October 22, 2024: Prison Stories: Alcatraz

[On October 27^th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ll AmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

On why it’s okay to turn a prison into a tourist attraction—and what we could do instead.

San Francisco’s Pier 39 is one of the more interesting tourist areas I’ve seen—because of its unique origin point, as the site of an annual (and now seemingly permanent) gathering of sea lions; because of the collection of stores and games and entertainments that has sprung up around that focal point, making the pier feel a bit like a combination of Coney Island and the Mall of America; and because it’s also the launching point for tours and explorations of Alcatraz, the island, National Park, and former federal prison in San Francisco Bay. As a result of that latter connection to The Rock (the penitentiary, not the action film starring Connery and Cage at their most, well, Connery and Cage), Pier 39 also houses the Alcatraz Gift Shop, a store where you can buy, among countless other things, baby clothes designed to look like inmates’ apparel (right down to the numbered nametags).

When I first encountered the gift shop, I found it in pretty poor taste, a crass commercialization of a site where over a thousand Americans were imprisoned, many for life and all in the most bleak maximum security conditions. I’d still say that’s part of the story, although the gift shop’s earnings do support the National Park and thus (as I understand it) the very deserving National Park Service as a whole. But I would also say that the gift shop, like the National Park, like the tours and explorations of the island, and perhaps even like the action film, although that would be a stretch at best, has the potential to connect tourists and visitors to the history of the prison—and that such a connection, like any burgeoning historical interest, could lead as well to further investigation and engagement with issues in the present, with the broader histories and stories of America’s prisons and prisoners. I’ve long since come to the conclusion that almost any method of engaging Americans with our histories, as long as it doesn’t blatantly misrepresent or falsify that past, is worthwhile, and certainly the Alcatraz tourism industry has the potential to produce such engagement.

On the other hand, there’s another Alcatraz history, one located after the prison’s 1963 closure and before its 1973 opening as a National Park, that isn’t part of the gift shop at all, nor, I would argue, much present in the island’s tourist narratives more broadly. That’s the 1969 takeover of the island by a group of Native Americans affiliated with the American Indian Movement; this particular community called themselves “Indians of All Tribes” and hoped to turn the island into a cultural center. During the nearly two years of occupation, this activist effort certainly succeeded in raising awareness and changing national conversations, although (as was the case with each AIM endeavor) it also produced unintended acts of destruction and violence. The history of the occupation is thus a complex one, connected to longer-term and even more complex histories and obviously unable to be turned into a gift shop product; but why couldn’t Alcatraz become the site of a cultural center, one that could include not only Native American communities and stories but those of the many other cultures that have called and continued to call the Bay Area home? Not sure I can imagine a more inspiring future for a former prison.

Next prison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’d highlight?

October 21, 2024: Prison Stories: Dorothea Dix

[On October 27^th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ll AmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

On the groundbreaking and inspiring activist who changed both prisons and mental health treatment, and from whom we still have a lot to learn.

In March 1841, a thirty-nine-year-old teacher and social worker named Dorothea Dix visited East Cambridge Jail in Massachusetts. She was there to teach a Sunday School class for female prisoners, but what immediately and entirely drew her attention were the conditions in which all of the inmates—but most egregiously, to her sensitive perspective, the mentally ill and disabled, who were held there not because they had necessarily committed a crime but because the facility doubled as an asylum, as almost all American prisons in the era did—were held. Among other things, the facility was entirely unheated and had been kept that way throughout the New England winter; when Dix inquired about this policy, she was told that “the insane do not feel heat or cold” (a frustratingly ubiquitous belief at the time).

That falsehood represents just the tip of a very sizeable iceberg of misinformation that constituted the vast, vast majority of public and even medical thinking about the mentally ill in the first half of the 19^th century. But Dix was not one to accept conventional or traditional wisdom, no matter how widespread or entrenched it might be. She took it upon herself to visit virtually all of the state’s jails and almshouses (the latter a more charitable but often no more suitable space in which the mentally ill were housed), talked at length with all those who worked in them as well as (when she could) some of those who were housed there, and wrote up incredibly detailed and thorough notes on the eerily similar conditions she observed throughout her travels; she turned those notes into a document for the Massachusetts legislature, and won as a result a significant state outlay of funds to expand the Worcester State Hospital and make it into a much more appropriate home for the state’s mentally ill wards.

