Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 125

October 14, 2021: SitcomStudying: Wandavision

[October 15th marks the 70th anniversary of I Love Lucy’s debut. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Lucyyyyyyyyyyyy and other sitcoms—share your responses and other sitcom analyses for a crowd-sourced post that’ll need no canned laughter!]

On one way the Marvel show embodies the best of sitcoms, and one way it reflects the worst.

I haven’t written much about Marvel movies or the MCU in this space, despite that world occupying a not-insignificant portion of the boys’ lives (and thus of course my own) over the last year or so, and perhaps the reason is that I share at least a bit of the frustration that many others have voiced with how much Marvel & Disney et al have come to dominate our cultural landscape (and how much other franchises like the DC Universe are now seemingly copying that model). But at the same time, I have to say this: each of the three Marvel TV shows released on DisneyPlus so far (Wandavision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki) hasn’t just been an entertaining diversion (although they have all been that for sure); each has also grappled in thoughtful and meaningful ways with some pretty big themes and issues. Which is to say, we can gripe about the MCU’s dominance all we want, but we’d also better be willing to engage specifically with what and how these texts are doing. (I’m sure I’ll get to the other two of those series in future posts, or at the very least Falcon which is as interesting on race in America as any recent pop culture work this side of Watchmen.)

Much of the critical conversation around Wandavision has understandably centered on its depictions of grief (not least because the clip at that last hyperlink features perhaps the best single summation of the emotion ever penned), but of course the show is really first and foremost about sitcoms. Not just that it uses and imitates the sitcom form, that is; Wandavisionis very much about what the genre does and doesn’t do, include, engage when it comes to family and community and identity, and so on. That formal and thematic throughline blends with the show’s themes of grief in quite potent ways, especially by the stunning and heartbreaking finale (even more SPOILERS in that clip than in this post overall). But it also makes the entire show a really thoughtful engagement with both the genre’s dangers (the way sitcoms can elide some of the darker and more human sides of life, and thus consuming them distract us in potentially destructive ways) and yet at the same time its potential power and value (the way the best of it can also connect us to those sides, as great art of any type can, and through so doing give us renewed life).

Of course lots of sitcoms aren’t “the best of it,” though, and one I’d put in that category is Bewitched, especially for the Salem-specific reasons I detail in this post. And in its own small but not insignificant way, Wandavision echoes that craptastic classic and makes the same historical mistake (more SPOILERS to follow, natch). The show’s eventual villain, the witch Agatha (played wonderfully by the great Kathryn Hahn), is introduced (not as a character overall, as she had been in the show for many episodes by that point, but as Agatha and the villain specifically) through a long episode-opening sceneset in (we’re told in the scene’s opening script) Salem in 1693. Which is to say, this isn’t just another pop culture text which reinforces the destructive myth that there were witches in 17th century Salem—by setting this scene the year after the Witch Trials, Wandavision suggests that the town’s cohort of witches endured after the Trials, which to my mind doubly reinforces the Trials’ goal of rooting out this mythologized community (which of course in practice meant killing mostly disadvantaged and disenfranchised folks). Not the biggest element of Wandavision by a long shot, but a frustrating echo of one of American sitcom history’s most negative influences.

Lucy post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sitcoms you’d study?

October 13, 2021: SitcomStudying: Grace and Frankie

[October 15th marks the 70th anniversary of I Love Lucy’s debut. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Lucyyyyyyyyyyyy and other sitcoms—share your responses and other sitcom analyses for a crowd-sourced post that’ll need no canned laughter!]

[NB. This post originally appeared in 2015, but I would argue all of its points have only deepened with all the G&F seasons since!]

On two ways the Netflix sitcom pushes our cultural boundaries, and one way it happily does not.

