Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 151

December 21, 2020: AmericanWishing: Inspiring Figures

[As this godawful year nears its close, we could all use some positivity. So for my annual series of wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves, I wanted to highlight hopeful figures, texts, histories, and stories we should all better remember in the new year. Leading up to a weekend post featuring a more personal hope!]

Six amazing Americans whose stories could inspire us all:

1)      Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker

2)      Yung Wing

3)      Ida B. Wells

4)      Zitkala-Ša

5)      Dolores Huerta

Next wish tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Figures we should better remember?

December 19-20, 2020: Crowd-sourced Fall 2020 Reflections

[This has been without a doubt the most challenging and exhausting semester in my 16 years at FSU and 20 years of college teaching. But I’ve also learned a ton, and for this end of semester series I wanted to reflect on a handful of those lessons. Leading up to this crowd-sourced weekend post of solidarity and support—add your reflections in comments, please!]

First, I’m excited to share this new book, The Insanely Awesome Pandemic Playbook, co-authored by my awesome colleague and friend Katy Covino! Katy writes, “We are truly living in an unprecedented time. Our kids are experiencing different levels of stress and trauma. The book is intended to use humor to help kids think about the issues that they may be dealing with because of the pandemic. In the book, we talk about tech use (and overuse), how to take a break from screens, strategies for focusing on schoolwork, ways of reflecting on feelings of anxiety, a recognition that others are feeling isolated and alone, and, most importantly, suggestions for steps to take to feel better. I think, more than anything else, Dr. Englander and I want to support kids (and their families) in understanding, processing, and addressing the challenges that they are facing in an accessible, kid-friendly way.”

In response to Tuesday’s ungrading post, Shayne Simahk writes, “My school's policies wouldn't allow for a complete ungrading of my classes and assignments (which in itself is an interesting commentary on public education), but I have made some changes to my policies this year that I think I will stick with in post-pandemic times. One is no late work penalties, and the other is no zeroes. For students in a year-long course, a term with several zeroes can mean an average that's hard to ‘come back from.’ If a student shows up regularly and has some sort of presence in class, I turn their zeroes into 40s. A student who would fail with something like a 17 average might still fail, but probably with something like a 50. Or just maybe, that kid can see that it would be possible to eke out a D if they started to put in effort towards the end of the term. The ‘no zero’ is controversial in my school, but I'm already seeing positive results.”

In response to the same post, Greg Spectertweets, “I wasn't in the classroom this semester, but I'll share my perspective on ungrading. Specifically some reasons for doing it. Ungrading fundamentally alters the traditional relationship between instructor and student. Ungrading removes the adversarial relationship that can exist between teacher and student. It balances power, too. Ungrading enables and promotes collaboration. That collaboration mirrors everything else we do in our academic lives. We collaborate when we share drafts with our peers. Why shouldn't that same spirit exist in our teaching relationship with students? It should. Ungrading alters the dynamic between instructor and student. It promotes opportunities for learning from each other. Conversations change. The ‘How do I get an A’ question falls away. It becomes how do I make the thing I am working on better? And the ‘thing’ becomes more than an assignment. It becomes more real. It doesn't exist for a grade. It exists as something to improve and make better. The conversation changes. When it comes to engaging with the intellectual work of students...ungrading changes that, too. I don't grade papers. I don't read them with an adversarial eye. I read them, engaging with them like any other text I encounter in my life. I'm not grading the work. I engage with them critically, like I would any professional peer's work that I read. What can I learn? What can I share to help make the work better? It is still a lot of work, but it moves faster. The work doesn't feel like a chore or burden. Ungrading enables me to actually hear and engage with student work. It takes time, but I don't dread doing my part. The burden of my labor in this case can't compare to sitting down and ‘grading’ work. It takes work to pull off ungrading in the classroom. However, having done it a few times...I don't want to go back to traditional grading ever.” And he adds, “if someone is thinking of ungrading, but they don't think they know enough to pull it off...If they're even thinking about doing ungrading, then the already know enough about it. Know enough to begin implementing it, I mean. There is always more to learn.”

