October 11, 2023: Vice President Studying: Henry Wilson’s Book

[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!]

How a vice presidential publication helps us rethink an administration.

In a 2019 New Year’s series on historical anniversaries, 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 VeepStudying tomorrow,

Ben

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

October 10, 2023: Vice President Studying: Andrew Johnson’s Nomination

[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 one very good and one very bad thing about the crucial wartime election.

I’ve blogged before about the moment in which I’d argue (hyperbolically to be sure, but not, I believe, without cause) that the Civil War and thus the fate of the American future most clearly hung in the balance: the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, and specifically Joshua Chamberlain and the 20^th Maine’s stand on Little Round Top. Even if I’m being too extreme about that particular moment, it’s certainly fair to say that after Gettysburg the Confederacy stood very little chance of winning the war militarily. But on the other hand, much remained uncertain and undetermined about the war’s final stages, outcome, and aftermath, and no single moment more decisively impacted those futures than the presidential election of 1864.

For a number of reasons, President Lincoln’s ultimately decisive victory over Democratic challenger (and former terrible Union general) George McClellan was a very positive result. For one thing, despite the eventual size of that victory (212 to 21 electoral votes, and a popular vote margin of more than 400,000), it was hardly a foregone conclusion: for much of 1864 the war was going poorly enough that Lincoln’s chances, particularly when coupled with John C. Frémont’s initial presence in the race as a third-party candidate, seemed gloomy at best. And for another, related thing, had McClellan triumphed he almost certainly would have negotiated a peace with the Confederacy (that was his stated platform and plan) that would have made such outcomes as the 1865 passage of the 13^th-15^th Amendments far more difficult, if not indeed impossible.

So it’s a very good thing that Lincoln won reelection. But in order to strengthen his chances of doing so, Lincoln and the Republican Party did a very bad thing: nominating Andrew Johnson, Tennessee’s Military Governor and a lifelong Southern Democrat, as Lincoln’s second Vice President (replacing his first, former Maine Governor and longtime Republican Hannibal Hamlin). Perhaps Johnson helped assure that victory, although by election day, with Frémont and his third party out of the race and the war going much better, it’s doubtful that his contribution was required. Far more certain is that, after Lincoln’s tragic assassination, the presidency of Andrew Johnson was one of the worst and most destructive in our nation’s history, culminating both in his near-impeachment (the first in American history) and, much worse, in a very different vision of Reconstruction than what Lincoln had begun. It can be easy to overlook VP nominations, but Johnson’s proves just how significant that element of an election can become.

Next VeepStudying tomorrow,

Ben

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

October 9, 2023: Vice President Studying: Aaron Burr’s Trial

[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 two dark sides to expansion that a Vice President’s trial helps us better remember.

In the summer of 1807, former Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr was tried for treason and high misdemeanor in a Virginia federal court, one presided over by none other than Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. While Burr has become much better known over the last few years due to his central role in the life and (especially) death of Alexander Hamilton, and while he lived a long and influential American life that included prominent roles in the Revolution and Founding, this trial focused on by far the most striking and controversial part of Burr’s story, what came to be known as the Burr Conspiracy: his 1805-06 efforts (begun while he was still VP, natch) to raise an independent military force in the Western United States and either use it to establish a separate nation with himself as the leader or to invade Mexico (possibly to enact the same purpose of carving out a distinct territory that he could rule). The uncertainties revealed by even that brief summary, however, along with other factors like the lack of reliable witnesses (other than one shady co-conspirator, James Wilkinson), led to an acquittal on both charges (despite President Thomas Jefferson’s ardent and possibly unconstitutional attempts to influence the outcome).

The histories around Burr’s conspiracy and trial, like all those in his incredibly complicated and compelling life, deserve their own specific attention and analysis. But this unique moment nonetheless also reflects a couple broader and quite dark realities of expansion, both in that early 19^th century period and throughout our history. For one thing, we often frame expansion (at least in how it is presented in our educational texts and conversations) through the official mechanisms by which territory was added, whether treaties like the one that began this week’s posts or financial transactions like the 1803 Louisiana Purchase through which the Jefferson Administration (with Burr as VP) acquired these Western territories from France. Yet while such measures did formally add new lands to the expanding nation, the actual expansion of Americans (individually and collectively) into those territories was far, far more messy and bloody. I’ve long argued that the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, in which US settlers invaded that future state while it was still all Indian Territory, was a striking and illegal historical moment—yet one could just as easily see it as emblematic of the chaotic and brutal way that US expansion always took place on the ground.

