Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 102

July 18, 2022: UtahStudying: Indigenous Utah

[On July 24, 1847, a weary group of about 150 migrants founded Salt Lake City. So for the city’s 175th birthday, this week I’ll AmericanStudy Utah histories, leading up to a special weekend post on that founding community!]

On just a few of the many communities and stories of indigenous Utah.

1)      The Paiute: That particular hyperlinked Paiute history comes from the branch of the tribe located in modern-day Oregon—but it features one of my all-time favorite Americans, Sarah Winnemucca, who was the daughter and granddaughter of chiefs and who became not just a vital spokesperson and activist for the tribe, but one of the most inspiring 19th century Americans from any community. And while the tribe, like most in the US, did spread out across a region that encompasses multiple states, it was indeed particularly part of modern-day Utah, including fraught and violent encounters with Mormon migrants in the mid-19th century that have to be front and center in any story of the state’s history. 

2)      The Goshute: It was the Goshute who had the most consistent such encounters with Mormons and other white settlers to Utah, however, as a significant portion of the tribe were native to the desert region right around Great Salt Lake. As a result of that proximity the federal government began attempts to remove the Goshutes to a reservation as early as the late 1850s, but the tribe successfully resisted those attempts for more than half a century; when they finally gave in to removal in 1912, it was to the Skull Valley Reservation, only about 50 miles from their ancestral homelands. Every tribe’s experience of histories of removal and the reservation system is distinct and worth full collective memory, but the Goshute in particular offer a crucial reminder of that system’s frustratingly arbitrary nature.

3)      The Ute: The Ute reservation, located about 150 miles east of Salt Lake City, is the nation’s second-largest and a complex and multi-layered setting in its own right. But of course indigenous communities are in no way defined by the histories and aftermaths of their relationships with white communities, and despite this series’ overall subject I don’t want to focus only on those dynamics in this post either. Instead, I’ll note here the Ute’s close association with two elements of Utah’s stunning landscapes (on which more in tomorrow’s post): their longstanding connection to the buttes which in 2016 became the basis of the Bears Ears National Monument, a site managed by members of the tribe among other indigenous communities; and the centuries-old Ute petroglyphsnear Arches National Park (on which more tomorrow as well). Indigenous Utah long predates white settlement, and remains as present on the landscape as its communities are in the state in 2022.

Next Utah history tomorrow,

Ben

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

July 16-17, 2022: Investigative Journalists: Ida B. Wells

[This weekend we celebrate the 160th birthday of one of my favorite Americans, Ida B. Wells. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of fellow investigative journalists, leading up to this special tribute to the inimitable Wells!]

On one of my favorite inspiring moments in a life absolutely overflowing with them.

I’ve written a lot about Ida B. Wells in this space and elsewhere, from her vital investigative journalism on the lynching epidemic to her crucial commentary on the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to her righteous protest within a protest at the 1914 Suffrage March in Washington. I’ve also singled out in a separate post the particularly courageous 1892 moment that I would put on the very short list, and maybe at the top of that list, of the most inspiring in American history. And I haven’t even had the chance to talk at length yet about her crucial and far too often downplayed role in co-founding the NAACP, or the groundbreaking women’s organizationshe founded in Chicago, or the equally groundbreaking Black Settlement House she and her husband created, or the time she ran for statewide political office just a year before she passed away, or…

So yeah, no shortage of incredible and inspiring moments in the life of one of my top-two favorite Americans. But in this tribute post I wanted to highlight a moment I only learned about recently, one that pulls together multiple sides of Wells’ identity and life as she so often managed to, one that really represents the grassroots yet groundbreaking community activism at the heart of all that Wells did, and one that’s just damn beautiful (among many other adjectives): her 1897 founding of a kindergarten in the basement of Chicago’s Bethel AME Church. That moment is traced in this NPR piece on Wells’ many legacies in Chicago, with much of the information (throughout the piece and for this particular section) provided by Wells’ great-granddaughter Michelle Duster. Duster’s book Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells (2021) should be required reading for all Americans, and mostly I want to say a) read both of those hyperlinked pieces and then b) pick up the book!

