Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 155

October 30, 2020: AmericanSpooking: The Wendigo

[This week’s series is, well, obvious. Your thoughts on American scary stories—real or fictional, artistic or historical, fun or horrifying, and anything else you can think of—will as always be anything but frightening. Boo!]On the supernatural legend that also offers cultural and cross-cultural commentaries.I’m not sure what kind of collection it was—whether it was an anthology of folk tales, of scary stories, of cultural myths and legends, of Americana—but I do know that only one story from it impacted this young AmericanStudier enough to stick with me nearly three decades later: an account of a party of hunters in rural Canada encountering the demon known as the Wendigo. I can even remember the way I felt inside when my Dad read the lines about the rising and howling wind, which at least in this version of the tale signaled the imminent arrival of—or perhaps even contained—the creature. Let’s just say that, unlike the boy who left home to find out about the shivers, from then on I knew exactly what that condition felt like, and didn’t need to venture outside of the pages of that very scary story to do so.So I’m here to tell you that the Wendigo is, first and foremost, a deeply effective scary story. But the creature and story, across their many versions, also offer complex and compelling lenses into American cultures, on two distinct and equally meaningful levels. For one thing, apparently Wendigo stories can be found in the belief systems and communal myths of numerous Algonquin-speaking native tribes across both the United States and Canada, including the Ojibwe, the Cree, the Naskapi, and others. While those tribes share a basic language system, they are as culturally and socially distinct as they are geographically widespread—and yet they share closely parallel images and accounts of these cannibalistic demons of the woods. While we have to be careful about how we read such potentially but ambiguously symbolic shared mythic figures—Joseph Campbell-like, sweeping structuralist pronouncements being largely discredited these days—there seems to be no question that the Wendigo represents a part of the collective identity and perspective of these tribes.But as they have evolved, Wendigo stories have also come to represent something else, and perhaps even more telling: tales of the perils of cross-cultural exploration and exploitation. That is, in many of the last century’s Wendigo tales, including both the Blackwood one linked above and the one that I remember from my childhood, those being threatened or destroyed by the creature tend to be non-native hunters, often if not always venturing into native territories, encroaching on previously protected or sacred spaces, or otherwise seeking to make their mark on a land not quite their own. Weird Tales such as Blackwood’s often highlight the dangers posed by an sort of spiritual boundary-crossing, so this particular trend is certainly not unique; but in these cases, I’m arguing, the boundaries being crossed are not only spiritual but also, and perhaps more importantly, cultural. Which is to say, while the Wendigo has always been cannibalistic, the particular identity of those upon whom he feasts has significantly, and symbolically, shifted over time.October Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d highlight?

October 29, 2020: AmericanSpooking: Last House on the Left

[This week’s series is, well, obvious. Your thoughts on American scary stories—real or fictional, artistic or historical, fun or horrifying, and anything else you can think of—will as always be anything but frightening. Boo!]On the horror film that’s more disturbing in what it makes us cheer for than how it makes us scream. The Last House on the Left (1972) was Wes Craven’s directorial debut, as well as one of the only films that he wrote and edited as well as directed (although it was at least partly based on Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring [1960], as Craven has admitted). But despite launching one of the late 20th century’s most significant horror talents, Last House is far less well known than Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street series, or even (I would argue) his other prominent early film, The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Partly that’s because Last House feels extremely raw in execution, the product of a talent still figuring out much of what he could do; but partly it’s because it also feels raw in another and more troubling way, one that makes us more deeply uncomfortable than horror films generally do.That rawness is most obviously comprised by the extended and very graphic abduction, rape, and murder sequence that opens the film—a sequence that feels less like horror than like cinema verité of an extremely disturbing kind. But even more raw, both in its emotional brutality and in the places it takes the audience, is the film’s culminating sequence, in which the killers find themselves in the home of the parents of one of the murdered girls—and the audience finds itself rooting for those parents to take the bloodiest and most violent revenge possible on these psychopaths. I suppose it’s possible to argue that we’re not meant to root in that way, or that we’re meant to feel conflicted about these ordinary and good people turning into vengeful monsters—but to be honest, any audience that has watched the film’s opening seems to me to be primed instead to cheer as the killers get their violent comeuppance, even—perhaps especially—if it requires this transformation of grieving parents into their own terrifying kind of killers.To be clear, if we do find ourselves cheering for the parents, we’re doing so not just because of how Craven’s film has guided us there. We’re also taking the next step in what I called, in this post on the comic book hero The Punisher, the long history of vigilante heroes in American culture; and perhaps at the same time living vicariously the most potent (if extra-legal) arguments for the death penalty. Yet the rawness of Craven’s film, whether intended or simply a result of its stage in his career, serves one additional and crucial symbolic purpose: it reminds us that vigilante justice and executions, however deserved they might feel, are also grotesque and horrifying, as difficult to watch as they are to justify when the heat of the moment has cooled off. Last House is scarier for what it reveals in ourselves than for anything that’s on screen—but what’s on screen can also help us examine that side of ourselves honestly, and that’s a pretty important effect.Last scary story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d highlight?

