Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 135

June 23, 2021: Vaccine Studying: Polio

[June 26th marks the 300th anniversary of Boston physician Zabdiel Boylston’s first inoculations against the raging smallpox epidemic. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Boylston and other vaccine figures and histories, leading up to Friday’s post on the Covid vaccine!]

Following up my points about Jonas Salk in yesterday’s post, three ways to present and engage a fuller, more nuanced historical narrative of the polio vaccine.

First and foremost, it’s important to remember just how widespread and destructive polio remained well into the mid-20th century. If you’re like me, perhaps you associate it more with the first few decades of the 20th century, the era in which Franklin Roosevelt contracted the disease for example. But the United States reported more than 25,000 annual cases of polio throughout the early 1950s, with 58,000 cases (and 3200 deaths) reported in 1952 alone. This wasn’t just a lingering medical issue or a vestige of earlier outbreaks; polio remained a full-fledged, annual epidemic (it struck with particular force every summer, it seems) in the same year that The Honeymooners debuted, 1955. (To put it another way, one that hits close to home in every sense: my parents were born in 1948, meaning that throughout their childhood, polio was a very real threat.) The collective efforts to develop a vaccine, that is, represented urgent work in response to a genuine and ongoing crisis.

I discussed those collective 1950s efforts yesterday, but it’s worth noting that they had really begun a couple decades earlier, to strikingly calamitous effects. Two different teams announced progress on a polio vaccine at the American Public Health Association meeting in November 1935, and both were attacked and denounced by their colleagues in extreme ways: Temple University researcher John Kolmer, whose attenuated vaccine had led to 5 deaths and 10 paralyses out of 10,000 child subjects, was publicly called a murderer after his presentation; New York Health Department researcher Maurice Brodie, whose formaldehyde-killed vaccine had apparently not led to any deaths (and was reported to be 88% effective at preventing subjects from getting polio), was immediately fired from his job and died tragically of a heart attack just three years later (at the age of 35). I have no doubt that these early vaccines weren’t yet effective or safe enough, but the virulent attacks on these researchers (by colleagues who should have been sympathetic to their efforts, not by fear-mongering media voices or the like) makes clear that the fears of vaccines were in key ways at least as substantial as those of this ongoing, deadly epidemic.

Nearly two decades later, Enders, Salk, and the other researchers, scientists, and physicians about whom I wrote yesterday did develop safe and effective polio vaccines, helping largely eradicate the disease by the early 1960s. But the vaccines themselves weren’t enough to effect that change—it took extensive campaigns to convince the public of the safety and efficacy of those vaccines, campaigns that relied, as this excellent recent Scientific American articletraces, on the support (and very public vaccinations) of celebrities like Elvis Presley. As that article notes, we are of course in the midst of our prominent, public push for vaccinations (about which more in a couple days), so we could learn a lot from the hugely successful (if quite multi-decade and fraught) history of the polio vaccine.

Next VaccineStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Vaccine histories or contexts you’d highlight?

June 22, 2021: Vaccine Studying: John Franklin Enders

[June 26th marks the 300th anniversary of Boston physician Zabdiel Boylston’s first inoculations against the raging smallpox epidemic. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Boylston and other vaccine figures and histories, leading up to Friday’s post on the Covid vaccine!]

On two types of challenging collective histories we can better remember through the story of the “Father of Modern Vaccines” (well, one of them anyway—in researching this post I learned that Maurice Hilleman is known by that nickname as well).

In many ways, John Franklin Enders’ story is profoundly inspiring, and an example of how a life of privilege can still help produce important collective progress. Enders’ father John Ostrom Enders (1869-1958) was the CEO of Hartford National Bank as well as a civic leader and Connecticut State Representative, and upon his death in 1958 would leave his son $19 million; that son, John Franklin Enders (1897-1985), attended Yale University and seemed predetermined for a similarly privileged life. Yet he took a leave of absence from Yale to volunteer for the World War I US Army Air Corps in 1918 (he did finish his college education upon the war’s end), and that moment foreshadowed a life of communal service, both through his groundbreaking work in immunology at Children’s Hospital Boston and (especially) through his pioneering, Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the 20th century development of vaccines, especially the measles vaccine but also in the field more broadly (leading to that aforementioned nickname).