Moreover, the seeming dichotomy between (yet clear interconnections of) Founding Father and Vice President Burr and treasonous conspirator Burr is also emblematic of the unsavory (or at the very least far from idealized) roles performed by countless prominent Americans in the expansion process. Davy Crockett is a particularly good example, a folk hero who had his own Walt Disney TV show yet one who made his name in wars against Native Americans and then a pre-Civil War rebellion in defense of slavery (all of which were also in service of eventual US expansions, whether into the Southeast or Texas). But another example is none other than George Washington, whose first military service (which led directly to all his future military and political roles) was in the French and Indian War, a conflict precipitated by (if not at all limited to) the expansion of English settlements into new territories. Hell, many of the Civil War US Colored Troops (one of my favorite American communities) went on to serve with the post-war Buffalo Soldiers, regiments of all-Black cavalry that fought Native Americans throughout the late 19^th century “Indian Wars.” When it comes to expansion, to quote my favorite line from my favorite depiction of that USCT community, “ain’t nobody clean.”

Next VeepStudying tomorrow,

Ben

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

October 7-8, 2023: LGBT Rights in 2023

[As we begin another LGBT History Month, this week’s series has highlighted some important moments across American history in the fight for gay rights and equality. Leading up to this weekend post on the current state of that ongoing battle!]

On one definite sign of progress, one frustrating regression, and a key battleground.

1)      Cultural Representations: In this weekend post almost exactly five years ago, I highlighted a trio of groundbreaking late 1990s cultural representations of LGBT lives. They certainly reflected a changing zeitgeist, but unfortunately it was not changing that fast nor that much—in a recent rewatch of Law & Order: Criminal Intent (what can I say, I’m a sucker for Vincent D’Onofrio’s Bobby Goren, the 2^nd best TV detective of all time), I came upon a 2004 episode where the solution (semi-SPOILERS) hinged upon two characters being gay and hiding that fact from their employer (which would, one of the characters made clear, fire them if their sexuality were revealed). Which makes it quite striking that less than two decades later, I routinely see LGBT couples featured (without commentary, as it should be) in TV commercials and other everyday media, as just part of the fabric of culture and society. My teenage sons can’t really imagine a pop culture landscape where that wasn’t the case, and that’s a very good thing.

2)      Educational Repressions: No area of progress can ever be taken for granted, however, and if certain prominent forces have their way future generations of teenagers will not be nearly as collectively aware of the presence of LGBT lives in their society. I’m thinking, of course, of political movements and laws like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay,” a bill which requires educators to pretend that LGBT people quite simply do not exist (and which overtly bans books that feature gay lives in any form). As a public school student in Virginia in the 1980s and early 1990s, that was largely my experience—I can’t remember a single reading nor lesson that featured LGBT lives, identities, stories, histories, etc. in any way (certainly not overtly, and probably not even implicitly). Not at all coincidentally, there was not a single out LGBT student at my high school during my time there, nor was I aware of meeting someone with a sexual orientation other than straight until I attended college. That’s the repressive and abusive world to which these bigots want to return us, and unfortunately they’re making progress.

3)      Legal Protections: Pop culture and education are thus two significant spaces in which to fight for continued and expanded representation of LGBT Americans. But above and beyond them, and indeed directly informing those fights as well as many others, is the basic but crucial fact that LGBT rights are protected under the Constitution, key elements like the 14^th Amendment, and related laws like the Civil Rights Act. It’s those protections which advocates of so-called “religious liberty” seek to deny, which are at risk in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which are absolutely being targeted by the anti-LGBT forces in our current moment (most blatantly in anti-trans laws, but that’s without doubt just the tip of the iceberg). The ongoing fight for LGBT rights is of course a human rights battle, but it is also, and most importantly for this blog and its author, a foundationally American one.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

October 6, 2023: LGBT Histories: 1970s Advances

[As we begin another LGBT History Month, a series highlighting some important moments across American history in the fight for gay rights and equality. Leading up to a weekend post on the current state of that ongoing battle!]

On three 1973 moments that helped advance the movement in distinct but interconnected ways.

