Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 105

June 13, 2022: Revisiting Beach Reads: Tony Hillerman

[I can’t lie, I haven’t had time to read for pleasure during this academic year, so I don’t have a ton of new recs for this year’s Beach Reads series. So I wanted to revisit authors and books I’ve read on the beach over my life—and to ask for your own recommendations for a crowd-sourced weekend post we can all throw in the beach bag!]

On a great mystery series that captures the lure of the Southwest, then and now.

There were a lot of reasons why Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park stood out to me among the many amazing stops on my family’s 1990 trip to visit Southwestern National Parks. Exploring thousand year old cliff dwellings, hiking out to the site of long-preserved petroglyphs, surprising a lone coyote at a sunset ruin—these are the kinds of experiences that will hit a 13 year old AmericanStudier in a particular way. But perhaps the most alluring aspect of Mesa Verde is its central mystery: the question of why the Anasazi people abruptly abandoned their cliff dwellings less than a century into their time there, and what happened to them after their departure. Archaeologists and historians have a variety of theories, but to some degree the Anasazi’s fate will always remain a mystery—and will thus keep young AmericanStudiers (and all the rest of us) coming back to Mesa Verde.

Even without an event as striking as the Anasazi’s departure, the dominant features of the Southwest’s human landscape—villages atop isolated mesas, dwellings in the sides of gaping canyons, petroglyphs carved in the rock and sand—lend themselves nicely to the mysteriously inclined. No one capitalized on that element more fully, nor more effectively, than Tony Hillerman, the University of New Mexico journalism professor who wrote (among his more than 30 total books) a series of 18 phenomenal mysteries focused on Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. I may be misremembering for dramatic effect, but I’m pretty sure I was reading one of the best novels in the series, A Thief of Time (1988), during that family National Park vacation—and I know that I won’t ever think of New Mexico’s canyons and ruins without thinking of how Hillerman captures them in the hugely atmospheric, spooky, and pitch-perfect opening to that novel.

Hillerman and his Navajo mysteries (as they’re usually collectively known) also interestingly complement another Southwestern writer about whom I’ve written in this space: Mary Hunter Austin. An Oklahoma native and decorated World War II veteran, Hillerman moved to New Mexico for his UNM job and, like Austin, found himself more and more deeply interested in and attached to the region and its histories, cultures, and communities. (As he chronicles in his wonderful memoir.) While I can’t say for sure how the Navajo felt about Hillerman’s books, from everything I have seen they recognized, as I believe would any reader, that Hillerman treated his focal cultures and communities with the same abiding respect and admiration he did his protagonist policemen and the landscapes they patrolled. Perhaps the one thing that links the many different Southwestern authors and artists about whom I’ve blogged over the years is how much they found themselves drawn to the Southwest—to its places, to its histories, and, certainly, to its very American stories.

Next Beach Read tomorrow,

Ben

PS. You know what to do—share Beach Read recs for the weekend post, please!

June 11-12, 2022: LGBTQ Icons

[June 10thwould have been Judy Garland’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of Garland’s performances, leading up to this special weekend post on Garland and a few other LGBTQ icons.]

On AmericanStudies takeaways from how and why Garland and other artists became LGBTQ icons.

1)      Garland: There are undoubtedly lots of factors that have combined to make Garland “The Elvis of homosexuals” (per The Advocate), and as with all of today’s subjects, I don’t have the space to get into them at length. Instead, I wanted to note one particular and very telling detail: that for many decades (dating back at least to the World War II era), gay men in particular would refer to themselves as “Friends of Dorothy” in order to secretly connect with other gay men. Which is to say, icons like Garland don’t just become part of the cultural landscape for oppressed communities—they can also and perhaps especially serve as a means of navigation and survival within an all-too hostile society.

2)      Cher: Cher has become particularly linked to the 21st century LGBTQ rights movement through her evolving relationship with and support for her son Chaz Bono, a transgender man; but as this interview reflects, she’s felt connected to the movement and LGBTQ identities throughout her life. What’s most telling for me in that interview is the idea of a shared experience of not quite fitting in—a perspective on themselves and the world that many artists share, often from a young age, and might explain all five of today’s subjects among many others.

