October 19, 2023: Basketball Stories: The Harlem Globetrotters

[With a new NBA season upon us, a series AmericanStudying some of basketball’s many interesting figures, stories, and debates. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the bball stories, histories, debates, and contexts you’d highlight—share ‘em in comments or by email, please!]

I couldn’t share a BasketballStudying series and not include my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column from his past March on the Harlem Globetrotters, a legendary team that featured one of my week’s subjects (Wilt Chamberlain) but also and especially connect to so much of 20^th century American history. Check out that column if you would, and share any responses, here or by email, for the weekend post!

Last bball story tomorrow,

Ben

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

October 18, 2023: Basketball Stories: Magic

[With a new NBA season upon us, a series AmericanStudying some of basketball’s many interesting figures, stories, and debates. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the bball stories, histories, debates, and contexts you’d highlight—share ‘em in comments or by email, please!]

On genuine low and high points for the legendary Lakers star, and what they both exemplify.

I’ve written before, in this post as well as in the chapter on AIDS epidemic histories and literature in my fourth book, that Magic Johnson’s 1991 announcement of his HIV-positive status marked a pivotal turning point in public conversations about the disease. I certainly believe that’s the case (and am of course not alone in arguing the point), but at the same time it’d be important not to let a desire to consider the historical big picture lead us to skip too quickly past what the moment meant for Johnson and his family. Even if we leave aside the moment’s personal (such as Johnson’s subsequent confessions of serial infidelity) and professional (his immediate, although not permanent, departure from the NBA) ramifications for Johnson, his wife Cookie, and their young family, in 1991 HIV and AIDS were still (and understandably, given the statistics) perceived as death sentences. While Johnson has been able to battle the disease quite successfully (it seems) for the three decades since his announcement, that subsequent history shouldn’t cloud our perspective on what his diagnosis and situation meant, for him and everyone around him, in 1991. It was as painful and frightening a moment as any faced by an American athlete or celebrity in the era.

While Johnson’s battle against that HIV diagnosis has continued for these 30 subsequent years, his moves forward from that moment and toward another career high point began much more rapidly than that. In 1994, less than three years after his announcement, Johnson and his Johnson Development Corporation announced their plan for Magic Johnson Theatres, a line of movie theaters that would open in and provide entertainment options, as well as jobs and revitalization, for urban communities. The first such theater, the Magic Johnson Crenshaw 15, opened in South Central Los Angeles in 1995; a second, the AMC Magic Johnson Harlem 9, opened in New York in 2000, and more followed in Cleveland, Atlanta, and other cities. While Johnson’s achievements will always be defined first by his basketball stardom and successes, it’s fair to say that on the court he was one of a number of great players, present and past (if a unique one to be sure)—whereas his theaters represent a more distinctive and singular vision and achievement, within their communities and in American business overall. Although many of the theaters have changed ownership in the decades since, they established a new model for both locations and styles of movie theaters (and other urban developments)—and in any case, as with Johnson’s HIV announcement, subsequent events shouldn’t elide what this moment in Johnson’s life and career meant at the time.

So for Johnson, these two moments and stories reflect contrasting yet nearly concurrent low and high points, a particularly striking spectrum in a life that’s been consistently mercurial. If we take a step back and examine them in relationship to the African American community, however, I would argue that they together represent a period of extreme social and cultural shifts on both destructive and productive levels. Johnson’s theaters offer one illustration among many—alongside films like Boyz in the Hood (1991), New Jack City (1991), and Menace 2 Society (1993) and the explosion in popularity of gangsta rap, among other examples—of how African American urban communities were becoming central to American popular culture in the 1990s. Yet at the same time, such communities were facing significant new threats, from the war on drugs and the rise of mass incarceration to, yes, the AIDS epidemic; while the disease was largely associated with gay communities at the time of Johnson’s announcement, by the end of the 90s it would be just as fully linked to impoverished, and often African American, inner city communities. While Johnson’s personal battle with HIV certainly differs from that communal epidemic, the presence in his life and career of both that battle and an economic and cultural transformation of urban spaces reflects a similar spectrum of danger and possibility for the African American community in this same period.

Next bball story tomorrow,

Ben

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

October 17, 2023: Basketball Stories: Chamberlain and Russell

[With a new NBA season upon us, a series AmericanStudying some of basketball’s many interesting figures, stories, and debates. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the bball stories, histories, debates, and contexts you’d highlight—share ‘em in comments or by email, please!]

On a clear distinction between two iconic greats—and why it’s not quite so clear as that.