That successful journey was only the beginning of an epic quest that would encompass much of Dix’s remaining forty-odd years of life; she would eventually travel across every state east of the Mississippi and even numerous European nations, visiting facilities constantly and working tirelessly to improve conditions in those facilities, to advocate for the opening of better facilities, and, perhaps most significantly, to change fundamentally the way society viewed these individuals and communities. Dix once wrote, as evidence for why she knew that many can be “raised from these base conditions,” of a young woman who “was for years ‘a raging maniac’ chained in a cage and whipped to control her acts and words. She was helped by a husband and wife who agreed to take care of her in their home and slowly she recovered her senses.” This woman represents only one individual among the untold millions who were positively influenced by Dix’s work and perspective, but of course even one individual’s live so radically changed for the better is a significant achievement; to contemplate how many people around the world were given the opportunity to go from unheated cages and brutal beatings to sensitive care and treatment by Dix’s efforts is to truly understand how much one inspiring American can do and transform in a life’s work.

Yet as much good as Dix’s efforts accomplished, it would do her memory no honor to pretend that we have adequately shifted our perception or, most importantly, our social and communal treatment of the mentally ill; a late 20^th century text like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest highlights (in fictional but not at all inaccurate form) just how far from desirable our mental institutions often remain. The definition of insanity, the phrase goes, lies in doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Dorothea Dix’s redefinitions are still, it seems, very much needed. Next prison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’d highlight?

October 19-20, 2024: An AmericanStudier Tribute to the Phone

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to this special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

As a son who has lived more than 550 miles away from his parents for more than half of his life, and as a Dad who has been apart from his sons about half the time for the last twelve years or so, I’ve long relied on the telephone to help me stay connected to the people I love most. But in the last few months, I’ve significantly amplified that need: getting married to the love of my life who happens to live thousands of miles away at the moment; and moving my older son into college in a city more than a thousand miles away. Quite simply, if it weren’t for FaceTime and video calls, for voicenotes and texted memes, for all the ways big and small that I can reach out to these favorite people and they can reach out to me and we can stay connected despite the thousands of miles in between, I would be infinitely unhappier and less whole and less me. I’m well aware of the challenges and problems that SmartPhones present, but there’s literally nothing in our 21^st century world for which I’m more grateful.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

October 18, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: The 2024 Election

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

On how phone calls can symbolize the striking contrast in our 2024 electoral choice.

I haven’t written much in this space about the 2024 campaign, which is fine by me and I imagine fine by you all as well (plenty of that elsewhere, and really everywhere else, if you want it!). I do have an election-week series on the 1924 campaign coming up in a couple weeks, and will end that series with a weekend post reflecting on the 2024 results, whatever they will be (keeping everything crossed, natch). I know it’s no secret to any reader of this blog (or anyone who knows me, or anyone who exists in October 2024) what I fervently hope will happen on Tuesday November 5^th, and not just for all the obvious and crucial political and contemporary reasons (although duh)—I also still believe, and in fact believe even more fully than I did when I wrote that 2020 Considering History column now that I’ve learned a lot more about her, that Kamala Harris’s heritage and identity make her just as foundationally American as, if not even slightly more tellingly and importantly American than, Barack Obama (whom I’ve called “the first American President”).

So yeah, the stakes in this election are high, in AmericanStudies terms as in literally every other way. And I’d say that phone calls offer a clear and compelling way to represent one of the most fundamental contrasts at the heart of our electoral choice. On the one hand we have the two justifiably infamous phone calls through which then-President Donald Trump sought to undermine the 2020 election (before and after it took place) as well as American democracy and ideals, the rule of law, and our relationships with foreign allies among other things: his July 2019 call to Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky; and his January 2021 call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. There are no shortage of moments to which we can point to make the case that Trump was the worst president in American history (with all due respect to Andrew Johnson), but I don’t think it gets much clearer than the combination of those two phone calls. Or, to put it another and even more telling way: Trump embodied and continues to embody the worst of American history, our most divisive and destructive impulses, the frustrating but inescapable fact that our boasted civilization is but a thin veener; and these phone calls are exhibits 1 and 1A in that case.

