June 8, 2022: Judy Garland Studying: A Star is Born

[June 10^th would have been Judy Garland’s 100^th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Garland’s performances, leading up to a weekend post on LGBTQ icons.]

On two things about Garland’s profound talents that her version of a much-told and -retold story helps us appreciate.

I think this all probably became common knowledge around the release of the much-acclaimed and hugely successful 2018 version, but maybe not; I know this AmericanFilmStudier wasn’t particularly aware of at least one of the films in question until researching this post. So first things first: there have been four total films entitled A Star is Born. The first was released in 1937 and starred Janet Gaynor and Fredric March; the third from 1976 starred Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson; and the fourth, that 2018 version, starred Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper (who also made his directorial debut). And in between, after a four-year hiatus from films, Judy Garland triumphantly returned in 1954’s A Star is Born, starring alongside James Mason and garnering a well-deserved Academy Award nomination (although she was robbed of the award itself, at least if you ask Groucho Marx) for her stunning, multi-layered performance as Esther Blodgett.

That nomination and performance alike can help us better remember and appreciate Garland’s talents as an actress, and I don’t just mean as a child star. Perhaps because she’s best known in terms of film performances for The Wizard of Oz (released when she was 17), and maybe second-best for Meet Me in St. Louis (released when she was 22), it seems to me that Garland is still often thought of as a youthful talent; that’s the case even when we don’t consider the Vaudeville career that she launched alongside her two older sisters when she was only 6, which of course only adds to the child star aura when we do add it into the story. She was indeed precociously talented from a young age, but those talents only continued to grow and deepen for the rest of her career, and no single performance better reflects her maturation as an actress than does A Star is Born (released when she was 32). Esther is a character who embodies just about every possible emotion across this one story, often pitched to the extremes that can very easily slide into full-on melodrama, and Garland keeps her quite powerfully and affectingly human throughout.

Esther is also a musical performer, however—a singer and dancer as well as an actress. That wasn’t the case with Janet Gaynor’s Esther from the 1937 film (she’s only an actress), so this was a change for Garland’s version of the character and story (and one that was of course kept for Streisand’s and Gaga’s subsequent takes). Because of how those multiple remakes have unfolded, it might seem like a no-brainer to make the character this kind of triple threat; but in truth, asking Garland to sing and perform so consistently throughout Star, all while giving that intensely powerful acting performance, was to ask quite a lot. And she did ever respond—Time magazine called the film “just about the greatest one-woman show in modern movie history,” and Newsweek wrote that its “best classified as a thrilling personal triumph for Judy Garland…In more ways than one, the picture is hers.” Few American performers have been as truly multi-talented as Judy Garland, and perhaps no work better showcases that combination than does A Star is Born.

Next Garland performance tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Garland works or moments you’d highlight?

June 7, 2022: Judy Garland Studying: Meet Me in St. Louis

[June 10^th would have been Judy Garland’s 100^th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Garland’s performances, leading up to a weekend post on LGBTQ icons.]

On three ways to analyze Garland’s next blockbuster film after The Wizard of Oz (although she made like 8 in between, this being Hollywood in the 1940s).

As I highlighted in this post on the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis (also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition), the hit song “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” was originally written in that historical moment and performed by a number of contemporary artists (perhaps the first recorded version being Billy Murray’s). That means that Judy Garland’s 1944 version of the song (which dropped the second “Louis” from the title) wasn’t just a cover, but could also be seen as a kind of musical historical fiction, commenting on both a song and a historical event and context that were four decades past by that time. The same can be said of the entire 1944 film, of course—while it feels very much like a contemporary musical film, it is instead historical fiction, a representation and reframing of a significant historical event from that 1940s perspective. To name just one example: the trolley on which the film’s most famous song focuses was itself a historic relic, far more central to St. Louis transportation and city life in 1904 than by 1944.

Like most cultural works, however, Meet Me in St. Louis combines multiple genres, and despite starting and ending with sequences set in the summertime (first in Summer 1903 and then at the World’s Fair in Summer 1904), the film can also accurately be described as a Christmas movie. That’s true not only because the central and longest section is set at that holiday, but because the story features the kinds of holiday humor, family melodrama, and “magic of the season” miraculous reversals that have become such staples of that film subgenre. While 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life can be seen as inaugurating the post-war explosion of Christmas films, and certainly to my mind influenced the genre more than any other single work then or since, that film was at best a middling box office success; whereas Meet Me in St. Louis was the second-highest grossing film of 1944 and MGM’s most successful musical of the entire decade. At the very least, Garland’s Christmas musical smash has to be in the conversation as well, and only Clarence Oddbody knows what the genre would look like if it didn’t exist.