Between 1956 (when Bill Russell was drafted by the Boston Celtics; Wilt Chamberlain was officially drafted by the Philadelphia Warriors three years later) and 1973 (when Chamberlain finished his last season with the Los Angeles Lakers; Russell had ended his playing career with the Celtics four years earlier), the National Basketball Association might as well have been renamed the Russell-Chamberlain Association. Russell and the Celtics won 11 NBA titles in those 18 years (1957, 1959-66, and 1968-69), while Chamberlain and his teams won 2 (with the Philadelphia 76ers in 1967 and the Lakers in 1972). The discrepancy between those two championship totals, and the fact that Russell’s teams often beat Chamberlain’s in the playoffs en route to their titles (the Celtics were 7-1 in playoff series against Chamberlain teams), has led many NBA fans and basketball pundits to opine that Russell clearly got the best of this truly unique rivalry. But while such debates are fun for fans and historians alike, the truth is that these are two of the all-time great NBA players, and there must be room in any account of the sport for acknowledging and engaging with both men’s achievements and successes.

Those on-court achievements are the most important part of Russell and Chamberlain’s careers and legacies—but if we turn our attention to their lives and personalities off the court, it would be difficult to imagine a more contrasting pair. Russell was (and has largely remained in the decades since his retirement) notoriously prickly and private, not only with the media but with fans and the public more generally, as illustrated (if in a particularly divisive way) by his description of Boston as a “flea market of racism” and his initial desire to have his jersey retired in an empty Boston Garden. Chamberlain was (and largely remained until his 1999 death) famously gregarious and social, as exemplified (if in a particularly controversial way) by his claim (in his 1991 autobiography A View from Above) that he had slept with roughly 20,000 women in his life. Those differences might help explain why Chamberlain only coached for a year (with the San Diego Conquistadors of the American Basketball Association), while Russell not only coached the Celtics for the final four years of his playing career (becoming one of the first African American coaches in professional sports in the process), but went on to coach two other teams in the next two decades (the Seattle Supersonics in the mid-1970s and the Sacramento Kings in the late 1980s).

Yet I would argue that those seemingly divergent details and lives also reveal a similar influence and factor for both men. In the interview at that last hyperlink, Russell argues that his time as the Celtics’ player-coach had nothing to do with race or racial progress; yet as his comments on Boston and its fans reflect, Russell has consistently become—whatever his own overall goals—a lightning rod of racial attitudes and debates in both the city and the sport. For his side, Chamberlain denounced the Black Panthers and openly supported Richard Nixon in both 1968 and 1972, separating himself very distinctly from African American social movements of the era; yet from his college days at the University of Kansas on through every subsequent stage of his career and life, Chamberlain both experienced direct instances of racism and was defined as a stereotypical black man (never more so than in the aftermath of his sexual claims). Neither of these two titans of the sport can or should be reduced to his race, but neither is it possible to separate them from that aspect of their identity, even when each has in some ways expressed a desire for such separation. Indeed, Russell and Chamberlain’s careers marked a significant step in the NBA’s continued evolution toward being the most centrally African American sports league and community in America—one more reason to remember their iconic presences and legacies.

Next bball story tomorrow,

Ben

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

October 16, 2023: Basketball Stories: James Naismith

[With a new NBA season upon us, a series AmericanStudying some of basketball’s many interesting figures, stories, and debates. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the bball stories, histories, debates, and contexts you’d highlight—share ‘em in comments or by email, please!]

Three interesting contexts for the sport’s inventor and its subsequent popularization.

1)      Canadian Origins: Naismith himself was Canadian: born in Ontario to Scottish immigrant parents, he attended (and starred in multiple sports) at Montreal’s McGill University, where he subsequently became the first director of athletics before leaving to become a physical education teacher at the Springfield (MA) YMCA International Training School (later Springfield College). That biography itself illustrates the interconnected identities of Canada and the U.S., in an era when the border was unpatrolled and movement between the two nations was particularly easy and frequent. But Naismith’s first ideas for “Basket Ball” likewise reflect a Canadian influence: the game of “duck on the rock,” which the young Naismith had played in the fields of Ontario and which taught him the value of arcing or lobbing rather than straight throws and directly inspired key aspects of basketball. Thanks, Canada!

2)      Fun at the Y-M-C-A: It was while teaching PE at that Springfield YMCA that Naismith invented basketball; he was tasked by the school’s PE director, the pioneering recreation advocate Dr. Luther Gulick, with coming up with a game that would keep the school’s rowdy young men active during the New England winters (and one that would both be fair and not too physically rough), and in December 1891 Naismith debuted “Basket Ball.” That origin thus reflects two core elements of the YMCA: its Christian emphasis on fairness and its attempt to harness the energies of young men. And it was through the YMCA that the sport truly began to spread: even when Naismith moved to the University of Kansas in 1898 and founded that institution’s men’s basketball program, many of their games were against regional YMCA teams (as most colleges did not yet offer basketball). We often focus on collegiate and professional athletics to trace the history of sports in America, but basketball’s early history reminds us of the equally vital role of community and recreational athletics in that story.

