January 11, 2022: Women in Politics: Jeannette Rankin’s Pacifism

[On January 12^th, 1932, Hattie Caraway became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate. So for the 90^th anniversary of that historic occasion, this week I’ll AmericanStudy Caraway and a handful of other political women—share your thoughts and your own nominees for an egalitarian crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]

On the historical women who would especially appreciate a wondrous one.

I wasn’t quite as enamored of Wonder Woman (2017) as most viewers—this post isn’t part of a non-favorite series, so I won’t go into all those details, but overall I would say it was a pretty conventional superhero origin story, if with of course an important gender reversal. But one thing that did really affect and impress me about the film was its emphasis on philosophical and historical pacifism. The entire reason Diana (Gal Gadot) leaves her island paradise in the first place is because she learns about the ongoing horrors of the Great War and becomes determined to stop them; granted she does so because she believes correctly that her people’s longstanding enemy Ares the God of War has returned and is behind the war (this is a comic book superhero film, after all), but it’s perfectly easy and appropriate to see that character as also a metaphor for the forces that drive nations to war and of its accompanying horrors and destructions. In any case, Wonder Woman’s central motivation and goal is profoundly pacifist, no small thing in a blockbuster action film.

No small historical thing either, of course, but in that sense Wonder Woman is part of a large and existing community and historical trend: the link between women’s rights activists and anti-war efforts. Forgive me for quoting myself, but these two paragraphs from this prior post on anti-war suffrage activists highlight these historical women who I’m pretty sure would be first in line to support this film:

“Such dismissals of anti-war protesters were nothing new in American society, of course. Whereas the Vietnam War became so broadly unpopular that its anti-war movement garnered as much support as it did critique (although the aforementioned stereotyping of the protesters still occurred to be sure), the World War II and World War I anti-war movements were far more nationally unpopular and subject to the same kind of attacks. During both wars, many of the most prominent pacificists, both in America and around the world, were also women’s rights activists; a trend exemplified by Jeanette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, who opposed both world wars and who represented the sole Congressional “no” vote against declaring war on Japan on December 8^th, 1941. Rankin’s political career survived her World War I pacifism, but her opposition to World War II proved not only politically costly but personally destructive, both in media coverage and in threats on her life. (She did not run for reelection, but did live to lead an anti-Vietnam War campaign in 1968!)

The virulent opposition to Rankin and her pacifist colleagues could be attributed solely to pro-war agitation and fever, and certainly that’s been a consistent part of such wartime historical moments and narratives. But I think it would also need to be analyzed in conjunction with the equally virulent and too-often forgotten opposition faced by suffragists and other women’s rights leaders. In that linked post I highlighted the shockingly nasty children’s book Ten Little Suffergets (c.1910), which offers a particularly vivid but far from isolated illustration (literally and figuratively) of such anti-women’s rights attitudes. If we have largely forgotten this kind of widespread anti-suffragist vitriol, one clear reason would be our collective recognition of just how fully those women’s rights activists were on the right side of history—a lesson that we perhaps have yet to learn when it comes to our anti-war movements, contemporary and historical.”

Next political woman tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other political women or moments you’d highlight?

January 10, 2022: Women in Politics: Victoria Woodhull’s Campaign

[On January 12^th, 1932, Hattie Caraway became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate. So for the 90^th anniversary of that historic occasion, this week I’ll AmericanStudy Caraway and a handful of other political women—share your thoughts and your own nominees for an egalitarian crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]

On the controversial layers to the first woman to run for president, and the moment’s significance beyond them.

To continue with one of last week’s 2022 anniversary posts, there was another candidate for president in the 1872 election beyond Republican incumbent Ulysses S. Grant and his Democratic challenger Horace Greeley: the newly established Equal Rights Party’s nominee Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to seek the nation’s highest political office. There are however at least a couple reasons to think that Woodhull’s candidacy was more a way to raise awareness for the Women’s Suffrage Movement (with which Woodhull had become prominently associated after her compelling 1871 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, which made her the first woman to address such a committee) than a serious quest for the White House: Woodhull didn’t turn 35 until nearly a year after the election, so if elected she would not have been Constitutionally able to serve as president; moreover, her announced vice presidential running mate, none other than Frederick Douglass, was not consulted on that decision and may not ever have been aware that he was on a presidential ticket (and at the very least was an open and ardent Grant supporter).

