March 9, 2022: The Pacific Theater: Model-making and Tarawa

[March 11^th marks the 80^th anniversary of General Douglas MacArthur’s famous departure from the Philippines. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and four other aspects of the war’s Pacific Theater, leading up to a special post on the U.S.-Filipino relationship.]

On a childhood building models, and what they can help us understand.

I’m not sure exactly when it started, but by the time I was in middle school I was seriously into model-building. I know that I constructed some trucks, a few planes, maybe the occasional car, but the vast majority of the models I built were of naval ships. I distinctly remember a box in our upstairs bathroom full of those completed steel-gray models—battleships, cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers, PT boats, troop carriers and amphibious landers, you name it and I had at least a few in my assembled fleet. The hobby hasn’t continued into my adult years (although I look forward to making some models with my boys, and especially my very careful and mechanically minded older son), but I’m sure that the skills it helped me hone—reading and following directions, precision, patience—have come with me into lots of other aspects of my life and identity.

Yet as I think back on those model ships, I have to admit that I don’t know that they communicated much at all about the complex realities of their uses, their histories, the battles and conflicts in which they participated. Obviously they weren’t necessarily designed to do so—or at least I’ve never encountered a plastic model that comes with any way to represent the effects of explosions, of aeriel bombardment or ship-to-ship combat, or the like—and there’s no reason why they would have to; there are plenty of other ways for interested young people to learn about war, after all. But you could make the case, and I think I might be inclined to agree, that in the absence of any such contexts and complications, military models can help convey ideals of war as a purely exciting and noble pursuit, something that every young person can imagine participating in heroically. For one of the most clear and compelling accounts of such youthful ideals and what they can produce, I can’t recommend strongly enough Ron Kovic’s memoir Born on the Fourth of July (1976).

I remember one model that was very different, though. That was a model of the beachhead at Tarawa (that’s not the one I had, but it’s not dissimilar), the Pacific Island which became the site of one of World War II’s most horrific and destructive battles. The model of course couldn’t convey every detail of the battle, but it did a couple of things that were distinct from the ships: it forced me to consider the experiences and lives (and deaths) of the individual soldiers I was putting down on the beachhead; and it inspired me to investigate the battle I was assembling, and so to learn about the U.S. casualties, the Japanese defenders who literally fought to the last man to hold the island, and so on. Doing so didn’t stop me from working on those other kinds of models, but it did make it much harder for me to entirely ignore or elide the contexts—or, more exactly, the defining realities—of the Pacific Theater, of World War II, and of war in general. That’s a perspective worth modeling, I’d say.

Next PacificStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other aspects of the Pacific Theater you’d highlight?

March 8, 2022: The Pacific Theater: Midway and The Thin Red Line

[March 11^th marks the 80^th anniversary of General Douglas MacArthur’s famous departure from the Philippines. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and four other aspects of the war’s Pacific Theater, leading up to a special post on the U.S.-Filipino relationship.]

On the clear and telling differences between two similarly star-studded World War II films.

Jack Smight’s Midway (1976) and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) have more in common than just their Pacific Theater settings. Or at least they have one pretty obvious and striking thing in common: each uses a huge and star-studded cast to capture a wide range of soldier and officer experiences within its focal battle. Midway features Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, Hal Holbrook, James Coburn, Dabney Coleman, Robert Mitchum, Toshiro Mifune, Pat Morita, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner, and Erik Estrada (among others!); Line includes Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly, and John Travolta (to say nothing of the equally big-name actors, such as Martin Sheen, Billy Bob Thornton, and Gary Oldman, whose parts were cut by Malick during editing). When it comes to cast size and scope, the two films are similarly old-school epics to be sure.