3)      A Coaching Tree: Although Naismith frequently argued that “you don’t coach basketball; you just play it,” he nonetheless originated a chain of coaches that includes some of the sport’s most legendary figures: he instructed his successor at Kansas, Forrest “Phog” Allen, who came to be known as “the Father of Basketball Coaching”; and during his long career at Kansas Allen coached both Adolph Rupp and Dean Smith, who went on to become two of the 20^th century’s most influential coaches (at Kentucky and North Carolina, respectively). That multi-generational story illustrates how influential individual figures and relationships can be in affecting and changing the course of history. But it also reminds us of how young America is, and how quickly our contemporary figures and stories (like that of Michael Jordan, who was coached and in his own words profoundly influenced by Smith) can be connected back to originating moments and histories. A great lesson to take away from Naismith and the origins of basketball.

Next bball story tomorrow,

Ben

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

October 14-15, 2023: Vice President Studying: Kamala Harris

[50 years ago this week, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned. That striking political moment was not only part of the deepening Watergate scandal, but one of the few times when an American Vice President has made major news. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Agnew and other noteworthy Veeps, leading up to this weekend post on our current VP!]

On a couple ways that the current Vice President represents real and meaningful progress.

First, one of those openings where I ask you to read another piece of mine in lieu of a full paragraph here: in this case, an August 2020 Saturday Evening Post Considering History column inspired by Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate. Check it out and then come on back if you would!

Welcome back! In the Conclusion of my book Redefining American Identity (2011) I made the case that Barack Obama might well be “the first American President” due to his multi-racial and cross-cultural heritage, a heritage that (my argument in that book went) is foundational to all of American history and identity. While that is of course a symbolic and somewhat overstated (on purpose) point, I’d stand by it, and would say much the same about the layers to Kamala Harris’s heritage and identity that I discussed in that 2020 column. Obviously she is not defined by what happened to and with her paternal ancestors, even less so than Obama is defined by his parents, so these are not really points about the figures themselves, so much as about the American (and global) histories that are part of the figures’ heritages, and how important it is to finally have leaders who overtly connect to those histories in ways we have not previously seen. Having such a leader in the Vice Presidency isn’t entirely new (seriously, check out that story about a prior VP we should all better remember), but it’s a significant and inspiring step nonetheless.

It’s not the only such step that Harris represents, of course, and even a cross-cultural America superfan like yours truly has to admit that there’s another layer to her representative status which is even more significant. Back in 2015, I made the case in another column, this one for Talking Points Memo, that Walter Mondale’s choice of Geraldine Ferraro for his 1984 running mate was one of the most impressive and inspiring political moments in our history. Unfortunately (for so, so many reasons), Mondale and Ferraro did not win that election, and so we had to wait nearly four decades more for our first woman Vice President. (And are, even more frustratingly, still waiting for our first woman President, but that’s another story for another post.) To anyone who might call that kind of step purely symbolic, I would respond (among other counter-arguments) that the Vice Presidency has long been a symbolic position, whatever else it might have included or meant, and it’s about damned time we have an occupant who symbolizes half of the country.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Vice Presidents you’d highlight?

October 13, 2023: Vice President Studying: Dick Cheney’s Power

[50 years ago this week, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned. That striking political moment was not only part of the deepening Watergate scandal, but one of the few times when an American Vice President has made major news. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Agnew and other noteworthy Veeps, leading up a weekend post on our current VP!]

On a key explanation for a Vice President’s unprecedented power grabs.

By an interesting coincidence, just before I began drafting this post, the prominent public historian Kevin M. Kruse Tweeted (in response to a controversy about Mike Pence), “For two and a half centuries, the vice presidency has been widely regarded as a fairly useless office—even by the ones who’ve held it themselves.” I’m not a vice presidential nor presidential historian (and neither is Kruse), so I’d always defer to those who have studied these figures, roles, and histories, with Lindsay Chervinsky’s The Cabinet (2020) a good starting point I’d say. But to my mind Kruse’s point is an accurate one—that the Vice Presidency, originally created in the Constitution/Framing as a bizarre first-loser situation when it came to presidential elections, has over the centuries morphed into a largely symbolic role, generally more relevant for elections (and what VP nominees can bring to the ticket) than for anything that the Vice President themselves will do while in office (other than those who have had to assume the presidency unexpectedly, of course, which as Tuesday’s post on Andrew Johnson reflects can be all too significant indeed).