Jeffrey Melnick adds, “Great idea! Here's my class website from last spring when I tried this experiment for the first time--with lots of help from smart people I met on here (Kate Antonova above all!). Now figuring how to adapt for remote in spring!”

In response to Wednesday’s post on reading lengths, Emily Hamilton-Honey shares, “When I've done survey courses in recent years, I have gone with almost all poetry and short stories, and maybe a one-act play. Nothing long, and I try not to assign more than 20 pages per class.” 

Sheryl Bundyadds, “Same. I used to love going to the bookstore as a student to see what novels we’d read. These days, it’s hard to assign them at all bc they won’t be read. Or at least I can’t have more than two, none more than about 200 pages.”

Now onto broader Fall 2020 reflections, on what Josh Eyler calls “one of the most challenging semesters in the history of American higher education.”

writes, “Although it was a challenging fall term, my students ( all freshmen) rose to the challenge. It was a new take on my English 102 class, this fall the class was informed by my participation in an anti-racist pedagogy group for Drexel's English & Philosophy Department. I am proud of my students for discussing difficult subjects (for example, codeswitching, white privilege, culture, language & power...) and for writing informative, sensitive final papers. Attendance was strong and we formed a community.”

shares, “I was thoroughly impressed with the work my students (all freshers in three FYW classes and a good mix from freshers to seniors about to graduate in an Intro to Queer Studies class) did during the semester. They diligently showed up for weekly Zoom meetings; participated regularly in class, on discussion boards, and in essays; and generally did exemplary work under ghastly circumstances. I had students who had lost family-members and friends, who were dealing with crippling mental and physical issues, who were working, who were stuck in difficult living situations--and not a single one of them made excuses or did anything other than apologize when something got in the way of their work. The academic quality and intellectual standards of the classes did not suffer at all. They were, frankly, amazing. (Also, I will throat-punch anyone who says this generation of students are lazy, unmotivated, or entitled, but you might not want to mention that in your post. If you wanna, of course, go ahead.)” [BEN: Since I 1000% agree with Shil, I do wanna!]

Rob Velella writes, “Students are resilient, but Zoom is merciless. Hours upon hours of classes, meetings, and online activities really adds up. At my institution, a feedback forum from students resulted in three conclusions: Students are overwhelmed, students are unmotivated, and students are having a hard time making connections.”

Kelly Stowell shares, “While my classes were small and all virtual, all of my students took part in our virtual production. They wrote all of their own pieces, were happy to be directed, and they did all of their own filming. My Stage Manager was a student, and everything is falling together. They learned while doing, and that's pretty impressive.”

Ian Murray writes, “My semester has been mixed. In my new temporary role as academic support for Nursing at FSU, it has been rewarding to help our nurses stay on track for graduation and to watch them work. They're an impressive and resilient group. On the other hand, I taught an online college class to a group of high school students enrolled as dual-credit. It is too much for them. I feel for high school teachers. I cannot get them to participate or finish assignments. I have tried to encouraged them throughout and now I'm practically begging (okay, I'm begging). About 80% of my class is failing and I'm losing sleep over it. The only bright spots are three young men and women who are among the best students I've ever worked with.”

Natalie Chase writes, “I’ve learned that we can’t expect to have the same teaching practices and expectations when we are all learning to navigate virtual/ semi virtual learning.”

Finally, on a more personal note, Amanda Lynn shares, “I have learned that I have spent a lot of time not putting myself and my health first. I think when you work customer facing you learn to shut off a lot of the ‘me’ emotion and this year has given the ‘me’ back. It has increased my motivation to be happier. I am super grateful for that.” To quote Dickens, may that be that truly said of us, and all of us, this 2020 holiday season more than ever!

Holiday series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Any other Fall 2020 lessons, challenges, reflections you’d add?