The Netflix original sitcom Grace and Frankie (2015) features one of the more distinctive and yet appropriately 2015 premises I’ve seen: two lifelong male friends and law partners come out to their wives as gay, in love with each other, and leaving their wives for each other and a planned gay marriage. The premise alone would make the show one of the more groundbreaking on our cultural landscape, but the fact that the two men are played by two of our most prominent and respected actors, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston, makes this nuanced, complex, warm, and so so thoroughly human portrayal of a same-sex relationship even more striking. It seems to me that a greal deal more has been written about Transparent and Jeffrey Tambor’s portrayalof that show’s transgender protagonist than about Sheen and Waterston in Grace and Frankie—and without taking anything away from Tambor’s equally nuanced and impressive performance, I would argue that seeing Sheen and Waterston in these roles represents an equally significant step forward in our cultural representations of the spectrums of sexuality, sexual preference, and identity in America.

What’s particularly interesting about Grace and Frankie, moreover, is that Sheen and Waterston’s characters and storyline represents only half of the show’s primary focuses—and the other half, focused on the responses and next steps and identities and perspectives of their former wives Grace and Frankie, is in its own ways just as ground-breaking. Played to comic, tragic, human perfection by legendary actresses Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, these two characters represent to my mind two of the most in-depth and multi-layered portrayals of older women in television history. That there has been some behind the scenes controversy about the paychecks of Fonda and Tomlin in comparison to those of Sheen and Waterston, while of course frustrating and tied to broader current issues and arguments, also seems to add one more pitch-perfect layer to the ways in which the show asks us to think about the experiences, lives, and worlds of older women in a society that tends (as this scene highlightswith particular clarity) not to include them in our cultural landscape much at all. In a year when the single leading candidate for the presidency (I refuse to consider Donald Trump for that title; [2021 Ben: man I wish I had been right]) is herself a woman over 65, Grace and Frankie engages with our current moment in this important way as well.

At the time that it’s four main characters and their storylines are thus so groundbreaking, however, I would argue (to parallel things I said about Longmire in this post) that in its use of the conventions and traditions of the sitcom form Grace and Frankie feels very comfortably familiar. That might be one reason why Transparent, which blends genres much more into something like a dramedy, has received more critical attention and popular buzz (of course the parallels to the Caitlyn Jenner story are another such reason). Yet just because Grace and Frankie stays more within those familiar sitcom lines (featuring everything from physical comedy and wacky misunderstandings to recurring catchphrases and jokes) doesn’t make it less stylistically successful—indeed, I might argue that using such familiar forms yet making them feel fresh and funny is itself a significant aesthetic success, and one that Grace and Frankie most definitely achieved for this viewer. Moreover, there’s a reason why the sitcom is one of television’s oldest and most lasting forms—it taps into some of our most enduring audience desires, our needs for laughter and comfort that not only continue into our present moment, but have an even more necessary place alongside the antiheroes and dark worlds that constitute so much of the best of current television. Just one more reason why I’m thankful for Grace and Frankie.

Next SitcomStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sitcoms you’d study?

October 12, 2021: SitcomStudying: Friends

[October 15th marks the 70th anniversary of I Love Lucy’s debut. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Lucyyyyyyyyyyyy and other sitcoms—share your responses and other sitcom analyses for a crowd-sourced post that’ll need no canned laughter!]

Let me start by saying that I’ve gotten a lot of pleasure out of Friends over the years; once they got into their rhythm, this was one of the better ensemble casts of any sitcom in history, and produced lots of very funny as well as many touching moments over the years. But at the same time, like so many hugely popular cultural works, this TV show also reflected and extended some of the darker elements in America’s collective psyche. Here are three such dark sides to the mega-successful sitcom:

1)      Anti-Intellectualism: As Richard Hofstadter knew all too well, there’s been a longstanding, influential current of anti-intellectualism in American society. And in its consistently snarky and often downright nasty portrayal of Ross Geller (David Schwimmer)’s job as a college professor of paleontology, Friendsunfortunately played into this current and to the stereotypes of eggheaded academics on which it has often relied. Each character’s work world was the subject of plenty of jokes, but I would argue that only Ross’s was so thoroughly tied to the character’s worst personality traits and tendencies, with virtually no attention to any other elements of the profession. Not smart, Friends.

