Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 110

April 18, 2022: Boston Marathon Studying: The First Marathon

[On April 19th, 1897, the first Boston Marathon was run. So for the 125th anniversary of this iconic road race, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Marathon histories and contexts, leading up to a special Guest Post from my favorite RunningStudier!]

On three layers to the histories of that first 1897 Boston Marathon.

1)      The B.A.A.: The Marathon was far from the starting point for organized athletics in the city. Ten years earlier, in 1887, the Boston Athletic Association had been founded, reflecting the rising national interest in both amateur and professional sports in the late 19th century. The BAA built an impressive clubhousein the city’s Back Bay neighborhood, with facilities for numerous sports including boxing, tennis, and water polo; and it began hosting track and field competitions and other athletic events, including an annual Spring competition known as the BAA Games. In 1897, perhaps in part to commemorate the BAA’s 10thanniversary and inspired by the marathon at the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens, the Association’s leadership decided to conclude those Spring games with a marathon of their own. BAA member and Olympic Team Manager John Graham worked with local businessman Herbert Holton to choose and design the 24.5-mile course.  

2)      Patriots’ Day: That overall Spring timing was to coincide with the end of the BAA Games, but the specific timing of April 19th was due to another factor: the newly-created holiday of Patriots’ Day. The then-Massachusetts-specific holiday was just three years old at the time, having been first celebrated in 1894 after the Lexington Historical Society petitioned the MA Legislature to create a holiday honoring the 1775 Revolutionary War Battles of Lexington and Concord. And running the Marathon on that date was even more specific than that, as the BAA sought to linkthe American Revolutionary effort and spirit to that displayed by the Athenian soldiers at the 490 BC Battle of Marathon for which the race had been initially named. A bit of a stretch, perhaps, but the Boston Marathon has never been anything less than grandiose!

3)      JJ “Little Mac” McDermott: The winner of that first Boston Marathon (known then as the B.A.A. Road Race) was quite a grandiose figure himself. Not in size, as the Irish American lithographer and amateur runner John J. “J.J.” or “Little Mac” McDermott was just 5’6” and 124 pounds when measured before the race. But as that hyperlinked article puts it, this was America’s first great marathoner, and I would argue one of the 19th century’s greatest American athletes: he won the first marathon run in the U.S., in New York in September 1896; and won the first Boston Marathon just seven months later, quite possibly while running with the tuberculosis that would kill him less than a decade later. It’s not clear whether McDermott definitely had TB when he won in Boston, but when it comes to the first iteration of such a legendary race, I’m going to print the legend.

Next Marathon split tomorrow,

Ben

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

April 15, 2022: Presidential Scandals: Watergate

[On April 14, 1922, the Wall Street Journal published a storybreaking the news of a crooked deal that became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that history and four other presidential scandals, leaving aside the Grant administration as we’ll get to them in a couple weeks and the Trump administration because ugh. Share your thoughts on these & other histories, including Grant or Trump if you’d like of course, for a scandalous crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On three telling pop culture representations of the generation-defining scandal.

1)      All the President’s Men(1976): The 1976 film was of course an adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein’s popular 1974 book of the same name, but I would argue it was really the film—and of course in particular the pair of acting luminaries known as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman—that really made President’sthe defining cultural representation of Watergate. There’s a lot to like about the film, including one of the best pop culture portrayals of journalism this side of Spotlight. But I wonder sometimes if the success of this story and in particular that emphasis on the journalists helped minimize the focus on the Nixon administration’s genuinely horrific misdeeds, making it easier for us to gradually forget some of the worst of (to my mind) the most stunning presidential crimes in history (at least until, well, y’know).

