Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 117

January 24, 2022: American Gangsters: The Godfather Part II

[On January 25th, 1947 Al Capone died at the age of 48. So for the 75thanniversary of the end of that notorious life, I’ll AmericanStudy different cultural contexts for American gangsters & organized crime!]

On the profoundly American layers to our greatest gangster story.

Given the enduring and justified popularity of and critical approbation for the first film, this might be AmericanStudies (or at least AmericanFilmStudies) heresy, but I’m not sure any American text (in any medium or genre) represents a more unexpectedly impressive reflection and commentary on our national narratives and identity than Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather:  Part II (1974). Anybody who has read the original source material, Mario Puzo’s pulp classic The Godfather (1969), is likely to agree with me about the unexpectedness; Puzo’s novel is fun but really quite pulp-y, from the opening’s graphic sex scene to the many similarly lowbrow highlights throughout. Puzo actually adapted his own novel for both of the first two films, and to my mind the first film, 1972’s The Godfather(1972), while undoubtedly a triumph in many ways, really tells one story: Michael Corleone’s. It tells it exceptionally well, and Al Pacino has never been better, but the thorough focus on Michael makes the film at least somewhat narrow in its themes and ideas as well.

While Puzo again worked with Coppola on the screenplay for the second film, while most of the original’s cast returned, and while Michael’s continuing trajectory is still very much at its core, it’s nonetheless difficult to overstate just how much more broad and deep Part II is, most especially in its connection to American narratives and identities. That extension and deepening is really the result of a couple of core and pitch-perfect structural choices made by Puzo and Coppola, one utilizing some material from the novel but in a very unique way, the other entirely new to this second film. For the first, the film incorporates Vito Corleone’s backstory from the novel, with a young Robert De Nirostepping into Marlon Brando’s shoes and fully inhabiting this younger version of the Don; even more impressive than De Niro’s quiet and nuanced performance and the recreation of this turn of the 20th century world (from Sicily to America and back again), however, is the way in which the film transitions back and forth between the flashbacks and Michael’s story in the present. The parallels complicate and yet amplify the film’s themes of a multigenerational American family’s progress from immigration to assimilation to power, making the Corleone family’s narrative a deeply and unsettlingly American one at every stage. And there’s one transition in particular, as De Niro holds a baby Michael in the past and then we transition to the adult Michael watching his young son sleep, that is as human and heartbreaking as anything in American film.

The film’s second, entirely new structural choice takes that present story of Michael’s to entirely new places, literally and figuratively, and is perhaps even more inspired. As part of his budding relationship with an older Jewish American crime boss, Hyman Roth, Michael travels to Cuba, where the dictatorial Batista government has been working hand in hand with wealthy American business (and criminal) interests to the mutual benefit for both sides. This new setting allows for the film not only to represent Castro’s revolution and the chaos and change it unleashes in Cuba (and within these American communities that have depended on Batista for much of their business and success), but also to set many of Michael’s own crises—including the breakdown of his relationship with Roth and, most importantly for the film, his revelations about his brother Fredo’s participation in efforts to assassinate him—against the backdrop of this society undergoing such powerful shifts. And while the specific historical details are hugely complex and interesting in their own right—both about Cuba itself and about the US’s relationship with the Batista regime—the thematic implications, the reflections on the kinds of American, political, and social power to which the Corleone family has ascended (and the kinds of people who resist such power, people in Cuba who seem quite literally parallel to where Vito Corleone and the family began in Sicily in relationship to that society’s power structures), are even more rich and revealing.

I’ll admit that I’ve never seen the whole of Part III (both because of the very critical things I’ve read and because, I suppose, I want Part II to be the culmination), so I can’t write with any authority about the trilogy as a whole. But ultimately, my point here is that whether you’re seen the first or the third films, whether you like gangster movies or historical epics or Al Pacino or Robert De Niro or hate all of those things and people with a fiery passion, The Godfather: Part II is not just our greatest gangster story but one of the greatest American films of all time, with a strong and significant emphasis on American. Next GangsterStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other gangster stories or contexts you’d share?

January 22-23, 2022: Spring Semester Previews: Two Sandlots

[A new semester is upon us, so this week I’ve previewed texts I’m excited to teach in my Spring 2022 classes. Leading up to this weekend update on my book project in progress!],

Life has done what it does in early 2022, and I don’t have a ton of new info to report on my next book project, Two Sandlots: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America. I continue to work with my amazing agent, Suzy Evans, on preparing the proposal and finding a home; and this Spring I’ll be teaching adult learning classes for my two favorite such programs, ALFAand WISE, on the book’s focal histories, stories, and subjects, which should help me keep moving the work forward. Can’t wait to share more with you all, so watch this space—and let me know what you’re working on this Spring and beyond, please!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring courses or other work you want to share?