December 18, 2020: Fall 2020 Lessons: Contemporary Connections

[This has been without a doubt the most challenging and exhausting semester in my 16 years at FSU and 20 years of college teaching. But I’ve also learned a ton, and for this end of semester series I wanted to reflect on a handful of those lessons. Please share some of yours—and any other Fall 2020 reflections and thoughts—for a crowd-sourced weekend post of solidarity and support!]

On how this semester has accelerated and amplified a gradual evolution in my teaching goals.

Five and a half years ago, I wrote one of my end of semester reflection posts on a striking pedagogical moment: when I connected our final conversation about Richard Wright’s Native Son in Major American Authors of the 20th Century to contemporary issues of mass incarceration, police brutality, and racism, and then took off my sweater to reveal an “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirt underneath. That post offers a starting point for my thoughts here, so I’d ask you to check that one out if you would and then I’ll see you back here.

Welcome back! As I wrote there, that was a watershed moment in my willingness to directly engage with contemporary issues in the classroom, in a way that I hope and believe was related to our readings and conversations, but that I shared much more overtly nonetheless. Over the next few years, I wouldn’t say that I did so particularly consistently, but rather that there were both specific classes (most obviously my Fall 2106 Senior Seminar on Analyzing 21st Century America, but also for example my Honors Lit Seminar on America in the Gilded Age that same semester) and moments in other classes (such as in both of my 19th and 20thCentury African American Lit courses) where I found more occasion to highlight, and have us discuss, contemporary connections, and even contemporary political issues and debates, than I would have in prior years. I continued to try to ground those moments in our class texts and conversations, and also and especially to make clear that, like all of our class discussions, they were more about what students had to say than about whatever my own perspectives and ideas might be. But I did at the same time become more comfortable with the idea of sharing in the course of those discussions my own such perspectives and ideas on these contemporary connections, just as I would with any text and topic in front of us.

As you might expect, this semester presented many such moments, not only in another section of that Honors Lit Seminar, but also in American Lit I and even in First-Year Writing I (where, for example, as part of our unit on analyzing song lyrics as poetry I shared the videos for “This Land,” “Land of the Free,” and “March March”). I did try to ground the majority of those contemporary connections in class texts and conversations, such as linking American Lit I discussions of William Apess’ and Frederick Douglass’ critical patriotism to the need for that perspective in 2020. But, as I talked about as part of my contribution to the Fall 2020 NEASA Colloquium on Teaching American Studies in a Time of Crisis, I also stepped back at various moments to raise, share some of my thoughts on, and most importantly ask for my students’ thoughts on aspects of our contemporary world that were not specifically related to our day’s texts or topics—but that were part of our crucial contexts for those conversations nonetheless. In Fall 2020, I’m no longer willing to pretend that everything we do isn’t part of, influenced by, and contributing to our world—indeed, chief among all the lessons of this fraught and fragile and frustrating and vital semester is how intertwined we always are with that world, in both the most potentially destructive and the most inspiringly positive ways.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Fall 2020 lessons, challenges, reflections you’d share for the weekend post?

December 17, 2020: Fall 2020 Lessons: Doing Away with Deadlines

[This has been without a doubt the most challenging and exhausting semester in my 16 years at FSU and 20 years of college teaching. But I’ve also learned a ton, and for this end of semester series I wanted to reflect on a handful of those lessons. Please share some of yours—and any other Fall 2020 reflections and thoughts—for a crowd-sourced weekend post of solidarity and support!]

On a key policy change I made this fall, the challenges it presents, and why I’m likely to stick with it nonetheless.