But I do want to say one thing more about why I love this particular moment so much. Wells was inspired to create the kindergarten not just out of a sense of communal need (although yes, as always), but also because of her own role as a young parent, her perspective on what her own growing children needed for their own best chance at happiness and success. I know it can be difficult enough to get us to better remember historical figures at all, but when we do, far too often it’s through a pretty narrow or simplistic lens, a focus on one particular side of their work or identity (such as Wells’ anti-lynching investigative journalism, which was indeed exemplary and vital but just one slice of this incredibly multi-layered person). When in truth, historical figures like Wells are as three-dimensional as all people—and moreover, I would argue that a main thing which makes our best figures so impressive and inspiring is the way in which their vital work extends into every arena, of their identities and lives and of our communities and society alike. So for her 160th birthday, I can think of few better ways to pay tribute to the inspiring greatness of Ida B. Wells than to remember that time she founded a kindergarten.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other investigative journalists you’d highlight?

July 15, 2022: Investigative Journalists: A.C. Thompson and ProPublica

[This coming weekend we’ll celebrate the 160th birthday of one of my favorite Americans, Ida B. Wells. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of fellow investigative journalists, leading up to a special tribute to the inimitable Wells!]

On a fictional character who helps us recognize one of our most vital current journalistic institutions.

I’ve written quite a bit about Treme in this space (and rightfully so, as it just might be my favorite TV show and at least is very high on the list), but interestingly have only mentioned one of my favorite characters from that show, Chris Coy’s reporterL.P. Everett, in this post on Coy’s character on a different David Simon show, The Deuce. Partly that’s because Treme is full to bursting with great characters, played by equally great actors, and I could easily write a post about each and every one of them. And partly it’s because of a strength of Coy’s performance—he effortlessly and thoroughly blends into the role of this seemingly unobtrusive but dogged and determined investigative journalist, making his scenes and plotlines far more about the people being interviewed, the clues being tracked down, the hard-won revelations being discovered. It’s one of the better representations of a fictional journalist I’ve seen on either the small or the big screen, and one I’d point to if I wanted to illustrate to an audience what investigative journalism is and should be.

In creating such a character, Simon and Eric Overmyer were also paying tribute to a real such investigative reporter, A.C. Thompson. Thompson was sent to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by ProPublica, for whom he has workedfor many years as both an investigative journalist and a staff reporter. His extensive investigations and reporting on the shootings of civilians by New Orleans police, among other related topics, won him the 2013 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for investigative journalism. In the speech he delivered upon receiving that award, Thompson talks particularly movingly and powerfully about a story of official corruption and brutality in Pincohet’s Chile that he remembered from when he was young, and that had at least partly been his inspiration for moving into a career in journalism. He ends by linking the main story he investigated in New Orleans, that of the police murder of Henry Glover and its corrupt cover-up, to that Chilean story, and notes, “I was sickened by how similar they seemed. That’s what I have to share with you.”

That’s a profoundly sobering thought, and one that rings even truer in 2022 America than it did in 2013 when Thompson delivered his speech. But it’s also perhaps the best possible argument for why we need investigative journalists, in 21stcentury America as in every nation and era. And I don’t know of any journalistic organization or institution that has done and is doing thoughtful and vital 21st century American investigative journalism better than ProPublica. I don’t want to suggest that it’d be impossible for our more traditional print or TV media to produce such journalism, and they certainly have at times (I almost dedicated a post in this series to Woodward and Bernstein, for example). But it’s worth noting that one thing which links all the folks about whom I’ve written in this series is that they took significant risks to pursue their investigations and the truth, and it seems to me that risk-taking is a trait often found more in the realm of independent media and voices. And in any case, there’s nobody around taking more risks, and doing more vital work, these days than the folks at ProPublica.

Tribute post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other investigative journalists you’d highlight?

July 14, 2022: Investigative Journalists: David Halberstam in Vietnam

[This coming weekend we’ll celebrate the 160th birthday of one of my favorite Americans, Ida B. Wells. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of fellow investigative journalists, leading up to a special tribute to the inimitable Wells!]

On a moment of genuine courage that reflects a broader role of wartime journalists.