January 21, 2022: Spring Semester Previews: The Short Story Online

[A new semester is upon us, so this week I’ll preview texts I’m excited to teach in my Spring 2022 classes. Leading up to a weekend update on my book project in progress!]

On three stimulating pairings from my accelerated online Short Story syllabus.

1)      “Girl” and “I Stand Here Ironing”: We start our seven-week semester with this pair of stories about mothers and daughters, multi-generational continuities and changes, social expectations and pressures, and where and how we place our sympathies as readers (the topic for their weekly response post on whichever story they choose to analyze). I’ve used this pairing in at least a dozen sections over the last decade, and continue to get different responses and ideas from students, which is about as positive a recommendation for these stories’ quality as you could ever find.

2)      “Boys Go to Jupiter” and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”: Danielle Evans’ story is one of my favorites of all time, as that hyperlinked post (among many others) indicates. It’s about many important things, including race and racism to be sure; but fundamentally it’s a portrait of a teenage girl struggling with the many different kinds of pressures and forces that are part of her 21st century life and world. That makes it a very provocative pairing with Joyce Carol Oates’ famous 1960s depiction of those issues and themes in my course’s second week, and my prompt asking students to analyze one of these protagonists always produces thoughtful and compelling work.   

3)      “Chapter Two” and “Sonny’s Blues”: At the end of our seven weeks we come to this pair of long, challenging, stunning stories about addiction, family and community, and the lies and truths we tell to and about ourselves. This is the only weekly post where I ask students to analyze both stories (in preparation for their similarly comparative final paper), and one particularly striking topic for such comparisons is the very different ways Antonya Nelson and James Baldwin use the literary elements of narration and perspective to frame those similar themes. A great reminder of the nuanced work all of our authors do to create these amazing stories!

Special update post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring courses or other work you want to share?

January 20, 2022: Spring Semester Previews: American Lit II

[A new semester is upon us, so this week I’ll preview texts I’m excited to teach in my Spring 2022 classes. Leading up to a weekend update on my book project in progress!]

On the three books I’m requiring my survey students to purchase (the first time I’ve done so in a couple years), and why.

1)      Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929): The chance to read Nella Larsen’s first two books in full—and to do so in that wonderful hyperlinked edition, edited by my friend Deborah McDowell—is the primary reason why I shifted my thinking about this course this time around, after a few sections where we’ve only read things available online (and only excerpted versions of longer works). Larsen is one of our great authors, these books are both to my mind must-reads (even before the new film adaptation of Passing put that book back on our collective map), and this is the only way we can really read her and them.

2)      Ceremony(1977): Once I had made that shift in my mind, it allowed me the freedom to add back onto the syllabus other longer readings that are not available in full online (because they’re too recent) and not even really excerpted there (for whatever reason). That hyperlinked post is one of many in which I’ve made the case for Leslie Marmon Silko’s book, my second favorite American novel and one that truly needs to be read in full to be understood and appreciated (the favorite section about which I write in that post comes toward the end). I’ll be very glad to share it with a new group of students!

3)      (2003): Ceremony is great but hugely challenging, both for students to read and thus for me to teach. So I’ve always loved that my American Lit II syllabus follows that long reading with Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, one of the most readable and teachable works I’ve ever encountered and one that opens up so many themes and threads of identity for our discussions and for student response and writing. I’ve really missed the chance to teach it over these last couple years, and ending the semester with it is once again one of the things I’ll most look forward to this Spring!

Last preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring courses or other work you want to share?

January 19, 2022: Spring Semester Previews: First Year Writing II

[A new semester is upon us, so this week I’ll preview texts I’m excited to teach in my Spring 2022 classes. Leading up to a weekend update on my book project in progress!]

Three genres of student paper I’m excited to read in my two Writing II sections.

1)      Ad Analyses: My Writing II syllabus starts with a short unit on advertisements, for a couple reasons: it begins the semester with the skill of close reading specifics from one text (of the students’ choosing), on which to my mind all other forms of analysis are built; and it helps us start talking about the many images and narratives which our 21st century world is always creating and sending our way. Where and how students find their ads has evolved a great in my years teaching this course, and it’s been exciting to see how YouTube ads and online banner ads offer distinct analytical frames from TV commercials and print ads. Can’t wait to see where these two classes start out!