The fact that Enders isn’t better known (at least outside of the medical and scientific communities) is a reflection of one of the challenging histories I want to highlight in this post: our tendency to remember individual “inventors” or pioneers, often those who build on the work of others, rather than the more collective histories that truly constitute innovation and progress. I’ll have more to say about this in tomorrow’s post, but that trend seems clearly to be the case when it comes to the polio vaccine; Jonas Salk was indeed one of the scientists working toward that vaccine, but his work built on that of many others, including a well-established team featuring Enders and his fellow virologists Thomas Huckle Weller and Frederick Chapman Robbins. The trio’s work won them the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, so it’s not as if it and they weren’t acknowledged; but since Salk had publicly announced his successful development of a polio vaccine a year earlier, he became the famous face and name forever (at least to this point) associated with the vaccine.

History is damn complicated, however (that could really be the slogan for this blog), and the other largely forgotten, challenging history I want to highlight puts Enders in a far worse light. In the same year that Enders won that Nobel, he and his colleague Thomas C. Peebles isolated the measles virus in an 11 year old patient, and Enders began working on a vaccine for that highly contagious childhood illness (on which more later in the week as well). Such a vaccine was announced by the New York Times in September 1961, and Enders generously wrote to the paper to downplay his own role and acknowledge the contributions of colleagues. Which is all well and good, but there was another community who contributed to that process: the 1500 mentally disabled New York children on whom Enders and his colleagues performed experimental trials. As that complex hyperlinked newsletter details, at least some of those children, like 1966-1967 Poster Child Kim Fisher, had been affected by measles, making their role in the vaccine’s development symbolically significant to be sure. But it’s still quite difficult to say how much a voice these children had in their own role in these medical experiments, experiments that had no certainty of a positive outcome for them. Just one more layer to the complex histories of the Father of Modern Vaccines.

Next VaccineStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Vaccine histories or contexts you’d highlight?

June 21, 2021: Vaccine Studying: Smallpox

[June 26th marks the 300th anniversary of Boston physician Zabdiel Boylston’s first inoculations against the raging smallpox epidemic. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Boylston and other vaccine figures and histories, leading up to Friday’s post on the Covid vaccine!]

On three figures who deserve to be part of the (complex) story of smallpox inoculations alongside Boylston.

1)      Onesimus: I’ve written before about how the enslaved woman Tituba helps us better remember not just another side to the Salem Witch Trials, but also the consistent presence of enslaved people (especially African Americans, but also Native Americans) throughout colonial New England. Tituba’s experience, like all those affected by the events in Salem, was both horrific and extreme, but it does reflect this larger New England and American community—as does the life and influence of Onesimus, an enslaved African American who was brought to New England in the early 18thcentury, was gifted to Cotton Mather by his Boston congregation around 1706 (and given the name Onesimus by Mather at that time), and through his knowledge of and experiences with inoculation became a vital source of information for the application of that concept by Boylston 15 years later.

2)      Cotton Mather: I’ve also written before about Mather’s contributions to the development of smallpox inoculations, and how it significantly shifts his story from his frustrating role in the Salem Witch Trials. At that point I don’t believe I knew the story of Onesimus, however, which is partly a reflection of my own need to continue learning, but also a reminder that even in their more inspiring stories white men tend to dominate our narratives of history in ways that need challenging and changing. Moreover, while it seems that Onesimus offered his knowledge freely to Mather (and in so doing changed the course of history), it’s nonetheless important to note that Puritan minister Cotton Mather, one of early America’s most influential religious thinkers and leaders, was also a slaveowner. That’s all part of the smallpox story too.

3)      John Boylston: When local physician Zabdiel Boylston learned from Mather of the concept and possibilities of inoculation, he decided to try the process out, producing a great deal of controversy among his fellow Bostonians, to the point where he had to hide out in a secret space in his house for some time to avoid threats. While Boylston thus took a significant risk in experimenting with inoculation, the far greater risk still was undertaken by the three people he initially inoculated with a small dose of smallpox. Two of them, to continue the thread of my prior paragraphs, were unnamed enslaved men who deserve a central place in the story alongside Onesimus. The third was Boylston’s 12 year old son John, who while far from enslaved likewise likely had little choice in the matter. Given the fatal threat posed by smallpox, I understand why Zabdiel sought to inoculate his son, who seemingly survived and lived into adulthood; but the least we can do is commemorate young John Boylston as part of this complex smallpox story.