October 28, 2020: AmericanSpooking: American Horror Stories

[This week’s series is, well, obvious. Your thoughts on American scary stories—real or fictional, artistic or historical, fun or horrifying, and anything else you can think of—will as always be anything but frightening. Boo!]On whether America can have home-grown horror—and where we might find it.Nathaniel Hawthorne once famously complained (in the Preface to The Marble Faun) about “the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong … Romances need ruin to make them grow.” Given what he and his era meant by “the Romance,” it’s possible to paraphrase his point this way: America was, at least in the early 19th century but perhaps remains, too young, too devoid of a distant past and the ancient castles and ruins that come with it, to produce a Gothic literary tradition in the same way as Europe. Even Edgar Allan Poe, the Hawthorne contemporary and American Gothic writer who would seem so clearly to disprove this idea, set his most Gothic stories either abroad or (as in “The Fall of the House of Usher”) in an undefined place that could be anywhere (and feels more European than American to be sure). So it might indeed be fair to ask whether there can be a homegrown American Gothic.It was of course in implied response to such a question that Grant Wood painted American Gothic (1930), one of the most famous and most ambiguous works of American art. Using his sister and the family dentist as his models for the iconic farmer and his wife, Wood created what seemed to be a simple and realistic portrait of two average (and somewhat unhappy and stiff, but not particularly mysterious) people. But then he gave it that title, and the whole thing suddenly became a great deal more complex and challenging. Is the title sarcastic, contrasting the simplicity and even boring-ness with those much more mysterious and compelling qualities Hawthorne had listed? Is it genuine, attempting to draw attention to the horrors that can lurk in quiet farmyards or families? Or is it an ironic combination of the two, recognizing that America does not have the overtly gothic qualities but might in its apparent simplicity and ordinariness possess a subtler and very different but ultimately no less horrifying quality?Your mileage may vary, of course, and Wood’s painting will always remain open to those and many other possible interpretations. But I would argue for the ironic interpretation, not least because it fits with the painting’s own two contrasted yet interconnected levels (what’s on the canvas and what’s in the title). And I would connect it to our contemporary popular culture by noting the echoes of Wood’s title in the recent hit TV show American Horror Story. At least in its first season (the show has changed settings and characters yearly), Storycould be seen as an extended and far more explicit (this was 2012, and they had a full season of episodes to fill) representation of the idea that average American families and homes contain within them great and gothic horrors, that the scariest thing of all might not be a ruined castle full of vengeful ghosts and supernatural terrors, but a sunlit suburban home full of, well, those same things. I’d like to think that Hawthorne would be entirely on that board with that idea.Next spoooooky post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d highlight?