The similarities pretty much end there, though, and while some of the differences can be attributed to Malick’s particular and very unique style—see: long, long shots of waving grass and the like—others can reveal a great deal about both the eras in which the films were made and the distinct genres in which they could be classified. For example, Midway makes significant use of stock footage, both from wartime camera shots of aerial battles and from numerous other films (American and Japanese); Malick’s film features no such footage. That’s partly a difference in period, as the use of stock footage was still somewhat common in the 1970s and has almost entirely disappeared from filmmaking in the decades since (other than in rare and significant cases such as Forrest Gump). But to my mind it also reveals a key difference in the films’ emphases and goals: Midway is largely uninterested in engaging critically or analytically with the history it portrays, focusing instead on the character identities, interactions, and communities as they experience those events; whereas in Line individual characters come and go almost at random (and again, some were dropped entirely in post-production), making the history itself far more consistently central than any particular identities or interactions—and making the battle scenes the film’s acknowledged centerpieces, rather than simply stock footage to be quickly shown before we get back to the characters.

To connect those distinct emphases to genre, I would argue that the films break down along the “period fiction” vs. “historical fiction” line that I delineated in this post. As I noted there, such a distinction is never absolute when it comes to individual works—it would be silly to claim that Midway could be set against the backdrop of any battle without changing in one important way or another; and some of Line’s key themes of individual choice and war’s destructiveness could be located in any military conflict. Moreover, it’s important to note that Midway includes an interesting subplot dealing with a very specific and important history, that of the Japanese Internment. Yet those qualifications notwithstanding, Midway is to my mind about its star-studded cast, and the individual characters they create and interactions they portray; while Line’s famously haphazard usage of its equally starry cast makes clear how much Malick sees those individuals as instead part of a larger and more central tapestry. While that distinction does to my mind make Malick’s the more historically complex and interesting film, the truth, as so often in this space, is this: watching both provides a particularly balanced picture of how epic films can portray war.

Next PacificStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other aspects of the Pacific Theater you’d highlight?

March 7, 2022: The Pacific Theater: Guadalcanal

[March 11^th marks the 80^th anniversary of General Douglas MacArthur’s famous departure from the Philippines. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and four other aspects of the war’s Pacific Theater, leading up to a special post on the U.S.-Filipino relationship.]

On three texts that can help us AmericanStudy a lengthy, pivotal military campaign.

1)      Kawaguchi’s quote: “Guadalcanal is no longer merely a name of an island in Japanese military history. It is the name of the graveyard of the Japanese army.” So stated Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi, commander of the first Japanese infantry brigade to attempt to retake the island after the Allied occupation. The back and forth battle for control of Guadalcanal, its strategically crucial Henderson (air)Field, and other neighboring Solomon Islands would stretch from August 1942 through February 1943, with any number of moments and conflicts that could have provided turning points in an alternative history of not only this campaign but the war’s (and world’s) future more broadly. Yet ultimately the result was the result—and as the Pacific Theater’s first truly substantive battle, that result fundamentally shifted the balance of power in the region and the war. Although of course the war would go on for two and a half more long and highly contested years, Kawaguchi’s quote helps us understand just how much the die was cast at Guadalcanal.

2)      Guadalcanal Diary (1943): In a strikingly new development in war journalism, International News Service correspondent Richard Tregaskis accompanied the Allied forces for months in the early stages of the battle, documenting both everyday experiences and the campaign’s biggest moments. The resulting book was published in January 1943, before the campaign had even concluded, and respresented a more immediate and grounded portrayal of war than any prior American text. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily more factually or historically accurate—the book is a personal memoir, as its title suggests, and so the same uncertainties of memory and truth that accompany any personal narrative apply—but the rawness and honesty of its perspective and details offers a kind of experiential accuracy nonetheless. This is what the campaign felt like, to a man who lived it and the men with whom he shared it. In November a Hollywood film adaptation of the book would be released, and it too felt more personal than most of the war’s big-budget blockbusters; but there’s no beating the book for that raw representation of wartime experiences.