In this very early post, I wrote about a David Halberstam speech to a graduating journalism class where he told a striking story from his days as a Vietnam War reporter; the link in that post no longer works, but the speech is also quoted at length here(in a post by a journalist on whom I have soured greatly since 2011, Glenn Greenwald). I want to quote from it at length as well, as Halberstam puts the moment perfectly:

“Probably the moment I am proudest of in my career is this: By the fall of 1963, I was one of a small group of reporters in Saigon -- we had enraged Washington and Saigon by filing pessimistic dispatches on the war. In particular, my young colleague, Neil Sheehan, and I were considered the enemy. The president of the United States, JFK, had already asked the publisher to pull me.

On day that fall, there was a major battle in the Delta (the Americans were not yet in a full combat role; they were in an advising and support role). MACV -- the American military command -- tried to keep out all reporters so they could control the information. Neil and I spent the day pushing hard to get there -- calling everyone, including Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and General Paul Harkins. With no luck, of course.

In those days, the military had a daily late afternoon briefing given by a major or a captain, called the Five O'clock Follies, because of the generally low value of the information.

On this particular day, the briefing was different, given not by a major but by a Major General, Dick Stilwell, the smoothest young general in Saigon. It was in a different room and every general and every bird colonel in the country was there. Picture if you will rather small room, about the size of a classroom, with about 10 or 12 reporters there in the center of the room. And in the back, and outside, some 40 military officers, all of them big time brass. It was clearly an attempt to intimidate us.

General Stilwell tried to take the intimidation a step further. He began by saying that Neil and I had bothered General Harkins and Ambassador Lodge and other VIPs, and we were not to do it again. Period.

And I stood up, my heart beating wildly -- and told him that we were not his corporals or privates, that we worked for The New York Times and UP and AP and Newsweek, not for the Department of Defense.

I said that we knew that 30 American helicopters and perhaps 150 American soldiers had gone into battle, and the American people had a right to know what happened. I went on to say that we would continue to press to go on missions and call Ambassador Lodge and General Harkins, but he could, if he chose, write to our editors telling them that we were being too aggressive, and were pushing much too hard to go into battle. That was certainly his right.

So: Never let them intimidate you. Never. If someone tries, do me a favor and work just a little harder on your story. Do two or three more interviews. Make your story a little better.”

That striking story speaks for itself, I’m sure. But I want to add this: investigative, adversarial, and activist journalism can and should be present in every arena of society, including—indeed, especially—those like war where we might see “unity” as a more desirable goal. I understand the phrase “politics stops at the water’s edge,” and would largely agree that we shouldn’t be playing politics with the lives of American servicepeople. But investigative journalism isn’t politics—it’s a vital effort to discover and share the truth, and that effort is not only still important when it comes to fraught situations like war, it’s doubly important in those moments.

Last journalist tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other investigative journalists you’d highlight?

July 13, 2022: Investigative Journalists: Ida Tarbell and Muckraking

[This coming weekend we’ll celebrate the 160th birthday of one of my favorite Americans, Ida B. Wells. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of fellow investigative journalists, leading up to a special tribute to the inimitable Wells!]

On why muckraking exemplifies investigative journalism at its best.

First, a paragraph from Chapter Five of Of Thee I Sing: “Another prominent and influential muckraking effort was the investigative journalism of Ida Tarbell (1857–1944). Tarbell was an iconoclastic activ­ist who took part in many of the era’s social and political debates, from the women’s suffrage movement to America’s entry into World War I. But she was best known for her investigative research into and writing about John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, which took shape across multiple serialized articles between 1902 and 1903 in McClure’s Magazine (for which Tarbell worked as an editor for many years) and was published in book form as The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904). Tarbell was careful to ground that project in detailed work with a voluminous collection of primary documents, as well as extended interviews with Standard Oil executives among many other groups. But she came nonetheless to an impassioned and convincing perspective on the negative effects of both Rockefeller and a mo­nopoly like Standard Oil on American society, writing in her book’s conclu­sion that ‘our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner, for the kind of influence he exercises.’ And her work contributed directly to a significant shift in those national conversations: the breaking up of Standard Oil under the auspices of the Sherman Antitrust Act.”