1)      Lambda Legal’s lawsuit: In 1971, New York City lawyer William Thom attempted to incorporate a nonprofit known as Lambda Legal, an organization that would be dedicated to addressing the legal, political, and social needs of LGBTQ Americans and their allies. His application was denied on the grounds that the organization’s goals were “neither benevolent nor charitable,” but fortunately Thom and his allies did not back down. They appealed the decision, and in 1973 the New York Court of Appeals ruled in Lambda’s favor and the organization was officially incorporated as a nonprofit, beginning operations in October. Over the next four decades Lambda has provided vital legal and social services to LGBTQ Americans around the country, and has played a significant role in such landmark legal decisions as 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court ruling (which invalidated all remaining anti-sodomy laws in the US). All of which stems from this crucial 1973 decision.

2)      PFLAG’s origins: On March 26^th, 1973, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) held its first official meeting, at Greenwich Village’s Metropolitan-Duane Methodist Church. PFLAG’s founder, Jeanne Manford, had over the prior year become the most prominent such parent, as the beating of her gay activist son Morty had prompted her to join him in his efforts and participate in the city’s 1972 Gay Pride march (holding a sign that famously read “Parents of Gays Unite in Support for Our Children”). From those personal and familial origin points sprang an organization that was initially similarly intimate—that March meeting had about 20 attendees, and for the next few years other such small groups began to emerge around the country—but that by 1982 had become substantive enough to be incorporated in California as a non-profit. PFLAG represented a significant advance in a number of ways, but I would especially emphasize the importance of an organization dedicated not to LGBTQ Americans themselves, but rather to their loved ones and social networks. This was another key step in recognizing the full social presence and participation of this American community.

3)      APA Small Steps: As this week’s posts have consistently highlighted, however, civil rights advances can’t and shouldn’t be separated from concurrent questions of discrimination, prejudice, and oppression. I wrote on Wednesday about the American Psychiatric Association’s discriminatory 1953 definition of homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance,” a prominent, frustratingly “scientific” example of such anti-gay prejudice. Two decades later, the APA finally removed that classification in 1973; in 1975 the American Psychological Association agreed, publicly announcing that “homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, reliability or general social and vocational capabilities, and mental health professionals should take the lead in removing the stigma of mental illness long associated with homosexual orientation.” These were small steps along the path toward inclusion, but they were steps nonetheless, and ones that complement the advances illustrated and gained by groups like Lambda and PFLAG.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

October 5, 2023: LGBT Histories: Stonewall

[As we begin another LGBT History Month, a series highlighting some important moments across American history in the fight for gay rights and equality. Leading up to a weekend post on the current state of that ongoing battle!]

On the significance of violence for civil rights movements, and also of remembering beyond it.

I don’t want to oversimplify the many layers and threads to Ava DuVernay’s wonderful and important historical drama Selma (2014), but if I had to identify one turning point scene in the film, it would be the stunning and painful sequence when a young John Lewis and his fellow Civil Rights marchers are brutally attacked and beaten by Alabama state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. As the film presents this moment, it was the violence directed against the nonviolent marchers—and more exactly the national awareness of that violence, as it was covered extensively on television news as well as in many other media venues—that led to significant shifts in both public consciousness and President Lyndon Johnson’s own policies, among other effects. And moreover, the film presents those effects are entirely purposeful and intended, as illustrated by an earlier scene when Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellow Civil Rights leaders argue that such violent responses to nonviolent resistance are precisely what they’re hoping to draw out of Selma’s Sheriff Jim Clark and his racist ilk. The violence, David Oyelowo’s King argues, is a painful but necessary and crucial step toward achieving the movement’s goals.

I don’t think there’s any way to argue that either the June 28, 1969 violent police raids on New York City’s Stonewall Inn or the subsequent nights of riots in protest of those raids were purposeful or intended by the gay rights movement or their allies. Although the LGBT community in New York had faced overt and official discrimination for years, and although there had been a similar police raid and riot at San Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria a few years earlier (in August 1966), the violent police crackdown on the Greenwich Village establishment Stonewall—the city’s most prominent gay bar and night club at the time—was nonetheless as unexpected as it was brutal. But from what I can tell, the raid and riots—both the night of the raid and for a new nights after, LGBT New Yorkers and their allies gathered at the scene to angrily protest the police brutality—achieved similar effects to the events on the Edmund Pettus Bridge: garnering significant national attention and sympathy for the gays right movement and its causes and goals, and in the process fundamentally shifting the conversations over this American civil rights issue and movement. In their different yet parallel ways, then, both Selma and Stonewall illustrate the tragic but important role that violence can play in helping civil rights movement advance their causes.