October 27, 2020: AmericanSpooking: Five Frights

[This week’s series is, well, obvious. Your thoughts on American scary stories—real or fictional, artistic or historical, fun or horrifying, and anything else you can think of—will as always be anything but frightening. Boo!]
My nominees for five of the scariest works of or moments in American literature (in chronological order):
1)      Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation (1798): Brown’s novel suffers from some seriously over-wrought prose, and it can be hard to take its narrator seriously as a result; the pseudo-scientific resolution of its central mystery also leaves a good bit to be desired. But since that central mystery involves a husband and father who turns into a murderous psychopath bent on destroying his own idyllic home and family, well, none of those flaws can entirely take away the spookiness.
2)      Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839): Just about any Poe story would fit in this space. But given how fully this story’s scares depend precisely on the idea of what reading and art can do to the human imagination and psyche of their susceptible audiences, it seems like a good choice.
3)      Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948): I don’t think there’s anything scarier, in the world or in the imagination, than what people are capable of doing to each other. And Jackson’s story is probably the most concise and perfect exemplification of that idea in American literary history. I’ve read arguments that connect it to the Holocaust, which makes sense timing-wise; but I’d say the story is purposefully, and terrifyingly, more universal than that.
4)      Ray Bradbury, “The Veldt”(1950; don’t know why the font is so small in that online version, but you can always copy and paste and then enlarge—it’s worth it!): The less I give away about Bradbury’s story, the better. Suffice it to say it’s a pretty good argument for not having kids, or at least for only letting them play with very basic and non-technological toys. Ah well, that ship has sailed for me.
5)      Mark Danielewksi, House of Leaves (2000): As I wrote in yesterday’s post, Danielewksi’s novel is thoroughly post-modern and yet entirely terrifying at the same time. Don’t believe it’s possible? Read the book—but try to keep some lights on, or maybe just read outside, while you do.
Next SpookyStudying tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d highlight?

October 26, 2020: AmericanSpooking: Scary Stories

[This week’s series is, well, obvious. Your thoughts on American scary stories—real or fictional, artistic or historical, fun or horrifying, and anything else you can think of—will as always be anything but frightening. Boo!]On the limitations and the possibilities of scary stories.
I don’t have any problem thinking of genre fiction and scholarly conversations about literature in the same ballpark, or even on the same base—I’m the guy who wrote one of my earliest posts here about Ross MacDonald’s hardboiled detective novels, and am also the guy who created an Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy class and has had an unabashedly good time teaching it five times now. When you get right down to it, it can be pretty difficult to parse out what qualifies as genre fiction and what doesn’t in any case—Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) owes a lot to detective fiction, Twain’s Connecticut Yankee (1889) is in many ways a Jules Verne-esque time travel sci fi novel, and, as critic David Reynolds has convincingly argued, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850) has a great deal in common with contemporary potboiler works of religion, romance, and scandal. So while I’m not averse to making judgment calls about whether a particular text is worth extended attention (in a class, in scholarly work, etc.), I try not to base those calls on whether it’s been put in a particular generic box or not.
And yet, I’ll admit that I have a bit of an analytical prejudice against works whose primary purpose—or one of them at least—is to scare their audiences. I suppose it has always seemed to me that a desire to frighten, while very much a valid and complex formal and stylistic goal—and one brought to the height of perfection I’d say by Edgar Allan Poe, whose every choice and detail in a story like “The Fall of the House of Usher”(1839) contributes to its scariness, making it a perfect example of his theory of the unity of effect—, is nonetheless a desire that requires an audience to turn off their analytical skills, to give in entirely to primal responses that, while not insignificant, are to my mind a bit more passive than ideal. (I’d compare this for example to humor, which certainly does tap into primal responses as well but which nonetheless can still ask an audience to think as well as laugh.) This isn’t necessarily the case when it comes to weird tale kind of scares, ones that connect an audience to deeply unfamiliar worlds and force them to imagine what they might entail and affect; but the more mainstream horror, tales of vampires and zombies and ghosts and the like, does often ask an audience mainly to react in terror to the artist’s and text’s manipulations.
But like any reasonable person who recognizes his or her prejudices, I’d like to challenge and eventually undermine this perspective of mine, and a text that has very much helped me to begin doing so in this case is Mark Danielewski’spostmodern horror novel House of Leaves (2000). Postmodern is a must-use adjective in any description of Danielewski’s novel, which features, among other things, at least three distinct narrations and narrators (one of whom does much of his narrating in footnotes, and another who does the majority of his narrating in footnotes on those footnotes); pages with only a single word, located in a random location; elaborate use of colored type to signal and signify different (if vague and shifting) emphases; and a large number of invented scholarly works, fully and accurately cited both parenthetically and in the aforementioned footnotes (alongside some actual works). Yet—and I know that scariness is a very subjective thing, which is perhaps another reason why I have a hard time analyzing it, but nonetheless—the novel is also deeply, powerfully, successfully scary. And moving, for that matter—certainly to my mind the best horror (and Poe would qualify here for sure) reveals and sympathizes with humanity even as it threatens and destroys many of its human characters, and Danielewski’s novel does each of those things, to each character at each level of story and narration, very fully and impressively. Yet I believe that the book’s principal purpose, first and last, is to scare its readers, and for me, at least, it has done so, not only the first time I read it but the second and third as well (another mark of the best horror I’d say).
So what?, you might ask. Well, for starters, you should check out House of Leaves! But for me, I suppose the ultimate lesson here is that the more I’m open to the potential power and impressiveness of any work of literature (and art in any medium), both emotionally and analytically, the more I can find the greatest works, of our moment and every other one. Nothing scary about that! Next spoooooky post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d highlight?