2)      Homophobia: To be honest, there’s not much I can say about Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry)’s constant homophobia that wasn’t said already in this great Slate piece. But I would particularly single out the character of Chandler’s father, who is either a cross-dressing man or a transgendered woman (it’s never made quite clear, but the character is played by Kathleen Turner), and whom both Chandler and the show treat almost entirely as a combination of cringing embarrassment and shameful joke. Transparent or Grace and Frankie this most definitely isn’t, folks—and even for its own late 90s/early 00s moment, Friendswas behind the curve.

3)      Diversity: None other than the great Ta-Nehisi Coates has referenced the thoroughgoing lack of racial diversity on Friends, as well as the careless way the show recycled the same plotline for its two prominent African American guest stars, Aisha Tyler and Gabrielle Union. But the show’s diversity problem was even broader and deeper than that: this was a show set in New York City in the late 20th century, and the only prominent Asian character was literally fresh off the plane from China; I can’t remember any significant Hispanic characters or indeed prominent characters of any non-white ethnicity other than the three I’ve mentioned (and that’s over ten seasons!). I’m not arguing that one of the six friends would have had to be non-white, necessarily—but if their turn of the 21st century American world is so completely white, well, that’s an indictment of either the characters or the show.

Next SitcomStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sitcoms you’d study?

October 11, 2021: SitcomStudying: Sitcom Dads

[October 15th marks the 70th anniversary of I Love Lucy’s debut. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Lucyyyyyyyyyyyy and other sitcoms—share your responses and other sitcom analyses for a crowd-sourced post that’ll need no canned laughter!]

AmericanStudying the clichéd extremes of sitcom dads, and the men in the middle.

1)      The Wise Men: It’s no coincidence that one of the first popular TV sitcoms was entitled Father Knows Best (1954-60, based on the 1949-54 radio show). A central thread throughout the genre’s history has been the trope of the wise father responding to his family’s problems and issues, from Father’s Jim Warren (Robert Young) and Leave It to Beaver’s Ward Cleaver (Hugh Beaumont, proving in that clip that father most definitely did not always know best) to The Cosby Show’s Cliff Huxtable(Bill Cosby, now ironically but nevertheless) and Growing Pains’ Jason Seaver (Alan Thicke), among countless others. It’s difficult to separate this trope from 50s stereotypes of gender and family roles (especially after seeing that hyperlinked Leave It to Beaver moment), but at the same time the trope’s endurance long after that decade reflects its continued cultural resonance. If sitcoms often reflect exaggerated versions of our idealized social structures, then there’s something about that paternalistic wise man that has remained a powerful American idea.

2)      The Fools: Yet at the same time that the TV version of Father Knows Best was taking off, Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners(1955-56, based on a recurring comedy sketch) was experiencing its own brief but striking success. I’m not sure whether Gleason’s foolish, angry husband (not yet a father in Gleason’s case) character was a direct response to wise characters or just the natural yang to that yin; but in any case such foolish fathers have likewise continued to be a sitcom staple in the decades since, with Married with Children’s Al Bundy (Ed O’Neill) and The Simpsons’ Homer Simpson (voiced by Dan Castellaneta) representing two particularly exaggerated end of the century versions of the type. Yet also two significantly distinct versions—Al Bundy consistently desires to escape from his wife and family (putting him in the American tradition of characters like Rip Van Winkle), while Homer is a macho stereotype who loves his beer and donuts but also mostly loves his family. To paraphrase Tolstoy’s famous quote, each foolish sitcom father is foolish in his own way.

3)      The Middle Men: Because these two extremes have been so prevalent in sitcom history, it’s easy to put each and every sitcom father into one or the other of these categories. But I think doing so would be a disservice to (among others) those sitcom dads who might superficially seem like caricatured fools, but whose characters included complexities and depths beyond that stereotype. I’d say that’s especially the case for a few 1970s dads: All in the Family’s Archie Bunker(Carroll O’Connor), The Jeffersons’ George Jefferson(Sherman Hemsley, who first appeared as the character on All), and Sanford and Son’s Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx). Each of those fathers could be as foolish and angry as any, but to stop there would be to miss much of what made them and their sitcoms memorable: partly the willingness to engage with social and political issues such as race and class; but also and just as importantly the messy, dynamic humanity each character and actor captured, all without losing an ounce of their comic timing and success. Few fathers are purely wise or foolish, after all, and these dads in the middle help remind us of the full spectrum of paternal possibilities.