2)      “Sweet Home Alabama” (1974): That certainly wasn’t the only reason for our gradual downplaying of Nixon’s crimes, however. In the same year that saw Woodward and Bernstein’s book, the good ol’ boys in Lynyrd Skynyrd(man does Word not like the spelling of those words) released their Southern-fried anthem. I’ve long found the song’s second verse one of the most politically despicable in all of rock music: “In Birmingham they love the governor/Now we all did what we could do/Now Watergate does not bother me/Does your conscience bother you?/Tell the truth.” In so feeling I tended to focus on the governor lines (that’s Governor George “Segregation Forever” Wallace, to be clear); but as awful as they are, I’d say minimizing the Watergate crimes committed by the President of the U.S. by asking listeners if they have a perfectly clear conscience is just as horrific, and helped set the stage for our ongoing ability to dismiss presidential crimes through a partisan lens.

3)      Dick (1999): When I initially planned this post, I thought I’d be making the case that a silly comic film like Dick, with its focus on two fictional teenage girls who become intertwined with Nixon and the scandal, further reflects that gradual cultural (and social and political) dismissal of the worst of Watergate. And maybe that’s still the most viable argument, I dunno. But I’d also say that the film, alongside a work like Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995), could be read as part of an attempt to grapple anew, a couple decades later, with the histories and stories of this most scandalous presidency and period in American history (again, to that point). Of course scholarly and historical writing, along with further journalism and other nonfiction genres like documentary, offer their own lenses on such histories. But so do pop culture works—and, with all due respect to the boys with the unspellable band name, such works can help remind us why yes, we should be bothered by a presidential scandal like Watergate.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Takes on this scandal or other ideas you’d share for the weekend post?

April 14, 2022: Presidential Scandals: Teapot Dome

[On April 14, 1922, the Wall Street Journal published a storybreaking the news of a crooked deal that became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that history and four other presidential scandals, leaving aside the Grant administration as we’ll get to them in a couple weeks and the Trump administration because ugh. Share your thoughts on these & other histories, including Grant or Trump if you’d like of course, for a scandalous crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On three figures at the heart of (at the time) the biggest presidential scandal in American history.

1)      Albert Bacon Fall: President Harding’s Secretary of the Interior was the public face of Teapot Dome, eventually becoming the first Cabinet member in U.S. history to serve a prison sentence (as much for his multiple years of tax evasion as for his role in the scandal’s corruption, it seems). But Teapot Dome is just one part of Fall’s multi-layered connection to the Western U.S. in the early 20th century—the former Senator from New Mexico was also a key player in Woodrow Wilson’s fraught and possibly illegal 1916 military invasion of Mexico (also known as the Punitive Expedition) to end Pancho Villa’s guerrilla raids. Both Teapot Dome and that invasion can after all also be connected to the foundational history of U.S. land theft throughout the West, not only from indigenous peoples but also from Mexican American communities.

2)      Thomas J. Walsh: The investigator who brought down Fall was Montana Democratic Senator Thomas Walsh, a former prosecutor whose brought those skills to his two-year investigation into Fall and Teapot Dome. Walsh wasn’t the first Senator to engage with the unfolding scandal—after the April 1922 story of the land deal first broke, it was Wyoming Democratic Senator John Kendrick who introduced an initial resolution to investigate; and then Wisconsin Republican Senator Robert La Follette who initially led that investigation in his role as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Lands. But it’s fair to say, given all the other business of the Senate as well as Fall’s careful attempts to cover his tracks, that it took the dogged persistence of Walsh to finally uncover and expose the depths of Teapot Dome.

3)      Warren G. Harding: Like the Reagan administration Iran-Contra scandal I wrote about two days ago, President Harding was never formally tied to Fall and Teapot Dome. But he was most certainly associated with the scandal, not only in the media and public opinion but through his own statements. To cite two quoted in that hyperlinked official White House history (drawn from Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey’s book The Presidents of the United States of America): he complained to allies that “My friends, they’re the ones that keep me walking the floors nights!”; and on a 1923 Western trip with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, Harding asked Hoover, “If you knew of a great scandal in our administration, would you for the good of the country and the party expose it publicly or would you bury it?” While on that trip Harding died of a heart attack in San Francisco—but the Teapot Dome scandal to which he referred (in all likelihood) would gradually emerge nevertheless.