3)      The Thin Red Line (1962): James Jones’s fourth novel was based, as were a number of his novels before and after (including his most famous, From Here to Eternity [1951]), on his experiences in World War II’s Pacific Theater; Thin in particular focuses on three battles from the Guadalcanal campaign. Although Terence Malick’s controversial 1998 film adaptation of the novel certainly amplifies these qualities, the book too is far more detached and (at times) dreamlike than Tregaskis’ journalistic text. It balances those aspects, however, with some of the most gritty and realistic depictions of violence in any World War II novel, leading military historian John Keegan to call it (in his 1983 book The Face of Battle) one of the two best literary portrayals of the war. In its naturalistic depiction of a battle and war that are far bigger than any of their individual participants, Jones’s book also compares favorably to such classics as Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). This is a vital war novel for perhaps the Pacific Theater’s most vital battle.

Next PacificStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other aspects of the Pacific Theater you’d highlight?

March 5-6, 2022: Megan Kate Nelson’s New Book on Yellowstone

[On March 1, 1872 Yellowstone became America’s and the world’s first National Park. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied five other amazing National Parks, leading up to this special weekend post highlighting a new book on Yellowstone from the amazing Megan Kate Nelson!]

Just a couple weeks back, I wrote in my post on frustrating frontier myths about one of the public historians and scholars doing the best work to challenge and offer alternatives to those myths: Megan Kate Nelson. That was certainly true of her award-winning The Three-Cornered War, which radically reframed the Civil War through the lens of a truly multi-cultural Western history. And it looks like it will be even more true of her next book project, The Westerners: The True Pioneers Who Built a Region and Defined a Nation.

But there’s a book in between those two, and it just came out this past Tuesday in time for Yellowstone National Park’s 250^th anniversary: Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America. As she did with the Civil War in Three-Cornered, Nelson in Saving Yellowstone reframes and expands Reconstruction historiography and collective memory (such as it is, which is why we desperately need more such public scholarly writing and work about Reconstruction) through the lens of this Western space and all the histories, stories, communities, and contexts to which it connects.

My copy of Saving Yellowstone is on the way, so I can’t share more specifics than that yet (but I know I’m gonna love it). But as someone working on a book project that seeks to connect striking individual stories, told narratively and engagingly, to larger American histories and issues, I can most definitely say that Nelson is a model of this vital form of public historical writing. She and Saving Yellowstone deserve our support and reading for all sorts of reasons, but that’s high on the list!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 4, 2022: National Park Studying: Acadia

[On March 1, 1872 Yellowstone became America’s and the world’s first National Park. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five other amazing National Parks, leading up to a special weekend post highlighting the new book on Yellowstone from the amazing Megan Kate Nelson!]

On a few telling moments in the strikingly French history of the Maine National Park.

French explorer Samuel de Champlain named Maine’s Mount Desert Island when he sailed past it on his second voyage to the Americas, in September 1604; Champlain noted that “the tops of [the island’s mountains] are bare of trees, because there is nothing there but rocks,” and so Mount Desert it was. Nine years later, in 1613, the Jesuit priest Father Pierre Biard and forty settlers established the first French missionary colony on the island, in the area of Southwest Harbor; but later that same year, the English Captain Samuel Argall sailed north from Jamestown and destroyed the settlement, taking two priests back to Jamestown as prisoners. As that last hyperlinked article illustrates, the early 17^th century was full of such back and forth conflicts between the French and English up and down the Eastern seaboard, and the earliest history of what would become Acadia was defined largely by those shifting European American winds (while the region’s Wabanaki people were of course an established part of that history as well and remained a vital part of it through each evolution).

The island changed hands between the two nations at least a few more times over the next century and a half, but a late 18^th century moment reflects a very different international relationship as of the period of the American Revolution. Mount Desert Island had been under the control of the English Royal Governor of Massachusetts, Sir Francis Bernard, since 1760, and in 1780 the newly independent state of Massachusetts granted the western half of the island to (or, I suppose, kept it in the possession of) Bernard’s son John. But the eastern half was granted instead to Marie Therese de Gregoire, a Frenchwoman and granddaughter of the French explorer and island’s 17^th century titleholder Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. Both John Bernard and Marie de Gregoire were of course the descendants of elite families, reflecting a continuation of landed gentry roles even in Revolutionary and post-Revolution America. But at the same time, this joint US and French ownership of the island was from what I can tell a first in its history, and illustrates both France’s vital role in the American Revolution and the ongoing relationship between the two nations (one that, of course, would be severely tested before the end of the 18^th century).

