January 6, 2025: Great Society Laws: Civil and Voting Rights

[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a number of Great Society laws, leading up to a post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]

On one smaller but still important detail in each of three pivotal civil rights laws.

1)      The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Among the many protections against discrimination and segregation in this groundbreaking law, I’d highlight Title VII’s prohibition against discrimination “based on sex.” There’s apparently a great deal of debate of whether that section, introduced as an amendment by the powerful Representative Howard W. Smith (D-VA), was intended sincerely or as an attempt to derail the bill’s protections for African Americans. But while Smith was a segregationist, he was also a longtime sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment, so it seems likely to me that he did hope to include these protections in the final law—and in any case, the amendment passed and was included in the Civil Rights Act.

2)      The Voting Rights Act of 1965: The many General and Special Provisions included in this landmark law could be the subject of an entire weeklong blog series in their own right, especially since so many of them connect to overarching American histories and issues. Here I’ll highlight just one: Section 203c, which created a census-based formula to determine which jurisdictions are required to provide election materials in multiple languages. Given the (stupid and racist) ways in which 21^st century Americans have responded to things like “Pressing 2 for Spanish,” I can only imagine how divisive this provision was in 1965—making me even gladder that it’s there.

3)      The Civil Rights Act of 1968: There’s a lot of goodness in this follow-up Civil Rights Act, including not just the protections that came to be known as the Fair Housing Act, but also the countless rights it helped grant to Native American communities through the “Indian Bill of Rights.” But because everything in our history is complicated and much of it contradictory, I’ll highlight here the law’s Title X, the Anti-Riot Act, which made it a felony to “travel in interstate commerce with the intent to incite, promote, encourage, participate in, and carry on a riot.” As I’ve written many times, “riot” is one of the most fraught terms in our political discourse—and when we learn that this act was signed into law during the uprisings after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., we realize just how fraught this particular usage of the term was and remains.

Next Great Society law tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 4-5, 2025: 2025 Anniversaries: Five 1975 Films

[A New Year means another blog series dedicated to historic anniversaries we’ll be commemorating this year. Leading up to this special weekend post on five films celebrating their 50^th this year!]

Quick thoughts on what five 1975 classics can tell us in 2025:

1)      Jaws: I wrote about what Spielberg’s game-changing summer blockbuster can tell us about American communities in that hyperlinked post. But here, in a moment when orcas are rightfully rising up to take back the seas from selfish greedy humans, I’ll add that it’s getting increasingly difficult not to root for the shark—and for all of nature to resist and overthrow the human regime that has been so unnecessarily destructive to it. Sorry for that bleak start to an ostensibly fun post, but, well, January 2025 be like.

2)      One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Surprisingly, that brief mention in a post on Dorothea Dix is the only time I’ve really engaged at all in this space with Milos Forman’s complex and wonderful film (or even with Ken Kesey’s even better 1962 novel, it seems). I can’t do any kind of justice to it in this brief space, but I will say that a fraught but definite lesson of the 2024 election is that we need to do better to engage with young men’s mental health—and the history of how we’ve done so (or how we haven’t) is, to say the least, relevant.

3)      Dog Day Afternoon: This 1975 film I have blogged about at length, in that hyperlinked post. But that post was from 2014, and I’d point out something deeply cringe-worthy that reflects a vital continued conversation in 2024: my use of “transsexual” in the final paragraph (in service of, I hope and believe, entirely inclusive ideas, but nonetheless). On the one hand, we’ve come a long way in the last ten years in how we talk about our transgender fellow Americans—but on the other hand, if you watched any Trump campaign ads, you know just how far we still have to go, and how much we need sympathetic portrayals like this film’s.

4)      The Rocky Horror Picture Show: The portrayal of LGBTQ+ Americans is significantly more central still in this cult classic film, of course. In recent years there’s been a lot of debate over whether the film is transphobic; I won’t pretend to be qualified to weigh in, but this article represents one side of the coin, and this one the other. Cultural works are complicated and contradictory, and ones from 50 years ago even more so of course. I vote we watch them all, take away what we can, critique what we need to, do the work.

5)      Nashville: In that recent post I made the case for how a few of the many main characters in Robert Altman’s film can help us think about not just that place and time, but our own as well. My older son now living in Nashville has pushed me to think more about that community, as both of my sons’ interests in country music have made me give that genre a far deeper listen. And that’s the thing—as much as I don’t feel that I recognize far too many fellow Americans in 2025, we’d all better find ways to do so more fully if we’re gonna survive together.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 3, 2025: 2025 Anniversaries: 1925 Literature

[A New Year means another blog series dedicated to historic anniversaries we’ll be commemorating this year. Leading up to a special weekend post on five films celebrating their 50^th this year!]

In lieu of a last full post in this series I’m going to ask you to read instead a Saturday Evening Post Considering History column of mine where I made the case for reading and remembering 1925 not only through the lens of its most famous and frequently-taught novel, but with other important books and voices in the mix as well. The fact that such educational efforts are likely to be endangered in 2025 America makes that goal only that much more important still!

