Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 158

September 25, 2020: Legends of the Fall: “American Pie”

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, for a crowd-sourced post sure to be as popular as pumpkin spice (if such a thing is possible)!]On the straightforward and subtler sides to a beloved ballad about individual and cultural losses of innocence.Like I imagine many teenage boys in the four decades since its release, I memorized the lyrics to Don McLean’s “American Pie” (1971) during my high school years. Partly that had to do with one very particular moment in the song, and just how much every teenage boy can associate with watching that certain someone dance with a certain someone else in the gym and “know[ing] that you’re in love with him”—and how much we thus all felt at times like “a lonely teenage bronckin’ buck.” But partly it seems to me that McLean’s song captures and allegorizes a more general part of teenage life, the life and death significance that we place on music, relationships, friendships, social status, all those potentially fleeting things we care about and worry about and love and hate with such force.As this piece on McLean’s official website indicates, McLean intended the song as a tribute both to his own turbulent teenage years and to the even more turbulent American moment with which they coincided—a moment that began (for McLean and in the song) with the February 1959 death of Buddy Holly (among other popular artists) in a plane crash and would conclude a decade or so later with American society and culture in one of our most fractured states. His song thus became an anthem for two seemingly unrelated but often conjoined narratives: “The Day the Music Died,” the story of one of the most tragic days in American cultural history; and the decade-long loss of innocence that is often associated with the 1960s and all the decade’s tragedies and fissions. These aspects of McLean’s song are contained in every section: the February 1959-set introduction, the increasingly allegorical verses, and the far more straightforward chorus.But there’s another, and to my mind far more ambiguous, side to that chorus and to McLean’s song. The question, to boil it down, is this: why do the chorus and song focus so fully on Buddy Holly, rather than (for example) on his fallen peer Ritchie Valens? Holly is generally cited as far more influential in rock and roll history, but at the time of the crash he had only been prominent for a year and a half (since his first single, “That’ll be the Day” [1957]); Valens, while five years younger, was on a very similar trajectory, having recorded his first few hits in the year before the crash. Moreover, while Holly’s sound paralleled that of contemporaries such as Bill Haley, Valens’ Latino American additions distinguished him from his rock and roll peers. So it’s difficult not to think that an Anglo-centric vision of America has something to do with McLean’s association of “Miss American Pie” and “good old boys” with Holly rather than Valens—an association that, aided no doubt by McLean’s song (if complicated a bit by the hit film La Bamba [1987]), American narratives too often continue to make.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: images of fall, or The Fall, that you’d share for the weekend post?

September 24, 2020: Legends of the Fall: Presumed Innocent

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, for a crowd-sourced post sure to be as popular as pumpkin spice (if such a thing is possible)!]On the multiple layers of revelations built into the best mystery fiction (major SPOILER ALERT for those who haven’t read Scott Turow’s novel or seen the Harrison Ford film, and might at some point).I’ve blogged frequently enough about mystery fiction (and films) to illustrate just how seriously I take the genre as art well worth our analytical time. There are lots of reasons why, but a prominent one would have to be just how much the genre, by its very nature, can teach us about society. That is, the detective’s job, or at least a necessary corollary to his or her job, is to learn about the world around him or her, whether specific (as in Agatha Christie’s town of St. Mary Mead or Ross MacDonald’s California) or broad (as in the mysteries of human nature with which Sherlock Holmes seems so frequently to grapple). And while it’s not impossible for those deductive revelations to include inspiring lessons (about love or courage in the face of threats, for example), the genre’s nature likewise means that most of the time the lessons entail literal falls from innocence, recognitions of the guilt not only in those who commit crimes but (much of the time) in the world as a whole.I know of few mystery novels that better exemplify those multi-layered, sobering revelations about the world than Scott Turow’s legal thriller Presumed Innocent (1987). Turow’s first-person narrator, prosecutor Rusty Sabich, stands accused of killing the woman with whom he was having an extra-marital affair; the evidence against Rusty is overwhelming, and although he is eventually acquitted, the cause is simply another level of guilt: Rusty and his lawyer discover that the case’s judge has been taking bribes, and use the information as leverage to force an acquittal. Moreover, virtually every other character in the novel is guilty of something significant as well; the cop who first investigates the case, for example, is a longtime friend of Rusty’s and illegally disposes of evidence in an (unsuccessful) attempt to shield Rusty from suspicion. Rusty’s story and world are so choked with guilt, so driven by it from start to finish, in fact, that the title begins to feel less like a legal concept and more like a sardonic social commentary.Moreover (double SPOILER ALERT for this paragraph!), the novel’s final revelation adds two intimate and even more compelling falls from innocence to the mix. In the closing pages, Rusty discovers evidence that makes clear that the murderer was his wife, who had uncovered the affair, confronted and killed the mistress, and then tried to frame Rusty for the crime instead (going so far as to plant his semen at the scene of the crime). Even on its own terms, this fall from innocence, connected as it is to the woman with whom he has spent his life and has a family, is the novel’s most shocking and damning. But Rusty chooses not to turn his wife in, and the reason is his recognition of the story’s fundamental layer of guilt, its original sin, the fall from innocence that started it all: his affair. Which is to say, the book’s ultimate revelation is that its first-person narrator, its voice and perspective, and (as in almost any first-person book) its most intimate connection to its audience, is the most guilty party of all.Last fall tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

