Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 121

December 8, 2021: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Tokyo Trials

[December 7thmarks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]

On the complex question of whether a military attack is also a war crime.

Although they are not as well-known as the concurrent Nuremberg Trials (perhaps because there wasn’t an excellent dramatic filmmade about them), the Tokyo War Crimes Trials comprised one of the most significant aftermaths of and responses to World War II in their own right. Convened in Tokyo by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), an organization established by General Douglas MacArthur in a January 1946 proclamation, the trials took place in the city between May 1946 and November 1948. Per MacArthur’s charter the IMTFE was tasked with bringing to trial Japanese officials and officers charged with war crimes and other “offenses which include crimes against peace”; under that aegis nine senior political leaders and eighteen military leaders were prosecuted, and all of them (other than two who passed away from natural causes during the course of the trials) were found guilty and sentenced to death or imprisonment.

Many of the Tokyo trials’ focal war crimes fit that broad category straightforwardly enough: the rape of Nankingand similar mass atrocities; the beheading of prisoners of war and similar violations of international law; and so on. But a number of the accused were also charged with Class A war crimes (the category that focuses on “crimes against peace”) stemming from the Pearl Harbor attack: this group included Shigetaro Shimada, the Minister of the Navy who authorized the attack (and was convicted of a Class A war crime for it); and the attack’s mastermind, Chief of Naval General Staff Osarni Nagano(who died in prison during the trial). This paperby University of Virginia law student Jeffrey D. Fox makes the case for why the Pearl Harbor attack should indeed have been defined as a war crime by the IMTFE, and it’s a compelling case, starting with the lack of a war declaration or a self-defense justification for the attack, and including broader legal ideas in the era related to “waging aggressive war.” I’m no expert in wartime or international law, and so I’m willing to accept such arguments and this legal definition of Pearl Harbor as a Class A war crime.

And yet (a favorite third-paragraph opener of mine, as longtime readers know well). I know that the August 9, 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki took place in the midst of a declared war, but in every other way (as I wrote in this 2015 piece for Talking Points Memo) that bombing seems to me more criminal than the Pearl Harbor attack. It targeted almost exclusively civilians, for one thing (soldiers comprised an estimated 3% of the city’s 1945 population). And it was extremely aggressive and likely unnecessary, for another thing (the Truman administration gave Japan only two days after the August 6th Hiroshima bombing to figure out what had happened and surrender, and the U.S. military was already rehearsing the Nagasaki bombing on the second day, meaning that there really was no time for Japan to take action before this second bombing). I’m not suggesting that Nagasaki fits the legal definition of a war crime, necessarily; just that such categories and their applications, as is always and inevitably the case with any law, are influenced in no small part by who is framing them and in what contexts. I’m also not excusing Pearl Harbor in any way—simply noting that the contrast between it and Nagasaki is not as clear-cut as the Tokyo trials would suggest.

Next history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 7, 2021: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Conspiracy Theory

[December 7thmarks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]

On the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory that doesn’t hold up but is illuminating nonetheless.

I wrote an entire weeklong series on American conspiracy theories a few years back, but managed to avoid writing about one of the most prominent historical conspiracy theories: the theory that high-ranking U.S. government officials, up to and in some of the theories including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack and let it happen (or even, in some of the most extreme theories, encouraged it) in order to push the United States into the European theatre of World War II through a so-called “back door.” Such theories go back at least as far as 1944, when John Flynn, a journalist and co-founder of the isolationist America First Committee, published a pamphlet entitled The Truth about Pearl Harbor (that’s the full text of the 1945 British edition, which seems unchanged other than a new “Publisher’s Preface”). A World War II naval officer, Rear Admiral Robert Theobald, wrote his own 1954 book, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The Washington Background of the Pearl Harbor Attack, developing the argument more fully. And in recent years, the most prominent of these conspiracy theorists has been World War II veteran and journalist Robert Stinnett, whose 1999 book Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor lays out the theory at particularly elaborate length.