October 24-25, 2020: The World in 2020

[October 24thmarks the 75th anniversary of the official establishment of the United Nations. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied five histories connected to the UN, leading up to this weekend post on global interconnectedness in October 2020.]On two ways to analyze our 21st century global moment, and what lies beyond both of them.Back in the early days of the Trump era, when I could still write the semi-hopeful phrase “presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump,” I wrote a piece for my (at the time) HuffPostgig in which I used Benjamin Barber’s somewhat dated but still relevant book Jihad vs. McWorld (1995) to analyze the rise of right-wing nationalist movements like Trump & MAGA, Brexit, Marine Le Pen in France, and others. If we parallel those movements to Al Qaeda, ISIS, and right-wing Islamic terrorism, as I tried to in that piece and still would, I think it’s fair to say that a great deal of what has happened around the world in the 21stcentury’s first two decades can be explained by such reactionary nationalist movements. Here in the United States, the Obama-era rallying cry of “I want my country back!”was a direct predecessor to Trump and MAGA, and I think that same phrase defines this vision around the world, whether it’s Brexiteers clinging to an imaginary, endangered Britain or Islamic extremists seeking to expel “the West” from their countries. At the same time, another prominent global trend over these same decades, and especially throughout the 2010s, has been mass, progressive protests, against those reactionary movements but also and especially against longer-standing status quos. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring to the July 2019 protests in Puerto Rico and those that rocked the entire globe in late 2019, these mass uprisings have reflected (often) youthful communities and movements that are part of neither neoliberal corporate globalism nor reactionary nationalism (to use Barber’s two categories). The late spring/summer of 2020 #BlackLivesMatter protests that began with the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis but transformed into something much broader and more widespread, both in the United States (and indeed all fifty of them at once, making them the only protest movement in American history to achieve that milestone) and once again around the world, make clear that this youth-driven global phenomenon is only deepening as we move into the 2020s, and perhaps will dominate this decade as fully as right-wing nationalism did the prior one.Unless climate change and its increasingly overt and destructive effects do. I worry that both the global pandemic (which is undoubtedly connected to climate change) and these opposing global social and political movements have diverted our attention from what has long been and certainly remains the most pressing issue facing the entire world. But on the other hand, what has long been absent is a truly widespread, collective recognition of the reality of climate change and its effects, the kind of shared engagement without which it’s impossible to truly begin considering and implementing the kinds of changes and policies necessary to confront and begin mitigating this crisis. Part of the reason for that absence is precisely the reactionary movements—a desire to return to a mythic past makes it difficult to deal with the present, much less address an onrushing future. So perhaps these global protests and activisms can become part of systemic change, not just when it comes to issues of race and justice (although yes please), but also and entirely relatedly when it comes to the changing planet on which, as my friends Dire Straits put it, we still must “find a way to be/One world in harmony.”Halloween series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