Such impassioned perspectives on their subjects might seem to put muckrakers like Tarbell at odds with definitions as journalism overall as the objective reporting of facts and investigative journalism specifically as an in-depth uncovering of such truths in order to then report them. It’s certainly important to be clear on such distinctions, particularly when it comes to different settings for journalistic work—that is, that a news story on the front page of a newspaper should indeed maintain a more objective tone and presentation of its reporting. But when it comes to investigative journalism, I believe  that a perspective, a subjective angle, is in fact a prerequisite for producing the genre—that in order to commence the investigations at all, that is, and certainly to do the often exhaustive work that they entail, the journalist has to believe that there are stories not being told, truths being ignored or even actively suppressed, and that their role is to do the work necessary to uncover and then share those stories. And moreover, that their purpose in doing so is quite overtly and centrally to change the conversations and narratives around those issues.

All of which would make Tarbell’s investigations into and journalistic writing about Standard Oil an exemplary form not just of investigative journalism, but also of journalism overall. Even the name “muckraker” reflects a begrudging understanding of the necessity and value of this work—based on a character from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the term was applied to American journalists by President Theodore Roosevelt; in a 1906 speech Roosevelt admitted that “the men with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them, to the crown of worthy endeavor.” His own experiencesand eventual frustrations with muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair might well have prompted Roosevelt’s attempt to separate muckraking from “worthy endeavor” here—whereas to me, such impassioned investigative journalism like Sinclair’s and Tarbell’s is indeed indispensable to society, and thus as worthy as any form of journalism and writing can be.

Next journalist tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other investigative journalists you’d highlight?

July 12, 2022: Investigative Journalists: Nellie Bly

[This coming weekend we’ll celebrate the 160th birthday of one of my favorite Americans, Ida B. Wells. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of fellow investigative journalists, leading up to a special tribute to the inimitable Wells!]

On a rightly famous work of investigative journalism, and another that should also be.

Yesterday’s subject, Fanny Fern, arrived at Blackwell’s Island (literally and as a subject for her journalism) long after she was well-established as a successful columnist—as I argued in that post, that timing only adds to the series’ impressiveness, but it does also mean that Fern was by no means an investigative journalist in her career overall (and never would have defined herself as such). Whereas when Nellie Bly (the pseudonym for Elizabeth Jane Cochran; 1864-1922) published her own sensational (in every sense) 1887 series about the Island, she had already been producing substantive investigative journalism for many years, since she was just a hugely precocious young writer submitting columns to the Pittsburgh Dispatch on controversial topics like the need for divorce reform. Bly published her groundbreaking first column for the Dispatch, “The Girl Puzzle” (1885), when she was just 20 years old, launching a career in provocative and investigative journalism that would change the industry and America alike.

When the Dispatch tried to limit Bly’s columns to more conventionally “women’s” subjects like theater and the arts, she left the newspaper and the city, moving to New York and talking her way into a job with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. She did so by making the case for the truly groundbreaking investigative assignment that would become her justifiably famous series on the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island (which had been renamed Roosevelt Island). Fern visited Blackwell’s and wrote thoughtfully about what she saw there, but Bly found a way to truly live the experience: going undercover, first in a boarding house where she convinced the authorities she was insane, then for a ten-day imprisonment at the asylum (before the World reached out to identify her and request her release). She published her reporting first in the World in October 1887 and shortly thereafter as the book Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887), and in both forms her investigations and journalism alike truly altered the way America thought about mental illness, public health, and women’s rights—as well as about the possibilities for women journalists and all journalists.

If Bly’s asylum work was her only investigative journalism, it would be more than enough to establish her as a titan in that field—but it wasn’t, and indeed despite her youth it wasn’t her first extended such assignment. Shortly after she began writing for the Dispatch her published a series of investigative reports on women factory workers in the city; they were significant enough that factory owners complained to the paper and Bly was reassigned. She then embarked on an extended investigation that, to my mind, was at least as impressive as the asylum one: the 21 year-old Bly traveled to Mexicoand spent six months embedded with locals, producing in-depth reporting on their communities as well as the dictatorial government of Porfirio Díaz. The latter reports angered the government sufficiently that Bly was forced to leave, but not before she had accumulated enough investigative journalism to publish in the subsequent book Six Months in Mexico (1888). I’m not in any way trying to downplay the asylum work by suggesting that this Mexican project was just as impressive—quite the opposite, I would argue that both represented the best of investigative journalism, of a courageous writer pushing into settings and stories that many of her colleagues and audiences alike never would, and changing our collective conversations in the process.

