September 14, 2021: Domestic Terrorism: The Weathermen

[This past weekend marked the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, a terrorist attack that occurred on American soil and was perpetrated by attackers who had lived in the US for months if not longer. Whether and how it qualifies as domestic terrorism is a topic I’ll focus on in the weekend post, after AmericanStudying a handful of other domestic terrorist histories and contexts.]

[NB. This post originally appeared on the blog in the fall of 2019, which is why some of the dates are out of whack. But it’s too relevant to this week’s series not to include here.]

On the difficulty, and the importance, of writing about domestic terrorists with whom we agree.

I apologize for getting into serious inside baseball territory with the opening of this post, but I think it helps me introduce the central point I want to consider here. I’ve been writing this daily blog for nearly nine years now, and for much of that time I’ve been scheduling posts (and then weekly series when I shifted to that format) quite a while in advance. But I’m drafting this post only one week out, on Tuesday October 1^st, which I believe is the closest I’ve gotten to running out of scheduled posts in at least the last six years. And the reason isn’t just that I’ve been enjoying a sabbatical full of lots of time with my sons and the first book talks of a schedule full of them, although both those things are true and very nice indeed (I’ll have more to say about those ongoing talks in next week’s series). Nor is it that the absolutely insane news of the last couple weeks has distracted me and made it difficult to write, although that is unquestionably true and not nearly so nice (if long overdue and entirely warranted, as my recent blog post on threats to the Constitution made clear).

No, my delay in working on this post (it was at least three weeks between scheduling yesterday’s and finally starting to write today’s, to add one additional, telling inside blogging detail into the mix) has a lot to do with a fraught pair of interconnected facts: my perspective closely aligns with many of the positions held and advocated by the leftists who formed the Weather Underground; and yet it’s impossible to describe many of that group’s activities as anything other than domestic terrorism. That’s true of a good deal of what transpired in the course of the four days of 1969 protests, although those acts of vandalism and destruction could possibly be seen as aftereffects (or at least side effects) of the 1969 activities, rather than central elements of them. But as the Weathermen continued to develop as an organization over the subsequent eight years, they turned their attention more and more fully to overt acts of domestic terrorism, such as the May 1970 bombing of the National Guard Association building in Washington, DC, the June 1970 bombing of the New York City police headquarters, and the March 1971 bombing of the US Capitol building, among many other attacks. One can argue that many of their bombings were designed to avoid injuring people, but they often did so nonetheless, and in any case bombings of domestic targets are acts of domestic terrorism, full stop.

I don’t have any difficulty naming them as such, but in writing about the Weather Underground I do find myself in a somewhat similar predicament to the one I addressed in this post on Nat Turner’s slave revolt: the need to critique an act of domestic terrorism while recognizing that it served a cause with which I agree. I don’t mean in any way to critique histories like those of the Vietnam War and the military industrial complex and the Nixon Administration (all targets of the Weather Underground’s political protests and violence) with those of slavery; even the horrific Kent State shootings, which prompted the May 1970 National Guard building bombing, shouldn’t be equated to the horrors of slavery. But nevertheless, just as Turner and his fellow rebels committed their acts of violent terrorism in opposition to systemic wrongs and abuses, so too did the Weathermen oppose many systems and histories that I likewise would critique and hope to dismantle. Which means I have to condemn their acts of domestic terrorism (which I do) while at the same time recognizing the legitimacy of their perspective, a difficult balance which, among other things, can lead to some serious writer’s block.

Next domestic terrorists tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories of domestic terrorism you’d highlight?

September 13, 2021: Domestic Terrorism: The KKK

[This past weekend marked the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, a terrorist attack that occurred on American soil and was perpetrated by attackers who had lived in the US for months if not longer. Whether and how it qualifies as domestic terrorism is a topic I’ll focus on in the weekend post, after AmericanStudying a handful of other domestic terrorist histories and contexts.]

On two under-remembered stages to the early histories of our oldest domestic terrorist organization.

