills we seek to inculcate in our students (critical thinking) to an engagement with both the complex and difficult realities of American history and the (to my mind absolutely vital) sense that we are all part of this community and have a responsibility to help it move forward and live up to its ideals. Indeed indeed, I would go further still: teaching American history (and literature, and studies) as fully and thoughtfully as we can is one of the best ways to create a more collective and shared sense of critical patriotism, with equal emphasis on both words in that concept. The more I talk and think about this book, the more I feel certain that critical patriotism will be essential if we are to move closer to being a more perfect union—and that means linking, not separating, history and patriotism in our work as educators.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Ideas for other settings or audiences with whom I could share the book?

July 2, 2021: Talking Of Thee I Sing: What’s Next

[Over the last few months, I’ve had the chance to talk about my new book in a number of settings, and as always every such talk has led to distinct and interesting follow-up questions and ideas. So this week I’ll reflect on those continuing conversations, leading up to a special July 4^th weekend post on the state of patriotism in 2021!]

On a type of book talk I’m especially excited to add onto the schedule this Fall.

The topics of this week’s posts—bookstores, libraries, historic and cultural sites, and educational institutions—are all examples of settings and communities with which I’ll always be excited to share my ideas and voice (and to hear from in conversation, of course), and I’d love nominations for others where I could give talks (whether virtual or in-person) this Summer and Fall. I’d also love ideas for other podcasts with whom I could chat and websites for whom I could write, along the lines of those I highlight on this page and otherwise. I’m also a big fan of chatting with book and reading groups, adult learning programs, and, well, any and all other communities and conversations you could think of, so bring it all on, please!

But in this last post of the week’s series, I wanted to make an appeal for one particular such community with whom I’d be especially stoked to chat this Fall (and beyond): classes. Whether undergrad or grad, secondary/high school or even earlier, I’ve never had a chance to talk with a group of students and not come away feeling as inspired as it’s possible to feel by such conversations. So if you’re a teacher (or a student!), or if you know teachers (or students!), I’d really love to hear from you, whether here or by email (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu), to see if it might work for me to chat with a class. Thanks in advance, and hope to see you down the road!

Special weekend post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Ideas for other settings or audiences with whom I could share the book?

July 1, 2021: Talking Of Thee I Sing: Mass Historical Society

[Over the last few months, I’ve had the chance to talk about my new book in a number of settings, and as always every such talk has led to distinct and interesting follow-up questions and ideas. So this week I’ll reflect on those continuing conversations, leading up to a special July 4^th weekend post on the state of patriotism in 2021!]

On the inspiration for my book’s title.

As was the case with the Boston Athenaeum, I was highly disappointed to miss out on the chance for a second in-person talk at the Massachusetts Historical Society (for a recording of this second, virtual talk, see their YouTube link here!). But the wonderful MHS staff found ways to replicate a great deal of what makes talks at their institution so inspiring, including my favorite thing about my first talk there: the pre-talk cocktail hour featuring relevant items from their amazing collections. On the introductory/title slide that attendees of the virtual talk saw as they logged on, the MHS staff highlighted another such wonderful primary source: a portion of the original lyrics to “America,” the 1831 song that would become better known as “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” At the end of my book’s Introduction I wrote a few concluding paragraphs on that song and its contexts, which I’ll share here:

“Like many cultural works, the song “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” took a long and winding road to becoming the popular schoolchildren’s song we know today. The melody seems to have originated as an 18th century English hymn and subsequently evolved into that nation’s “God Save the King”; before the 18th century was out it had likewise become the basis for national anthems in a number of other European nations, including Denmark’s “A Song to be Sung by the Danish Subjects at the Fete of their King, to the Melody of the English Hymn” and Prussia’s “Hail to Thee in the Victor’s Wreath.” The melody also made its way to the American colonies, and at George Wash­ington’s first presidential inauguration (in New York City in 1789) he was greeted with a version with new lyrics composed for the occasion, such as “Joy to our native land!/Let every heart expand/For Washington’s at hand.” 

In 1831, the renowned Massachusetts organist and composer Lowell Mason worked with Samuel Francis Smith, a young man studying for the ministry at the Andover Theological Seminary, to compose the adaptation that became “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” That version, also known simply as “America,” was first performed by a children’s choir at the July 4th cel­ebrations at Boston’s historic Park Street Church, where Mason was organist and choirmaster. Smith’s lyrics feature the celebratory and mythic forms of patriotism as clearly as do Katharine Lee Bates’, as in the lines “Sweet land of liberty” and “Land of the pilgrims’ pride.” But his most interesting line is “Of thee I sing,” a self-referential acknowledgment not only of the song’s existence as such, but also and most importantly of the role of such shared songs, of cultural works and their collective performances, in constructing both patriotism and through it the nation itself.

But there have always been competing visions of those constructions and of “My Country.” In the same decade as that first 1831 performance of the song, Boston would also be the site for numerous moments and expressions of active and critical patriotism: the first issue of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator was published in the city on January 1st, 1831; on January 25th, 1834 Garrison published an editorial in that paper expressing his support for the Mashpee Revolt, the Massachusetts rebel­lion through which the Cape Cod Native American community of Mashpee resisted white settler aggression and convinced the state legislature to name Mashpee a self-governing district; and on January 26th, 1836, one of the key figures in that successful Mashpee uprising, the Native American min­ister, orator, and author William Apess, delivered his fiery “Eulogy on King Philip” in Boston’s Odeon lecture hall, making the case for the 17th century Wampanoag chief as a revolutionary American ancestor akin to and as de­serving of commemoration as George Washington.

All these figures and communities likewise sang America, exemplifying active and critical perspectives on the work still to be done if that nation was to become a genuine land of liberty. As in 1830s Boston, every setting and period in American history has been defined by the presence of and conflicts between celebratory, mythic, active, and critical patriotisms. The history of competing American patriotisms is in many ways the history of America itself, a legacy that echoes ever more clearly and crucially into our own mo­ment’s debates and our shared future.”

Hopes and plans for what’s next tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on this reflection? Ideas for other settings or audiences with whom I could share the book?