October 23, 2020: UN Histories: Peacekeeping

[October 24thwill mark the 75th anniversary of the official establishment of the United Nations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories connected to the UN, leading up to a weekend post on global interconnectedness in 2020.]What we can learn from both the longest-running and a more recent UN peacekeeping mission.The first two missions on which UN peacekeepers embarked have also proven to be the organization’s longest-running international efforts. In 1948, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO) sent peacekeepers to the Middle East to monitor a ceasefire in Palestine between Israel and the coalition of Arab states that had commenced hostilities against the new nation on the day after the May 14thproclamation of the Israeli state. In 1949, the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) was created and dispatched to the states of Jammu and Kashmir, in an effort to maintain a ceasefire between India and Pakistan over those contested regions. In both of these cases, multiple subsequent outbreaks of hostilities—and the uneasy peaces that exist even when conflicts have not broken out—have required the peacekeeping forces to remain in place; as we near the 70thanniversary of both missions, it’s fair to say that UN peacekeepers now comprise a permanent part of the community in these contested spaces.In April 2014, the UN authorized peacekeepers with the newly created United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA; the UN does love its acronyms) to travel to that African nation, hoping to alleviate some of the human rights crises unfolding in the aftermath of civil conflict and genocide and to help the nation transition back to stability. An African-led effort, the International Support Mission in the Central African Republic (MISCA), had already been in place, but in September that organization formally transferred its authority to the UN peacekeepers, ushering in the UN’s official role in the rebuilding nation. It’s far too early to assess the outcome or success of this latest UN peacekeeping mission, but as of the August 2015 moment in which I wrote this post, the news isn’t good: a Rwandan peacekeeper working for the UN mission has apparently shot and killed four of his colleagues and wounded four others. This act of murder and perhaps terrorism is of course far from unique to the UN or its peacekeepers, but it does reflect an uncomfortable truth about all of the UN’s missions: that they are undertaken by people and groups just as flawed and limited as in any other human endeavors, and yet are consistently asked to perform heroic duties in the world’s worst situations.It’s easy to see that contradiction as the root of, or at least a primary factor in, the inability of the Palestine and Kashmir peacekeeping missions to keep conflicts and hostilities from reoccurring in those contested spaces; the UN peacekeepers might not be responsible for the conflicts in the same way as the local parties, that is, but they’re just as human and so just as unable to prevent the conflicts as are even progressive leaders in those affected nations. A famous, coincidental photograph which made the social media rounds in 2015 expresses with particular clarity that cynical take on the peacekeepering missions and their failures to change the realities on the ground. Yet on the other hand, who’s to say that without the presence of the UN peacekeepers, conflicts in Palestine and Kashmir (both of which include the possibility of nuclear retaliation, let’s note) wouldn’t have intensified far further and more destructively? After all, UN peacekeepers have completed 55 missions over the organization’s 70 years of existence, leaving these affected nations and regions not perfect but unquestionably more stable and healthy than would otherwise have been the case. While we can’t be naïve about the realities, it’s nonetheless worth remembering and celebrating those successes on this anniversary.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