I could probably focus the first paragraph of every post on this blog on the books, articles, and work of other scholars that have informed my own thinking about that particular subject. I generally try at least to highlight them through hyperlinks, but sometimes I know the scholars in question themselves as well as their work, and know that they are equally awesome. In that case, and especially when they are women (whose work, as has been illustrated too often in recent years, is often particularly under-cited), I will try to dedicate some blog space to sharing those scholarly texts. So: if you want to learn about the Ku Klux Klan’s Reconstruction origins, check out Elaine Frantz Parsons’s Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (2015); and if you want to follow the Klan’s evolution into the early 20^th century, check out Kelly J. Baker’s Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (2011). Both those books expand greatly and in more far depth and analytical nuance on the histories and ideas about which I’ll write briefly in this post; for those in my last paragraph in particular, I also greatly look forward to Cynthia Lynn Lyerly’s forthcoming Thomas Dixon, Jr.: Apostle of Hate.

One of the histories that Parsons’s book helps us remember is just how contested and controversial the Klan was in its early years. As Parsons traced in this 2014 We’re History post (which was a partial excerpt from and certainly foreshadowed her book), in the late 1860s and early 1870s the Grant Administration and federal government conducted a series of investigations into the Klan, leading to famous Congressional hearings among many other political and legal responses. I can’t agree (and I don’t think Parsons would either, per the end of that We’re History piece) with Grant biographer Ron Chernow, however, when he writes that Grant and these federal inquiries helped destroy the Reconstruction-era Klan; as Parson notes, even those Klan members convicted of crimes as a result of these new laws were generally pardoned by Grant after the 1872 election. So better remembering these Reconstruction debates not only helps us recognize the conflicts over the Klan, but also offers a frustrating glimpse into how that domestic terrorist organization and its violent activities were normalized, even (perhaps especially) in precisely the same moments when it was being treated as the criminal enterprise it always was (and remains to this day).

As I argued in my own We’re History piece on the subject, and as Baker’s book details and (I’m quite sure) Lyerly’s book will as well, popular culture comprised one central vehicle through which that normalization of the Klan took place. One of the first such cultural normalizations was created as a direct response to the Congressional hearings themselves: Mississippi lawyer and white supremacist James D. Lynch’s epic poem Redpath, or, the Ku Klux Tribunal (1877), which depicts a fictional Northern political aide who journeys to the South to investigate the Klan and ends up converting to its cause based on what he finds there. Texts like Lynch’s poem helped create the conditions in which Thomas Dixon’s Klan trilogy could become bestselling “historical” novels, in which the film adaptation of those novels The Birth of a Nation could become one of the most influential American movies of all time, and in which Gone with the Wind (written by a woman, Margaret Mitchell, who would respond to Dixon’s praise of the novel by telling him that she was “practically raised on” his books) remains one of the most successful American novels. All those texts, most released during the years (1872-1915) when the KKK was officially not active, remind us that even a domestic terrorist mainstay like the Klan is not a given, that its arc and influence were constructed over time, and can, crucially, be engaged, challenged, and destroyed in our own era.

Next domestic terrorists tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories of domestic terrorism you’d highlight?

September 11-12, 2021: Tanya Roth’s Guest Post on “The Real Miss America”

[Tanya Roth is a writer, historian, and high school educator with whom I’ve been very fortunate to connect through the #twitterstorians community over the last few months. This Guest Post is an excerpt from her forthcoming book Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945-1980, which is due out September 30^th!]

[Ad from the National Archives, Record Group 330, stored in a Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS) member's folder.]

Excerpt from Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945-1980 by Tanya L. Roth

 

Chapter 2: The Real Miss America: Recruiting Womanpower 

 

Four years after the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act passed, someone in recruiting decided that the first all-out campaign for womanpower should take place with the 1952 Miss America pageant. It must have seemed like the perfect pairing: the pageant highlighted the best young American women from around the nation, perfectly poised, beautiful, talented, and educated. Recruiters dreamed of signing just these types of young ladies for service in the armed forces. Military publicity officers secured a presence for servicewomen throughout the pageant, ensuring visibility whenever possible. The goal was simple: get Americans to associate servicewomen with the excellent reputation Miss America contestants had at that time and to impart a sense of glamour into Americans’ ideas of women in uniform...