As I briefly mentioned in my kindness/policy of care post earlier in the week, one specific policy change I made for all my Fall 2020 classes was to do away with late paper penalties of any kind. I’ve always been very willing to grant extensions for papers and other work (I tell students on the first day of class for every course and semester that my only defining policy is “keep me posted”), but officially at least have in the past had such late paper penalties, effects on a paper’s grade if it comes in late without such an extension. It seemed to me that that policy was an important way to be fair across the board, to make sure for example that students getting work in on time were not disadvantaged in how they did on that work. But this semester, the last thing I wanted was for my classes to add stress or pressure to students’ lives already far too full of those things, so I did away with late paper penalties, meaning that while our papers still had official “due dates,” students could get those papers in to me at any point and they would be counted as on time (whether they were ungraded and for full credit, as was the case for our first papers and as I discussed in the ungrading post a couple days ago; or were graded as were the final pieces of work in my classes).

Clearly students needed this policy change, as reflected with particular clarity in my two sections of First-Year Writing I—I’d estimate that less than half of those 44 students consistently got papers in by the official due date, and maybe another quarter did so within the subsequent week. But that latter data point also reflects one of the key challenges caused by this policy change: many students not only let papers hang over their heads for more than a week after the due date, but seemed to struggle to keep working on the papers at all; I tried as best I could to reach out individually to keep the conversation going, but some students simply did not complete some of our work, and I have to believe the absence of a firm deadline contributed somewhat to that breakdown (and something similar happened in my upper-level literature courses as well, if at slightly less extreme numbers than in Writing). Moreover, while this is a far less significant challenge, the change also meant that starting in about week 3 of the semester, I received and had to grade at least a few papers on literally every day of the semester; usually grading comes in waves, with some particularly busy times, but this semester was the opposite, a steady, constant drip of incoming papers that needed feedback (especially in a class like Writing I where the papers and work build on each other).

So doing away with late paper penalties seems to have had its unintended downsides, for me and especially for students. If I carry this policy change forward, I’ll have to set some sort of second-deadline for each particular paper, so they don’t simply hang over all of our heads indefinitely or accumulate in too difficult and even counter-productive ways. And indeed, despite those downsides, I do plan to carry the policy change forward—definitely into the Spring 2021 semester (which at FSU will be more or less identical to the Fall, at least as currently planned), but quite possibly into future ones once (I fervently hope) we return to more normal pedagogical modes and situations. At the end of the day, everything I’ve done this semester has been to try to help maximize student work and success while recognizing and accommodating all that’s happening in their lives—and while that might mean different things in future semesters, those fundamental goals won’t change. While soft or suggested deadlines can perhaps help with them, hard or strict or punitive ones no longer seem to me like they do—one striking and likely permanent lesson for me from Fall 2020.

Last lesson tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fall 2020 lessons, challenges, reflections you’d share for the weekend post?

December 16, 2020: Fall 2020 Lessons: Quantity (and Brevity) over Quality

[This has been without a doubt the most challenging and exhausting semester in my 16 years at FSU and 20 years of college teaching. But I’ve also learned a ton, and for this end of semester series I wanted to reflect on a handful of those lessons. Please share some of yours—and any other Fall 2020 reflections and thoughts—for a crowd-sourced weekend post of solidarity and support!]

On two tough but unavoidable lessons about my class content, this fall and moving forward.

Almost three years ago, I wrote in one of my Spring 2018 semester preview posts about my decision to replace longer readings with shorter ones in my first online literature survey course (American Literature II, which I’ve taught online a few more times since, alternating with my online Short Story class). I didn’t come to that decision lightly, for lots of reasons including the fact that many of the longer readings on my American Lit II syllabus—especially Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, Silko’s Ceremony, and Lahiri’s The Namesake—are among my favorite American novels and ones that I’m always excited to have the chance to teach. But I believed then and have continued to believe ever since that asking students in an online class to read and respond to novels and other long works is not only impractical, but also and most importantly doesn’t help with their work with either content (students having a chance to connect to and learn from our works) or skills (students practicing the skills of close reading and analysis that are at the heart of every class I teach).