On the other hand we have a famous phone call that came to symbolize the actual results of the 2020 election: “We did it, Joe!” The contrast in not just content but also and I’d argue especially tone between that November 2020 call and Trump’s pair is striking, and connects to the ways that this year’s Democratic National Convention in August leaned into tones of hope and joy (in direct and potent contrast to the fearful and resentful Republican National Convention in July). But it was also just a very meaningful and moving moment for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, an important stage in the arc of a definingly American family story, individual life, and political career that are all both literally and figuratively on the ballot this November. I guess I’m not telling y’all how to vote (although if you’re planning to vote Trump, I really am not sure what you get out of this blog)—but who on earth would vote for the guy who made those 2019 and 2021 phone calls when they could vote for the lady who made this 2020 one?!

Tribute post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?

October 17, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: “Madam and the Phone Bill”

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

On a funny and fun poetic voice and character, and the layers of meaning she reveals.

Across his nearly 50 years writing and publishing poetry (among other genres), American treasure Langston Hughes went through a number of different stages and series. One of the more unique were the Madam Alberta K. Johnson poems—originally created by Hughes in “Madam and the Number Runner” (later revised to “Number Writer”), published in the Autumn 1943 issue of Contemporary Poetry, Johnson would go to serve as the speaker/persona for nearly 20 more of his poems (all titled in that same “Madam and the” style) over the next few years. Johnson was a confident, no-nonsense Harlem matriarch, a woman navigating with humor, resilience, and serious attitude both contemporary and universal challenges of economics and survival, gender and relationships, race and community, and many more. As with almost all of Hughes’ works, the Madam poems are deceptively straightforward, highly readable and engaging but with significant layers and depth (of literary elements and cultural/historical contexts alike) that reward our close readings.

The one that I’ve close read the most often, as I teach it in my American Literature II course alongside a couple other Hughes poems, is “Madam and the Phone Bill” (1944). Like most of the Madam poems, this one is presented as part of a dialogue, but with the reader only getting Johnson’s half of the conversation. In this case that conversation is with a representative of the “Central” phone company who has contacted Johnson to make her pay for a long-distance call from her wandering (in both senses) significant other Roscoe. The first stanza immediately establishes every aspect of that situation along with Johnson’s unique and witty voice and perspective: “You say I O.K.ed/LONG DISTANCE?/O.K.ed it when?/My goodness, Central/That was then!” Effortlessly using poetic elements like rhythm and rhyme, as well as typographical ones like capitalization, italics, and punctuation, Hughes locates us within his speaker’s voice, in the middle of this phone conversation (or rather argument) in progress, and with an immediate sense of the problem facing our put-upon heroine. The voice and humor only deepen from there, as in the poem’s middle stanza (the 5^th of 10): “If I ever catch him,/Lawd, have pity!/Calling me up/From Kansas City.”

But like all the Madam poems, and as I said all of Hughes’ poems and works period, there’s a lot more to “Phone Bill” than just that fun and funny feel. Certainly the poem offers a glimpse into Johnson’s fraught negotiation of gender dynamics, such as the contradictions between her desire to maintain her status as an independent woman and her worries about what “them other girls” might offer Roscoe (perhaps especially while he’s hundreds of miles away in KC). Written in the shadow of the recently ended Great Depression (a frequent Hughes topic), the poem likewise reflects the fraught dynamics of an individual’s conversations with the corporations who could with a single bill (or instead with an understanding waiving of that bill) profoundly change their economic situations. And I would say that it’s particularly relevant that the bill in question is a phone bill—the period’s increasingly ubiquitous telephones, and more exactly evolving technological possibilities like long-distance calling, symbolized at once greater social and communal connections and yet another way in which individuals were beholden, to grasping corporations and distant but still needy significant others alike. Like it or not, Alberta, those are debts we’re all “gonna pay!”

Last famous phone call tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?

October 16, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: Phone Songs

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

On five pop songs that call upon this technology.

1)      “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)” (1972): One of the more interesting lost elements of telephone technology is the role of the switchboard operator, that unseen middle person on whom callers relied for decades to make their connections. While I believe that role had significantly lessened by the 1970s (I certainly never had to speak to an operator to make a phone call), both of my first two songs use it in a compelling symbolic way, with Jim Croce’s 1972 ballad featuring a speaker who spills his emotions over a breakup to an apparently quite sympathetic operator.