3)      Diana Ross: That hyperlinked article highlights a handful of reasons for the legendary singer’s status as an LGBTQ icon, but to my mind it all boils down to one: her 1980 song “I’m Coming Out.” That song’s co-writers, Chic bandmates Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, fully intended the song to serve as an LGBTQ anthem, with Rodgers noting in a recent video that they believed the song could have “the same power as James Brown’s ‘Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.’” But it took more than the writing to make the song happen and a hit—it took the participation and immense talent of Ross, one of the towering figures in 20th century American popular culture. That was no small thing in 1980, and worth icon status to be sure.

4)      Madonna: Again, that hyperlinked article traces many stages of Madonna’s career, both overall and as an LGBTQ icon, including the way in which her connection to and celebration of a longstanding trend like “Voguing” helped bring musical and dance counter-cultures into mainstream spaces. But what stands out most to me is her friendship with and support for artist and activist Keith Haring, during a time when (as Madonna herself notes in the first post in that series of memories) far too many people refused even to touch doorknobs after an HIV-infected person like Haring used them. It takes cultural figures to help move the needle, and in that and many other ways Madonna helped do so when it came to AIDS.

5)      Elizabeth Taylor: But no one, and I mean no one, did more for the early fight against both the stigmas and the horrific realities of AIDS than did legendary actress Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor started her AIDS Foundation in 1991, and she spent much of the remaining two decades of her life fundraising, supporting efforts and activisms of all kinds, and giving interviews like the one featured in this 1992 Vanity Fair profile. Those twenty years of work led to the honorary title “The Joan of Arc of AIDS”; and without taking a single thing away from Garland’s own relationship with the LGBTQ community, I think Joan of Arc is an even more powerful symbol than Elvis, making Taylor perhaps the most influential of all five of these inspiring subjects.

Beach Reads series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other icons or allies you’d highlight?

June 10, 2022: Judy Garland Studying: The Judy Garland Show

[June 10thwould have been Judy Garland’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Garland’s performances, leading up to a weekend post on LGBTQ icons.]

On power moves behind the scenes and even more powerful presences on the screen.

Across my more than 11.5 (!) years of researching and writing these blog posts I’ve learned a ton (certainly one of the main reasons why I continue to do it; my hope that y’all are learning too is another), enough in fact that I can break down the things I’ve learned into sub-categories. One of the more striking and telling such sub-categories would have to be the things I’ve learned about famous women across our cultural landscape, and more exactly about the layers to their careers and successes that have been too often left out of our collective memories and narratives of them. That would definitely apply to Lucille Ball and her truly groundbreaking work as a television producer (seriously, Star Trek!), and I’d say it applies as well to the many layers of Marilyn Monroe’s life and career (which I traced in that whole weeklong series) beyond the sex symbol iconography. And I hope that this week’s series of posts has already reflected things I’ve learned about Judy Garland’s acting career and performances that have likewise expanded my sense of this already-iconic-but-perhaps-in-a-too-limited-way cultural figure.

Like Ball and Monroe and so many other powerful women, Garland’s career and legacies went way beyond acting, and indeed beyond performing on screen at all. In 1961, the same year in which she made the triumphant return to film acting in Judgment at Nuremberg about which I wrote in yesterday’s post, she settled a longstanding contract dispute with CBS and went on to sign two significant deals with the network: first for a series of stand-alone specials in 1962-63; and then a $24 million offer (well over $100 million in 2020s numbers, and thus described as “the biggest talent deal in TV history”) to produce and star in a weekly series. Titled simply The Judy Garland Show, that series debuted on September 29, 1963; it only aired for one season (26 episodes), not least because CBS decided to schedule it against NBC’s Western mega-hit Bonanza, but The Judy Garland Show would go on to receive four Emmy nominations, and in any case reflects Garland’s power behind the scenes as well as the power and draw of her name and presence.

And, through her, so many other powerful names and presences. Here are just some of the guest stars across the show’s first three months, from that late September premiere through the end of 1963: Barbra Streisand (nominated for an Emmy for her appearance), Lena Horne, Tony Bennett, Count Basie, Mickey Rooney, Peggy Lee, Bob Newhart, Carl Reiner, and Mel Tormé. This wasn’t just a late-night talk show format where the stars would chat for a few minutes, either—it was a groundbreaking performance and sketch show, at least somewhat akin to (but of course preceding by more than a decade) Saturday Night Live. I don’t know enough about television history to say with any definitiveness whether The Judy Garland Show had an influence on such later shows—but I do know that its general absence from our collective memories should not in any way be taken as proof that it wasn’t influential or didn’t leave such a lasting legacy. When it comes to the lives and legacies of powerful and seemingly already famous showbiz women like Judy Garland, after all, we still have a lot to learn.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Garland works or moments you’d highlight?