From the beginning...concerns about appearances framed woman power recruiting efforts. Recruiters followed the philosophy that familiarity and femininity would be the most practical and effective ways to entice women to military careers. Military service became advertised as an avenue by which women could become not just ideal American women, but respectable ladies. This approach helped make women’s service acceptable to Americans both inside and outside the armed forces. If military service— especially in wartime—could transform boys into men, then military service could also turn girls into proper ladies. Women belonged in national defense in part because military and government officials saw them as partners in service with men, doing things women did best and capitalizing on their identities as women to do so. In these regards, staging the women’s recruiting drive in conjunction with the 1952 Miss America pageant made sense. The pageant was about thirty years old, and community service was— and still is—an important element of holding the title “Miss America.”  During World War II, the crowned Miss Americas all performed war service activities such as visiting troops and selling war bonds, their version  of supporting national defense.⁵ Scholar Mary Anne Schofield argues that  during wartime, such efforts “supported the propaganda machine that said  that femininity and war work went together.” In the process, the pageant itself solidified the image of Miss America as “the ideal American woman.” By 1952, if military leaders wanted a venue that would showcase servicewomen as the very best of American womanhood and service, the Miss America pageant was the place to be.

[9/11 series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other pageant histories, stories, or contexts you’d share?]

September 10, 2021: PageantStudying: Santana Jayde Young Man Afraid of His Horses

[September 7-8 marks the 100^th anniversary of the first Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy histories and stories of pageants, leading up to a special Guest Post on a pageant story from a forthcoming book!]

[Most of my posts this week have been pretty negative, so I wanted to end on a more positive note, with this repeat of a 2016 post on a very inspiring pageant winner!]

On a young tribal emissary who embodies 21^st century communal activism.

Most everything I know about Santana Jayde Young Man Afraid of His Horses, who in late 2015 at the 30^th Annual Oglala Lakota Nation Wacipi (Pow Wow) was crowned Miss Oglala Lakota Nation 2015-2016, I learned from this article. I could paraphrase the article’s details and quotes in this paragraph, but instead I’ll ask you to check out that story about the amazing work and voice of this inspiring young activist, and then come back here when you’re done!

Welcome back! I’m not sure I can imagine a more fitting moniker than Santana’s Lakota name, When She Speaks They Listen. In the series of testimonials with which late 19^th century Paiute leader and activist Sarah Winnemucca concludes her autoethnographic book Life among the Piutes (1886), a friend of Winnemucca’s notes that “she deserves the attention of our best ears.” Indeed she did, and so too do Santana and her work, both to raise awareness of reservation issues such as domestic violence and teen suicide (among many others) and to “celebrate life,” deserve as wide a hearing and response as possible. To read the quotes of Santana’s in that article, to see the many layers to her community, tribal, and national activisms (while she’s attending college, serving as the president of the Oglala Lakota College Center, and preparing for law school applications), can’t help but inspire renewed commitment from all of us to do our part to better the communities and world we share.

None of us can do it alone, of course, and Santana’s story also illustrates how truly communal are these activist efforts. Of particular note is the article’s recounting of her visit to the innovative and successful Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where students from kindergarten through high school all study the Lakota language as a central part of their curriculum. The school’s Lakota language teacher, Waniya Locke, articulates succinctly the connections of language to identity and community: “I invited Miss Oglala Lakota Nation into my classroom to show my students that outside my classroom, people really do care about our language. She encouraged them to continue to speak and grow in the Lakota Language.” Genuine patriotism takes impressive individual voices and leaders like Santana to be sure, but it also takes generations and communities of activists and leaders, like those being educated at Red Cloud. There’s nothing more inspiring and significant, nor more American in the best sense, than that combination.

Guest Post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Pageant histories, stories, or contexts you’d share?

September 9, 2021: PageantStudying: Trump

[September 7-8 marks the 100^th anniversary of the first Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy histories and stories of pageants!]

On two uncomfortable realities that the Former Occupant forces us to confront.