Yet as much of my writing in this space (and in my online spaces overall) argues, collective memories are always about emphasis, about what we particularly focus on and make central to our shared narratives and conversations. And so we can recognize and engage with the role of violence in a history like that of the Stonewall Uprising, but still focus our collective memories on different, under-remembered, and to my mind even more influential elements of that history. For example, the six months after Stonewall saw the founding of a number of new and significant gay rights organizations and initiatives in New York: the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), founded just days after Stonewall and the first civil rights organization to use “gay” in its name; three newspapers, Gay, Come Out!, and Gay Power; and the Gay Activists Alliance, which complemented but also diverged from the GLF and made clear that the gay rights movement in the city (and beyond) had multiple voices and communities. For another example, on the one-year anniversary of the raid, June 28, 1970, Gay Pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago; these are considered the first such marches in America, and would become one of Stonewall’s most prominent and enduring legacies. The more we can remember and emphasize these effects to Stonewall, the more we can focus on how the gay rights movement truly advanced its causes and perspectives, in response to but also far beyond the oppressive violence of the raid.

Last history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

October 4, 2023: LGBT Histories: 1950s Discriminations

[As we begin another LGBT History Month, a series highlighting some important moments across American history in the fight for gay rights and equality. Leading up to a weekend post on the current state of that ongoing battle!]

On two horrific 1950s decisions, and whether we can find light in such dark moments.

The longstanding and widely-accepted narrative of the 1950s as a particularly conservative period in American society and culture has been challenged somewhat by historians and commentators in recent years, and for good reason: decades don’t tend to break down quite so cleanly into singular identities. While of course such narratives are generally based on particular starting points—such as American society’s return to a post-war status quo in the ‘50s, especially when contrasted with the radical cultural, social, and political changes that would come in the following decade—they also depend on eliding or minimizing all of the layers and contradictions that are present and significant in any moment. So while it would be easy to see the 1950s as entirely opposed to any acceptance (or even tolerance) of homosexuality in American society, the truth, as historians have long worked to remind us, is that many identities and communities flourished in the decade, despite various prominent forms of cultural conservatism or oppression.

Yet at the same time, we can’t swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, minimizing those oppressions and their striking and horrific effects. And the early 1950s saw too particularly ugly official decisions that not only oppressed but quite literally attacked gay Americans. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association published the first edition of its seminal Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-I), and in it classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance”; that deeply offensive classification would be partly revised in 1973 but only fully removed in the 1980s, meaning that its painful and destructive effects for gay Americans lasted for nearly three decades. And in April 1953, shortly after taking office for his first term as president, Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which not only banned gay and lesbian federal employees but encouraged both private contractors and allied nations to fire their own such gay employees; this horrific federal action led directly to the so-called Lavender Scare, during which countless Americans were fired and persecuted due solely to their perceived sexuality. Taken together, these two official decisions reflect an early 1950s institutional culture extremely and aggressively hostile toward gay Americans.

Remembering these horrific decisions and oppressions is important, not because they embody the entirety of the decade but because they certainly illustrate a pervasive set of attitudes (in the supposedly scientific community just as much as the bureaucratic one) toward gay Americans and their fitness as members of society. Moreover, such darker memories shouldn’t and don’t make it impossible to focus as well on the kinds of individual and communal progress on which the historians to whom I hyperlined in the first paragraph above (among many other pioneering gay/queer studies scholars) have written. Indeed, recognizing some of the darkest sides to 1950s America for gay Americans makes the commitment and courage of those Americans that much more apparent and admirable still. In my book on History and Hope in American Literature, I focused one chapter on the 1980s AIDS epidemic, and images of both those dark histories and of hard-won hope for gay Americans (and all Americans) through them. But the same could certainly be said of these 1950s oppressions, and of the ways that gay Americans and their allies fought for their rights and identities in the face of such horrific decisions and hostilities.

Next history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?