I’ve long since made my peace with that reality of online teaching, but this semester I’ve had to begin doing the same—and then take one additional, significant mental step further to boot—in reflecting on my hybrid classes. Only one of those classes, my Honors Lit Seminar on America in the Gilded Age, had longer readings, the four main texts that were the focal points of our four thematic units (such as Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona for our first unit on the West, for example), and quite simply the Honors students (always among the most dedicated I have the chance to teach) did not have the time or energy to consistently read those longer works. Moreover, I also found a second, related thing to be just as much as the case: in that class, and in every other one this semester as usual with me, we read a few texts per week and students were able to choose on which ones to focus their weekly reading responses; and this semester, pretty much across the board, students likewise only had the bandwidth to focus their attention on those particular works, and seemed generally not able to read (even at a more superficial level) into most of the other texts. Providing a series of shorter readings, then, didn’t just mean setting aside longer texts—it meant offering options from which students would tend to choose and work with particular ones.

Does that mean that I’m going to have to continue emphasizing both quantity and brevity over quality (ie, longer favorite works that I think deserve to be read in full) in future semesters? Or, to put the same question a bit more hopefully, sharing a series of quality shorter texts as options for students to explore, rather than featuring individual quality longer ones? I think it might, and this coming Spring semester will give me a chance to see how I feel about those shifts: not just in a hybrid section of American Literature II (where I’ll be using the all-shorter-text syllabus from those prior online sections), but also and even more significantly in Major American Authors of the 20th Century (an upper-level lit seminar that has in my prior sections always been organized around central longer readings, from Sister Carrie and Native Son to Love Medicine, American Pastoral, and a rotating 21st century novel). Teaching that latter class without those longer readings (after having done so with them across at least five sections over 15 years) is going to be a serious adjustment—but if Fall 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that serious adjustments, in our content and readings as in everything else in our pedagogy, are both necessary and valuable.

Next lesson tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fall 2020 lessons, challenges, reflections you’d share for the weekend post?

December 15, 2020: Fall 2020 Lessons: Ungrading Works

[This has been without a doubt the most challenging and exhausting semester in my 16 years at FSU and 20 years of college teaching. But I’ve also learned a ton, and for this end of semester series I wanted to reflect on a handful of those lessons. Please share some of yours—and any other Fall 2020 reflections and thoughts—for a crowd-sourced weekend post of solidarity and support!]

On two unexpected, but ultimately not surprising, effects of my first work with a new pedagogical approach.

In another of my Fall 2020 semester preview posts, I highlighted my plans to work for the first time with (a partial version of) the pedagogical concept of “ungrading.” Rather than restate my initial perspective, goals, and questions about it, I’ll ask you to check out that post and then come on back.

Welcome back! I believe this mini-ungrading experience went even better than I could have hoped, and the first reason is a direct response to the one concern I expressed in that post: I believe students not only put as much time and focus into the ungraded papers and work as they would have if they were graded, but did so in ways that made them more personal and (it felt to me at least) meaningful than likely would have otherwise been the case. They certainly did and submitted that work on a more flexible timeline and schedule (in response as well to the absence of any late paper penalties that was part of my overarching policy of care I wrote about yesterday, and about which a little more later in the week), but that shift likewise, I would argue, made it more possible for them to make the papers what they wanted them to be, rather than being driven by arbitrary timelines or concerns over my grading focal points.

The other reason why my first ungrading experience felt so successful was perhaps even more unexpected, although again upon further reflection I don’t think it should be surprising. For many years now my main feedback on papers has taken the form of a long typed final comment, one that I either attach to the back of a hard-copy paper or email directly to the students when their papers are submitted electronically (as was the case with all work this semester. Usually that feedback includes a grade, of course; but for my first, ungraded papers in all my classes this semester, I only mentioned what the grade would have been on future work (so they could get a sense of my grading perspective and emphases). And judging by the number of students who responded to and follow up on my feedback emails, far more of them read and thought about my feedback on these ungraded papers than have ever done so with graded work. Which does stand to reason—when a paper is graded, of course that grade becomes the main focus of the feedback, and likely frames any other ways a student looks at that feedback; but in the absence of a grade, they’re freed to look at the feedback on its own terms, and see what stands out to them and what they want to keep thinking about. Given that that’s precisely the reason we give feedback, this was by far the best ungrading effect I could have hoped for.