Next journalist tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other investigative journalists you’d highlight?

July 11, 2022: Investigative Journalists: Fanny Fern

[This coming weekend we’ll celebrate the 160th birthday of one of my favorite Americans, Ida B. Wells. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of fellow investigative journalists, leading up to a special tribute to the inimitable Wells!]

On a journalistic series that isn’t perfect, but is pretty darn impressive nonetheless.

I’ve written many times about my love for Fanny Fern, most especially in this Saturday Evening Post tribute. In place of the first paragraph here I’ll ask out to check that column out if you would, and then come on back here for more on Fern’s most striking example of investigative journalism.

Welcome back! Toward the end of that column I mention Fern’s 1858 series of columns on Blackwell’s Island, calling it a “long, imperfect but important look at the forgotten women housed in that fraught space.” Imperfect Fern’s Blackwell’s pieces certainly are—if we look for example at the one hyperlinked above, which I believe was a follow-up reflection on the series itself and which there is republished in her 1872 collection Caper-Sauce, we see the way in which Fern consistently contrasts “our sons and our daughters” with the women imprisoned at Blackwell’s (officially all convicted prostitutes, although as I mention in my Sat Postcolumn that was a frustratingly capacious category). It’s certainly understandable that she wouldn’t want to think of her own children as part of such a category or community, and likewise that she imagines herself writing to audiences in similar positions and with similar perspectives. But there’s no reason to think that the women at Blackwell’s wouldn’t have the chance to read Fern’s columns—and in any case and more importantly, there’s every reason to remember that they are just as much “our daughters” as any other women.

But as I hope every day on this blog (and everywhere else I write and talk and teach and work and live) makes clear, I’m very much not in favor of making the perfect the enemy of the good, and there is a great deal that is good about Fern’s investigative journalistic series on Blackwell’s Island. Most especially, I would reiterate something I also mentioned in my column—that by this time Fern was already the highest paid newspaper columnist in America (and had been for three years). I suppose you could argue that that position gave Fern license to take risks, but in my experience the opposite is much more often the case: that achieving success and stability (especially after years of painful instability such as those Fern had experienced) makes authors, artists, activists, all of us more likely to do what we perceive as safe and smart enough to keep that position. Whereas Fanny Fern, having experienced a multi-layered version of some of the worst of what could happen to women in 1850s America (abuse, neglect, abandonment, widowhood, single parenthood, extreme poverty, and more), decided to investigate a community featuring women in even more desperate shape, women whom (as she notes in that hyperlinked reflection, and more importantly demands that her audience recognize) the rest of society was all too willing to ignore and forget. Seems to me that’s a profoundly impressive and inspiring moment and way to use investigative journalism indeed.

Next journalist tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other investigative journalists you’d highlight?

July 9-10, 2022: 4th of July Contexts: Patriotism in 2022 America

[In honor of the 4th of July, this week’s series has highlighted various historical and cultural contexts for this uniquely American holiday. Leading up to this special weekend post on patriotism in 2022!]

In Of Thee I Sing, I trace four types of patriotism across American history. The first, celebratory patriotism, has been relatively constant, but the other three have continued to evolve, so in this post I wanted to say a bit about where I see each of them here in mid-2022:

1)      Mythic patriotism: Over the last few months there have been a number of stories about rising white Christian Nationalism, many connected to this important recent book by Philip Gorski and Sam Perry. In Of Thee I Sing I resisted using the term “nationalism,” as I find it distinct from (and significantly more dangerous than) what I would want to define as “patriotism.” But there’s no doubt that my category of mythic patriotism is quite far along the spectrum toward nationalism, and more exactly that the myths on which this form of patriotism depend have consistently featured both white- and –Christian centered visions of America. Even when these narratives are not overtly white supremacist (and I think it’s important to recognize that they can be more benign than that), they begin with the idea that the American community was at any point fundamentally white and/or Christian—and so a significant goal of my ongoing work, on patriotism and on America, is to push back on those narratives as the myths that they have always been.