When much of Mount Desert Island was first preserved by the federal government in the early 20^th century, the two initial such efforts overtly honored these Franco-American histories. In July 1916 President Woodrow Wilson established Sieur de Monts National Monument, naming it after an early French explorer and compatriot of Champlain’s (Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons). Three years later, when the area was upgraded to full National Park status, it was named Lafayette National Park in honor of the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette. Even Acadia, the name given to the park instead in 1929, is a tribute to the French legacy in the area, as Acadia was a French colony in northeastern North America that included Maine. But Sieur de Monts and Lafayette more directly highlight and embody those Franco-American figures and stories, and better remembering them as part of the establishment and development of Acadia National Park helps us keep those contested, conflicted, crucial Maine and American histories in our collective memories.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

March 3, 2022: National Park Studying: Mesa Verde

[On March 1, 1872 Yellowstone became America’s and the world’s first National Park. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five other amazing National Parks, leading up to a special weekend post highlighting the new book on Yellowstone from the amazing Megan Kate Nelson!]

On two distinct but complementary effects to a foundational AmericanStudier moment.

When I was in 7^th grade, my family and I took a trip out West to visit a number of Southwestern National Parks. We saw Zion, Bryce, Four Corners, and the Grand Motherfucking Canyon (pardon my French, but I’m pretty sure that’s the full official name), and even checked out a bit of Las Vegas when we flew in and out of the city. But there’s no doubt at all that it was Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park that most affected this 12 year old AmericanStudier. There were lots of spaces and moments in Mesa Verde that hit me, but by far the most moving was a post-sunset encounter with a coyote as we explored an aboveground (ie, not a cliff dwelling) Pueblo ruin in the park. Probably didn’t hurt that I had been reading a bunch of Tony Hillerman mysteries on the trip, as the moment felt right out of such evocative Southwestern thrillers (although luckily we didn’t stumble upon a dead body or awaken an ancient curse or the like). But I would say that the moment affected me, and indeed was foundational for my lifelong AmericanStudying, in a couple key ways that go well beyond Leaphorn & Chee mysteries and that also reflect essential elements to a site like Mesa Verde.

For one thing, the moment made crystal clear something that a know-it-all 12 year old (or 41 year old…) can sometimes have difficulties remembering: just how much I didn’t and don’t know. As I wrote in that same blog post on Hillerman, Mesa Verde has long been defined by a couple central mysteries of its own: the question of why the Anasazi people abandoned their cliff dwellings, and what happened to them after they left. It appears that some significant recent progress has been made in answering those questions, which of course is part of the historical and cultural process as well. But in truth, the mystery of Mesa Verde is just a more extreme version of a fundamental but all too easily forgotten fact about all historical knowledge—there’s a lot more that we don’t know than we’ll ever know, and most of the things we do know we only kinda know (to get all Rumsfeldian on ya). And that’s never more true than when it comes to the simple but crucial question of what it meant, or really what it felt like, to live in these historical periods and places. I love the interpretations of the past at places like Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg, but that’s all they are, interpretations; we’ll never really know what life was like for those folks in those worlds, and I felt that divide, acutely and potently, as I stood atop that darkened Mesa Verde ruin.