Next lesson tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fall 2020 lessons, challenges, reflections you’d share for the weekend post?

December 14, 2020: Fall 2020 Lessons: God Damn It, You’ve Got to Be Kind

[This has been without a doubt the most challenging and exhausting semester in my 16 years at FSU and 20 years of college teaching. But I’ve also learned a ton, and for this end of semester series I wanted to reflect on a handful of those lessons. Please share some of yours—and any other Fall 2020 reflections and thoughts—for a crowd-sourced weekend post of solidarity and support!]

On the most fundamental and crucial lesson.

My post title is a famous Kurt Vonnegut quote, so I’ll start by sharing this wonderful Wonkette column from Doktor Zoom, updating Vonnegut’s advice and perspective for life in late 2020. Check that out, then come on back!

Welcome back! I’m gonna try to get a bit further into the pedagogical weeds as the week goes along, because I do feel that I’ve learned some specific things about my teaching during these trying times that might be of use to y’all (and will certainly be helpful for me to think through in this space in any case). But without question, the most clear and crucial thing I learned would have to be a sequel to this semester preview post from back in late August, where I described my new syllabus/policy statement and principle of care. I meant what I said then and there, but I can’t lie, I had no idea just how much that underlying principle would feel essential—not just helpful or meaningful, but absolutely essential—to teaching and work and life over these last few months.

I imagine I’m preaching to the choir here, so I won’t dwell at great length on this lesson. But I will add this: while of course Fall 2020 is a specific circumstance, and I hope (I hope I hope I hope) one that won’t become anything close to a new normal, I’d say this lesson does apply even in more normal/typical circumstances and semesters. Which is to say: I know I have colleagues and friends who would argue that “rigor” is a central goal of our classes and of the college academic experience overall. I’m certainly not averse to offering readings, assignments, conversations that challenge my students and all of us in all sorts of ways. But I believe, now more than ever, that we do provide such intellectual challenges while also (and relatedly) offering social and emotional and communal support, solidarity, sympathy, and, yes, kindness. Because as Fall 2020 has made so potently clear: whatever else we do and try to do and hope to do, god damn it, we’ve got to be kind.

Next lesson tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Fall 2020 lessons, challenges, reflections you’d share for the weekend post?

December 11-13, 2020: Pearl Harbor Histories: Remembering Infamous Days

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

On the complex, challenging, and crucial question of how we remember our infamous days.

Few presidential statements have been proven as accurate by the subsequent decades as Franklin Roosevelt’s description of December 7th, 1941 as “a date which will live in infamy.”  We have a fair number of national memory days of one kind or another, of course, but I can’t think of another that remembers anything that’s anywhere near as explicitly negative and destructive as does National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day (although of course Columbus Day would qualify from the counter-argument side). The only potential equivalent would be September 11th, which doesn’t currently have an official remembrance day but likely will get there—and for that reason, along with many others, it’s worth considering how we remember an event like Pearl Harbor, and what the stakes are.