If 1903-04 St. Louis and Christmas are significant parts of what’s on screen in the film, the offscreen origin points represent one additional layer to AmericanStudying Meet Me in St. Louis. The film is an adaptation of a series of short stories by Sally Benson, originally published in a 1941-42 New Yorker series titled “5135 Kensington” and then expanded for the short story cycle Meet Me in St. Louis (1942, and named that because the film was already in the early stages of production). Benson, a St. Louis native who was 6-7 during the World’s Fair and who consistently wrote about life in that city, had a surprisingly long and influential career, not only as a writers of fiction but as a screenwriter; while her early work on Meet Me in St. Louis did not end up being part of the final screenplay (and so went uncredited), she would go on to write such films as Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Anna and the King of Siam (1946, for which her screenplay was Oscar-nominated), and Elvis’ Viva Las Vegas (1964) among many others. Given how much Meet Me focuses on precocious and talented young women, not at all limited to Garland’s Esther, it’d be a shame not to include its author in the mix.

Next Garland performance tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Garland works or moments you’d highlight?

June 6, 2022: Judy Garland Studying: The Wizard of Oz

[June 10^th would have been Judy Garland’s 100^th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Garland’s performances, leading up to a weekend post on LGBTQ icons.]

On two ways to analyze Garland’s most iconic performance.

I AmericanStudied a couple layers to The Wizard of Oz (1939) in this post last year, and since my thoughts there are very much related to what I’ll say in this post, I’ll stop this first paragraph here and ask you to check that one out and come on back.

Welcome back! Oz wasn’t Garland’s debut feature film performance (that seems to have been 1936’s Pigskin Parade), but she was still only 17 when it came out, and the film unquestionably relies on her freshness, her striking sense of youth and innocence (which, to be clear, are part of a performance, as she had been acting since she was six years old), for much of its characterization of Dorothy. Indeed, I would go further, and say that the film’s ultimate emphasis on and preference for that Kansas childhood home (despite its Dust Bowl dreariness) depends on a sense that Dorothy still belongs there, rather than in the infinitely more colorful (in every sense) Oz. As I wrote in that prior post, I’m far from convinced of any part of that concluding emphasis—but if anyone alive could have sold “There’s no place like home” convincingly for even such a home as this one, it was teenage Judy Garland (although she sure sold the desire for something and somewhere else captured by “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” just as successfully!).

Yet the ending is never the only part of a film or story, of course, and I would argue that the depiction of Oz offers a different way to think about Dorothy and Garland’s performance. As Gregory Maguire’s Wicked has helped us recognize, the leadership of Oz is powerfully female (despite the pretend power of the film’s title character), a world where Good and Bad Witches vie for control (and are, perhaps, more similar than that dichotomy would suggest). It is those female leaders who contribute to every part of Dorothy’s story in Oz, becoming along the way striking models of adult womanhood at its most helpful and destructive. And while in some ways Dorothy seems to be less powerful (it is her accidental murder of one of them that sets off her Oz saga, for example), ultimately it is precisely Dorothy who through her strength and choices triumphs over the Bad Witch, lives up to the legacy of the Good, and unmasks the fraud of a male Wizard in the process. She may return home after that, but I believe it’s fair to say she does so as a significantly more mature person, well on her way to Good Witch status—and Garland captures every layer to that evolving character.

Next Garland performance tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Garland works or moments you’d highlight?

June 4-5, 2022: A Memorial Day Tribute

On why the holiday’s contemporary meaning also has profound AmericanStudies significance.

Throughout this past week’s series, I’ve made the case for how and why we should better remember the Decoration Day origins of our modern Memorial Day, as well as the overtly white supremacist reasons for the shift from one holiday and frame to the other in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. As is the case with so many aspects of 21^st century America, we can’t understand where we are without a better sense of where we’ve been—and that remains true, if it’s not indeed especially true, when it comes to seemingly innocuous societal elements like a shared and celebratory national holiday. As I said back in Monday’s post, however, none of that means that I don’t recognize and agree with that contemporary meaning for the holiday, the emphasis on commemorating and celebrating those who have fallen in American wars and conflicts over the centuries.