One of my happier recent accomplishments is that I’ve managed to write more than 8 months’ worth of 2021 blog posts with very few mentions of the Orange Boil upon Satan’s Buttocks. While I’m breaking that trend a bit today, I don’t want to dwell on the Trumptastic details themselves any more than is necessary. So if you need a refresher on the deeply disturbing stories about Trump’s time as the owner of the Miss Universe pageant (across nearly two decades until he was forced to sell in 2015), here’s a link that covers many of those stories; then come on back for some broader and hopefully less Trump-centric contexts and takeaways.

Probably the most disturbing of those stories is Trump’s consistent references (confirmed by other pageant employees) to his going backstage to ogle (“inspect,” as he oh-so-cleverly put it) the contestants in various stages of undress. That would be disturbing no matter what, but it becomes significantly more so when we learn that many of those contestants were underage—as, of course, was that first 1921 Miss America about whom I wrote in Monday’s post, 16 year old Margaret Gorman. While as far as we know the Atlantic City businessmen who invented that 1921 pageant didn’t blatantly and purposefully walk in on Gorman and her peers while they were changing (although I’m honestly not sure if we would know if they had done so; we know about Trump’s behavior because he was crass enough to admit it and then it was confirmed by others, not because it was initially reported anywhere else), the entire premise of the pageant—and of every such pageant about which I’ve ever read—was to ogle these young women, to examine and judge their “beauty.” Worth noting that many of them, in the past and in the present, have been extremely young if not, indeed, legally underage.

That’s by far the grossest story from Trump’s Miss Universe days; but the story of how the 2013 Miss Universe pageant ended up hosted in Vladimir Putin’s Russia is in many ways just as disturbing. It’s of course disturbing for all that it meant about future candidate and President Trump’s ongoing relationship to Putin, the overt subject of that hyperlinked article. It’s certainly disturbing as a reflection of how many American businesses, businesspeople, and other power players have cozied up to Putin’s autocratic and murderous regime over the years. But in terms of this week’s topics, it’s also quite disturbing to realize how much pageants such as Miss Universe are bought and owned—not only by their literal owners/CEOs like Trump, but also by those who pay for the right to host the events. Which is to say, to follow up my prior paragraph, for the right to ogle these young women—quite possibly backstage (this was a Trump pageant, after all), but most definitely on stage and likely at multiple other events and moments throughout the pageant. As with so many societal ills, Trump’s version might be more blatantly gross, but it reflects broader and deeper realities to be sure.

Last PageantStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Pageant histories, stories, or contexts you’d share?

September 8, 2021: PageantStudying: American Pastoral

[September 7-8 marks the 100^th anniversary of the first Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy histories and stories of pageants!]

On a superficial but still strikingly symbolic fictional character.

I wrote about one central thread and theme in Philip Roth’s historical novel American Pastoral (1997) in this post, and in lieu of my opening paragraph here would ask you to check that one out if you would and then come on back here.

Welcome back! If the character of Merry Levov is one complex female protagonist of Roth’s novel, the Swede’s wife Dawn Dwyer Levov is another. As is so often (if not indeed always) the case in Roth’s works, these women are filtered through multiple male lenses: that of the Swede himself, the perspective character for the novel’s 3^rd-person section; and that of Nathan Zuckerman, the novelist-narrator for the framing 1^st-person section. And indeed Dawn, a former Miss New Jersey and Miss America contestant, is consistently portrayed through various superficial or physical elements that appeal in stereotypical but unquestionable ways to these male characters: her beauty; her allure to the Swede and his entire Jewish American community as a “shiksa” (a non-Jewish woman; “He’d done it,” Zuckerman writes of the moment when the community learns that the Swede had married a shiksa); her multiple plastic surgeries through which she attempts to maintain those elements over the years, dragging the Swede with her to exotic European clinics in the process; and her sex appeal, both in extended sex scenes with the Swede and then in (SPOILERS) the adulterous sex scene which comprises one of the novel’s final moments.