2)      Personal Narratives: The class’s overall focus is on writing 21st century identities, and it’s the second unit—which includes two papers so is significantly longer than the first—where we really begin to explore the multiple layers to that content. More exactly, it’s there where the students generally start to write about their own identities (some do so as part of the ad analysis, but it’s not required), as we read and discuss both personal narratives and essays that engage with elements of 21st century identities (especially around social media and technology). I use and enjoy reading student personal narratives in a few different classes, but these Writing II papers always offer particularly great lenses into not just my students, but how they’re moving through this moment and world of ours.

3)      Research Papers: First Year Writing II at Fitchburg State concludes with a research analysis paper for all sections, as I believe it should (now more than ever, skills of information literacy alone couldn’t be more important). Every time I teach the course, I struggle with one particular aspect of this culminating assignment: I’m 1000% committed to giving students the freedom to choose and design their own topic; but for many of them, that flexibility is hugely daunting and they’d greatly prefer for me to assign a topic. I hear that, and am always willing to offer suggestions (especially ones based on prior student work in the class), but I remain absolutely committed to that openness, as in my experience it really allows students to write papers that reflect—and analyze—their own interests and identities very potently. Excited to read these two new batches come May!

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring courses or other work you want to share?

January 18, 2022: Spring Semester Previews: 19th Century Women Writers

[A new semester is upon us, so this week I’ll preview texts I’m excited to teach in my Spring 2022 classes. Leading up to a weekend update on my book project in progress!]

On three reasons for the one book I’m requiring my grad students to buy, Joyce Warren’s edition of Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and Other Writings.

1)      “Hungry Husbands” (1857): Fern was first and foremost a groundbreaking newspaper columnist, a writer who wed humor and social commentary in truly innovative ways that make her feel fresh and salient in our own moment as well as opening up a wonderfully alternative window into mid-19th century America. Some of those columns, like “Hungry,” are available online, but it’s by reading a bunch in a collection like Warren’s that we really can appreciate Fern’s voice and style.

2)      Blackwell’s Island series (1858): Fern’s journalism went way beyond that particular brand of column, however, as exemplified by her multi-part series on this women’s prisonin New York Harbor. Those columns are not available online, and are required reading to give us a genuine sense of the breadth and depth of Fern’s writing and career—so I’m very grateful that Warren collected them in this edition.

3)      Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1855): Fern’s autobiographical novel complements her journalism in at least two ways: reflecting the darker sides of her experiences, which open up all sorts of 19th century issues around gender, marriage, family, money, and more; and offering a witty and biting alternative to any stereotypes we might have about “sentimental” fiction. Teaching it alongside Fern’s journalism is something I hardly ever get to do, so this Spring’s grad class is the perfect opportunity!

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring courses or other work you want to share?

January 17, 2022: Spring Semester Previews: Major Authors: W.E.B. Du Bois

[A new semester is upon us, so this week I’ll preview texts I’m excited to teach in my Spring 2022 classes. Leading up to a weekend update on my book project in progress!]

On three (of the many) Du Bois texts that speak to our current moment.

1)      “Returning Soldiers” (1919): It’s a tragic and telling irony that the explosion of racial terrorism known as the Red Summer of 1919 was caused by white supremacist backlash to the very sight—hell, the very idea—of African American WWI veterans. No text helps us better remember that backlash more than Du Bois’ Crisis editorial—and none more succinctly reflects the alternative, vital idea of African American critical patriotism as well.

2)      Black Reconstruction in America (1935): In an era when the very idea of teaching race and racism has somehow become divisive, it’s fair to say that we need Du Bois’ magisterial work—to my mind still the single best historical and historiographic text I’ve ever read—more than ever. “The Propaganda of History” indeed.

3)      The Souls of Black Folk (1903): Du Bois’ best book, and one of the handful of best American books I know, features perhaps my single favorite paragraphin American writing. That would be more than enough to feature it in this post and in this course, but Souls is so, so much more—including some of the most poignant and devastating autobiographical writing I’ve ever read. Can’t wait to teach that chapter and all things Du Bois this Spring!

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring courses or other work you want to share?