Moreover, that modern Memorial Day meaning can in and of itself offer a profound challenge and alternative to white supremacist histories and visions of America. In this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, I made the case for the WWII soldiers of color—Japanese American, African American, and Native American soldiers and units (in the still-segregated armed forces) in particular—whose stories and sacrifices truly exemplify the American contribution to that crucial conflict. The same is true for every war and conflict in which the United States has been involved: Americans and communities of color have participated, have served and sacrificed, in numbers that far outstrip their demographics within the national population at the time. The nearly 180,000 African Americans who served in the Civil War’s United States Colored Troops units, and most especially the 20% of those soldiers who were killed in action (a number 35% higher than the equivalent rate for white Union troops), offer only a particularly striking illustration of this longstanding trend.

After one of my book talks for We the People a couple years back, an audience member asked why so many of my examples of an inclusive America were related to wars and military service. I took the point to heart, and in Of Thee I Sing I tried not to focus too much on military service for my examples of active and critical patriotism. War, even in the most idealized versions, certainly features and often foregrounds horrors that can’t be elided or minimized. But there’s no doubt that military service also represents one of the most overt and consistent forms of civic participation, an expression of an individual’s presence in and commitment to the national community. It’s thus pretty damn telling that Americans of color have so consistently, so centrally, and so inspiringly served and sacrificed for a nation that too often has been dominated by white supremacist narratives and ideologies that would seek to exclude those Americans from the national community. That’s a history worth commemorating and celebrating every day—and doubly so on Memorial Day.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Memorial Day tributes or thoughts you’d add?

June 3, 2022: Decoration Day Histories: So What?

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]

On three ways to argue for remembering Decoration Day as well as Memorial Day.

If someone (like, I dunno, an imaginary voice in my head to prompt this post…) were to ask me why we should better remember the histories I’ve traced in this week’s posts—were, that is, to respond with the “So what?” of today’s title—my first answer would be simple: because they happened. There are many things about history of which we can’t be sure, nuances or details that will always remain uncertain or in dispute. But there are many others that are in fact quite clear, and we just don’t remember them clearly: and the origins and initial meanings of Decoration Day are just such clear historical facts. Indeed, so clear were those Decoration Day starting points that most Southern states chose not to recognize the holiday at all in its early years. I can’t quite imagine a good-faith argument for not better remembering clear historical facts (especially when they’re as relevant as the origins of a holiday are on that holiday!), and I certainly don’t have any interest in engaging with such an argument.

But there are also other, broader arguments for better remembering these histories. For one thing, the changes in the meanings and commemorations of Decoration Day, and then the gradual shift to Memorial Day, offer a potent illustration of the longstanding role and power of white supremacist perspectives (not necessarily in the most discriminatory or violent senses of the concept, but rather as captured by that Nation editorial’s point about the negro “disappearing from the field of national politics”) in shaping our national narratives, histories, and collective memories. In much of my teaching, writing, and work over the last decade I’ve argued for what I called a more inclusive vs. a more exclusive version of American history, one that overtly pushes back on those kinds of narrow, exclusionary, white supremacist historical narratives in favor of a broader and (to my mind) far more accurate sense of all the American communities that have contributed to and been part of our identity and story. Remembering Decoration Day as well as Memorial Day would represent precisely such an inclusive rather than more exclusive version of American history.

There’s also another way to think about and frame that argument. Throughout the last few years, conservatives have argued that the new Common Core and AP US History standards portray and teach a “negative” vision of American history, rather than the celebratory one for which these commentators argue instead (we saw the same argument made at length in the 1776 Commission report). As so many historians and scholars have noted in response, these arguments are at best oversimplified, at worst blatantly inaccurate. But it is fair to say that better remembering painful histories such as those of slavery, segregation, and lynching can be a difficult process, especially if we seek to make them more central to our collective national memories. So the more we can find inspiring moments and histories, voices and perspectives, that connect both to those painful histories and to more ideal visions of American identity and community, the more likely it is (I believe) that we will remember them. And I know of few American histories more inspiring than that of Decoration Day: its origins and purposes, its advocates like Frederick Douglass, and its strongest enduring meaning for the African American community—and, I would argue, for all of us.

Special Memorial Day tribute post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

June 2, 2022: Decoration Day Histories: “Rodman the Keeper”

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]

On the text that helps us remember a community for whom Decoration Day’s meanings didn’t shift.

In Monday’s post, I highlighted a brief but important scene in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short story “Rodman the Keeper” (1880). John Rodman, Woolson’s protagonist, is a (Union) Civil War veteran who has taken a job overseeing a Union cemetery in the South; and in this brief but important scene, he observes a group of African Americans (likely former slaves) commemorate Decoration Day by leaving tributes to those fallen Union soldiers. Woolson’s narrator describes the event in evocative but somewhat patronizing terms: “They knew dimly that the men who lay beneath those mounds had done something wonderful for them and for their children; and so they came bringing their blossoms, with little intelligence but with much love.” But she gives the last word in this striking scene to one of the celebrants himself: “we’s kep’ de day now two years, sah, befo’ you came, sah, an we’s teachin’ de chil’en to keep it, sah.”