June 9, 2022: Judy Garland Studying: Judgment at Nuremberg

[June 10thwould have been Judy Garland’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Garland’s performances, leading up to a weekend post on LGBTQ icons.]

I’ve seen Judgment at Nuremberg(1961) only once all the way through, at some point in high school while we were in a unit on the Holocaust. I don’t know if I was aware at that time that the role of Irene Hoffmann was played by Judy Garland, but if I was, I had entirely forgotten that fact before researching options for this week’s series. And I mostly wanted to include the film in the series to make sure we’re all aware, and in particular to share this scene (the YouTube clip’s title for which seems to be making a point about another context of which I’m not certain, but the scene is the scene):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HP1oiEhgaE&t=16s

A couple of additional thoughts on that stunning scene, one of only three in the film for Garland totaling just under 15 minutes (but does she ever make the most of her limited screen time):

1)      It had been seven years since Garland was last in a film (in yesterday’s subject, 1954’s A Star is Born), and she was apparently so happy to be working again that it took some effort for her to be able to cry on camera (she used her relationship with her late father as inspiration for the scene’s heightened emotions). As you can see, she certainly got there, one more testament to her serious acting chops.

2)      One of the most important things about Judgment as a feature film focused entirely on the war crimes tribunal (rather than, for example, using that as a frame to flash back to the Holocaust/war itself) is that it can explore in depth a number of layers to the Holocaust, the Nazi regime, and their effects on both Jewish and non-Jewish victims. Garland’s character is the latter, a German woman who had an intimate (non-sexual) relationship with an older Jewish man, and in this scene we can see what he and that relationship meant, and what it meant when the Nazis destroyed it and him.

3)      It’s very tough to get typecast as a certain kind of performer and then find opportunities to branch and break out. Garland’s typecasting led to some lifelong successes to be sure, including the show that will be the subject of tomorrow’s last post in the series. But I’m sure it also meant she missed many chances to demonstrate the full range of her talents—and I’m very glad that she didn’t miss the chance to be part of Judgment, nor that my failure to remember her and scenes like this were permanent.

Last Garland performance tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Garland works or moments you’d highlight?

June 8, 2022: Judy Garland Studying: A Star is Born

[June 10thwould have been Judy Garland’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Garland’s performances, leading up to a weekend post on LGBTQ icons.]

On two things about Garland’s profound talents that her version of a much-told and -retold story helps us appreciate.

I think this all probably became common knowledge around the release of the much-acclaimed and hugely successful 2018 version, but maybe not; I know this AmericanFilmStudier wasn’t particularly aware of at least one of the films in question until researching this post. So first things first: there have been four total films entitled A Star is Born. The first was released in 1937and starred Janet Gaynor and Fredric March; the third from 1976 starred Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson; and the fourth, that 2018 version, starred Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper (who also made his directorial debut). And in between, after a four-year hiatus from films, Judy Garland triumphantly returned in 1954’s A Star is Born, starring alongside James Mason and garnering a well-deserved Academy Award nomination (although she was robbed of the award itself, at least if you ask Groucho Marx) for her stunning, multi-layered performance as Esther Blodgett.

That nomination and performance alike can help us better remember and appreciate Garland’s talents as an actress, and I don’t just mean as a child star. Perhaps because she’s best known in terms of film performances for The Wizard of Oz (released when she was 17), and maybe second-best for Meet Me in St. Louis (released when she was 22), it seems to me that Garland is still often thought of as a youthful talent; that’s the case even when we don’t consider the Vaudeville career that she launched alongside her two older sisters when she was only 6, which of course only adds to the child star aura when we do add it into the story. She was indeed precociously talented from a young age, but those talents only continued to grow and deepen for the rest of her career, and no single performance better reflects her maturation as an actress than does A Star is Born (released when she was 32). Esther is a character who embodies just about every possible emotion across this one story, often pitched to the extremes that can very easily slide into full-on melodrama, and Garland keeps her quite powerfully and affectingly human throughout.