I could pretend that I’ve done all the research myself to disprove those sources and theories, but in truth I’ve mainly relied on this excellent Wikipedia page, which takes the different theories one-by-one and takes them apart quite effectively. Highlighting any one tends to reveal just how easily and thoroughly they can be debunked, as illustrated by the argument that the absence of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers from Pearl Harbor indicates advance knowledge of the attack (and a desire to protect the carriers from it). For one thing, one of those carriers, the Enterprise, was on its way back to Pearl Harbor that morning (having delivered fighters to Wake and Midway Islands), and had been scheduled by arrive at 7am (about an hour before the attacks commenced) but was delayed by weather. And for another, even more important thing, at that time carriers were considered far less central to naval strategy and warfare than battleships; if the U.S. had wanted to protect key elements of its fleet, it would certainly have not had all 8 of its Pacific Fleet battleships in the harbor at the time. Certainly after the attack carriers became central to the U.S. war effort in the Pacific, but that represents both a strategic shift and a direct response to the attack’s destruction of the U.S. battleships and navy.

So there really doesn’t seem to be much to the various layers to the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories—but they have endured for more than 75 years, and I think there are a couple significant reasons why (besides our general societal and perhaps human fascination with conspiracy theories, about which I wrote many times in that aforementioned series). For one thing, few if any other military moments in American history have been as surprising and embarrassing for the U.S. forces, and thus in need of alternate explanations for the disaster; this was even more true in the 1940s, when the U.S. had not yet suffered what is considered its first defeat in an international military conflict, the Vietnam War (and that conflict has its own share of “The powers that be wouldn’t let us win” theories). And for another thing, Franklin D. Roosevelt has in my experience received about as much extreme and vehement hate as any American president not named Lincoln. Since Roosevelt was president during a war that should have united Americans, rather than one that directly divided us, that vitriolic opposition is a bit harder to understand; but I’ve encountered it time and again, and I believe it helps again why so many Americans can apparently continue to believe that FDR allowed a catastrophic attack on the United States to take place on his watch.

Next history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 6, 2021: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Attack

[December 7thmarks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]

On three little-known histories that add layers to the Pearl Harbor attack.

1)      The Other Attacks: On the same day as the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese forces also launched attacks on three other US territories (the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island) and three British ones (Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong). Compared to the immediacy and intense focus of the Pearl Harbor bombings, those other attacks tended to be the start of multi-day and –week (or even –month) campaigns, and so they were less dramatic, produced far fewer casualties in that first day, and generally don’t stand out in the same ways as did and does Pearl Harbor. All of which is to say, I understand why Pearl Harbor drew the lion’s share of the outrage, attention, and collective memories, in its own momentand down into ours. But when it comes to collective memories I’m an additive guy, and so I think it would still be interesting and important to make these other attacks, and thus these other spaces and communities, part of our remembrances on December 7th as well.

2)      The First Prisoners of War: Despite that central focus on Pearl Harbor, there are of course also histories related to that attack with which we’re not as collectively familiar. For example, while the bulk of the attack was from the air, the Japanese sent five two-man “midget submarines” to raid the harbor; all five were sunk, and nine of their ten crew killed. The tenth, Japanese sailor Kazuo Sakamaki, lost consciousness while trying to detonate an explosive device in his submarine and was found and captured by an American infantryman, Native Hawaiian and Hawaii National Guard member David Akui. Sakamaki became the first Japanese prisoner of war in the U.S., and his submarine became the second: it was recovered and exhibited around the country as part of wartime propaganda and fund-raising efforts. After his return to Japan at the war’s end, Sakamaki wrote a memoir, apparently an honest and thoughtful attempt to grapple with both his role in the attacks (the English title is I Attacked Pearl Harbor) and his time as a POW (the Japanese one is Four Years as Prisoner of War Number One), each of which make Sakamaki one of the war’s most significant individual figures.