Next SitcomStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sitcoms you’d study?

October 9-10, 2021: AmericanFires: Wildfires and Climate Change

[October 8-10 marks the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied that tragedy and four other historic fires, leading up to this somber special post on the crucial context for our current crops of horrific wildfires.]

On the longstanding history of defining environmental disasters, and how it’s not nearly enough to understand the present.

In one of my very first posts, just under eleven years (!) ago, I highlighted (as a context for the great film Chinatown) one of my favorite works of AmericanStudies scholarship: David Wyatt’s Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California (1997). As you might expect from his title, Wyatt’s focal fires are mostly metaphorical/symbolic (specifically around issues of race and culure), although he does feature the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the accompanying, actual fire as one of those five. But there’s certainly also a case to be made that natural disasters, including that 1906 catastrophe among the many other floodsand hurricanesand volcanic eruptions and the like that I’ve written about in this space during this week’s series and beyond, offer a potent way to frame and analyze American history. After all, while virtually everything about America and the world has changed over the last few centuries, the presence and potency of natural disasters, and their ability to affect and reshape so much of society, has remained a constant.

One of the first major global news stories of 2020 was a horrific such natural disaster, the wildfires that absolutely ravaged so much of Australia for more than six months (from September 2019 through March 2020). And here in the United States, that news story foreshadowed our own year-long, historically horrific California wildfires, which by the year’s end had burned more than 4% of the state’s land, making this the worst wildfire season in recorded history (and it was a season that extended and has continued to extend well beyond the Golden State). For those of us on the East Coast, it was at times possible (if not ideal) to forget just how much of the United States was devastated, affected, and threatened by wildfires throughout 2020—but I try as best I can not to suffer more from such East Coast biasthan is inevitable for someone who has pretty much only ever lived along the I-95 corridor, and from a national perspective there’s no doubt that these catastrophic wildfires were one of the biggest stories (if not indeed the single biggest story) of last year—and that they’re shaping up to be just as big of a story here in 2021.

And that very ubiquity illustrates a complicated but crucial fact: the long history of environmental disasters can’t quite capture the realities of our present, climate change-driven moment. Indeed, I think it’s no longer accurate to think about such things through the lens of individual disasters—the globe as of October 2021 is one overarching environmental disaster, reflected through so many different trends from wildfires to the constant “worst hurricanes ever” to tornadoes (more complicatedly, although debatable causes doesn’t change their destructive effects) to so, so much more. When I want to get really depressed, particularly about the world into which my sons are growing up, I read the stories about how we’re already past the point of no return when it comes to global climate change. But when I want to counter that feeling, I think about my sons and their generation, about for example my older son’s proposal-in-progress for a climate change-battling project for part of his high school’s community service requirement (more on that in this space as the contours develop!). Both depression and inspiration seem important emotional states when it comes to wildfires and climate change here in late 2021.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fires or other historic disasters you’d analyze?

October 8, 2021: AmericanFires: The Great Chicago Fire

[October 8-10 marks the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that tragedy and four other historic fires, leading up to a somber special post on our current crops of horrific wildfires.]

Decided to focus my new Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on the Great Chicago Fire, so I'll share that link here.

And hope that you'll check it out (and feel free to share your thoughts on it there or here)! 

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fires or other historic disasters you’d analyze?

October 7, 2021: AmericanFires: The Hindenburg

[October 8-10 marks the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that tragedy and four other historic fires, leading up to a somber special post on our current crops of horrific wildfires.]

On a justifiably famous context for the airship disaster, and a more ambiguous but equally compelling one.