Esther is also a musical performer, however—a singer and dancer as well as an actress. That wasn’t the case with Janet Gaynor’s Esther from the 1937 film (she’s only an actress), so this was a change for Garland’s version of the character and story (and one that was of course kept for Streisand’s and Gaga’s subsequent takes). Because of how those multiple remakes have unfolded, it might seem like a no-brainer to make the character this kind of triple threat; but in truth, asking Garland to sing and perform so consistently throughout Star, all while giving that intensely powerful acting performance, was to ask quite a lot. And she did ever respond—Time magazine called the film “just about the greatest one-woman show in modern movie history,” and Newsweek wrote that its “best classified as a thrilling personal triumph for Judy Garland…In more ways than one, the picture is hers.” Few American performers have been as truly multi-talented as Judy Garland, and perhaps no work better showcases that combination than does A Star is Born.

Next Garland performance tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Garland works or moments you’d highlight?

June 7, 2022: Judy Garland Studying: Meet Me in St. Louis

[June 10thwould have been Judy Garland’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Garland’s performances, leading up to a weekend post on LGBTQ icons.]

On three ways to analyze Garland’s next blockbuster film after The Wizard of Oz (although she made like 8 in between, this being Hollywood in the 1940s).

As I highlighted in this post on the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis (also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition), the hit song “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” was originally written in that historical moment and performed by a number of contemporary artists (perhaps the first recorded version being Billy Murray’s). That means that Judy Garland’s 1944 versionof the song (which dropped the second “Louis” from the title) wasn’t just a cover, but could also be seen as a kind of musical historical fiction, commenting on both a song and a historical event and context that were four decades past by that time. The same can be said of the entire 1944 film, of course—while it feels very much like a contemporary musical film, it is instead historical fiction, a representation and reframing of a significant historical event from that 1940s perspective. To name just one example: the trolley on which the film’s most famous song focuses was itself a historic relic, far more central to St. Louis transportation and city life in 1904 than by 1944.

Like most cultural works, however, Meet Me in St. Louis combines multiple genres, and despite starting and ending with sequences set in the summertime (first in Summer 1903 and then at the World’s Fair in Summer 1904), the film can also accurately be described as a Christmas movie. That’s true not only because the central and longest section is set at that holiday, but because the story features the kinds of holiday humor, family melodrama, and “magic of the season” miraculous reversals that have become such staples of that film subgenre. While 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life can be seen as inaugurating the post-war explosion of Christmas films, and certainly to my mind influenced the genre more than any other single work then or since, that film was at best a middling box office success; whereas Meet Me in St. Louis was the second-highest grossing film of 1944 and MGM’s most successful musical of the entire decade. At the very least, Garland’s Christmas musical smash has to be in the conversation as well, and only Clarence Oddbody knows what the genre would look like if it didn’t exist.

If 1903-04 St. Louis and Christmas are significant parts of what’s on screen in the film, the offscreen origin points represent one additional layer to AmericanStudying Meet Me in St. Louis. The film is an adaptation of a series of short stories by Sally Benson, originally published in a 1941-42 New Yorker series titled “5135 Kensington” and then expanded for the short story cycle Meet Me in St. Louis (1942, and named that because the film was already in the early stages of production). Benson, a St. Louis native who was 6-7 during the World’s Fair and who consistently wrote about life in that city, had a surprisingly long and influential career, not only as a writers of fiction but as a screenwriter; while her early work on Meet Me in St. Louis did not end up being part of the final screenplay (and so went uncredited), she would go on to write such films as Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Anna and the King of Siam (1946, for which her screenplay was Oscar-nominated), and Elvis’ Viva Las Vegas (1964) among many others. Given how much Meet Me focuses on precocious and talented young women, not at all limited to Garland’s Esther, it’d be a shame not to include its author in the mix.

Next Garland performance tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Garland works or moments you’d highlight?

June 6, 2022: Judy Garland Studying: The Wizard of Oz

[June 10thwould have been Judy Garland’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Garland’s performances, leading up to a weekend post on LGBTQ icons.]

On two ways to analyze Garland’s most iconic performance.

I AmericanStudied a couple layers to The Wizard of Oz (1939) in this post last year, and since my thoughts there are very much related to what I’ll say in this post, I’ll stop this first paragraph here and ask you to check that one out and come on back.

Welcome back! Oz wasn’t Garland’s debut feature film performance (that seems to have been 1936’s Pigskin Parade), but she was still only 17 when it came out, and the film unquestionably relies on her freshness, her striking sense of youth and innocence (which, to be clear, are part of a performance, as she had been acting since she was six years old), for much of its characterization of Dorothy. Indeed, I would go further, and say that the film’s ultimate emphasis on and preference for that Kansas childhood home (despite its Dust Bowl dreariness) depends on a sense that Dorothy still belongs there, rather than in the infinitely more colorful (in every sense) Oz. As I wrote in that prior post, I’m far from convinced of any part of that concluding emphasis—but if anyone alive could have sold “There’s no place like home” convincingly for even such a home as this one, it was teenage Judy Garland (although she sure sold the desire for something and somewhere else captured by “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” just as successfully!).