In the Atlantic essay that I hyperlinked under “likely will get there,” historian and educator Kevin Levin argues that, as the essay’s synopsis puts it, “Over time, our memory of national catastrophes becomes less personal and more nuanced.” But Levin’s comparison for September 11th is to our national memories of the Civil War, and I would argue that there’s an overt and key difference between that horrific event and either 9/11 or Pearl Harbor: everyone involved in the Civil War was an American (whether they wanted to admit it at the time or not), and so after the event it became and has continued for the next 150 years to be important (for better and for worse reasons) for us to find ways to produce more nuanced and less divisive memories of it. Obviously there are American communities of which we could say the same when it comes to Pearl Harbor (ie, the Japanese Internment) and 9/11 (the anti-Muslim backlash), but the fact remains that those infamous events were caused by nations and entities outside of America, and so it’s entirely possible for us to continue to define them through a more explicitly divided, us vs. them frame.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, or at least not absolutely—Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both, in their definitely distinct ways, attacks on the United States by such external forces, and there’s no way we can or should try to remember them outside of such a frame. While I would certainly emphasize remembering those who were lost in the attacks, rather than focusing our attention on the attackers, that shift wouldn’t change the fundamental frame so much as (potentially) produce different emotional responses to it (mourning rather than anger, for example). This 2016 Obama White House statement on National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day illustrates this kind of emphasis and emotion nicely, I’d say. But to come back to Levin’s argument, I would agree with him that more nuance—more understanding of the multiple perspectives and histories contained in an event, and the various and often competing causes and elements that lead up to it, and the equally varied and in many cases still unfolding results—should always be part of our goal for such remembrance as well. That it’s far more difficult to reach for such nuance when it comes to these external attacks (compared to the Civil War) only makes the effort that much more valuable.

Semester recaps series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 10, 2020: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Varsity Victory Volunteers

[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 a post-Pearl Harbor group who embody the best of the war, Hawai’i, and America.

I learned a great deal while researching and writing my last book, We the People: The 500-Year Battle over Who is American. I had a general sense of the exclusionary and inclusive histories I wanted to highlight in each chapter, having talked about most of them in a number of settings over the last couple years; but in the course of working on each chapter I discovered new histories related to those central threads, stories that surprised me yet also and especially exemplified my topics and themes. So it went with Chapter 7: Japanese Internment and Challenges: I knew that I wanted to focus in that chapter on Japanese American World War II soldiers as a central, inclusive challenge to the exclusionary histories and narratives of the internment policy and camps; but it was only when researching those respective World War II communities further that I learned about the amazing, inspiring, foundational story of the Varsity Victory Volunteers (VVV).

There were quite simply too many Japanese Americans in Hawai’i (and they were too integral to the community’s economy and society) for internment camps to be possible. But the island featured its own forms of World War II anti-Japanese discrimination to be sure, and it was out of one such discriminatory moment that the VVV was born. The day of the Pearl Harbor attacks, all of the island’s ROTC students were called up for active duty as the newly constituted Hawaii Territorial Guard (HTG). But when federal officials learned that Japanese American students were among those numbers, they dismissed those students from service, deeming them 4C (“enemy aliens”) and thus ineligible to serve. Frustrated by this treatment, many of the students met with Hung Wai Ching, a Chinese Hawaiian community leader who had become an ally to the group. On his advice they drafted a letter to the territory’s military governor, Delos Emmons, which read in part: “We joined the Guard voluntarily with the hope that this was one way to serve our country in her time of need. Needless to say, we were deeply disappointed when we were told that our services in the Guard were no longer needed. Hawaii is our home; the United States, our country. We know but one loyalty and that is to the Stars and Stripes. We wish to do our part as loyal Americans in every way possible and we hereby offer ourselves for whatever service you may see fit to use us.”

Emmons accepted the VVV’s offer, and in February 1942 they were constituted as a labor battalion (attached to the 34th Combat Engineers) and assigned to Schofield Barracks. Over the next year they would contribute both their labor and their presence to the community there, becoming such an integral part of its operations and society that when Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy visited in December 1942 (escorted by none other than Hung Wai Ching), he was struck by the VVV in particular. Not at all coincidentally, in January 1943 the War Department reversed its policy and allowed Japanese Americans to serve in the armed forces; the VVV requested permission to disband so they could volunteer, and nearly all of the VVV members ended up in the 442ndRegimental Combat Team, the all-Japanese unit that would become the most decorated in American military history. I knew about the 442ndbefore I wrote the chapter and book, but I had never heard of the VVV—and I know of few stories that exemplify the best of American military, social, and cultural history more fully than does this post-Pearl Harbor, volunteer Japanese American student community.

Special post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 9, 2020: 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?