January 15-16, 2022: Crowd-sourced Political Women

[On January 12th, 1932, Hattie Caraway became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate. So for the 90th anniversary of that historic occasion, this week I’ve AmericanStudied Caraway and a handful of other political women. Leading up to this crowd-sourced weekend post featuring responses & nominations from fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]

Responding to Tuesday’s Jeannette Rankin post, Amanda Mecke tweets, “There was much space between Lindbergh and GOP Isolationists and a sincere pacifist like Rankin no doubt, but her unsupported stance after the destruction of the fleet in Pearl Harbor meant she offered no acceptable alternative not just to war mongers but even Quakers etc.” She follows up, “I think the agonizing choice of Quakers who fought in WWII provides interesting contrast to Rankin’s political choices among 3 US prongs: US anti-Semitism; recognized pacifism only for organized religions like Quakers or Amish; & both right wing & liberal anti-Stalin discomfort.”

Rebecca Fachner(one of our most badass contemporary political & public history voices) writes, “Rankin was such a boss. She knew the vote against WW2 would cost her the next election and did it anyway. True courage.” She adds, “Also, she’s the only woman in American history to vote to give women the vote. She’s just so great.”

Responding to Friday’s Shirley Chisholm post, Winston Smithshares this video“for those of us who have never experienced the power of Shirley Chisholm.”

One of my favorite podcasters, Kelly Therese Pollock, shares this Sagas of She episode where she talked about Chisholm.

Responding to the series’ subject overall, Irene Martyniuk writes, “I think it is always important to consider all the women who serve at the local level in politics—for instance, our now-retired colleagues Judy Budz and Margarite Landry who have served and continues to serve on various committees in their town or my sister who also sits on various committees in her township. ‘All politics is local’ and these women (all of whom serve without remuneration or fanfare) are vital pieces in American democracy.”

Some great Twitter additions to the conversation:

M.A. Davis tweets, “Ruth Bryan Owen deserves to be better-remembered. Largely in the same memory hole as her dad but an important figure in women’s politics.”

Tiffany Wayne shares “a piece I wrote back in 2016 about another woman who ran for President back in the 1970s, part of a series of blog posts by Nursing Clio called ‘Run like a Girl.’”

Spring Semester previews series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other political women or moments you’d highlight?

January 14, 2022: Women in Politics: Shirley Chisholm’s Campaigns

[On January 12th, 1932, Hattie Caraway became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate. So for the 90th anniversary of that historic occasion, this week I’ll AmericanStudy Caraway and a handful of other political women—share your thoughts and your own nominees for an egalitarian crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]

On two telling political efforts beyond Chisholm’s groundbreaking presidential campaign.

I started this week’s series with the first woman to run for president, so it’s only appropriate to end the week with the first to run for the Democratic presidential nomination (and the second woman to seek a major party nomination, after Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith in 1964), and the first African American presidential candidate to boot: New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. Chisholm’s 1972 campaign was groundbreaking for both of those reasons, and was also quite successful, with the candidate achieving significant results (sometimes classified as wins, although each case is complicated) in the New Jersey, Louisiana, and Mississippi primaries, and eventually garnering 152 delegates (some symbolically released by the nominee George McGovern, but all real nonetheless) at the Democratic National Convention in Miami. Everything I said in Monday’s post about the symbolic significance of Victoria Woodhull’s 1872 campaign holds true for Chisholm’s campaign a century later, and I’d say Chisholm’s represented a significantly more serious contention for the nomination as well.

If that were Chisholm’s only contribution to national politics it would be more than enough to deserve collective memory—but it’s not, and her participation in a couple specific efforts helps us better remember the full scope of her half-century career in politics. Chisholm’s first political work took place in 1953, the same year that the 29-year-old Chisholm began directing a couple New York City child care centers (putting her MA in Elementary Education from Columbia’s Teachers College to work in the process). In that year she joined prominent local Democratic politician and power broker Wesley “Mac” Holder’s successful campaign to elect Lewis Flagg Jr. as the first African American judge in Brooklyn. That campaign became the basis for a more overarching organization, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League (BPSL), which fought for civil rights, economic equality, and fairness in housing throughout the 1950s. While both those efforts were partly local in emphasis, they were also part of the burgeoning national civil rights movement—and that combination of local and national, targeted and broader political goals, is at the heart of all Congressional work, particularly in the House in which Chisholm would serve for seven groundbreaking terms between 1969 and 1983.