3)      The Niihau Incident: Another prominent Japanese individual, Shigenori Nishikaichi, was part of a more complex and fraught post-Pearl Harbor history. Nishikaichi’s Zero fighter was damaged during the attack, and he flew to Niihau, a small nearby Hawaiian island that the Japanese had chosen as a landing and rescue point for such damaged aircraft. Niihau had no radio or other means of hearing about the attacks, and that separation contributed to a complex and controversial next few days for Nishikaichi and the island’s few inhabitants, a period that ended with Nishikaichi dead, a Japanese American islander committing suicide after allegedly collaborating with the pilot to recover maps and documents taken from the plane, and a set of questions that remain open to this day. As that last hyperlink notes, a new film in production about the incident seems likely at the very least to reopen all those questions, and perhaps stir up anti-Japanese American fears at a moment when such xenophobia is literally the last thing we need. But such is the complex ongoing legacy of Pearl Harbor and its many historical contexts and echoes.

Next history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 4-5, 2021: Crowd-sourced Online Reading List

[2021 marks the 50thbirthday of Project Gutenberg, the amazing web resource for full texts from across literary and cultural history. So this week I wanted to share a handful of the American literary works you can read in full on PG, leading up to this crowd-sourced reading list—add yours in comments, please!]

On the overall question of reading in different formats, Olivia Lucier writes, “I did start to read Anna Karenina on Project Gutenberg….lasted about 7 chapters. I have read many ‘books on tape’ as I still say and it is difficult to follow characters. Seeing a name versus hearing it makes a difference in comprehension. As complex as Anna Karenina is, hearing it versus seeing it made it VERY difficult.”

Other online collections:

Rachel Weeks Bright shares this “working list of open access 19th-century periodicals.”

Ilene Goldman tweets, “I’m a big fan of the Hathi Trust Digital Library. I’ve found some real gems there.”

One of my favorite librarians, Jenny Fielding, writes, “And of course—free ebooks and audiobooks through your public and academic libraries.”

Pearl Harbor series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What would you add to our reading list?

December 3, 2021: Project Gutenberg at 50: The Marrow of Tradition

[2021 marks the 50thbirthday of Project Gutenberg, the amazing web resource for full texts from across literary and cultural history. So this week I wanted to share a handful of the American literary works you can read in full on PG—add yours for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list, please!]

Did you really think I wouldn’t end this series with a plea for you to read, free and in full on Project Gutenberg, my favorite American novel, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901)?!

Crowd-sourced reading list this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: What would you add to our reading list?

December 2, 2021: Project Gutenberg at 50: The Squatter and the Don

[2021 marks the 50thbirthday of Project Gutenberg, the amazing web resource for full texts from across literary and cultural history. So this week I wanted to share a handful of the American literary works you can read in full on PG—add yours for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list, please!]

There are few American novels I’ve written about more often than Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885)—and as much as I’d love to hear your thoughts on those many pieces of mine, I’d be even more excited to hear that you’ve had the chance to read and respond to this Mexican American historical novel of 19th century California itself!

Last Project Gutenberg reading tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What would you add to our reading list?

December 1, 2021: Project Gutenberg at 50: The House of the Seven Gables

[2021 marks the 50thbirthday of Project Gutenberg, the amazing web resource for full texts from across literary and cultural history. So this week I wanted to share a handful of the American literary works you can read in full on PG—add yours for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list, please!]

Speaking of historical romances (as I was in yesterday’s post), I don’t know any American text that more thoughtfully considers that complicated genre than does the Preface to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables(1851). And while the novel that follows isn’t nearly as perfectly constructed as The Scarlet Letter (1850), I’d argue that besides being far less well-known, it’s also more interesting on some pretty key American themes. Read it on PG and see what you think!

Next Project Gutenberg reading tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What would you add to our reading list?

November 30, 2021: Project Gutenberg at 50: Ramona

[2021 marks the 50thbirthday of Project Gutenberg, the amazing web resource for full texts from across literary and cultural history. So this week I wanted to share a handful of the American literary works you can read in full on PG—add yours for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list, please!]

Helen Hunt Jackson’s historical novel Ramona (1884) complicatedly links realism and the romance, as illustrated by the longstanding Southern California pageant which portrays the novel’s idealized romance without necessarily engaging with its tragic Native American histories. But as with so many complex literary works (and just about all of the other literary works as well), those ambiguities are all the more reason to read and respond for yourself—and fortunately when it comes to Ramona, you can do so for free on PG!

Next Project Gutenberg reading tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What would you add to our reading list?