Last scandal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on this scandal or other ideas you’d share for the weekend post?

April 13, 2022: Presidential Scandals: Clinton and Lewinsky

[On April 14, 1922, the Wall Street Journal published a storybreaking the news of a crooked deal that became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that history and four other presidential scandals, leaving aside the Grant administration as we’ll get to them in a couple weeks and the Trump administration because ugh. Share your thoughts on these & other histories, including Grant or Trump if you’d like of course, for a scandalous crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On how two quite distinct things can be true at once, and how my own perspective has changed over time.

The first true thing I want to say about the President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal is that it was the result of a multi-year, highly partisan and suspect fishing expedition. After he was appointed in August 1994 as an independent counsel to investigate the nothing-burger that was the Whitewater “scandal,” attorney Ken Starr—who had long been an avowed opponent of Clinton’s and was funded by an even more overt and powerful such opponent, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife—kept expanding the scope of that investigation to other and equally suspect “scandals.” For example, in October 1997 (more than three years after his appointment) Starr released a 137-page report (drafted by Starr’s assistant Brett Kavanaugh!) on the 1993 suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. After that wasted effort, Starr turned his attention to Clinton’s adulterous relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, making the resulting scandal the sole successful product of a four-year partisan fishing expedition into all things Clinton.

But the second true thing I want to say is this: the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was more than that, was indeed a significant and serious presidential scandal. Partly that’s because of how Ken Starr initially learned of it: Clinton was being deposed in Paula Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit against him, and lied under oath about whether he had ever “had sexual relations” with Lewinsky (I’m not willing to accept Clinton’s later argument that he didn’t consider oral sex “sexual relations” and so wasn’t lying). But it’s also because of the affair itself—not because of the adultery part (countless presidents have cheated on their spouses, and to my mind that’s ultimately a personal matter) but because of its unethical and unprofessional nature: of Clinton having sex with an intern, someone over whom he had direct professional power; and of him doing so in the Oval Office, while conducting the political and national business of the presidency. I don’t imagine he was the first president for whom those things were true either, but repetition of something scandalous doesn’t make it any less scandalous, and I would argue those unethical and unprofessional sides to the affair demand our condemnation in any case.

Finally, a third, more personal but also I believe broadly relevant true thing: my perspective on the relative dynamics of those other two things has shifted significantly in the 20+ years since the scandal. At the time, I was entirely convinced that, whatever Clinton’s personal flaws and failures, the scandal was far more fully a reflection of the GOP’s unhinged hatred of him and his administration (which seems to have been a main public takeaway from the impeachment trial at the very least). But while those contexts and factors remain part of the story as I’ve said here, I have to say that over the last few years, the unfolding perspectives and narratives of the #MeToo movement have fully convinced me of the paramount importance of challenging and ending workplace sexual harassment (among many other issues of course). While Clinton’s own such workplace harassment scandal might not have risen to the level of an impeachable offense, it nonetheless reflects clearly and potently the truly ubiquitous presence of such issues, even at the highest and most powerful levels of American society. To my mind, that (along with the deeply impressive second act of Monica Lewinsky’s life and work) should be the ultimate takeaway from this 1990s presidential scandal.

Next scandal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on this scandal or other ideas you’d share for the weekend post?

April 12, 2022: Presidential Scandals: Iran-Contra

[On April 14, 1922, the Wall Street Journal published a storybreaking the news of a crooked deal that became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that history and four other presidential scandals, leaving aside the Grant administration as we’ll get to them in a couple weeks and the Trump administration because ugh. Share your thoughts on these & other histories, including Grant or Trump if you’d like of course, for a scandalous crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On three foreign policy contexts for the 80s scandal, and one crucial lingering question.