September 23, 2020: Legends of the Fall: The Body and Stand by Me

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, for a crowd-sourced post sure to be as popular as pumpkin spice (if such a thing is possible)!]On the novella that’s explicitly about the “fall from innocence,” and the film adaptation that’s less so.In 1982, frustrated by his inability to publish works that weren’t part of the horror genre in which he had risen to fame, Steven King decided to release four such novellas as one collection, Different Seasons , with each novella linked to one of the four seasons. The most famous, thanks to its cult classic film adaptation, is almost certainly the collection’s first piece, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (seasonal subtitle: Hope Springs Eternal). But nearly as well-known, thanks in large measure to its own popular film adaptation Stand by Me (1986), is the collection’s third piece, The Body (seasonal subtitle: Fall from Innocence). (The collection’s summer novella, Apt Pupil: Summer of Corruption , has also been made into a recent film, and is, in its portrayal of a teenage boy corrupted by a former Nazi war criminal, a candidate for both this week’s series and last weeks on Nazis in America.)On the surface, The Body and Stand by Me are almost identical: in each forty-something novelist Gordie Lachance narrates the story of a teenage adventure with his three best friends, a trip that the four boys take after hearing about a dead body out in the woods near their hometown. Moreover, each ends with (among other things) Gordie informing the audience that his best best friend, Chris Chambers, worked his way out of a poor and violent upbringing to reach college and law school, only to die in a random and tragic stabbing, a detail that certainly symbolizes the loss of childhood innocence as the protagonists move into the often brutal and cold adult world. Yet the change in title from the novella to the film illustrates a broader thematic shift: Rob Reiner’s movie is far more centrally concerned with the camaraderie and joys of teenage friendship (its last line is “I never had any friends like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”, which appears in the middle of King’s book and is thus emphasized far more in the film); while King’s novella depicts the world’s brutalities much more consistently, including a savage beating that all four boys receive at the hands of an older brother and his friends.Which is to say, at the risk of oversimplifying the two works, Reiner’s film is ultimately pretty nostalgic about the world of childhood, while King’s novella complicates and to my mind ultimately rejects that kind of nostalgia. Concurrently, the two could be read as depicting the loss of innocence in very different ways: Reiner’s film portraying it as a moment of genuine shift, from one kind of life and world to another; and King’s as more of a realization about the darkness of the world we have always inhabited, even as young people. I think there’s a place in our narratives and images for both stories, and that they complement each other nicely; but I also think that King’s story is a bit truer to the world of young adulthood, which while certainly free of various adult responsibilities and pressures can still be (as the Knowles and Cormier books from Monday’s post illustrate) as fraught and perilous as the darkest realities of adult life.Next fall tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