2)      “Switchboard Susan” (1979): Nick Lowe’s speaker addresses the switchboard operator even more directly and spills some emotions as well, but in a quite different tone than that of Croce’s ballad. In an attempt to pick up this “greater little operator” with whose “ringing tone” he “fell in love” immediately, that speaker resorts to a series of increasingly desperate telephonic double entendres, including (apropros of the week’s inspiration) “When I’m near you girl I get an extension/And I don’t mean Alexander Graham Bell’s invention.” What more is there to say about that?

3)      “867-5309/Jenny” (1981): As operators faded away, wannabe callers could dial their desired numbers directly—but this former teenage dialer can confirm that it’s not always easy to go through with the call. That’s one telephonic lesson of one-hit wonder Tommy Tutone’s 1980s smash: with the line “I tried to call you before but I lose my nerve” he succinctly sums up that painful experience of ending a call mid-dial. But Tutone’s song also illustrates another side to the topic I talked about with Scream yesterday—the way the phone can connect us to strangers. In horror films that’s a threatening proposition, but as “number[s] on the wall” like Jenny’s suggest, it can be an enticing one as well. 

4)      “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” (1996): Sometimes the phone lets us down, though. I’m sure there are other pop songs which also use the distinctive (if perhaps now outdated) sounds of telephone calls falling to connect, but I don’t know of any off-hand. And in any case, this Primitive Radio Gods track with one of the longest titles in pop music history is a true original, in sound and sound effects as well as in lyrics.

5)      “Telephone” (2009): Music videos were of course already a thing in 1996 (and even in 1981), but over the subsequent decades they’ve become more and more fully a genre unto themselves, as illustrated by that hyperlinked short film for Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s “Telephone.” To be honest, that video is far more interesting than (and quite fully distinct from) the song. But I did want to note that even in our cell phone/smartphone age, the trope of a phone call (answered or unanswered) to represent the highs and lows of a romantic relationship remains very much in force in pop music.

Next famous phone call tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?

October 15, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: The Scream Films

[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21^st century life!]

On one thing that’s really changed since the first Scream, and one that hasn’t.

I wrote about the most important conceit of the Scream series of horror films, their metatextual commentary on the tropes and traditions of the horror genre, in this 2020 post. I think that element relates closely to the way the films use phones, so I’ll ask you to check out that post and then come on back here for this related topic.

Welcome back! One of the many, many many many, horror movie tropes on which Scream (1996) was commenting was the external yet intimate threat posed by horror monsters and killers, a threat exemplified by Halloween’s Michael Myers looking into windows but also captured quite nicely by a threatening phone call (whether or not it’s “coming from inside the house!”). There’s a reason, after all, why Scream begins with the sound of a phone ringing followed by a young woman’s screams, before the audience even sees the specific, threatened young woman (Drew Barrymore) who will unfortunately answer this call and provide her own screams. But it’s pretty telling that that call comes in on a landline, and one without caller ID at that—if Barrymore’s Casey Becker and her family had that technology, and/or if she had a cell phone with caller ID as well, she’d likely not pickup a call from a strange number, eliminating the entire premise of the killers toying with her over the phone.

Yet even as the Scream series has evolved into the smartphone era (with both 2011’s Scream 4 and, even more fully, 2022’s Scream and 2023’s Scream VI set in that brave new world), a time when virtually everyone has both a cell phone and the ability to see and screen our calls, it has apparently maintained this central trope of the killers calling on the phone (I haven’t seen any of those films, so as always I welcome corrections and comments of all kinds!). I’m sure the filmmakers have found specific ways to explain how these smartphone-era killers are maintaining their anonymity (even in the original Scream there’s an elaborate plotline about a cloned cell phone, for example). But to my mind, the more important point is that the scary phone call trope endures, and perhaps has even deepened in the smartphone era—I know for me, almost every time my phone rings these days (unless it’s my kids calling to say goodnight when they’re with their mom) it feels at best unnerving and at worst potentially threatening. It doesn’t have to a psycho killer on the other end to make the phone an external yet intimate and potentially invasive technology, it turns out.

Next famous phone calls tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?