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 2, 2025: 2025 Anniversaries: Two 1875 Laws

[A New Year means another blog series dedicated to historic anniversaries we’ll be commemorating this year. Leading up to a special weekend post on five films celebrating their 50^th this year!]

The Page Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the worst and best of America.

I’ve written a good bit about the Page Act of 1875, the nation’s first federal immigration law, both in this space and in other projects like my Considering History column and my podcast (where the Page Act frustratingly foreshadowed the Chinese Exclusion era that so affected the Celestials). In researching for the podcast’s Fifth Inning in particular, I learned about just how blatant California Representative Horace Page was in his arguments for this law and its attempts to restrict (if not entirely exclude) Chinese arrivals overall and Chinese women in particular, which he claimed were intended “to end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women.” And, for that matter, how none other than President Ulysses Grant echoed some of those prejudiced and xenophobic sentiments, as in his December 7, 1875 annual message to Congress: “I invite the attention of Congress to another evil—the importation of Chinese women, but few of whom are brought to our shores to pursue honorable or useful occupations.”

Grant’s endorsement of this racist and exclusionary federal law was particularly frustrating given his crucial role in that same year in the support for and passage of a far more progressive and inclusive law: the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Drafted by Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner in a direct response to the developing system of racial segregation that would become known as Jim Crow, this law prohibited discrimination in any public conveyances and accommodations (so not just public transportation, but also “inns, theaters, and other places of public amusement”). Although the increasingly awful Supreme Court would later strike down the law in its 1883 Civil Rights Cases decision, it’s important not to let that eventual history minimize how progressive and significant the 1875 law was—and, for that matter, how much of an influence it was on the more famous and more enduring (we hope, he added in early 2025) Civil Rights Act of 1964.

So how can we possibly commemorate the 150^th anniversary of these diametrically opposed federal laws without minimizing one or the other? Certainly the duality helps remind us that many of the late 19^th century’s most ardent advocates of African American rights and equality were frustratingly unable to extend that perspective to Chinese and Asian Americans, as apparently illustrated by Grant but also and far more clearly by Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. But to my mind it’s also a reflection of just how difficult it can be, and concurrently and not coincidentally how crucial it is, to fight for solidarity and community as well as rights and progress—to truly imagine and work toward, that is, liberty and justice for all. Even in periods of progress that balance isn’t easy to maintain, and in our more fraught and fragile eras (like the late 19^th century, and like right freaking now) it’s far easier still to throw certain Americans overboard. Let’s commemorate 1875 by recommitting that we not make the same mistake in 2025.

Last anniversary tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 1, 2025: 2025 Anniversaries: The Erie Canal

[A New Year means another blog series dedicated to historic anniversaries we’ll be commemorating this year. Leading up to a special weekend post on five films celebrating their 50^th this year!]

For the 200^th anniversary of its opening, three figures who helped construct the Erie Canal.

1)      DeWitt Clinton: There’s a whole Early Republic history to be written through the lens of the Clinton family, including George (the fourth Vice President of the US) and his nephew DeWitt (who himself ran for President in 1812, in between stints as a Senator and Governor of New York among other influential roles). The final public act in DeWitt’s life was his two terms as NY Governor, during the second of which he died unexpectedly in February 1828. And no aspect of DeWitt’s time as governor was more significant to him, nor more influential for the state and young nation, than his support for the Erie Canal project (leading to his nickname “Father of the Erie Canal”). He and it met with plenty of opposition, producing such colorful phrases as “Clinton’s Big Ditch.” But as with so many progressive ideas, just about everybody was more than happy to get on board once Clinton’s pet project opened and contributed so potently and positively to the evolving Early Republic.

2)      Canvass White: Prominent political allies are key for any major project of course, but at the end of the day it takes the folks on the ground to make the project a reality. There weren’t really professional civil engineers yet (at least not in America), and so the folks on the ground came from many walks of life: politicians like James Geddes, judges like Benjamin Wright, educators like Nathan Roberts, and amateur inventors and would-be engineers like Canvass White. Just 26 when he began working for Judge Wright as an engineer on the Erie Canal project in 1816, White persuaded Governor Clinton to fund a trip to England to learn more about their canals. He learned so much, and contributed so much to the Erie Canal project over the decade leading up to its opening, that he would be appointed Chief Engineer for multiple subsequent such projects, including the Delaware and Raritan Canal and the Lehigh Canal.

3)      Ely Parker: I’ve written about Parker, one of my favorite Americans, many times in this space, including that hyperlinked post and this one among others. He was born in 1828, so to be clear he didn’t play any role in the original construction of the Erie Canal (he was awesome but not superhuman). But he studied civil engineering at RPI, and when an 1840s extension of the canal was announced, Parker (still only 20 years old at the time) applied for and was appointed as the project’s resident engineer in Rochester. He was also in that same period continuing his lifelong fight for his Seneca Nation’s land rights and claims, which helps us remember both that all construction projects in America intersect with such fraught issues and that figures like Parker have worked to complement rather than oppose these needs.