Those campaign controversies were far from the only controversial and complex layers to Victoria Woodhull’s life and career. To cite just a few others: her first marriage, to traveling doctor Canning Woodhull who had treated her through a childhood illness, took place when Victoria was just 15 years old (and may have been prompted by Canning abducting Victoria from her family in Ohio); she first rose to prominence and wealth through her work as a spiritualist and “magnetic healer,” after the decline of which she nearly went bankrupt; and she then rose to wealth a second time through her and her sister Tennessee Claflin’s groundbreaking Wall Street brokerage and controversial newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. That newspaper was also the cause of the final and most dramatic controversy of Woodhull’s 1872 presidential campaign: in response to media attacks on her radical stance on marriage, Woodhull devoted the entire November 2^nd, 1872 issue of the paper to publishing graphic and lurid details of an adulterous affair between Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton; that same day Federal Marshals arrested Victoria, Tennessee, and Victor’s second husband James Blood for “publishing an obscene newspaper” and held them in prison for a month (meaning Victoria was in jail when the election took place).

All of those elements of both Woodhull’s life overall and the 1872 campaign in particular are important to remember, not least because they’re so damn compelling (I sense the potential for an HBO limited series!). But none of them make her presidential candidacy any less meaningful of a political and social step. For one thing, countless male presidential candidates (and presidents) have had their own controversial moments and pasts, many of them far more controversial than anything in Woodhull’s story (cough*Trump*cough), and we still recognize them as part of our political history (as we should). For another, and even more important thing, presidential candidates, like presidents, are more than political figures—they’re symbolic representations of America and its identity and community. I can think of precious few symbolic statements more powerful, in its own moment and in our own alike, than an 1872 presidential ticket headed by a woman and featuring an African American man.

Next political woman tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other political women or moments you’d highlight?

January 8-9, 2022: 2022 Predictions

[A few years back I started January by highlighting some of the historic anniversaries we’d be commemorating in the year to come. It was a fun series, so I thought I’d do the same this year with some 2022 anniversaries. Leading up to this special post on predictions for 2022!]

I ended that January 2019 series with some predictions for the year to come, while noting that I had no earthly idea what would happen politically. That was a serious understatement, and if anything I feel even less certain about the state of our politics in early 2022. So once again I’m gonna leave that arena alone, and share three other predictions for the year ahead:

1)      Education Debates: Speaking of knowing precious little about our politics, I was not at all prepared for how much of the second half of 2021 would revolve around debates over education, and specifically history education. I addressed those debates in a couple of my Saturday Evening Post columns, as well as one section of this blog post, and of course it’s obvious where I stand on those questions. But as we near the one-year anniversary of the release of the 1776 Commission Report (on MLK Day, no less), I wanted to add just how much I believe those educational debates are already and will continue to be interconnected with debates over American patriotism. For which I’ve got a book I’m happy to talk about with students/classes, groups and communities, and all interested parties, this year as ever!

2)      “Cancellation” Controversies: I put that word in scare quotes because I mostly agree with this excellent L.D. Burnett piece: “cancel culture” isn’t a real thing, or at least isn’t at all what the dominant narratives suggest it is. At the very least, as the late 2021 Dave Chappelle situation reveals, those who are ostensibly “cancelled” generally fare quite well in the long run, often much better than they deserve (as that hyperlinked article illustrates). In any case there are going to be plenty more of these faux-controversies in 2022—it often seems like there’s a new focus for such debates every day on Twitter, for example—so the question will be whether we can turn those moments into opportunities for more meaningful and forward-looking conversations. I wish I were more optimistic about that, but at the very least I’m determined to do what I can not to feed the outrage machine.

3)      Inspiring Voices: On the other hand, I am deeply optimistic about how many inspiring American voices have emerged over the last few years, most of them unexpected (at least to this AmericanStudier). When I wrote that January 2019 post, for example, I had never heard of Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose innovative and important 1619 Project would come to dominate so much of the second half of that year (and beyond). During 2021 one of the voices who most inspired me was Kelly Therese Pollock, the podcaster whose Unsung History and Uncorked History podcasts (the latter co-hosted with Jamie L.H. Goodall) brought so many other voices and stories to my attention (and on which I was fortunate enough to guest). What voices and conversations will unexpectedly and powerfully inspire us all in 2022? I can’t predict—but I’m very excited to find out!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you predict for the year to come?

January 7, 2022: 2022 Anniversaries: 1972 Films

[A few years back I started January by highlighting some of the historic anniversaries we’d be commemorating in the year to come. It was a fun series, so I thought I’d do the same this year with some 2022 anniversaries. Leading up to a special post on predictions for 2022!]

On three 1972 films that together capture the multiple layers to violence in America.

1)      The Godfather: In that early post I made the case for 1974’s The Godfather: Part II as one of the most impressive cinematic reflections on American identity and history, and I’d stand by that assessment; I think it’s significantly more thoughtful about such questions than the first film. It’s also at least a bit less violent (or at least contains fewer famous violent set-pieces than the first), and I think that’s actually a complex but key reason why it’s the first which has lingered so fully in our collective consciousness. I believe Coppola’s film is more clearly critical of that violence than the Scorsese gangster films I’ve critiqued in this space (and Part II is even more overtly critical of what such violence has turned Michael Corleone into); but critical or not, it represents another epic (in every sense) depiction of the central role of both sudden and organized violence in American society and culture.