Compared to yesterday’s presidential scandal, which focused entirely on American domestic politics, the 1980s Iran-Contra Affair was driven by a trio of complex international issues. The first two were both tied to the Reagan Administration’s support for Nicaragua’s violent far-right insurgent group the Contras in their ongoing battle with the nation’s Communist Sandinista government. Of course longstanding Cold War conflicts between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (and proxy states like Cuba, which supported the Sandinistas), and more specifically American fears of the spread of Communism around the globe, offer one context for that specific Central American connection. But at the same time, I would argue that we can’t separate this invasive (and eventually illegal) U.S. involvement with another Western Hemisphere nation’s politics and affairs from the multi-century history of such interventions (including in Nicaragua itself), interventions driven at least in part by the foundational concept known as the Monroe Doctrine. To my mind, much of that history is at least as scandalous as what went down with the U.S. and the Contras in the mid-1980s, just much less well-publicized and –known.

Partly this 80s scandal became better-known because of the recent rise of new media such as 24/7 cable news networks, but partly that infamy was due to its third international context: the longstanding and highly complicated relationship between the U.S. and Iran. I wrote about the long 20th century histories of that relationship in that hyperlinked Saturday Evening Post, but would add here that the Reagan Administration in particular came to embody two seemingly contradictory ends to the spectrum of U.S-Iran dynamics. This was a president, after all, who was first elected at least in part because of his hard-line on the Iranian hostage crisis, itself a controversial and potentially scandalous story given the immediacy with which Iran released those hostages after his election. And while that latter question, of whether Reagan had backroom dealings with Iran during that hostage crisis (and thus was far less opposed to Iran than his public statements and policies would suggest), remains an open-ended one, there’s no doubt whatsoever that high-ranking members of his administration were selling weapons to the Iranian government under the table during the Iran-Contra Affair.

No doubt whatsoever about those high-ranking administration figures—not only National Security Council member Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who became the public face of the scandal; but also National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter, as well as National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane and CIA Director William Casey (these latter two were definitely aware of the illicit arms sales to Iran, at least). That list would suggest, of course, that the one figure who links all of them, their boss Ronald Reagan, had to have known about the multiple layers of the Iran-Contra Affair as well. But I use “suggest” and “had to have” purposefully, because the questions of Reagan’s awareness and involvement in this scandal remain just that, questions, and likely always will. I don’t want to minimize the importance of that distinction—if Reagan genuinely didn’t know, he’s (at least in this way) more like Ulysses S. Grant, burdened with a stunning presidential scandal that seems nonetheless separate from his own actions and presidency. But at the same time, I don’t think there’s any way to truly separate a national scandal like this one from the president it engulfed, and on whose administration it reflects profoundly and disturbingly.

Next scandal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on this scandal or other ideas you’d share for the weekend post?

April 11, 2022: Presidential Scandals: The Corrupt Bargain

[On April 14, 1922, the Wall Street Journal published a storybreaking the news of a crooked deal that became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that history and four other presidential scandals, leaving aside the Grant administration as we’ll get to them in a couple weeks and the Trump administration because ugh. Share your thoughts on these & other histories, including Grant or Trump if you’d like of course, for a scandalous crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On a scandal that reveals the fragility of our election system, and what that means in 2022.

In this post on the pivotal presidential election of 1800, I made the case for how that profoundly contested and controversial election very easily could have marked the end of the nascent American experiment—and how it fortunately and importantly did not. As I usually do when I start a post with a link to another post of mine, I’ll end this first paragraph here and ask you to check out that post and then come on back.

Welcome back! While that election of 1800 ended up reinforcing fundamental American ideas like the peaceful and orderly transfer of political power, it’s certainly fair to say that it also reveals just how fraught and fragile the electoral system was in that Early Republic period. A quarter-century later, another and even more contested and controversial election, the presidential election of 1824, drove home that point and then some. That excellent educational resource highlights the main elements to this scandalous election: due to a variety of factors, the election came down to a group of candidates from the same political party, the Democratic-Republicans; one of them, Andrew Jackson, received a plurality (but not a majority) of both the popular and electoral votes; but when the election was thus thrown to the House of Representatives (per the Constitution), another candidate, John Quincy Adams, was elected to the presidency, possibly due (in the “Corrupt Bargain” narrative advanced by Jackson and his supporters, at least) to Adams’ close relationship with Speaker of the House Henry Clay. Whatever precisely took place in the House, that narrative became a defining one over the next four years, contributing directly to Jackson’s successful presidential challenge in 1828.