Eighty years ago, the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire while docking in Manchester Township, New Jersey, a horrific, tragic accident that produced thirty-six fatalities among passengers and crew. Much like the Titanic a couple decades earlier, the Hindenburg was a famous, groundbreaking vehicle that had left Europe to a great deal of fanfare, on the first of what were to be ten round-trip transatlantic flights that year; its scheduled return trip to Germany was already sold out. Yet while the Titanic’s disaster did not (as I understand it) lead to any immediate or significant change in the popularity of nautical travel, the Hindenburg crash marked the beginning of the end of the brief dominance of airships as a preferred option for passenger travel. Partly that striking effect was due to the particularly horrific idea of being caught on an airship in flight when it catches fire, of course; but I would argue that even more significant was the fact that for potential passengers all over the United States and the world, the Hindenburg fire was far more than just an idea: it was a series of infamous, viral images, videos, and radio broadcasts.

A still image, photographer Sam Shere’s shot of an inflamed and crashing Hindenburg behind the mooring mast, became the defining depiction of the disaster. But it was through the newer video and audio technologies that the story of the crash truly went viral. Four different American and international organizations (Pathé News, Movietone News, Hearst News of the Day, and Paramount News) had representatives present for the landing and captured extensive newsreel footage, allowing viewers around the world to watch clips of an unfolding disaster for the first time in history (although, as those hyperlinks reflect, the clips were part of thoroughly produced and narrated pieces). But most striking of all was Herbert Morrison’s eyewitness radio report, recorded live and broadcast on Chicago’s WLS station the following day. Morrison was already a prominent figure in the industry (and would go on to become one in early television news as well), but his visceral reaction to witnessing the crash—epitomized by the phrase “Oh, the humanity!”—both propelled him to international fame and became inextricably linked with images and stories of the Hindenburg. If we’re now entirely accustomed to associating disasters with the media coverage of them, that link began with the Hindenburg.

Far less famous than that media context, and far more ambiguous to be sure, were the connections between the Hindenburg crash and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. The airship itself was entirely linked to Hitler, as its first public flight, alongside another airship the Graf Zeppelin in March 1936, served as propaganda for the regime; the two airships traveled around Germany broadcasting pro-Hitler messages and helped sway German public opinion in favor of reoccupying the Rhineland ahead of a referendum on the question. Most of the numerous, never proven theories of sabotage as the cause of the Hindenburgfire were based on various permutations of these Nazi ties: from A.A. Hoehling’s book Who Destroyed the Hindenburg? (1962), which named crew member Erich Spehl the saboteur in part because his girlfriend was a communist with anti-Nazi contacts; to more outlandish theories such as one that names Hitler himself as the culprit, in order to punish the German airship pioneer Hugo Eckenerfor his failure to support the regime. Historians and scientists have largely countered all of these theories; but even if the Hindenburgcrash was simply an accident, it seems important to me to remember that the airship had prominent swastikas on its tailfins. The Hindenburgmight have become a symbol of disasters for a new media age, that is, but it also embodied the relationship (at least as of 1937) between Nazi Germany and the United States.

The Chicago fire tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fires or other historic disasters you’d analyze?

October 6, 2021: AmericanFires: The Triangle Fire

[October 8-10 marks the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that tragedy and four other historic fires, leading up to a somber special post on our current crops of horrific wildfires.]

On two well-established legacies of and one evolving question about a horrific industrial disaster.

The March 25th, 1911 fire at New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory led to the deaths of 146 garment workers, some as young as fourteen years old, making it one of the most deadly and tragic industrial disasters in American history. A number of factors came together to make the fire as destructive as it was: the factory was on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the Greenwich Village Asch Building, and inadequate methods of communication meant that for at least those workers on the 9th floor news of the fire literally arrived at the same time that the fire itself did; the factory’s owners kept many of the doors to stairwells and exits locked in order to prevent both theft and unauthorized breaks, leading many workers to jump to their deaths from windows rather than wait to be killed in the fire; the building’s one exterior fire escape was in terrible shape and perhaps already broken, and collapsed during the fire, sending at least twenty workers to their deaths; and so on. Yet while the particular combination of such contexts and events produced the fire’s strikingly high number of fatalities, it’s entirely accurate to say that each of those individual factors was representative of trends across the nation’s industrial sector in the period (and for many decades prior), the recognition of which in the fire’s aftermath led to a number of important legacies and changes.