September 22, 2020: Legends of the Fall: American Pastoral

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, for a crowd-sourced post sure to be as popular as pumpkin spice (if such a thing is possible)!]On a novel with over-the-top moments that practically scream “loss of innocence,” and the quieter scene that much more potently captures it.To follow up the main idea from yesterday’s post, I experienced a very different kind of teenage literary loss of innocence when I decided to read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) for pleasure in early high school (what can I say, I was a nerd and the son of an English professor to boot). I can still quite distinctly remember arriving at Chapter 2, “Whacking Off,” and encountering for the first time just exactly how far Roth is willing to go—how obscene, how graphic, how flagrantly over-the-top. For reasons not quite known to me, in my second semester at Fitchburg State I chose to put Portnoy on the syllabus of a junior-level seminar on “Major American Authors of the 20thCentury,” and got to see 25 undergrads—24 women, by chance—having their own such encounters with Roth, the novel, and that chapter in particular. Let’s just say that it wasn’t just me.Roth’s late masterpiece American Pastoral (1997) is a far more realistic and restrained work than Portnoy, but nonetheless Roth includes a couple of distinctly Roth-ian over-the-top scenes, both symbolizing quite overtly his novel’s overall themes of the loss of innocence that accompanied the late 60s and early 70s in American culture and society. In the first, the novel’s now middle-aged protagonist, Swede Levov, meets with a seemingly innocent young women to try to learn the whereabouts of his missing daughter Merry; the woman turns out instead to be a brazen and cynical 60s radical, and she meets the Swede naked, graphically exposing and probing herself in front of him (while daring him to, in essence, rape her). In the second, the tour-de-force set piece with which Roth concludes the novel, a family dinner full of shocking revelations and betrayals is set against the backdrop of the televised Watergate hearings, and culminates with a crazy drunken woman stabbing an elderly man in the head with her fork.These scenes are as surprising and shocking as intended, and I suppose in that way they make Roth’s point. But if he intends the theme of the loss of innocence to be tragic as well as disturbing and comic (which those two scenes are, respectively), then I would point a far quieter and to my mind far more potent scene. In it, the Swede finally finds Merry and sees her again, for the only time between her teenage disappearance (after she bombs a local post office in political protest and kills an innocent bystander) and his own later death. He asks a few questions, but mostly what he does is listen (to her stories of all the horrors she has experienced in the years since the bombing) and observe (her literally fading life as a converted Jainist, one for whom any contact with the world is destructive and so self-deprivation and -starvation comprises the only meaningful future). As a parent, I can imagine nothing more shattering hearing and seeing such things from one of my children—and in the Swede’s quiet horror and sadness, Roth captures a far more powerful and chilling loss of innocence.Next fall tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

September 21, 2020: Legends of the Fall: Young Adult Lit

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, for a crowd-sourced post sure to be as popular as pumpkin spice (if such a thing is possible)!]On two iconic YA novels that fractured my innocence right alongside that of their characters.The early teenage years—those of late middle school into the beginning of high school—seem to resonate particularly well with the idea of a loss of innocence. I’m sure that kids who grow up in far more difficult situations than I did, or who have to deal with loss at a young age, or otherwise are confronted with the world’s darker realities experience the shift from innocence to experience, naiveté to maturity, earlier. But even those of us who make it through childhood unscathed are going to come up against the harsher sides to life at some point, and ages 12-15 seems like a pretty common such milestone. I say that partly as a kid who was badly hazed by his cross country teammates during his freshman year of high school—but also partly the one who read John Knowles’ A Separate Peace (1959) and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974) and Beyond the Chocolate War (1985) in 8th grade.I’d be lying if I said I remember much at all of the three books—that’s about 25 years, and a whole lot of books, under the bridge. But what I do remember are a couple of specific and very dark moments, of literal and symbolic falls: the seemingly accidental fall that Knowles’ protagonist Gene purposefully causes his friend Finny to take, a fall that eventually leads to Finny’s death (among other destructive effects); and a profoundly disturbing suicide scene in Cormier’s sequel, one that locates readers in the perspective of a young student leaping to his death after being ostracized and abused for his homosexuality by his peers and even a teacher. Obviously those weren’t the first literary deaths I had encountered—in 6th grade English I read Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None (1939), for crying out loud!—but they might have been the first in which kids my own age were killed, at least in such purposeful and brutal ways (ie, not the accidental drowning in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia [1977], traumatic as that was for this young reader).Perhaps it was that sense of proximity and (in a way) threat to myself that led these particular moments, and the novels in which they occur, to hit me as hard as they did. Perhaps it was that all three books are deeply concerned with what it means to be a teenage boy, in some of the better but (I would argue) mostly some of the worst senses. And perhaps it’s a tribute to their interesting and almost entirely implicit engagement with the wars during which they’re set—Knowles does have his characters engage with World War II at times, and especially toward the end of his novel; I don’t believe Cormier mentions Vietnam at all, certainly not at length, but his titular war certainly gestures in that direction. War, after all, has long been one of the most overt and catastrophic ways in which young men—and their societies—lose their innocence; in my reading of these young adult novels and their effects on me, I was led to feel such effects far more intimately than might otherwise have been the case.Next fall tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