But while Dawn might not be successful as a three-dimensional character, she is nonetheless a strikingly successful representation of the novel’s historical, cultural, and national themes (on which I touched a bit in that prior post). The three generations of the Levov family reflect the myths and realities of the American Dream (and its flipside, what Zuckerman calls the “American berserk”), both for immigrant and ethnic communities and for all Americans. The most overt symbolic representation of those themes is the Swede and Dawn’s home in Old Rimrock, the fictional New Jersey community (with a history dating back to the Revolution) where they move to raise their all-American (in every sense) daughter Merry. But I would argue that it’s easy and wrong to overlook Dawn’s starting point as a Miss America contestant, not only in terms of what she represents to the Swede and his community, but also and even more importantly in terms of that event as a goal for Dawn herself. Indeed, that early flashback section of the novel is the place where Dawn’s character is most fully developed, and where we get a sense of what “Miss America” means for young Dawn Dwyer and her family and community, at least as much as it does for young Seymour Levov and his.  

Next PageantStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Pageant histories, stories, or contexts you’d share?

September 7, 2021: PageantStudying: Vanessa Williams

[September 7-8 marks the 100^th anniversary of the first Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy histories and stories of pageants!]

On what’s deeply frustrating about a 1980s scandal, and how its subject transcended it nonetheless.

As all of this week’s posts will no doubt reveal, I have a number of issues with both beauty pageants in general and the Miss America pageant in particular. But with that said, there’s no denying the fact that 1984 Miss America winner Vanessa Williams comprised a striking and inspiring story. The descendant of one of the first African American state legislators in post-Civil War Tennessee (William A. Feilds), and the daughter of two elementary school music teachers (Helen Tinch and Milton Augustine Williams Jr.), Williams’ March 1963 birth announcement actually read “Here she is: Miss America.” When she won the September 1983 pageant as Miss New York (making her the 1984 Miss America, as the reign lasts for a full year), fulfilling that prescient prediction and bringing all that history and heritage to the stage with her, she became the first African American Miss America, a long-overdue and important step toward diversifying what had for too long been a profoundly white event.

Which makes the following year’s scandal all the more frustrating. In September 1984 (just a few weeks before Williams’ reign would have concluded at the next pageant) Penthouse magazine acquired private nude photos that a young Williams had taken and chose to publish them in the September issue, and Williams was pressured by the pageant organization to relinquish her title to the runner-up, Miss New Jersey Suzette Charles. This “scandal” was frustrating in part because of the false dichotomy between amateur and professional contestants about which I wrote in yesterday’s post—if we acknowledged that all contestants are in one way or another already professional models, I believe the photos would have been far less controversial. But it’s especially frustrating because of the stunning hypocrisy: the entire ethos of the Miss America pageant (like all beauty pageants) is to ogle the contestants, to treat them as objects to be scrutinized in every conceivable way (including while wearing very little in the swimsuit portion); so I have to think that the real problem with Williams’ photos was that they weren’t part of the pageant, not able to be controlled within that objectifying environment.

The Miss America folks seem to have belatedly recognized that fact as well, and at the September 2015 pageant CEO Sam Haskell offered an overdue public apology to both Williams and her mother. But in truth, it was all that Williams had done and accomplished over those intervening 32 years that truly reflected how far beyond Miss America she had gone (and perhaps had always been): eight studio albums to date that have included a #1 hit (“Save the Best for Last”) and multiple Grammy nominations; performances in more than 25 films, with NAACP and Harlem Film Festival awards for two of them (1997’s Soul Food and 2007’s My Brother); three Primetime Emmy nominations and one win for her role on Ugly Betty, one of countless TV shows of which she’s been part; a Tony nomination for her performance in a 2002 revival of Into the Woods; a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; and all sorts of work as an entrepreneur, spokesperson, and philanthropist. If the Miss America pageant truly seeks to celebrate the most impressive and inspiring American women, there couldn’t possibly be a more deserving winner than Vanessa Williams; and if, as the scandal indicates, the pageant has a far too narrow and conservative view of that identity, then Williams makes plain how silly and superficial that perspective is.

Next PageantStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Pageant histories, stories, or contexts you’d share?