But at the same time, I felt something else, something I’d call not contradictory so much as complementary: I wanted to bridge that divide. I wanted to learn as much as I could about periods and places and peoples, really all of ‘em but most especially all those that felt most distinct from me and mine. I wanted to read about them and talk about them and, perhaps most of all, write about them, help create stories that could, not exactly bring them back to life of course, but make them a part of our own moment and world as fully as those unavoidable gaps would allow. I don’t think that was the first time I felt that desire so acutely (I’m sure I did on my Camp Virginia trips, for example), but it was one of the strongest such moments, and it has stuck with me to be sure. I’ve visited and been inspired by a lot of cultural and historic sites in the decades since, including a number of federal National Historic Parks, and will write about some of my favorites in that latter category in the weekend post. But Mesa Verde remains striking and perhaps singular in that regard, a place and moment with which I was confronted with especial force with both the challenges and the call of all that I’ve tried to spend my career doing. So, y’know, it’s well worth a visit if you’re out that way!

Last Park tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

March 2, 2022: National Park Studying: Everglades

[On March 1, 1872 Yellowstone became America’s and the world’s first National Park. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five other amazing National Parks, leading up to a special weekend post highlighting the new book on Yellowstone from the amazing Megan Kate Nelson!]

On the very American story of the woman who helped save the Everglades.

Since 2018, the name Marjory Stoneman Douglas has likely and tragically become synonymous with the Parkland, Florida mass shooting in February at the high school named for her. But while of course we can and should continue remembering the Douglas High shooting (and celebrating the amazing group of Parkland students who have turned that tragedy into an occasion for activism), Marjory Stoneman Douglas deserves separate and full commemoration as well. In a 108-year life that spanned nearly all of the 20^th century (she was born in April 1890 and passed away in May 1998), Marjory Stoneman experienced a number of striking and very telling moments, including many by the time she turned 25: from watching her mother, concert violinist Florence Lillian Trefethen, get committed to a mental hospital in Providence for being “high-strung” to attending Wellesley College and helping form its first suffrage club; from a brief marriage to charming con artist Kenneth Douglas (who was already married at the time and subsequently attempted to defraud Marjory’s father) to a groundbreaking 1915 divorce and move to Miami (then a small town of less than 5000) to rejoin her father and join the staff of his decade-old newspaper The Miami Herald.

For the next few decades, Douglas (she continued to go by her married name for the rest of her life) made quite a name for herself as a South Florida (and national) journalist and literary figure. (After serving in both the navy and the Red Cross during World War I.) Besides her work for the Herald, which included long stints as Book Review Editor and Assistant Editor, she also worked extensively as a freelance and creative writer; she published forty stories in the Saturday Evening Post, for example, and also wrote a number of one-act plays for the Miami Theater as well as the foreword to the WPA’s 1941 guide to Miami. Around that same time, however, Douglas became involved with the cause that would define her second half-century of life, and all of America, very fully. The publisher Farrar & Rinehart approached her to write a book on the Miami River for their new Rivers of America series; as she began her research Douglas found herself unimpressed by the river but profoundly moved by the Everglades, and convinced F&R to let her research and write a book on them instead. She spent five years researching and writing, working closely with geologist Garald Parker, and the result was The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), a monumental achievement that sold out its initial printing in a month and remains one of the most significant and influential works of American naturalism.

River of Grass was just the beginning, however (and not even that, as Douglas had been fighting for local environmental causes for decades by that time). Over the next half-century, Douglas would more than earn her nickname “Grande Dame of Everglades,” waging continual war to protect and preserve the wetlands from developers, politicians, corporations, sport hunters and fishermen, and just about every other adversary one could imagine. Douglas titled the last chapter of River of Grass “The Eleventh Hour,” warning that the region was on the brink of destruction; but in December of that same year Everglades National Park was dedicated, and thanks to those federal protections and Douglas’s lifelong efforts, the area instead has become the largest tropical wilderness in the US and the largest wilderness of any kind east of the Mississippi. No individual can achieve such milestones single-handedly, of course; but at the same time, American history reminds us time and again of the power a determined and impressive individual can have to help shape the future. Marjory Stoneman Douglas most definitely did so for the Everglades and South Florida—and having had the good fortune to visit the Glades a few times as a kid (my maternal grandparents had retired to South Florida), I can testify that she helped preserve a truly unique and amazing American space.

Next Park tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?