Next VaccineStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Vaccine histories or contexts you’d highlight?

June 19-20, 2021: American Whistleblowers: Alexander Vindman

[June 13thmarks the 50thanniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a controversial moment made possible by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Ellsberg and other whistleblowers, leading up to this weekend post on one of the true heroes of the Trump era.]

To pay tribute to this recent, profoundly inspiring whistleblower, here are the opening few paragraphs of my new book on American patriotism:

“On November 19th, 2019, Army Lt. Colonel and National Security Council (NSC) official Alexander Vindman testified before the House of Representa­tives’ impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Vindman, who had first-hand knowledge of the telephone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, offered testimony that was highly damaging to the president, and so Trump’s defenders and allies went on the attack against Vindman. They did so in large part by using his story as a Ukrainian American immigrant to directly impugn his patriotism and implicitly accuse him of treason: after Fox News host Laura Ingraham highlighted Vindman’s background in relation­ship to his work as a Ukraine expert for the NSC, law professor and former Bush administration official John Yoo replied, “I find that astounding, and some people might call that espionage”; and the next morning CNN contribu­tor and former Republican Congressman Sean Duffy went further, claiming, “I don’t know that he’s concerned about American policy, but his main mis­sion was to make sure that the Ukraine got those weapons . . . He’s entitled to his opinion. He has an affinity for the Ukraine, he speaks Ukrainian, and he came from the country.” Unstated but clearly present in these responses is the idea that Vindman’s criticism of the president had marked him as unpa­triotic and even un-American, opening up these broader questions about his affinities and allegiances. 

Just over a century earlier, however, former president Teddy Roosevelt be­gan his 1918 Metropolitan magazine article “Lincoln and Free Speech” with these lines: “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country . . . In either event it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth—whether about the President or anyone else.” And in the prepared statement with which he began his testimony, Alexander Vindman expresses his own vision of patriotism clearly. “I have dedicated my entire professional life to the United States of America,” he begins. “As a young man I decided that I wanted to spend my life serving the nation that gave my family refuge from authoritarian oppression, and for the last twenty years it has been an honor to represent and protect this great country.” He contextual­izes his ability to offer such honest public testimony as part of “the privilege of being an American citizen and public servant.” And he ends with his fa­ther, whose “courageous decision” to leave the U.S.S.R. and move his family to the United States had, Vindman argues, “inspired a deep sense of gratitude in my brothers and myself and instilled in us a sense of duty and service.” Addressing his father directly with his closing words, Vindman makes a mov­ing and compelling case for Roosevelt’s point about the essential patriotism of telling the truth: “Dad, my sitting here today . . . is proof that you made the right decision forty years ago to leave the Soviet Union and come here to the United States of America in search of a better life for our family. Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth.”

Unfortunately, Vindman paid a significant price for his truth-telling—after Trump was acquitted by Senate Republicans in February 2020, he had both Vindman and his twin brother Yevgeny (a JAG officer and attorney on the NSC staff) removed from their positions and escorted out of the White House by security. While that action clearly constituted direct payback by Trump against a figure who had criticized him, it was applauded by Trump’s supporters as a necessary step to remove figures who were not sufficiently patriotic to serve in such important national roles. As Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn Tweeted about Vindman, “how patriotic is it to badmouth and ridicule our great nation in front of Russia, America’s greatest enemy?” Although the last phrase of Blackburn’s Tweet jumps out, it is her contrast between “our great nation” on the one hand and “badmouth[ing] and ridicule” on the other that constitutes the core of her attack on Vindman’s patriotism.”

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other whistleblowers you’d highlight?

June 18, 2021: American Whistleblowers: Chelsea Manning

[June 13thmarks the 50thanniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a controversial moment made possible by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Ellsberg and other whistleblowers, leading up to a weekend post on one of the true heroes of the Trump era.]

On the particularly fraught and particularly vital role of wartime whistleblowers.