Yet the ending is never the only part of a film or story, of course, and I would argue that the depiction of Oz offers a different way to think about Dorothy and Garland’s performance. As Gregory Maguire’s Wicked has helped us recognize, the leadership of Oz is powerfully female (despite the pretend power of the film’s title character), a world where Good and Bad Witches vie for control (and are, perhaps, more similar than that dichotomy would suggest). It is those female leaders who contribute to every part of Dorothy’s story in Oz, becoming along the way striking models of adult womanhood at its most helpful and destructive. And while in some ways Dorothy seems to be less powerful (it is her accidental murder of one of them that sets off her Oz saga, for example), ultimately it is precisely Dorothy who through her strength and choices triumphs over the Bad Witch, lives up to the legacy of the Good, and unmasks the fraud of a male Wizard in the process. She may return home after that, but I believe it’s fair to say she does so as a significantly more mature person, well on her way to Good Witch status—and Garland captures every layer to that evolving character.

Next Garland performance tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Garland works or moments you’d highlight?

June 4-5, 2022: A Memorial Day Tribute

On why the holiday’s contemporary meaning also has profound AmericanStudies significance.

Throughout this past week’s series, I’ve made the case for how and why we should better remember the Decoration Day origins of our modern Memorial Day, as well as the overtly white supremacist reasons for the shift from one holiday and frame to the other in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As is the case with so many aspects of 21st century America, we can’t understand where we are without a better sense of where we’ve been—and that remains true, if it’s not indeed especially true, when it comes to seemingly innocuous societal elements like a shared and celebratory national holiday. As I said back in Monday’s post, however, none of that means that I don’t recognize and agree with that contemporary meaning for the holiday, the emphasis on commemorating and celebrating those who have fallen in American wars and conflicts over the centuries.

Moreover, that modern Memorial Day meaning can in and of itself offer a profound challenge and alternative to white supremacist histories and visions of America. In this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, I made the case for the WWII soldiers of color—Japanese American, African American, and Native American soldiers and units (in the still-segregated armed forces) in particular—whose stories and sacrifices truly exemplify the American contribution to that crucial conflict. The same is true for every war and conflict in which the United States has been involved: Americans and communities of color have participated, have served and sacrificed, in numbers that far outstrip their demographics within the national population at the time. The nearly 180,000 African Americans who served in the Civil War’s United States Colored Troops units, and most especially the 20% of those soldierswho were killed in action (a number 35% higher than the equivalent rate for white Union troops), offer only a particularly striking illustration of this longstanding trend.

After one of my book talks for We the People a couple years back, an audience member asked why so many of my examples of an inclusive America were related to wars and military service. I took the point to heart, and in Of Thee I Sing I tried not to focus too much on military service for my examples of active and critical patriotism. War, even in the most idealized versions, certainly features and often foregrounds horrors that can’t be elided or minimized. But there’s no doubt that military service also represents one of the most overt and consistent forms of civic participation, an expression of an individual’s presence in and commitment to the national community. It’s thus pretty damn telling that Americans of color have so consistently, so centrally, and so inspiringly served and sacrificed for a nation that too often has been dominated by white supremacist narratives and ideologies that would seek to exclude those Americans from the national community. That’s a history worth commemorating and celebrating every day—and doubly so on Memorial Day.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Memorial Day tributes or thoughts you’d add?

June 3, 2022: Decoration Day Histories: So What?

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]

On three ways to argue for remembering Decoration Day as well as Memorial Day.

If someone (like, I dunno, an imaginary voice in my head to prompt this post…) were to ask me why we should better remember the histories I’ve traced in this week’s posts—were, that is, to respond with the “So what?” of today’s title—my first answer would be simple: because they happened. There are many things about history of which we can’t be sure, nuances or details that will always remain uncertain or in dispute. But there are many others that are in fact quite clear, and we just don’t remember them clearly: and the origins and initial meanings of Decoration Day are just such clear historical facts. Indeed, so clear were those Decoration Day starting points that most Southern states chose not to recognize the holiday at all in its early years. I can’t quite imagine a good-faith argument for not better remembering clear historical facts (especially when they’re as relevant as the origins of a holiday are on that holiday!), and I certainly don’t have any interest in engaging with such an argument.