September 19-20, 2020: Nazis in America: Project Paperclip and Hunters

[On September 20, 1945, the first group of Nazi scientists repatriated to the US under Operation Paperclip arrived at a landing point in Boston Harbor. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of histories and stories of American Nazis, leading up to this special post on that fraught anniversary.][NB. Serious SPOILERS for Amazon Prime’s Hunters in this post’s final paragraph!]On a more historical and a more fictional side to a recent TV show’s depiction of Nazis in America.Like all the histories about which I’ve written in this week’s series, the US government’s Project Paperclip program needs a great deal more of a place in our collective memories. The program’s very name reflects the idea that the Nazi pasts of the scientists brought to the United States in the months after the war’s end would be excised from their files, these personal and collective histories elided so that the US could advance its Cold War and (eventually) Space Race goals and deny the Soviet Union the same opportunities. We can debate whether bringing the scientists over and employing them was the right or wrong decision (I’d side with “wrong,” but I understand the other arguments), but to my mind the purposeful erasure of their Nazi histories was unequivocally wrong, and frankly an implicit recognition that there was a shameful side to this program that was always intended to be withheld from the American people. So any means by which we can better remember Paperclip and those fraught decisions and questions is a very good thing indeed.One such means, and I’ll freely admit the one through which I learned most directly about Project Paperclip (I had already written in this space about von Braun, but I don’t think I had known about that overall/official frame for the operation until watching the show earlier this year), is Amazon Prime’s controversial alternate history show Hunters. I understand and largely agree with that hyperlinked article’s critiques of the show’s depiction of the Holocaust, but would say that when it comes to the histories of Paperclip and Nazis in America, Hunters get a couple of seemingly contradictory, equally accurate things impressively right. On the one hand, the show depicts the ways in which the majority of the ex-Nazis disappeared into everyday American life, many of them in Huntsville, Alabama (site of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center). And at the same time, the show recognizes that some ex-Nazis (like von Braun) ended up instead in far more prominent public positions—while the show’s choice to make the first ex-Nazi we meetthe US Secretary of State is as exaggerated as everything else about Hunters, I’d argue that exaggeration (and perhaps especially the fact that his Nazi past has been kept secret) is not all that far from the truth of von Braun’s influence on the US government for decades. The last ex-Nazi we meet in Season 1 of Hunters is also a prominent figure who has been hiding his Nazi past—but in this case, I would argue that in service of a “twist” the show does a significant injustice to its historical subjects. [Again, SPOILERS from here on out.] Throughout the show’s arc, Al Pacino’s Meyer Offerman serves as a mentor and father-figure to Logan Lerman’s Jonah Heidelbaum, bringing Jonah into the team of Nazi hunters who are tracking down these hidden figures and delivering vigilante justice to them. But in the final episode’s final minutes, Jonah learns that Meyer is himself an ex-Nazi, none other than “The Wolf” who terrorized Jonah’s grandparents during their time in a concentration camp. The revelation allows Jonah the chance to make his own final decision about vigilante justice and murder (something he’s been struggling with throughout the show), but it doesn’t quite work within the show’s plot—and much more importantly, to my mind it doesn’t work at all within the show’s historical and cultural themes. After all, this twist literally collapses the distinctions between Nazis and Jews, Holocaust perpetrators and victims/survivors—and that’s an injustice not only to the Holocaust itself, but also to better remembering the histories of those Nazis who found their way to the United States in the decades after committing those horrors. Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