2)      Active patriotism: One of the questions I’ve been asked a good bit, in book talks and in adult learning classes and in various other settings, has been “What can we do?” I’m not going to pretend that there are clear or easy answers to that, nor that I don’t face the same frustration and sense of hopelessness at times as well. But one of the main reasons I wanted to include this category in my book is to push back on the idea that patriotism, or civic engagement, or citizenship, or anything we might aspire to is passive, is about accepting things as they are or have been. Celebratory patriotism might be relatively passive—but if we recognize that there’s an alternative, active form of patriotism as well, it frees us to think about actions like voting, like organizing, like protesting as all expressions of a patriotic commitment to the nation. There’s a lot we can do, and in doing any and all of it we’re extending the legacy of some of our most inspiring active patriotic figures and communities.

3)      Critical patriotism: There’s another layer to it, though. “What can we do?” isn’t just an expression of hopelessness—it’s also, quite often these days, an understandable cynicism, a sense that things are very bad on so many fronts and far too many of those in power don’t seem to care (or at least not enough to fight). Perhaps the single biggest reason I wanted to write the book was to challenge the idea that such understandable (and accurate) critiques are and must be separate from patriotism—that’s mythic patriotism talking, advancing the “love it or leave it” narrative. I really detest that narrative, as I believe not just that critical patriotism is an important form that always needs to be in the conversation, but that in many ways it’s the most important form precisely for this reason: that it reminds us that criticizing something with the goal of pushing it toward the best version of its self is absolutely a form of love, and in many ways the highest form. And, without doubt, one that we desperately need to advocate for and practice here in 2022.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 8, 2022: 4th of July Contexts: “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”

[In honor of the 4th of July, a series highlighting various historical and cultural contexts for this uniquely American holiday. Leading up to a special weekend post on patriotism in 2022!]

On the stunning speech that challenges us as much today as it did 150 years ago.

I’ve written many times, in this space and elsewhere, about the inspiring history of Elizabeth Freeman, Quock Walker, and their Revolutionary-era peers and allies. Freeman, Walker, their fellow Massachusetts slaves, and the abolitionist activists with whom they worked used the language and ideas of the Declaration of Independence and 1780 Massachusetts Constitution in support of their anti-slavery petitions and court cases, and in so doing contributed significantly to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. I’m hard-pressed to think of a more inspiring application of our national ideals, or of a more compelling example of my argument (made in the second hyperlinked piece above) that Black history is American history. Yet at the same time, it would be disingenuous in the extreme for me to claim that Freeman’s and Walker’s cases were representative ones, either in their era or at any time in the two and a half centuries of American slavery; nor I would I want to use Freeman’s and Walker’s successful legal actions as evidence that the Declaration’s “All men are created equal” sentiment did not in a slaveholding nation include a central strain of hypocrisy.

If I ever need reminding of that foundational American hypocrisy, I can turn to one of our most fiery texts: Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass’s speech is long and multi-layered, and I don’t want to reduce its historical and social visions to any one moment; but I would argue that it builds with particular power to this passage, one of the most trenchant in American oration and writing: “Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?” The subsequent second half of the speech sustains that perspective and passion, impugning every element of a nation still entirely defined by slavery and its effects. Despite having begun his speech by noting his “quailing sensation,” his feeling of appearing before the august gathering “shrinkingly,” Douglass thus builds instead to one of the most full-throated, confident critiques of American hypocrisy and failure ever articulated.