The whistleblowers about whom I’ve written so far this week fall into two broad categories, categories which I’d say encompass the vast majority of folks who take such actions: whistleblowers who outed governmental secrets (as with Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden) and those who took action against powerful corporations (as with Karen Silkwood and Jeffrey Wigand). There are plenty of similarities between both types (not least because the government and such corporations so often align, not only in those specific cases and industries but in their interests and efforts overall), and also some key differences (including the respective questions of legality and forms of criminal charges that come with each type of whistleblowing). But there’s also a third type, one that somewhat parallels the governmental whistleblowers but brings with it its own distinct questions, not just of legality but of the fraught relationship between patriotism and morality: whistleblowers like Chelsea Manningwho bring to light military, wartime secrets and lies.

Manning was assigned to an Army unit in Iraq as an intelligence analyst when she began leaking classified information in early 2010, both to Wikileaks and to her online acquaintance Adrian Lamo (subsequently found dead under somewhat mysterious circumstances); that information included videos of military actions, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, and Army reports that came to be known as the “Iraq War Logs” and the “Afghan War Diary.” Leaking this sensitive and classified material would likely have been treated as a crime had anyone done it, but because Manning was part of the US military in a war zone at the time, her actions carried yet another layer of weight. That extra level was illustrated by the most serious of the 22 charges leveled against Manning by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command after her May 2010 arrest: aiding the enemy, a charge synonymous to treason and which could thus result in a death sentence. Manning was acquitted on that charge but convicted on the others (10 of which she had already pled guilty to), leading to a 35-year sentence at Leavenworth’s U.S. Disciplinary Barracks (a sentence commuted by President Obama in January 2017, after which Manning was released; she subsequently spent another year in jail, between March 2019 and March 2020, for contempt after refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Julian Assange).

There’s no doubt that leaking classified information during and about a war is its own form of whistleblowing, and one that can’t simply be paralleled to the other forms I’ve discussed; I’m not suggesting that Manning should have been convicted of aiding the enemy (indeed I don’t believe she should have), but the very existence of the question reflects this distinction, as does the fact that her arrest, trial, and imprisonment were at the hands of the military rather than the criminal justice system. But at the same time, those distinctions themselves make precisely clear why figures like Manning play a vital role in our collective histories: because wars lend themselves so easily and fully to ideas of shared and absolute patriotism, of “supporting the troops” and “politics stopping at the water’s edge” and the rest of it, it is that much easier for illegal actions to take place without awareness (much less consequence). What Manning did, in the face of those longstanding and ongoing realities, wasn’t just tremendously brave (although it certainly was); it was a vital embodiment of the necessity of whistleblowing if every aspect of our society, including if not especially our military, is to function with transparency and integrity.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other whistleblowers you’d highlight?

June 17, 2021: American Whistleblowers: Edward Snowden

[June 13thmarks the 50thanniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a controversial moment made possible by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Ellsberg and other whistleblowers, leading up to a weekend post on one of the true heroes of the Trump era.]

On historical parallels that contextualize two contrasting sides to the 21stcentury whistleblower, and how to reconcile the pair.

Not long after CIA and NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden revealed classified documents to a group of journalists in an effort to blow the whistle on illegal and unconstitutional government programs, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Snowden with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. In the excerpts from my new book in that last hyperlinked post, I argue at length for the multiple layers of exclusionary, discriminatory, mythic patriotism that precipitated and are embodied by the Espionage Act and its complement, the Sedition Act of 1918; while many of those elements have been dismantled over the years, others remain fully in force more than 100 years later. Those layers help remind us that “espionage” has always been tied to xenophobic and bigoted visions of particular American communities; while there’s no doubt that Snowden knew the riskshe was taking when he released the documents (as all this week’s whistleblowers did when they took their actions), we need to be very careful to go along with charges under the Espionage Act without a full engagement with the histories surrounding that law.

At the same time, Snowden’s actions after he blew the whistle, and for the more than 8 years since, link him to a distinct historical context: the connections between American spies and Russia. The Russia to which Snowden fled seeking asylum in June 2013 and where he has remained ever since, gaining permanent resident status in October 2020, is not the Cold War Soviet Union with which alleged spies like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg worked, of course. But not only is Vladimir Putin’s Russia just as much of a hostile adversary to the US on the world stage, it’s also one that has repeatedly and prominently taken covert action against the US, including the repeated efforts at election hacking that have taken place during Snowden’s time in Russia. Snowden has claimed that he is not cooperating with Putin’s Russian government and intelligence services, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. But I likewise have no reason to disbelieve that Putin sees Snowden as a potential ally, as someone who is at least similarly opposed to the US government; authoritarian regimes don’t generally grant permanent residency to those they view as dissidents, after all.