It’s that final note that I would say offers a potential and problematic warning for politics and elections in our own contemporary moment. I want to say this as clearly as I possibly can: the election of 1824 was unquestionably controversial, and even if it was on the up-and-up relied on a highly unusual and quite strange Constitutional quirk to decide the victor; the election of 2020, on the other hand, was ultimately quite straightforward, with one candidate receiving a clear majority of both the popular and electoral votes. Yet in the 18 months since that election, the losing candidate—one who I would argue bears a striking resemblance to Andrew Jackson in some clear and disturbing ways (although there are those historians who disagree)—and his supporters have been just as consistent in advancing their own narrative of corruption and cheating and a fraudulent election and president that need challenging. Whatever did or didn’t happen in 1824, after all, it was the next four years’ worth of “Corrupt Bargain” narratives that really influenced the 1828 election—making clear just how fully we have to push back on our 2022 version of that narrative.

Next scandal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on this scandal or other ideas you’d share for the weekend post?

April 9-10, 2022: Arbor Day Activists

[This month we celebrate the 150thanniversary of Arbor Day, so this week I’veAmericanStudied a handful of tree-tastic stories. Leading up to this special weekend post on the holiday’s histories!]

On three historical figures who together helped create and codify the tree-tastic holiday.

1)      J. Sterling Morton: Morton (1832-1902) was a prominent figure in both Nebraskan and American history across the second half of the 19thcentury: he served as Nebraska’s territorial Secretary of State and then Governor in the 1850s; and as President Grover Cleveland’s Secretary of Agriculture (in Cleveland’s 2nd term) from 1893-1897. But interestingly, his most lasting legacy comes from the period in between those roles (roughly 1867-1882), when he had largely retired from politics to serve on the Nebraska State Board of Agriculture and its Horticultural Society. It was in that capacity in 1872 that he proposed Arbor Day, a day when trees would be planted across the state; over a million were planted on the first such Arbor Day, April 10th, 1872, and the rest is history.

2)      Birdsey Northrop: But not just like that, of course. Morton’s holiday was a relatively local one, and it was up to others, like the Connecticut farmer, minister, educator, and diplomat Birdsey Grant Northrop (1817-1898), to extend and amplify the idea. In his 50s Northrop became dedicated to the idea of reviving Connecticut’s primordial forests, and, inspired in part at least by Morton’s holiday, in 1876 he proposed an Arbor Day for that state, encouraging every resident to plant a tree so that “its fruits may survive 1976.” Nearly two decades later, when the 78 year old Northrop finally realized a lifelong dream of traveling to Japan, he focused most of  the 38 lectures he delivered there on making the case for a Japanese Arbor Day, which has indeed been celebrated (as Greenery Day) in that nation ever since.

3)      Major Israel McCreight: As with many conservationist efforts, Arbor Day really took off in the United States during the Teddy Roosevelt administration. That was due in part to Roosevelt’s Chief of the Forestry Service, Gifford Pinchot; but also and especially to Major (his first name, not a rank) Israel McCreight (1865-1958), a lifelong advocate for conservation (as well as Native American rights) who in 1906 argued to Pinchot and Roosevelt that the president’s current conservation efforts were too focused on the business sector. Convinced by McCreight and Pinchot’s joint efforts, on April 15th, 1907 Roosevelt issued his “Arbor Day Proclamation to the School Children of the United States,” a vital step in establishing the holiday as a truly national one that would carry forward for the next 115 years (and hopefully beyond!).

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other tree texts or contexts you’d share?

April 8, 2022: Tree Tales: The Overstory

[This month we celebrate the 150thanniversary of Arbor Day, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of tree-tastic stories. Leading up to a special weekend post on the holiday’s histories!]