But there are also other, broader arguments for better remembering these histories. For one thing, the changes in the meanings and commemorations of Decoration Day, and then the gradual shift to Memorial Day, offer a potent illustration of the longstanding role and power of white supremacist perspectives (not necessarily in the most discriminatory or violent senses of the concept, but rather as captured by that Nation editorial’s point about the negro “disappearing from the field of national politics”) in shaping our national narratives, histories, and collective memories. In much of my teaching, writing, and work over the last decade I’ve argued for what I called a more inclusive vs. a more exclusive version of American history, one that overtly pushes back on those kinds of narrow, exclusionary, white supremacist historical narratives in favor of a broader and (to my mind) far more accurate sense of all the American communities that have contributed to and been part of our identity and story. Remembering Decoration Day as well as Memorial Day would represent precisely such an inclusive rather than more exclusive version of American history.

There’s also another way to think about and frame that argument. Throughout the last few years, conservatives have argued that the new Common Core and AP US History standards portray and teach a “negative” vision of American history, rather than the celebratory one for which these commentators argue instead (we saw the same argument made at length in the 1776 Commissionreport). As so many historians and scholars have noted in response, these arguments are at best oversimplified, at worst blatantly inaccurate. But it is fair to say that better remembering painful histories such as those of slavery, segregation, and lynching can be a difficult process, especially if we seek to make them more central to our collective national memories. So the more we can find inspiring moments and histories, voices and perspectives, that connect both to those painful histories and to more ideal visions of American identity and community, the more likely it is (I believe) that we will remember them. And I know of few American histories more inspiring than that of Decoration Day: its origins and purposes, its advocates like Frederick Douglass, and its strongest enduring meaning for the African American community—and, I would argue, for all of us.

Special Memorial Day tribute post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

June 2, 2022: Decoration Day Histories: “Rodman the Keeper”

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]

On the text that helps us remember a community for whom Decoration Day’s meanings didn’t shift.

In Monday’s post, I highlighted a brief but important scene in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short story “Rodman the Keeper” (1880). John Rodman, Woolson’s protagonist, is a (Union) Civil War veteran who has taken a job overseeing a Union cemetery in the South; and in this brief but important scene, he observes a group of African Americans (likely former slaves) commemorate Decoration Day by leaving tributes to those fallen Union soldiers. Woolson’s narrator describes the event in evocative but somewhat patronizing terms: “They knew dimly that the men who lay beneath those mounds had done something wonderful for them and for their children; and so they came bringing their blossoms, with little intelligence but with much love.” But she gives the last word in this striking scene to one of the celebrants himself: “we’s kep’ de day now two years, sah, befo’ you came, sah, an we’s teachin’ de chil’en to keep it, sah.”

“Rodman” is set sometime during Reconstruction—perhaps in 1870 specifically, since the first Decoration Day was celebrated in 1868 and the community has been keeping the day for two years—and, as I noted in yesterday’s post, by the 1876 end of that historical period the meaning of Decoration Day on the national level had begun to shift dramatically. But as historian David Blight has frequently noted, such as in the piece hyperlinked in my intro section above and as quoted in this article on Blight’s magisterial book Race and Reunion (2002), the holiday always had a different meaning for African Americans than for other American communities, and that meaning continued to resonate for that community through those broader national shifts. Indeed, it’s possible to argue that as the national meaning shifted away from the kinds of remembrance for which Frederick Douglass argued in his 1871 speech, it became that much more necessary and vital for African Americans to practice that form of critical commemoration (one, to correct Woolson’s well-intended but patronizing description, that included just as much intelligence as love).

In an April 1877 editorial reflecting on the end of Reconstruction, the Nation magazine predicted happily that one effect of that shift would be that “the negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.” Besides representing one of the lowest points in that periodical’s long history, the editorial quite clearly illustrates why the post-Reconstruction national meaning of Decoration Day seems to have won out over the African American one (a shift that culminated, it could be argued, in the change of name to Memorial Day, which began being used as an alternative as early as 1882): because prominent, often white supremacist national voices wanted it to be so. Which is to say, it wasn’t inevitable that the shift would occur or the new meaning would win out—and while we can’t change what happened in our history, we nonetheless can (as I’ll argue at greater length tomorrow) push back and remember the original and, for the African American community, ongoing meaning of Decoration Day.

Last Decoration Day history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?