September 18, 2020: Nazis in America: Neo-Nazis and Charlottesville

[On September 20, 1945, the first group of Nazi scientists repatriated to the US under Operation Paperclip arrived at a landing point in Boston Harbor. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of histories and stories of American Nazis, leading up to a special post on that fraught anniversary.]On how to respond to a resurgent neo-Nazi movement.The American neo-Nazi movement has been present for more than half a century—in the same mid-1960s years that Tom Lehrer was releasing “Wernher von Braun,” a dishonorably discharged Navy veteran named George Lincoln Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party (ANP), and the organization has been active in American politics ever since (despite Rockwell’s August 1967 murder by disgruntled former ANP member John Patler). Over those decades it has also spawned competing organizations such as Matthias Koehl’s New Order, a monthly magazine ( The Stormtrooper ), and a briefly active 1970s youth organization (the National Socialist Liberation Front, or NSLF). Reading all the info in those hyperlinked posts (none of which, to be clear, are from the organizations themselves) makes me want to take a shower, but it’s important not to look away from the fact that American Nazis have been a vocal political force (if of course a minority one) for more than 50 years.In August 2017, however, almost exactly 50 years after Rockwell’s murder, neo-Nazis enjoyed their moment of greatest national visibility: the August 11-12 white supremacist “Unite the Right” rallies in my hometown of Charlottesville. The single most famous neo-Nazi participant in those hateful rallies was James Fields, the domestic terrorist who drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing Heather Heyer. But while neo-Nazis might want to disavow Fields’ blatantly illegal action, I’m sure they were much happier with the Friday evening march and rally on the University of Virginia grounds, at which neo-Nazis sporting swastikas and offering Hitler salutes chanted slogans such as “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us!” By emphasizing the presence of neo-Nazis at the rallies, I don’t mean to downplay the many other white supremacist forces there, nor quite frankly the centrality of these communities to mainstream 2010s right-wing American politics (there’s a reason why President Trump argued for “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville). But while white supremacist rhetoric and violence has been a common thread in Charlottesville and American history, the overt embrace of Nazism in this moment felt distinctly new and even more threatening still.So how do we respond to that resurgent neo-Nazi movement (other than by punching Nazis, which I’m fine with but isn’t sufficient by itself as a collective response)? It will come as something less than a surprise to know that a main answer of mine is that we need to better engage with our histories, including those about which I’ve written in this week’s series. But we really do, for lots of reasons but especially this one: despite our understandable desire to define it as something entirely outside of and opposed to our national identity, Nazism is indeed as American as, well, the Ford Mustang. Or, y’know, the moon landing. But so too is fighting Nazis, not just on the battlefields of Europe but in communities and conversations here at home. Which is to say, the original Antifa wasn’t just all those WWII soldiers—it was also, and I would argue especially, someone like Isadore Greenbaum. As always, learning the horrific histories of American Nazism also means learning the inspiring histories of figures like Greenbaum (and the 100K New York protesters with whom he shared that 1939 activism). There are no more important lessons than those for our renewed fight here in 2020. Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

September 17, 2020: Nazis in America: Wernher von Braun

[On September 20, 1945, the first group of Nazi scientists repatriated to the US under Operation Paperclip arrived at a landing point in Boston Harbor. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of histories and stories of American Nazis, leading up to a special post on that fraught anniversary.]On three striking lines from Tom Lehrer’s satirical song about the Nazi-turned-Americanscientist.1)      “Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown/‘Ha, Nazi, Schmazi,’ says Wernher von Braun”: As I’ll discuss at greater length in the weekend post, what was perhaps most striking about Operation Paperclip wasn’t that it brought Nazi scientists to America, but that it did so so quickly and openly. Von Braun, the scientist single-handedly responsible for the V2 rocket that killed a great many Londoners in the final year of the Blitz (among other work he did for Hitler’s Nazi regime), was among those initial arrivals in the United States in late September 1945, less than 5 months after V-E Day. He would go on to be a prominent public spokesperson as well as scientist for NASA and the Space Program, appearing for example on three Walt Disney Man in Space TV shows. Clearly von Braun was able to immediately and consistently laugh away his service to Nazi Germany, and so, it seems was the US government. 2)      “Like the widows and cripples in old London town/Who owe their large pension to Wernher von Braun”: But not all Americans were as willing or able to laugh that history away, as Lehrer’s early 1960s song illustrates. There’s no shortage of contenders for the song’s most biting couplet, but I would have to go with this one, especially as it follows “But some think our attitude/Should be one of gratitude.” Obviously those who have been permanently and fatally affected by von Braun’s rockets would show him no gratitude—and Lehrer here links “us” and “our attitude” to those London casualties. The first line in this verse, “Some have harsh words for this man of renown,” really drives home the point—after all, in 1945 what von Braun was renowned for was designing killing machines, and it was then that the US decided to not just spare him from post-war trials and punishments, but to bring him to America and make him an integral, acclaimed part of our own Cold War efforts. 3)      “Good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun!”: All of this adds a great deal more to Lehrer’s spoken introduction to the song, which asks “what is it” that helped America advanced in both the nuclear and space races. “Well,” Lehrer replies, “it was good old American know how, that’s what, as provided by good old Americans like” von Braun. While of course immigrants to the US are indeed American, von Braun’s immigration took place, again, just a few months after he was employed by and making weapons for the US’s wartime adversary. Yet while on that level Lehrer’s description of him as a “good old American” could be read as ridiculous, I would say that the true satire lies deeper—that our willingness to abandon morality or ethics in pursuit of scientific and Cold War “victories” was and is, indeed, all too defining and foundational of an American trait. Last NaziStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