On the long legacy of cli fi, and a stunning recent novel that reveals the genre’s true potential.

The term “cli fi” (for “climate fiction”) has only been around for the last 10 years or so; it was apparently first coined in 2011 by activist and author Dan Bloom to describe Jim Laughter’s novel Polar City Red, and then gradually picked up by various media voices and stories around 2013-2014. But as with so many literary genres, there are numerous earlier authors and works that can productively be classified within this frame, including Jules Verne’s The Purchase of the North Pole (1889), Laurence Manning’s The Man Who Awoke(1933), multiple novels by J.G. Ballard, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), among others. While all of those works are distinct and specific, I’d say that all of them fall under the broad umbrella of science fiction, wedding as they do their realistic depictions of science and the natural world to imagined futures in which (generally) worst-case climate and environmental scenarios have come to pass and humans (individually and/or collectively) are dealing with the aftermaths.

Sci fi cli fi (say that five times fast) has continued to be a prominent sub-genre here in the 21st century, as exemplified particularly clearly by science fiction legend Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitol trilogy (comprising the novels Forty Signs of Rain [2004], Fifty Degrees Below [2005], and Sixty Days and Counting [2007]). But as we’ve moved further and further into a world where climate change is not an imagined future scenario but a very, very real present reality, we’ve concurrently seen authors begin to produce as well cli fi novels and stories that depict, respond to, and engage in more socially realistic ways that present world. That list includes, among others, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure (2018), a number of the stories in John Joseph Adams’ edited anthology Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction (2015), and one of the most acclaimed and powerful American novels in recent memory, Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory (2018).

Yet in truth, to classify The Overstory as an example of more contemporary and/or socially realistic fiction is no more accurate than to describe it as science fiction. Powers’ book does trace the individual yet ultimately interconnected stories of nine realistic fictional characters, all Americans living in our early 21st century moment, all descended from family and communal histories involving trees in central ways. But through that shared theme, and through his structural and narrative choices as well, Powers ultimately produces a work that I would call a historical novel in which the history (as well as the present and future) of the world is viewed through the lens of trees and forests, rather than through the perspectives or experiences of humans (individual or collective, fictional or real). Which is to say, Powers’ first cli fi novel (his latest, 2021’s Bewilderment, has been described that way as well, but I haven’t had the chance to read it) isn’t just about climate change or environmentalism—it makes the environment, and specifically trees, its main character, main narrative perspective, and ultimately main emphasis, above (in every sense) and beyond us transient humans.

Next tree tale tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other tree texts you’d throw in?

April 7, 2022: Tree Tales: Into the Woods

[This month we celebrate the 150thanniversary of Arbor Day, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of tree-tastic stories. Leading up to a special weekend post on the holiday’s histories!]

On the deep dark heart of fairy tales—and musicals?

No AmericanStudier can be equally familiar with every part of our culture and history, and I’d be the first to admit that musical theater is an area where my knowledge is relatively thin (despite my Mom’s best efforts to share the collected works of Rodgers & Hammerstein among others, efforts which at least did result in that weeklong blog series!). But even a relatively newb like myself knows that when Stephen Sondheim passed away this past November at the age of 91, it was the passing of a true titan, not just in literary theater or theater but in all of American culture. He achieved that success and influence across a fifty-year careerthat included writing the music & lyrics to more than 15 musicals, the lyrics to another few, and collaborating on countless other theatrical, film, and cultural projects. But throughout that long and varied artistic career and life, it seems to me, at least from the testimonies I’ve encountered from fellow AmericanTheaterStudiers, that 1986’s Into the Woods was and remains a particularly important and impressive high-water mark.