October 22, 2020: UN Histories: Secretary Generals

[October 24thwill mark the 75th anniversary of the official establishment of the United Nations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories connected to the UN, leading up to a weekend post on global interconnectedness in 2020.]What three representative UN leaders tell us about the organization and its histories.1)      Dag Hammarskjöld (1953-1961): Sweden’s Hammarskjöld was not the first elected UN Secretary General (that honor went to Norway’s Trygve Lie), but I would argue he was the first to illustrate the new organization’s international influence. That was particularly illustrated by the controversial 1960-1961 Congo Crisis, in which the precise nature of the UN’s involvement and influence remains under debate by historians. While the UN had not been able to prevent the Korean War (a situation that contributed greatly to Lie’s 1952 resignation), in the Congo the organization wielded its power and authority far more successfully, in the process shaping that nation’s and its continent’s future for many years to come. While we might debate President John F. Kennedy’s statement(after the Secretary General’s tragic death in a 1961 plane crash) that Hammarskjöld was “the greatest statesman of our century,” he unquestionably made the UN into far more of a global player than it had previously been.2)      Javier Pérez de Cuéllar(1982-1991): Each of the subsequent Secretary Generals have extended that legacy, dealing with their own global crises and wielding the organization’s authority and influence in their own ways. Peru’s de Cuéllar was the first Secretary General from the Western Hemisphere, and on that level alone reflects the organization and the world’s evolution into and beyond the 1980s. Moreover, a number of the crises through which de Cuéllar led the UN connected closely to postcolonial settings and issues as well: from mediating Britain and Argentina’s disputes in the aftermath of the 1982 Falklands War and promoting the 1983-4 work of the Contadora Group (a transnational Central American organization working for regional peace) to negotiating Namibia’s 1990 bid for independence from South Africa, among other moments. Such issues had been part of the world for centuries, of course, but they gained much greater visibility in the 1980s, and de Cuéllar’s UN reflected and amplified that presence.3)      Kofi Annan (1997-2006): Like de Cuéllar, Ghana’s Annan was significant in part because of geography: he was the first UN Secretary General from sub-Saharan Africa. But in many of his most prominent actions and initiatives, Annan also helped usher the UN into the new millennium, working to reform and strengthen its management, secretariat and Security Council, and Human Rights Council, among other efforts. It was in part for these necessary and meaningful reforms, and in part for such pioneering initiatives as the UN Global Compact and The Global Fund (for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria) that Annan and the UN were co-recipients of the 2001 (centennial) Nobel Peace Prize. While the UN is far from perfect, as I’ll work to analyze in the next two posts, Annan ensured that it would move into the 21stcentury in evolving and vibrant ways, extending and deepening the legacy of these prior Secretary Generals and of the organization’s global role and impacts.Last UN history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

October 21, 2020: UN Histories: Muir Woods

[October 24thwill mark the 75th anniversary of the official establishment of the United Nations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories connected to the UN, leading up to a weekend post on global interconnectedness in 2020.]On a potent symbolic expression of memory and community.In this post on the histories and meanings of Northern California’s Muir Woods National Monument, I highlighted a unique and striking May 19th, 1945 ceremony. On that spring day representatives from 50 nations, in the midst of the meetings in San Francisco that would produce the United Nations Charter, traveled to the woods to commemorate Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the histories and ideas that had led them and the world to this moment and the new organization it would create. Roosevelt, who had died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage just over a month before the ceremony (on April 12th), had proposed (inspired by his visionary, activist Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes) that the conference as a whole take place at Muir Woods. While that did not end up being the case, the May 19thceremony in the woods represented a clear way for the group to honor Roosevelt’s vision, one cemented by their placing of a commemorative plaque at the site’s sacred Cathedral Grove in tribute to the fallen president and world leader.The plaque and tribute bring into stark focus the contrasts between Roosevelt’s role in the origins of and support for the United Nations and those of Woodrow Wilson for the League of Nations. There were of course numerous factors and histories that contributed to those contrasts, and it’s neither fair nor productive to compare the two presidents and moments (or the two world wars, for that matter) as if they existed in a vacuum or on a level playing field. Yet without using the contrast to judge or blame Wilson, necessarily, it is nonetheless instructive to note Roosevelt’s far more consistent and successful connection to and advocacy for the international organization he had helped found. Indeed, while we might criticize the level of individual influence wielded by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the UN’s origins, there can be little doubt that without those two leading figures, and the ways in which they pushed their fellow Allied leaders to sign and support the 1942 UN Declaration, the idea for the UN might never have survived the subsequent years of war. For those and many other reasons, the May 1945 ceremony and plaque rightly remembered and celebrated Roosevelt’s foundational and vital role in the UN’s development.The Muir Woods ceremony did more than just remember a fallen leader, however. It also captured two distinct but interconnected elements of an ideal global community, both reflected in Harold Ickes’s initial argument for holding the UN conference at the woods: “Not only would this focus attention upon the nation’s interest in preserving these mighty trees for posterity, but in such a ‘temple of peace’ the delegates would gain a perspective and sense of time that could be obtained nowhere better than in such a forest.” The first clause of Ickes’s inspiring sentence highlights the global environmental advocacy toward which the UN would move over the next half-century; such environmentalism was of course not a focus of the organization’s wartime efforts, but could and did become an important ongoing emphasis for such a groundbreaking international entity. And Ickes’s second clause reflects the idea of a long view of global history and community, one that does not focus simply on specific conflicts or issues but also seeks to move beyond them and toward the kind of overarching understanding of humanity and the world on which the survival of both those entities ultimately depends. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” Muir himself argued—an idea expressed nicely by this symbolic and significant 1945 ceremony.Next UN history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