It might seem that these two historical contexts can’t comfortably coexist—the first challenges the very idea of “espionage” as it’s been constructed; while the second notes that some Americans have apparently worked as spies on behalf of one of the nation’s most longstanding global foes. I can’t lie, Edward Snowden does indeed seem both to contain and to produce conflicted and contradictory layers. But so does American history, not only overall but also and especially when it comes to nuanced categories like spies—and, at least a good bit of the time, whistleblowers. It’s very important not to conflate those two categories, and I’m not in any way trying to do so here. But in the case of a whistleblower like Snowden from within the intelligence community, and one who subsequently moved to another nation whose intelligence community has been as opposed to the US’s as any over this decade, it’s fair to say that the category of spy is also part of the conversation—which then requires us to grapple with the history of that category and its construction, as well as with however we might or might not apply it to aspects of Snowden’s ongoing story. I don’t have any answers here, but rather complicated and crucial questions that this particular 21st century whistleblower forces us to engage.

Last WhistleblowerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other whistleblowers you’d highlight?

June 16, 2021: American Whistleblowers: Jeffrey Wigand

[June 13thmarks the 50thanniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a controversial moment made possible by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Ellsberg and other whistleblowers, leading up to a weekend post on one of the true heroes of the Trump era.]

On two things Michael Mann’s The Insider gets right about Wigand, and one layer it’s important to add.

Inspired by journalist Marie Brenner’sexcellent 1996 Vanity Fair article “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” Michael Mann’s 1999 film The Insider tells the true story of tobacco company scientist turned whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand(played perfectly by Russell Crowe in the film). One of the things that the film gets very right is (by all accounts—like most of my blog’s subjects, I obviously don’t know the man) Wigand’s genuine “everyman” identity and perspective, which is illustrated potently by his very gradual and in many ways reluctant decision to blow the whistle on tobacco company lies and malfeasance—long before he did so he had left his company (Brown & Williamson), taking a severance package and signing a very restrictive non-disclosure agreement in the process, and was working as a high school science teacher. Unlike Monday’s subject Daniel Ellsberg, who had been something of a lifelong foreign policy crusader, or Tuesday’s subject Karen Silkwood, who was a union organizer and activist before she decided to blow the whistle, Wigand was simply a scientist who got fed up with his work and industry and left it, apparently never intending to do anything more than that.

He ended up doing a great deal more than that because of his evolving relationship with CBS and 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, played by Al Pacino in another element of Wigand’s story that the film gets right. Bergman initially worked with Wigand as a scientist advisor for a different story, but gradually learned of Wigand’s intimate knowledge of secret and scandalous information and helped convince him to blow the whistle on B&W and tobacco companies more generally. Yet as he did so, Bergman had to struggle against CBS executives seeking to squash or neuter the story nearly as much as Wigand did against his former employers, which helps us remember a vital and sometimes overlooked level to whistleblowing: the way in which journalists not only support and complement the whistleblowers, but themselves have to play a similar role both within their industry and in contrast to the hierarchies of power in society more broadly. The journalists do not usually take on the same risks as the whistleblowers, but they are nonetheless interconnected: a duality exemplified by my favorite scene in the film, a phone call between Bergman and Wigand where the former is on a beach (and so in a beautiful spot, if there because he is on a forced “vacation” from his job) and the latter in a hotel room under guard due to threats to his life.

The film ends not too long after that moment, with the two characters more triumphant in their quest to air the full story. That’s not only understandable but inevitable, given the timing of the film’s production and release, but it does mean that there are additional layers to Wigand’s story and life that can now be added into the mix (along with his winning a 1996 Kentucky teacher of the yearaward, which I believe the film does mention in its closing text). To my mind the most important and inspiring such layer is the work he’s done since leaving teaching: founding and running the non-profit organization Smoke-Free Kids Inc., which is dedicated to helping young people avoid tobacco products. Often we think about the negative consequences and aftermaths for whistleblowers, which even when not as extreme as Karen Silkwood’s can indeed be destructive for far too many (including the remaining folks on whom I’ll focus in this series). But another part of the aftermath is their continued work to change both their world and the world as a whole for the better, and no whistleblower more inspiringly exemplifies that ongoing effort than does Jeffrey Wigand.