One reason for the prominence of that particular musical has to be the way in which it offers a witty, sophisticated, timeless yet modern meta-commentary on its fairy tale characters, settings, and plotlines. And to my mind, that starts with the musical’s title, its recognition (pace Bruno Bettelheim among others) of the central role that deep dark woods play in our collective acts of storytelling (across so many different eras and cultures). Theorists like Bettelheim have often focused on the psychological and pedagogical sides to such settings and stories, the ways for example that the woods both reflect and allow us to explore our unconscious fears and desires (a central thematic thread of Sondheim’s musical as well). But I would add that there’s a pretty strong cultural and historical component to these fairy tale woods as well, and not just in the medieval past or other distant times—I think for example about the “wild beasts and wild men” that William Bradford feared lay just beyond the walls of the very small and very isolated Plimoth Plantation in 1620. That was part genuine uncertainty, part psychological horror, part prejudice—and all one of so many instances of the ubiquitous collective “woods” into which Sondheim’s musical taps.

So in fairy tales, a central presence of a deep dark that needs confronting is pretty familiar stuff. But in musicals, at least throughout the 20thcentury, that would seem generally not to be the case. Again I’m far from an expert, and I welcome any and all disagreements and other responses in comments (as always!). But it seems to me that even when musicals feature dark or tragic plotlines, they have often if not consistently represented them in relatively cheery ways; I’m thinking for example about the snapping, dancing, choreographed gang fights of West Side Story (for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics), or the spectacular (literally and figuratively) helicopter evacuation at the end of Act 1 of Miss Saigon. I’m not suggesting that Into the Woods is a Tarantino film brought to the stage or anything, and indeed its cleverness and humor are frequently its most celebrated elements. But at the same time, Sondheim’s musical does plumb the deep dark depths of both individual and collective psyches in a way that feels distinct from many musicals—and perhaps offers another factor in what has made these musical woods so enduringly popular and powerful.

Last tree tale tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other tree texts you’d throw in?

April 6, 2022: Tree Tales: The Learning Tree

[This month we celebrate the 150thanniversary of Arbor Day, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of tree-tastic stories. Leading up to a special weekend post on the holiday’s histories!]

On Parks’s autobiographical novel and its even more ground-breaking film version.

If Gordon Parks were just the hugely talented and influential photographer on whose career and works I focused in these two prior posts, that would be more than enough to merit much fuller collective memory of Parks and perhaps even a coveted spot in the under-construction American Hall of Inspiration. But in truth Parks was far more multi-talented than that, producing substantial and meaningful work in a number of artistic forms and genres, and as a result he left a cultural legacy that extends well beyond the worlds of photography and art. I’ll focus here on one of the most singular and impressive texts and moments in that legacy, his work telling the story of his own childhood as first a writer and then a filmmaker.

Parks told that story first in his one published work of fiction (he published numerous autographiesand poetry collections as well as photography collections and textbooks), the autobiographical novel The Learning Tree (1963). I would locate Parks’s readable, compelling, and thought-provoking young adult novel alongside a work like William H. Armstrong’s Sounder (1969) in its ability to turn African American history into the kind of story that can engage and entertain as well as educate young readers. Parks’s book might not be quite as successful as Armstrong’s (which remains one of the greatest American young adult novels), but on the other hand it is both drawn from the author’s own life far more closely (which has its own interest and appeal) and represents, in its portrayal of 1910s and 20s Kansas, a period of African American and American history more consistently overlooked than the post-war sharecropping era of Armstrong’s book. Not bad at all for the man’s one published work of fiction!

A few years after publishing his novel, Parks took an even more radical and significant artistic step: directing a feature film version of The Learning Tree(1969), and in the process becoming the first African American director of a Hollywood studio film (it was made for Warner Bros./Seven Arts). That Parks also wrote the screenplay, produced the film, and, just for good measure, composed the musical score to boot makes this truly one of the most virtuoso artistic performances in American film or cultural history. But all that behind the scenes history shouldn’t overshadow a simpler but even more crucial way in which the film made history: representing an African American childhood as the central story of a Hollywood movie. That is, there had been plenty of other novels like The Learning Tree; I don’t think there had ever been a film remotely like it, just one more way that Gordon Parks profoundly influenced and altered American culture and history.

Next tree tale tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other tree texts you’d throw in?