November 29, 2021: Project Gutenberg at 50: American Indian Stories

[2021 marks the 50thbirthday of Project Gutenberg, the amazing web resource for full texts from across literary and cultural history. So this week I wanted to share a handful of the American literary works you can read in full on PG—add yours for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list, please!]

Following up last week’s post on indigenous voices, I wanted to start this series with one of my favorite texts by a Native American author, and one of the most compelling multi-genre literary works in American history: Zitkala-Ŝa’s American Indian Stories (1921). From memoirs and essays to folktales and fiction, this book from one of the most impressive and inspiring Americans exemplifies autoethnographyand is a must-read for all 21st century Americans.

Next Project Gutenberg reading tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What would you add to our reading list?

November 27-28, 2021: Emily Lauer’s Guest Post on Afrofuturism in Museums

[I’ve been fortunate enough to share a couple Guest Posts from my NeMLA colleague and friend Emily Lauer, and am excited to share another this weekend!]

In New York City on Museum Mile, both the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art now feature Afrofuturist rooms. At the Cooper Hewitt, the temporary exhibit is called “Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects” and the museum’s website explainsthat this “Selects” room “is the 19th installation in the exhibition series that invites designers, artists, architects and public figures to explore and interpret Cooper Hewitt’s collection of more than 215,000 objects. The exhibition will be on view [through]  Feb. 13, 2022.” A few blocks down at the Met, “’Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room’” opened on November 5th of this year, and will be an ongoing exhibit, nestled amongst other period rooms.

 

Both of these exhibits are richly imagined and immersive, as one might expect from their hosting institutions. Further than that, I was interested to realize that they both imagine Afrofuturism similarly. Each concocts a speculative scenario in which free, relatively comfortable and homed Black people intentionally enact the role of the museum, adventuring around time and/or space to gather items that are then put on display.

 

At the Cooper Hewitt, Jon Gray’s premise is that a post apocalyptic future has a Black adventurer gathering artifacts from the ruins, and those artifacts are displayed in this gallery. At the Met, the premise of the room is that the people who lived in Seneca Village discovered time travel and the “period room” is full of the residents’ finds they’ve gathered while time traveling.

 

Just as Hollywood loves making movies about Hollywood, and authors love writing novels about authors, so too it should not be surprising that the speculative fiction scenarios of museums feature their protagonists enacting the role of the museum. Of course the scenarios envisioned for these rooms make good use of the setting of their fictions, but in doing so they are offering one very specific take on what Afrofuturism is. If either of these rooms was a visitor’s first exposure to the idea of “Afrofuturism,” the visitor would come away with an incomplete understanding of the concept.

 

By envisioning Afrofuturist protagonists enacting the role of the museum, both rooms seem to imply that Afrofuturism is concerned with collecting and exalting vestiges of the past. In fact, many Afrofuturist visions don’t do that and the relationship between Afrofuturism and museums is more fraught in pop culture than implied by these rooms.

 

For instance, think of the scene in the 2018 film Black Panther when Killmonger liberates an African artifact held by a western museum, immediately using it. Or even more analogously, consider how Janelle Monae’s music video for Q.U.E.E.N. from 2013 explicitly features time-traveling rebels “frozen in suspended animation” in a “living museum” who break free of these bonds, perhaps the opposite of the premise of the Afrofuturist rooms currently on display on Museum Mile.

 

Thus, these rooms seem like they are explicitly looking for ways that museums could take part in a Afrofuturist vision. Instead of seeing the museum as the pillaging colonizing force, or a symbol of stultifying repression, the Cooper Hewitt and the Met want to see themselves, and their roles as museums, in more positive ways. Both of their Afrofuturist rooms, therefore, have the effect of putting the museum’s role on a kind of pedestal by imagining the protagonists of their Afrofuturist visions engaging in museum behavior, a “cool” way to see curatorship, and a way to see curatorship as cool.

 

If the video for Q.U.E.E.N. might be said to be Afrofuturism for musicians, both the new immersive rooms at the Cooper Hewitt and the Met might be said to be Afrofuturism for museums.

[Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Museums or museum spaces you’d highlight?]