Next WhistleblowerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other whistleblowers you’d highlight?

June 15, 2021: American Whistleblowers: Karen Silkwood

[June 13thmarks the 50thanniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a controversial moment made possible by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Ellsberg and other whistleblowers, leading up to a weekend post on one of the true heroes of the Trump era.]

On two well-known and important sides to Silkwood’s story of whistleblowing and its consequences, and one that needs more attention.

Thanks in no small measure to Meryl Streep’s Academy Award-nominated performance as Silkwood in Mike Nichols’ 1983 film, some of the key elements of Karen Silkwood’s story are quite familiar, yet remain important for us to remember. Certainly the most famous is her mysterious death in a car crash, almost certainly a murder orchestrated in some form by the powers that be at the Kerr-McGee nuclear fuel fabrication site in Oklahoma against whom she was in the process of blowing the whistle. While we will likely never known for certain who killed Karen Silkwood (a familiar refrain from the period that became the name of a 1981 book on the case), there’s no doubt that her case reveals the genuine danger that whistleblowers face, especially when (as is so often the case) they go up against the nation’s biggest and most powerful corporate interests. Such danger can seem like the realm of conspiracy theorists or political thriller films, but Karen Silkwood reminds us that it’s all too real.

Of course, the danger to Karen Silkwood’s health and life had begun long before her death, and was at the heart of the source of her whistleblowing in the first place: the plutonium contamination to which she and (she alleged, and as has subsequently been confirmed) many of her coworkers at the site had been exposed. While the cause of Silkwood’s accident and death could not be proven, her contamination certainly could be and was, leading to a successful lawsuit by Silkwood’s family against Kerr-McGee (or rather, the company settled out of court for $1.38 million without admitting guilt, but I’d call that successful enough). This prominent and important detail of Silkwood’s story helps us remember that workplace health and safety concerns aren’t just part of the history of labor in the United States (which is often where we locate them, in the 19th century conditions that gave rise to the labor movement)—they have remained central to labor struggles and successes in the 20th century and into the 21stas well.

Speaking of the labor movement, that’s one aspect of Silkwood’s famous story that to my mind has not received enough attention: the role of union organizing and activism in her personal story and that of the site’s workers overall. When Silkwood got a divorce, moved to Oklahoma (from Texas) with her three children, and got a job at the Kerr-McGee site, she almost took part in a strike with the Oil, Chemical, & Atomic Workers Union; shortly thereafter she became the first woman elected to the site’s union bargaining committee and was assigned to investigate health and safety issues. Which is to say, both Silkwood’s contamination and her whistleblowing apparently took place not in her role as a worker (which is how I had always thought of them), but rather in her capacity as a labor representative and leader. As dangerous as work has always been in America, labor activism and leadership are at least as dangerous, and also of course comprise dangers undertaken for the communal benefit of one’s fellow workers (in that job and everywhere). Karen Silkwood braved those dangers for all her colleagues, and her life and death alike reflect that reality as much as any other side of work and whistleblowing.

Next WhistleblowerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other whistleblowers you’d highlight?

June 14, 2021: American Whistleblowers: Daniel Ellsberg

[June 13thmarks the 50thanniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a controversial moment made possible by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Ellsberg and other whistleblowers, leading up to a weekend post on one of the true heroes of the Trump era.]

On three inspiring stages in a lifelong fight for transparency and truth.

1)      The Pentagon Papers: Ellsberg, an economist and analyst who had moved from a position at the RAND Corporation to work with the US Defense Department in the Johnson administration, is best known for his vital role in sharing and disseminating the classified Vietnam War-related documents that collectively became known as the Pentagon Papers, a role that put not only his freedom but also his health and life in jeopardy. As he put it when he surrendered himself to US Attorneys, “I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.” In my new book I call Alexander Vindman’s whistleblowing (on which more later in the week) an embodiment of critical patriotism, and I’m not sure there’s any such action that rises to that exemplary definition better than Ellsberg’s.