Next anniversary tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 31, 2024: 2025 Anniversaries: Lexington and Concord

[A New Year means another blog series dedicated to historic anniversaries we’ll be commemorating this year. Leading up to a special weekend post on five films celebrating their 50^th this year!]

On two ways to add to our memories of an already very familiar history.

Compared to yesterday’s subject of King Philip’s War, and indeed compared to almost any other American histories, the battles of Lexington and Concord figure very, very prominently in our collective memories. Even as a kid learning about American history in Virginia schools—and thus occupying an overtly partisan, anti-New England place in the debate over where the American Revolution and thus the United States of America itself began—I distinctly remember how much was made of the minutemen at Lexington and Concord (and of related figures and stories like Paul Revere’s ride). There’s no version of our revolutionary and founding histories that doesn’t include these sites and stories in central ways, and thus commemorating the 250^th anniversary of Lexington and Concord might well feel like a repetition, or at least a reinforcement, of existing memories.

If you’re a reader of this blog, though, you already know that I believe we can and should always expand and add nuance to our collective memories, and that the process is only that much more important when the histories already feel familiar. I’ve written previously in this space, in response to Serena Zabin’s phenomenal book The Boston Massacre: A Family History (2020), about the importance of thinking of the American Revolution as a civil conflict, rather than a war between two distinct nations. As Zabin traces, even the British soldiers had become part of American communities in a variety of ways that made these battles familial; and if we go beyond the people firing guns at each other at Lexington and Concord, we can really remember the range of perspectives featured among colonists themselves on the conflict, on England and America, and on every aspect of this historical moment. In a very real sense, the shot heard ‘round the world was more like Fort Sumter, the first shots in a civil war, than we’ve generally been able to see.

Moreover, and more complicatedly still, that reference to Fort Sumter can remind us of another vital and too often forgotten aspect of Massachusetts in 1775—the presence and practice of slavery in the colony (and in the state once it was created as well). I’ve made the case repeatedly, in this space and most everywhere else, for thinking about enslaved people like Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker as American revolutionary leaders. Seen in that light, another shot heard ‘round the world (or one that should have been and still should be, anyway) was the 1777 petition through which Massachusetts enslaved people and their allies argued for their freedom in a post-Declaration of Independence world. At the very least, 250^th anniversary commemorations of Lexington and Concord in 2025 should include Massachusetts and American enslaved people, a recognition of both the limits of revolution and of what every part of those unfolding histories meant and could mean for these American communities.

Next anniversary tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 30, 2024: 2025 Anniversaries: King Philip’s War

[A New Year means another blog series dedicated to historic anniversaries we’ll be commemorating this year. Leading up to a special weekend post on five films celebrating their 50^th this year!]

For its 350^th anniversary, a couple important ways to push past our memories of a tragic conflict.

In this post on the Pequot War’s horrific massacre at Mystic, I noted that that 1630s war represented a painful and definitive shift in the relationship between English settlers and Native American communities in New England. Of course settler colonialism and violence had always been part of that relationship, but so too had the possibility of cross-cultural alliances like those traced by historian Cynthia Van Zandt in her excellent book Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580-1660. But across the 17^th century, that relationship in New England became more and more overtly and centrally hostile and violent—and if the Pequot War marked a significant step in that destructive direction, it was King Philip’s War forty years later which really reflected the worst of European-indigenous encounters and set the stage for (for example) the unfolding history of scalp bounties that I traced in this column.

As with so many of our most painful histories, we’ve done a pretty terrible job including King Philip’s War in our collective memories. When we have done so, at least here in New England, it seems to me that it’s been entirely through the lens of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, the story of an English woman taken hostage by the Wampanoag who witnesses much of the war during her time with that community. As I argued in that hyperlinked post, and at length in a chapter of my book Redefining American Identity, Rowlandson unquestionably experiences cross-cultural transformations that reflect the possibility of more mutual relationships between these communities. But her narrative begins with an extended depiction of the violent attack on her home and town by Wampanoag warriors, and it ends with her grateful return to her white world and sense of the entire experience as a challenge presented by her Christian God. Which means that in too many ways, remembering the war through Rowlandson’s lens deepens our sense of the divisions and hostility between these two communities.

There’s another possible lens through which our collective memories of this conflict can be viewed, though, and that’s the Wampanoag chief (known to his people as Metacomet) after whom we’ve named the war. I’ve written many times in this space about one of my favorite critical patriotic texts, William Apess’s “Eulogy on King Philip” (1836). Apess doesn’t just ask his audiences—both white Bostonians in the 1830s and all Americans at all times—to remember Philip/Metacomet with more nuance and more sympathy, although he certainly does that. He also makes the case for thinking of this figure as an ancestor of all Americans, and thus for “every patriot” to see him as a revolutionary leader akin to George Washington himself. I agree entirely, but would add this: even if 21^st century white Americans might struggle to get to that perspective, they and all of us could at least since this war as a civil conflict, a tragic battle between multiple, interconnected American communities. That’d be an important reframing as we work to commemorate the war’s 350^th.

Next anniversary tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?