As an avowed and thoroughgoing optimist, it’s far easier for me to grapple with Freeman’s and Walker’s use of the Declaration and the 4th of July than with Douglass’s—which, of course, makes it that much more important for me to include Douglass in my purview, and which is why I wanted to end this week’s series with Douglass’s speech. There’s a reason, after all, why the most famous American slave is undoubtedly Harriet Tubman—we like our histories overtly inspiring, and if we’re going to remember slavery at all, why not do so through the lens of someone who resisted it so successfully? Yet while Tubman, like Walker, is certainly worth remembering, the overarching truth of slavery in America is captured far better by Douglass’s speech and its forceful attention to our national hypocrisies and flaws. And despite the ridiculous attacks over the last couple decades on “too negative” histories or “apologizing for America,” attacks that have morphed directly into the current anti-“CRT” mania, there’s no way we can understand our nation or move forward collectively without a fuller engagement with precisely the lens provided by Douglass and his stunning speech.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 4th of July histories or contexts you’d highlight?

July 7, 2022: 4th of July Contexts: Born on the 4th of July

[In honor of the 4th of July, a series highlighting various historical and cultural contexts for this uniquely American holiday. Leading up to a special weekend post on patriotism in 2022!]

On three evolutions of a classic, complex American phrase.

To my knowledge, the phrase “born on the 4th of July” first appeared in “The Yankee Doodle Boy” (usually known as “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy”), a song that first appeared in George M. Cohan’s musical Little Johnny Jones (1904) and became most famous through James Cagney’s performance of it (as Cohan himself) in the film Yankee Doodle Dandy(1942). In this context, the phrase is a straightforward as it seems, capturing the speaker’s stereotypical all-American identity, an unironic embrace of the mythology that is amplified by every line in Cohan’s song: “I’m glad I am/So’s Uncle Sam”; “Yanks through and through/Red, white, and blue”; “A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam”; and so on. I suppose it’s possible to read the song’s question about this identity—“Oh say can you see/Anything about my pedigree that’s phony?”—as a recognition of its over-the-top embrace of stereotypical patriotism, but I don’t know that anything in the song, musical, or Cohan’s career and work warrants that kind of ironic reading.

At the other end of the irony spectrum is the use of Cohan’s phrase in a searing autobiographical work published in the nation’s bicentennial year: Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (1976). Kovic, a Vietnam veteran turned antiwar protester, was indeed born on July 4th, 1946; but in his memoir that coincidence becomes a multi-layered metaphor for both the myths and ideals that contributed to his volunteering for service during the Vietnam War and the realities and gaps of his experiences in that conflict and upon his return home as a wounded veteran. As he puts it in a new introduction for a 2005 re-issue of the book, “I wanted people to understand. I wanted to share with them as nakedly and openly and intimately as possible what I had gone through, what I had endured. I wanted them to know what it really meant to be in a war, … not the myth we had grown up believing.” While the myths of war about which Kovic writes were no doubt due in part to the very specific, post-World War II context of his birth and childhood, they’ve also been a part of our national mythos since the war with which our nation originated, a connection captured potently by Kovic’s evocation of July 4th.

Oliver Stone’s award-winning 1989 film version of Born on the Fourth of July, adapted for the screen by Kovic himself (along with Stone), certainly represents another evolution of the phrase, one in which it ironically returned to a Cohanesque mainstream popular culture prominence (thanks in no small measure to the film’s breakout performance by its movie star leading man). Yet I want to highlight as well a more recent use of the phrase, one that exemplifies a more detached, less socially critical form of irony. In a middle verse of The Killer’s song “Sam’s Town” (2006), which opens their concept album of the same name, the speaker portrays his family’s iconic American identity thusly: “I still remember Grandma Dixie’s wake/I’d never really known anybody to die before/Red, white, and blue upon a birthday cake/My brother he was born on the fourth of July and that’s all.” Coupled with a preceding line, “Running through my veins an American masquerade,” this verse seems to offer the first steps toward a layered critique of American mythology to complement Kovic’s. Yet while the remainder of Sam’s Town is engaging rock and roll, socially or historically aware it is not—and indeed, the band’s frontman Brandon Flowers critiqued Green Day’s American Idiot album and tour for attacking America. [Although, as I’ve highlighted in this space, one of The Killers’ more recent songs and videos is overtly and stunningly political, so they seem to have evolved on this score.] By the 21st century, perhaps, the phrase “born on the fourth of July” has come to capture most fully the cypher that is American popular culture.

Last July 4th context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 4th of July histories or contexts you’d highlight?