“Rodman” is set sometime during Reconstruction—perhaps in 1870 specifically, since the first Decoration Day was celebrated in 1868 and the community has been keeping the day for two years—and, as I noted in yesterday’s post, by the 1876 end of that historical period the meaning of Decoration Day on the national level had begun to shift dramatically. But as historian David Blight has frequently noted, such as in the piece hyperlinked in my intro section above and as quoted in this article on Blight’s magisterial book Race and Reunion (2002), the holiday always had a different meaning for African Americans than for other American communities, and that meaning continued to resonate for that community through those broader national shifts. Indeed, it’s possible to argue that as the national meaning shifted away from the kinds of remembrance for which Frederick Douglass argued in his 1871 speech, it became that much more necessary and vital for African Americans to practice that form of critical commemoration (one, to correct Woolson’s well-intended but patronizing description, that included just as much intelligence as love).

In an April 1877 editorial reflecting on the end of Reconstruction, the Nation magazine predicted happily that one effect of that shift would be that “the negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.” Besides representing one of the lowest points in that periodical’s long history, the editorial quite clearly illustrates why the post-Reconstruction national meaning of Decoration Day seems to have won out over the African American one (a shift that culminated, it could be argued, in the change of name to Memorial Day, which began being used as an alternative as early as 1882): because prominent, often white supremacist national voices wanted it to be so. Which is to say, it wasn’t inevitable that the shift would occur or the new meaning would win out—and while we can’t change what happened in our history, we nonetheless can (as I’ll argue at greater length tomorrow) push back and remember the original and, for the African American community, ongoing meaning of Decoration Day.

Last Decoration Day history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

June 1, 2022: Decoration Day Histories: Roger Pryor

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]

On the invitation and speech that mark two shifts in American attitudes.

In May 1876, New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music invited Confederate veteran, lawyer, and Democratic politician Roger A. Pryor to deliver its annual Decoration Day address. As Pryor noted in his remarks, the invitation was most definitely an “overture of reconciliation,” one that I would pair with the choice (earlier that same month) of Confederate veteran and poet Sidney Lanier to write and deliver the opening Cantata at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Indeed, reunion and reconciliation were very much the themes of 1876, threads that culminated in the contested presidential election and the end of Federal Reconstruction that immediately followed it (and perhaps, although historians have different perspectives on this point, stemmed from that election’s controversial results). In any case, this was a year in which the overtures of reconciliation were consistently heard, and we could locate Pryor’s address among the rest.

Yet the remarks that Pryor delivered in his Decoration Day speech could not be accurately described as reconciliatory—unless we shift the meaning to “trying to reconcile his Northern audiences with his Confederate perspective on the war, its causes and effects, and both regions.” Pryor was still waiting, he argued, for “an impartial history” to be told, one that more accurately depicted both “the cause of secession” and Civil War and the subsequent, “dismal period” of Reconstruction. While he could not by any measure be categorized as impartial, he nonetheless attempted to offer his own version of those histories and issues throughout the speech—one designed explicitly, I would argue, to convert his Northern audience to that version of both past and present. Indeed, as I argue at length in my first book, narratives of reunion and reconciliation were quickly supplanted in this period by ones of conversion, attempts—much of the time, as Reconstruction lawyer and novelist Albion Tourgée noted in an 1888 article, very successful attempts at that—to convert the North and the nation as a whole to this pro-Southern standpoint.

In my book’s analysis I argued for a chronological shift: that reunion/reconciliation was a first national stage in this period, and conversion a second. But Pryor’s Decoration Day speech reflects how the two attitudes could go hand-in-hand: the Northern invitation to Pryor could reflect, as he noted, that attitude of reunion on the part of Northern leaders; and Pryor’s remarks and their effects (which we cannot know for certain in this individual case, but which were, as Tourgée noted, quite clear in the nation as a whole) could both comprise and contribute to the attitudes of conversion to the Southern perspective. And in any case, it’s important to add that both reconciliation and conversion differ dramatically from the original purpose of Decoration Day, as delineated so bluntly and powerfully by Frederick Douglass in his 1871 speech: remembrance, of the Northern soldiers who died in the war and of the cause for which they did so. By 1876, it seems clear, that purpose was shifting, toward a combination of amnesia and propaganda, of forgetting the war’s realities and remembering a propagandistic version of them created by voices like Pryor’s.

Next Decoration Day history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?