Those legacies can be roughly divided into two main categories: workplace safety regulations and labor activism. The safety issues were investigated first by a New York State Committee on Public Safety (headed by Frances Perkins, the sociologist and activist who would go on to serve as FDR’s Secretary of Labor and the first woman appointed to a presidential cabinet) and then by the newly created Factory Investigating Commission (chaired by State and future U.S. Senator Robert Wagner and future NY Governor and presidential candidate Al Smith). These two efforts produced nearly forty influential state laws and numerous other workplace safety recommendations and changes. At the same time, the labor movement responded to the fire with vigor and sustained activism; on April 2nd, just a week after the fire, socialist and feminist union leader Rose Schneiderman gave a speech at the city’s Metropolitan Opera House to members of the Women’s Trade Union League, arguing that “the only way [working people] can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.” In the subsequent months and years, it was the relatively new but rapidly expanding International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) that most directly took up that charge, fighting for factory and sweatshop workers around the country. Indeed, it’d be impossible to separate the legislative and legal advances from the presence and role of these labor activists, and it’s most accurate to say that the two forms of response to the fire went hand-in-hand.

Those safety and labor responses and changes represent the most clear and enduring legacy of the Triangle fire. But as a public AmericanStudies scholar interested in our national collective memories, I would argue that the question of how to remember the fire is another important, and certainly still evolving, one. Many of those conversations were centered on, as were the initial efforts of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition(formed in 2008), the 2011 Centennial, a hugely prominent event that featured contributions and speechesfrom then-Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis among many other luminaries. Yet as important as such an individual moment for memory is, it’s vital to think about longer-term and more lasting ways to add histories like the Triangle fire into our national memories and narratives. The Coalition is working to build a permanent public art Triangle Fire Memorial in Lower Manhattan; those efforts remain in their early stages and I’m sure could benefit from any and all ideas and contributions, fellow AmericanStudiers. But as big of a fan as I am of public art memorials, I would also stress that 21st century collective memories are created at least as much in digital, multimedia, and educational spaces and communities. How to better include a horrific disaster like the Triangle fire in those kinds of collective conversations remains, both specifically and generally, an open and evolving question, I’d say.

Next fire tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fires or other historic disasters you’d analyze?

October 5, 2021: AmericanFires: The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire

[October 8-10 marks the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that tragedy and four other historic fires, leading up to a somber special post on our current crops of horrific wildfires.]

On two distinct, equally inspiring communal responses to one of our most destructive disasters.

The April 18th, 1906 earthquake that struck the coast of Northern California, with a particular locus of the San Francisco Bay Area, was itself a particularly destructive one, measuring 7.8 on the Richter Scale and hitting the maximum level of Mercalli intensityof XI (both of those measures were developed in the 1930s, and so have been applied retroactively to estimate the quake’s force and effects). But it was the fires that developed throughout the city in the quake’s aftermath—some started by firefighters themselves while dynamiting buildings to create firebreaks; others supposedly started by homeowners seeking insurance payouts; but most simply the effects of a natural disaster on a largely wooden city—that produced the most widespread destruction; by the times those fires died down several days later, an estimated 80% of San Francisco had been destroyed. Well more than half of the city’s population of 410,000 were left homeless by the quake and fires, with refugee camps in areas such as the Presidio and Golden Gate Park still in operation two years later. Although the relatively new technology of photographyand the very new technology of filmallowed the quake’s effects to be catalogued more overtly than for any prior disaster, amplifying the destruction’s public visibility, by any measure and with or without such records the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake was one of America’s most horrific natural disasters.

No amount of inspiring responses to that tragedy can ameliorate its horrors and destructions, and I don’t intend for the next two paragraphs to do so. Yet in the aftermath of the earthquake, San Francisco communities did respond to it in a couple of distinct but equally compelling and inspiring ways. In the quake’s immediate aftermath, the city’s residents began to set up emergency procedures and services with striking speed and effectiveness, a process documented and celebrated by none other than William James. The pioneering American psychologist and scholar was teaching at nearby Stanford at the time, and, after waking up to the earthquake, managed to journey into San Francisco later that day and to observe at length the city’s and community’s ongoing responses to the quake. He detailed those observations in Chapter IX, “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” in 1911 book Memories and Studies, describing what he saw as “a temper of helpfulness beyond the counting” and noting that, while “there will doubtless be a crop of nervous wrecks before the weeks and months are over, … meanwhile the commonest men [used in a gender-neutral way, I believe], simply because they are men, will go on, singly and collectively, showing this admirable fortitude of temper.” While not all American disasters have produced that same communal spirit (as we’ll see later in the week’s series), it does represent a consistent historical thread, and James’s observations ring true across many such moments.