There’s one recent and very notable exception to that trend, however: Richard “Dick” Cheney, who in his 8 years as George W. Bush’s Vice President wielded significantly more power than any other VP (and by many accounts, including one from Bush’s own father and one presented in the recent dramatic film Vice (2019), more than the President himself). To go with the general theme of the week’s posts, Cheney was also the subject of a particularly bizarre Vice Presidential scandal, when he shot a man in the face during a February 2006 quail hunting trip and then pretty much blamed the man (who seemed all too eager to take that blame) for the incident. But while that event is impressively symbolic of narratives of Cheney as a malevolent figure who consistently escaped any culpability for his actions (narratives with which I would entirely agree, to be clear), it’s important not to let it distract us from the far more significant story about Cheney: the way he grabbed far more power than any VP before or since, turning that largely symbolic office into a despotic one with destructive and tragic results (never more clearly than with the Iraq War).

That power grab was absolutely unprecedented (if not, as our most recent awful Oval Office resident might say, unpresidented), but it didn’t come out of nowhere, and I would argue that a key origin point for Cheney’s embrace of unconstitutional powers links him closely to one of yesterday’s subjects, the Nixon administration. There’s a famous photograph, included in this article, of a very young Cheney shaking hands with President Nixon in the Oval Office alongside Donald Rumsfeld (another powerful Bush administration figure and Iraq War instigator, natch). Nixon might not have been willing to grant his own VP much power, but he was most definitely a believer in the Imperial Presidency, and indeed as that hyperlinked article argues a hugely influential step along the way toward presidential administrations with secretive and dangerous levels of power. It was only a matter of time before the Imperial Presidency spawned (pun very much intended) an equally and dangerously Imperial Vice President like Dick Cheney.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Vice Presidents you’d highlight?

October 12, 2023: Vice President Studying: John C. Calhoun and Spiro Agnew

[50 years ago this week, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned. That striking political moment was not only part of the deepening Watergate scandal, but one of the few times when an American Vice President has made major news. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Agnew and other noteworthy Veeps, leading up a weekend post on our current VP!]

On a significant difference between the two VPs who resigned, and a linking thread.

When Agnew tendered his resignation, he became (and remains to this day) just the second Vice President ever to resign the office. The first, President Andrew Jackson’s first Vice President John C. Calhoun (who had also served as President John Quincy Adams’ Vice President, making Calhoun the second of two figures to date to serve as VP for two different Presidents), resigned in a significantly less consequential way: Jackson had already won a second term in the 1832 election with a new Vice Presidential nominee, Martin Van Buren; and so Calhoun was a lame-duck Vice President (not a phrase we often use, but an accurate one in this case) when he resigned the office in late 1832. He did so in order to replace outgoing South Carolina Senator Robert Y. Hayne, who had resigned that position to become the state’s Governor; in the resulting special election Calhoun was unanimously elected by the South Carolina legislature (as was the plan to which all these parties had apparently agreed) to fill Hayne’s Senate seat.

While Calhoun’s resignation itself was thus largely symbolic (and strategic vis-á-vis these other positions), the reasoning behind it was nonetheless quite significant, and represents a key distinction between Calhoun and Spiro Agnew. To put it simply: Agnew resigned in large part because he was too closely associated with his President and a key scandal engulfing the administration (although the public explanation for the resignation was a series of smaller differences between the two men, as well as Agnew’s own prior bad behavior); while Calhoun resigned because of a scandal of his own making that divided him from his President. That scandal was the South Carolina nullification debate that I wrote about in this early post and that was a hugely important step on the multi-decade move toward secession (for which Calhoun became a direct inspiration) and Civil War. With all due respect to Monday’s subject and a close contender for this title, Aaron Burr, I’m pretty sure a Vice President was never more overtly at odds with their President than Calhoun was with Jackson over nullification, and certainly Agnew and Nixon were never anywhere close to so antagonistic.

Despite those significant differences in their administration relationships and resignations, however, there’s at least one way in which I would link Calhoun and Agnew (and through which both men foreshadowed certain key elements of the contemporary American Right). Calhoun’s racist support for the system of slavery (which he called “a good—a positive good”) led him to advance a mythic patriotic, blatantly white supremacist vision of American identity and history, one that as I argue in Of Thee I Sing the Confederacy would later take up as a central founding narrative. In his critique of journalists who opposed the Vietnam War as “nattering nabobs of negativity” (among many other attacks, as that article traces), Agnew became one of the 20^th century’s most overt proponents of a mythic patriotic narrative, one in which critics of an administration and its policies became nothing less than enemies of the state. A white supremacist vision of the nation and a narrative that critiques of America are treasonous are not identical positions, but what they are, as I’ve argued in many places for the last few years, are two essential elements of mythic patriotism—a divisive and destructive form that was embodied by both John C. Calhoun and Spiro Agnew.

Last VeepStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Vice Presidents you’d highlight?