2)      21st Century Whistleblowers: Ellsberg’s Vietnam-era whistleblowing was due not only to his sense of the federal government’s missteps and lies, but also to his principled opposition to the Vietnam War itself. That anti-war activism has continued throughout Ellsberg’s life, most notably in his vocal opposition to the Iraq War and the similar governmental lies which precipitated that conflict. And while Ellsberg himself was no longer in a position to blow the whistle on that governmental misconduct, he has become one of the most potent advocates for those figures who have done so in this 21stcentury moment, including Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Manning in particular has suffered extensive penalties, including a great deal of jail time, for both her whistleblowing and her refusal to testify against fellow whistleblowers, and Ellsberg has been one of her most consistent and vocal supporters throughout those struggles.

3)      The Doomsday Machine: Ellsberg has linked those 21st century efforts to a more overarching campaign for transparency and truth, as illustrated by his role in the 2012 founding of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. But he has also continued to embody those goals through his own voice and writing, most notably in his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. In that book Ellsberg partly adds to the histories around the Pentagon Papers, making the case that it was in his role as a nuclear war planner that we began to truly understand the horrors of US military and foreign policy and the need for whistleblowers to make public those secret ideas. But he also notes that while the Cold War may have ended, the threat of nuclear war remains as present as ever, if not indeed more so due to the large and often relatively unsecure nuclear arsenals scattered around the world. Doomsday is a scary and important work, which could describe a great deal of Ellsberg’s contributions to our collective conversations for 50 years now.

Next WhistleblowerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other whistleblowers you’d highlight?

June 12-13, 2021: Crowd-sourced BasketballStudying

[June 6thmarks the NBA’s 75th birthday, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of basketball figures and stories. Leading up to this crowd-sourced weekend post featuring bball contexts shared by fellow BasketballStudiers—add yours in comments or by email, please!]

First, a few of my favorite SportsStudiers:

Lou Moore

Sport in American History

Zach Bigalke

Nathan Kalman-Lamb

And

Responding to Wednesday’s Magic Johnson post, Douglas Sackmantweets, “I remember where I was when I heard the news (in Orange County during grad school). I appreciate your take on how Magic's commercial enterprise and vision challenged ‘Fortress LA.’”

Douglas also follows up Thursday’s GOAT post, writing, “YES! Pretty much how I look at it. We learned a lot about MJ from Last Danceand his life context, and he is a compelling figure, as is his rise to greatness. Still, I find much of the investment in him as GOAT over LeBron (or Kareem!) ties into a toxic masculine model of greatness (which avers he made his teammates better by refusing empathy and modeling indomitability), and they romanticize hating the opponents and seeing the game as battle, while LeBron affirms the humanity of his teammates, opponents, and fellow citizens.”

One of my favorite FSU English Studies alums ever, and an up-and-coming sportswriter in his own right, Kurtis Kendall, argues, “Obviously you were taking a different approach, but if we’re talking goat debate, it comes down to your preference of playstyle between Jordan and LeBron (Kareem is definitely 3rd all-time though). I put Jordan at #1 because I'd want the best scorer all time first and foremost, among other reasons. Also, what people forget is Jordan can do the 8 assists and 8 rebounds like LeBron as well (his 88-89 season), while scoring more and shooting more efficiently. He just decided he was more effective scoring than passing, which, it's hard to argue with the results.”

Both Glenna Matthewsand my FSU colleague Ben Lieberman agree with my choice of Kareem. And the conversation continues at this twitter thread.

Other NBA & basketball thoughts:

Tim McCaffrey writes “When I was a teenager, every year the Lakers seemed to be playing the Celtics in the finals. People used to say that the Celtics were a racist organization, and that the Lakers weren’t (likely because of the race of their star players). I used to get so mad.”

Derek Tang shares, “Grew up watching the Celtic-Showtime Lakers rivalry in full swing, then The Bad Boys, then Jordan's prime. Drifted away from the sport in the 2000s, and still don't follow it anywhere near as closely as I used to. However, my 12-yo son is a huge Luka Doncic fan, and I cannot deny that he makes following the Mavs a whole ton of fun...until they lose in the playoffs and his lack of a strong supporting cast shines through.”

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Other bball stories, histories, or contexts you’d share (in comments or by email)?