The other inspiring response to the earthquake came from a more specific San Francisco community, and represented an opportunity to challenge a discriminatory and unjust law. By 1906 the Chinese Exclusion Act and its many subsequent extensions had been in operation for a quarter century, leading to both the detention and exclusion of Chinese arrivals and numerous hardships for existing Chinese American families and communities (such as San Francisco’s century-old Chinatown). When the 1906 fires destroyed numerous public birth records, members of those Chinese and Chinese American communities saw a chance to resist and circumvent those laws, and the concept of the “paper sons” was born. Current Chinese American men and families would produce fraudulent birth documents, whether for children born in China or to be sold or given to other unrelated young men, in order to claim them as having been born in America and thus U.S. citizens (itself certainly a fraught category for this community, but one to which, the Supreme Court had ruled in 1898’s United States vs. Wong Kim Arkdecision, the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship still applied). Despite its unequivocal horrors and losses, then, the 1906 earthquake allowed for the city’s and nation’s Chinese American community to continue and grow despite the Exclusion era’s xenophobic limitations, a positive and inspiring outcome to be sure.

Next fire tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fires or other historic disasters you’d analyze?

October 4, 2021: AmericanFires: The Armory Fire

[October 8-10 marks the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that tragedy and four other historic fires, leading up to a somber special post on our current crops of horrific wildfires.]

On the tragedy that sheds new light on one of our more complex histories.

In this post on Martin Scorcese’s Gangs of New York (2002), I gave the filmmaker a good bit of grief for the way in which his film builds toward a chaotic but sympathetic depiction of the city’s Irish American community during the 1863 draft riots. As I noted there, the riots were of course part of a complex set of historical and social contexts and factors, but likewise, and even more saliently for Scorcese’s sympathies, was the period’s Irish American community. It’s always challenging for those of us striving for a progressive perspective on history when one oppressed community opposes another, and that’s undoubtedly part of the story of the riots (if not, frankly, the central story of them): a recent, heavily discriminated-against American community (Irish immigrants) reacting to yet another perceived discrimination (the Civil War draft) by enacting violence against an even more discriminated-against community (African Americans).

If we’re going to remember the draft riots more fully and accurately, as I believe we certainly should, it’d be important at the same time to remember the ways in which Irish Americans contributed much more constructively to the Union cause during the war. That would definitely include the nearly 150,000 Federal troops who had been born in Ireland, nearly a third of whom were apparently New Yorkers and all of whom were instrumental to the war’s successful outcome. But it would also include the many Irish American women who worked in the era’s mills, factories, and especially arsenals—the latter especially not only because of their overt contributions to the war effort, but also because of the striking number of tragic arsenal explosions and accidents that claimed many workers’ lives (in the South as well as the North) over the course of the war.

Exemplifying such tragedies, and particularly overtly linked (in its own era and in our collective memories of the event) to the Irish American community, was the June 1864 Washington Arsenal fire. 1,500 men, women, and girls worked in that arsenal, and while it’s impossible to ascertain an exact tally of how many were killed and wounded in the fire, historians estimate that at least twenty women died (the particular area where the fire began was worked almost exclusively by women), and many of the rest were likely injured either in the blaze or during their escape. It’s certainly fair to say that these workers were casualties of war, just as all such workers contributed mightily to the war effort; fair and important to remember them right alongside those Irish American soldiers. And, to reiterate, right alongside the New York draft rioters as well. History’s not reducible to any one moment, and the more we put them in conversation, with each other and all their contexts, the stronger and more valuable those collective memories will be.

Next fire tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fires or other historic disasters you’d analyze?