October 20, 2020: UN Histories: World War II

[October 24thwill mark the 75th anniversary of the official establishment of the United Nations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories connected to the UN, leading up to a weekend post on global interconnectedness in 2020.]On why it’s important, and challenging, to remember the UN’s wartime origins.I imagine just about everybody with a sense of history understands that the United Nations was created in the immediate aftermath of, and thus directly due to, World War II. Yet far less well known, I would argue, are the UN’s earlier origin points, the two crucial wartime moments that produced this next international organization. Both followed almost immediately upon the US’s official entrance into the war: in late December 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill worked together to draft a “Declaration by United Nations”; and just a short time later, on New Year’s Day 1942, Roosevelt, Churchill, and the leaders of the USSR and China signed what came to be known as the United Nations Declaration, with representatives from 22 other world leaders adding their signatures in the days that followed. While the organization would not be formally established until the war’s end, it was these wartime moments that set the process in motion.While of course it’s important to remember these histories accurately for their own sake, doing so also helps us differentiate the origins of the United Nations from those of the League of Nations (about which I wrote in yesterday’s post) in two meaningful ways. First, while the League was formed as part of a contentious peace process, and thus seemed to some observers to be punishing particular nations and rewarding others based on the Great War’s enmities and outcomes, the idea for the United Nations originated in the horrors and exigencies of war; indeed, that initial 1942 UN Declaration overtly prohibited signatories from making their own peace and bound these global allies together. Which is to say, while the League’s creation arguably and ironically amplified international divisions and separations, the UN’s Declaration responded to existing such divisions (reflected in an ongoing war) by constructing instead a vision of global unity and shared effort. The new organization’s name itself exemplified that emphasis on global unity, on a mutual recognition of the interdependence that bound together even seemingly opposed nations such as the US and the USSR.At the same time, there was an irony within this wartime origin point for the UN. That is, not only was the new organization not overtly framed (as had been the League) as seeking to achieve to international peace, but in fact a prominent element of the 1942 Declaration was the signatories’ pledge to put forth “maximum war effort.” That may have been an understandable and necessary element in the heat of World War II, but as the UN has transitioned into its full postwar existence and mission, and especially into the emphases on global peacekeeping about which I’ll write more later in the week, the challenge of wedding that mission to the organization’s origins has persisted. To cite one prominent component of that challenge, the five permanent members of the UN’s Security Council (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US) are drawn directly from those nations that signed the 1942 Declaration (along with France, which was occupied at the time but closely tied to the UK in its resistance to the Nazis), and quite purposefully do not include any of the war’s Axis nations (Germany, Italy, Japan). That choice does not necessarily lead to any particular actions or outcomes, but it certainly reflects the complex legacies of the UN’s wartime origins into its ongoing existence and identity, legacies we can better consider if we remember when and why the UN was created.Next UN history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?