2)      Deliverance: In that 2014 post I made the case that there’s a somewhat hidden but crucial layer to both the film and (especially) the 1970 James Dickey novel Deliverance which depicts collective, systematic violence targeting Appalachian and rural communities. Better remembering those contexts helps us think about the story’s much more overt violence, that targeting the four central characters, as one side in a broader and brutal conflict between rural and urban communities in late 20^th century America—a conflict these characters have unwittingly but unquestionably brought with them to their rural getaway, or at least embody for the inhabitants of that rural world.

3)      Last House on the Left: I said in that post much of what I’d want to say about vengeance and vigilante violence in Wes Craven’s directorial debut. I’ll just add this: one of the biggest stories of late 2021 was the trial & acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, a young man whose acts of illegal (whatever the verdict, I think their illegality is beyond question) vigilante violence were and are celebrated by many of my fellow Americans. There are lots of factors, historical and contemporary, in that fraught and divisive unfolding story—but we can’t understand it without including the longstanding embrace of vigilantes in America, a narrative that Craven’s brutal film at least partly contributes to.

Predictions this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 6, 2022: 2022 Anniversaries: 1922 and “The Waste Land”

[A few years back I started January by highlighting some of the historic anniversaries we’d be commemorating in the year to come. It was a fun series, so I thought I’d do the same this year with some 2022 anniversaries. Leading up to a special post on predictions for 2022!]

On two AmericanStudies contexts for a relatively non-American literary masterpiece.

As far as I remember (and as far as my searches reveal), I’ve only written at length in one post about T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” (1922; it was published first in his own magazine The Criterion in October, then in the November 1^st issue of The Dial, and then in book form in December): this one comparing and contrasting Eliot’s poem’s opening images of Spring with those in William Carlos Williams’ “Spring and All” (1923). That might be surprising for a work deemed one of the most influential American (and world) Modernist texts, but I would say that my relative silence is due to the fact that the poem largely renounces America for Europe (as its author did almost exactly five years after that Dial publication). Indeed, while “The Waste Land” is absolutely littered with allusions and references and quotations and intertexts (so much so that I’ve found it hugely difficult to teach, although its importance has led me to continue trying to do so), in the published version of the poem precisely none of them are to American texts, voices, or histories.

I say “in the published version” purposefully, however, because in Eliot’s drafts of “The Waste Land” (which I first encountered in graduate school through this truly wonderful 1970s book edited and introduced by Eliot’s widow Valerie) he included an eventually-cut opening section that offers one way to AmericanStudy the poem. That opening section (which I’m not finding online, but which is included in full in that book) describes a night out on the town with a group of college students, a group that seemingly includes a version of Eliot himself and thus likely comes from Harvard College (which he attended from 1906 to 1909); that would of course make this section’s setting Massachusetts (whether Cambridge or Boston is unclear). Eliot cut this entire 50-plus line section on the advice of his friend Ezra Pound, and Pound may well have been right, as it’s not nearly as gripping an opening as those famous lines about April. But even though it didn’t end up in the published version, I’d say it’s quite interesting and telling that this college and American setting and scene were where Eliot initially chose to begin the poem—a reflection at the very least that however English and European his eventual life and career became, they began in every sense in turn of the 20^th century America.

I’m not suggesting that the poem’s setting and themes, like its allusions and intertexts, aren’t as distinctly European as I mentioned above; I very much believe that they are, including in a central way the physical and psychological effects of World War I (then known as The Great War) on European landscapes and communities. But over the last couple years, as I discussed in my Semester Recap post on my adult learning class on the 1920s, I’ve come to think a lot more about the effects and aftermaths of the Influenza Pandemic on the United States, a catastrophic event that paralleled World War I but that (unlike the war) hit the U.S. as hard as it did Europe and the rest of the world. Eliot was living and working in London throughout the pandemic, but much of his family and community remained in the U.S., specifically in his native St. Louis (of which, along with the Mississippi River, he would later write they “have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world”). So I think it’s not only possible but helpful to read “The Waste Land” as a poem about the devastating effects of these multiple world catastrophes, and thus as part of an American (and global to be sure) tradition of post-pandemic literature as well.

Last anniversary tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 5, 2022: 2022 Anniversaries: 1872 and Henry Wilson

[A few years back I started January by highlighting some of the historic anniversaries we’d be commemorating in the year to come. It was a fun series, so I thought I’d do the same this year with some 2022 anniversaries. Leading up to a special post on predictions for 2022!]