One of Chisholm’s many important efforts during those 14 years in Congress took place just a year before her presidential run. In 1971, she once again utilized her education and experience in early childhood education and care, teaming with fellow New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug to co-sponsor a historic bill that would allocate $10 billion toward child care services. Senator Walter Mondale came on board for the Senate version of the bill, which passed both houses in December 1971 as the Comprehensive Child Development Act. Unfortunately President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, arguing not only that it was too costly but also that it would implement a “communal approach to child-rearing” and thus that it was “the most radical piece of legislation” to have crossed his presidential desk. The fight for federal support for child care has continued into this year, one of many arenas in which we still have a great deal to learn from the lessons and model of Shirley Chisholm.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: What do you think? Other political women or moments you’d highlight?

January 13, 2022: Women in Politics: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Flight

[On January 12th, 1932, Hattie Caraway became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate. So for the 90th anniversary of that historic occasion, this week I’ll AmericanStudy Caraway and a handful of other political women—share your thoughts and your own nominees for an egalitarian crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]

On one of the most famous American flights, and one that should be.

Our national fascination with Amelia Earhart (1897-1937)—I think you could make a case that she’s the most famous 20th century American woman—is entirely understandable. Even before she flew off into the unknown just a few weeks shy of her fortieth birthday, she was a hugely unique and compelling figure who also happened to live at precisely the right time: that era of the first prominent pilots, of the Red Baron and Charles Lindbergh (one of Earhart’s nicknames was “Lady Lindy”) and Howard Hughes, of those terrifyingly fragile-looking planes making their way across the continent and the oceans. And beyond the mythologies, of Earhart’s individual mystery and of those high-flying national figures in general, she was also a genuinely complex and interesting American, one whose identity can help us AmericanStudiers think about technology and progress, the aftermath of World War I and the lead up to World War II, gender and identity, and many other topics besides.

Yet I’d still make the case that Earhart’s final journey has some serious competition for the most significant flight featuring an American woman, and at the very least that her competitor’s flight, like her competitor herself, deserves a lot more attention in our national narratives and memories. In March 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), whose husband Franklin was just beginning his third term as President under the very dark cloud of the ongoing Second World War, visited the Tuskegee Air Corps Advanced Flying School in Tuskegee, Alabama. Self-taught pilot Charles Anderson had founded the school for African American civilian pilot training two years earlier, and was facing in his attempts to support and extend its efforts all of the discrimination and lack of funding and the like that we might expect in the depths of the Jim Crow South and in an era when the military itself (like so many organizations) was fully segregated. And so when the nation’s First Lady not only visited the school, but despite the protests of her Secret Service agents requested a private flight with Anderson and spent over an hour in the sky with him, the event took on a literal and a symbolic significance that is difficult to overstate. Nor was this a one-off for Roosevelt, as she facilitated a White House visit for Anderson and others later that year where they successfully lobbied for more military support and collaboration for Tuskegee.

The thousands of pilots who would graduate from Tuskegee over the next few years and become part of the Tuskegee Airmen, and what that community meant for both America’s war efforts and toward President Truman’s 1948 desegregation of the armed forces, is a rich and powerful AmericanStudies topic in its own right, and one about which I wrote in this post. But Roosevelt’s March 1941 flight likewise serves as a particularly salient single linchpin for her candidacy for my Hall of American Inspiration. While I don’t doubt that Roosevelt’s name is familiar to most Americans, I nonetheless believe that, as has been the case for all of my nominees, our narratives greatly underrate the striking breadth and depth of her contributions to American and world identity and history: from the nearly 100 columnsshe wrote for national magazines during her years in the White House to her service as one of America’s first Delegates to the UN General Assembly, her pioneering work as the inaugural chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights (work that culminated in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” a document that Roosevelt called “the international Magna Carta of all mankind”) to her chairing (the year before she died) of President Kennedy’s groundbreaking President’s Commission on the Status of Women, and in many other arenas and ways alongside these efforts (including her work throughout the 1920s on behalf of the Women’s Trade Union League), Roosevelt was for more than three decades one of America’s brightest lights and most powerful voices.

Amelia Earhart is largely an a-political figure, one whose appeal has (or at least can have) nothing to do with politics or with narratives that can divide as well as unite Americans; I know that it is and might always be impossible to say the same of Eleanor Roosevelt, or of any First Lady. Yet a moment like that 1941 flight with Anderson has nothing whatsoever to do with politics, and the more we can remember and highlight such moments, and the inspiring Americans who made them happen, the more our national community can likewise take flight. Last political woman tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other political women or moments you’d highlight?