How a vice presidential publication helps us rethink an administration.

In that prior historic anniversaries series, I dedicated a post to the thorny question of how we remember Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency, and more exactly how we acknowledge his administration’s significant failures while still highlighting some of its genuinely impressive and inspiring elements. Rather than repeat myself here, I’ll ask you to check out that post and then come on back here.

Welcome back! Grant’s first Vice President, former Indiana Congressman and Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, declined to seek the office for a second time (at least in part due to significant conflicts between him and Grant related to those ongoing scandals), and so Grant selected a new running mate for his 1872 reelection campaign (and thus a new Vice President once Grant defeated Democratic nominee Horace Greeley and earned that second term): Henry Wilson, a longtime Massachusetts Senator and leading member of the abolitionist Radical Republicans since before the Civil War. Wilson had actively sought the Vice Presidential nomination in 1868, and so was poised to make a real contribution to Grant’s second term and the period’s ongoing battles over Reconstruction, among other issues. Unfortunately he suffered a serious stroke in May 1873, just a few months after Grant’s second inauguration, and although he stayed in office his health declined thereafter until he passed away after a second stroke in 1875.

While those health issues likely led Wilson to be a less active contributor to Grant’s second term than he would have liked, another 1872 moment both exemplifies his impressive voice and illustrates the stakes for that administration’s ongoing efforts. In the same year he won the Vice Presidency, Wilson published (with the prominent Boston publisher J.R. Osgood and Company) volumes 1 and 2 of his magisterial The History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, an important early scholarly effort to trace the lead up to and events of the Civil War (volume 3 would be published after his death, in 1877). In an era when the propagandistic efforts to reframe the Civil War (and related histories of slavery and race) around white supremacist narratives were well underway, Wilson’s book offered instead an abolitionist account of slavery’s centrality to the war, the Confederacy, and (at least implicitly) Reconstruction’s ongoing debates and conflicts. That the soon-to-be Vice President of the U.S. wrote and published such a book reminds us that whatever its faults, Grant’s administration was fighting for that abolitionist vision on a number of levels that we can and must remember (and be inspired by) today.

Next anniversary tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 4, 2022: 2022 Anniversaries: 1822 and Monrovia

[A few years back I started January by highlighting some of the historic anniversaries we’d be commemorating in the year to come. It was a fun series, so I thought I’d do the same this year with some 2022 anniversaries. Leading up to a special post on predictions for 2022!]

On a few layers to the fraught founding of a West African settlement and nation.

On January 7^th, 1822, a ship carrying a small cohort of African Americans arrived at Cape Mesurado on the West African coast, where they established a new settlement they named Christopolis. The land on which they founded that settlement was part of a 60-mile area of the coastline that had been purchased by the American Colonization Society (ACS), an organization of white Americans dedicated to the goal of both freeing enslaved African Americans and (especially, as the organization’s name suggests) sending as many African Americans as possible (those freed and those already free alike) “back to Africa.” One of the most prominent supporters of that organization and goal was then-President James Monroe, and two years later the burgeoning settlement would be renamed Monrovia, and would become the capital of the new nation of Liberia (which endures in West Africa to this day, with Monrovia by far its most populous city).

The connection to and support of none other than the President of the United States helps us remember an important point: that the ACS connected to countless individuals and threads in Early Republic America. It was only while researching “The Star-Spangled Banner” for Of Thee I Sing, for example, that I learned that the anthem’s author, the Maryland lawyer Francis Scott Key, was a co-founder of the ACS. As that last hyperlinked article notes, Key was also a lifelong slave-owner—a status he inherited but also expanded upon by purchasing enslaved people—and that detail illustrates another layer to the ACS: the central role played by slave-owners in its founding and efforts. It’s true that some of the ACS’s founding figures and most active members were Quaker abolitionists who believed that African Americans had the best chance to live full and happy lives outside of the United States. But many others, like Key, were themselves slave-owners, pursuing colonization out of a combination of anti-Black prejudice and (perhaps even more tellingly) practical fears of slave revolts.

There’s no way to separate the founding of Monrovia/Liberia from that organization and those (at best) troubling views and goals. But neither should we limit our perspective on the community and nation to the worst of those origins. After all, the African American community in the United States began with enslavement and all its attendant horrors; while we cannot forgot nor minimize all those histories (both of which remain in danger of happening in our ongoing education debates), no one would argue that they mean that all of African American identity since is or should be defined solely or centrally by them. Moreover, the settlers who founded Monrovia and Liberia were, whatever the fraught means by which they arrived in that place, not enslaved, were instead a community of free people establishing a city and nation that have survived and grown into the 21^st century. That’s an origin and history worth commemorating, and indeed worth separating from the worst of those who played a part in those histories.

Next anniversary tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?