September 16, 2020: Nazis in America: The Plot Against America

[On September 20, 1945, the first group of Nazi scientists repatriated to the US under Operation Paperclip arrived at a landing point in Boston Harbor. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of histories and stories of American Nazis, leading up to a special post on that fraught anniversary.][NB. As of my drafting of this post, I haven’t had a chance to watch David Simon’s HBO miniseries adaptation of Roth’s novel, so my thoughts here will focus on the book. I hope to get to that soon and will add an update here when I do!]On three telling & compelling layers to Philip Roth’s 2004 alternate historical fiction.One of the consistent pleasures of reading alternate histories(as with historical fiction in general, of course) is seeing how they incorporate actual historical figures into (and refigure them within) their imagined histories. Roth’s novel includes dozens of such figures in both important and minor roles, but three of the most central are ones I’ve featured or referenced in prior posts this week: in Roth’s central premise, Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940 and aligns the US with Nazi Germany; he appoints Henry Ford as his Secretary of the Interior; and one of Lindbergh’s most consistent adversaries in the novel is New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (who in real life pushed back on the 1939 Madison Square Garden Nazi rally, among many other anti-Nazi and pro-Jewish efforts during his tenure as mayor). These historical figures make Roth’s novel a juicier read for any student of American history, but they also reflect a profound understanding of how the actual course of 1930s and 40s American history already intersected with Nazi Germany in many different ways. That is, this may be an alternate history, but it’s a potently realistic one.Roth’s novel does also include Father Coughlin, but in a briefer and more minor role, perhaps because one of Roth’s central fictional characters is a religious leader in his own right: Newark’s Conservative Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, who becomes a prominent Lindbergh supporter and who later marries the narrator Philip’s Aunt Evelyn. As far as I’ve been able to learn, no prominent Jewish American figures or leaders supported movements like the German American Bund or the America First Committee (which I wrote about in Monday and Tuesday’s posts, respectively), which makes sense given their overt and defining antisemitism. But it’s also the case that no one linked to those movements ran for president, nor gained the widespread popular support of a frontrunner for that highest office; both of which are true of Roth’s Lindbergh by the time that Bengelsdorf endorses him. So it certainly seems plausible that a conservative Jewish figure like Bengelsdorf would under those circumstances hitch his wagon to Lindbergh’s star—but it is even more plausible that doing so does not spare Bengelsdorf from the rising tide of Nazism and antisemitism, as he is later arrested when widespread white supremacist riots target Jewish Americans throughout the nation.To my mind the novel’s most compelling characters are its younger generation Jewish Americans, however, a group that includes not only the narrator Philip, but also and most complicatedly his older brother Sandy (among others). Sandy is selected by the Office of American Absorption (OAA) for its “Just Folks” program, which places Jewish boys with Southern and Midwestern families in order to “Americanize” them; Sandy is sent to a farm in Kentucky and returns home highly critical of his family (calling them “ghetto Jews”). This complex and fraught plotline echoes the experiences of young Native Americans sent to the late 19th and early 20thcentury boarding schools, as well as the broader “Americanization” movement of that same period. But it also allows Roth to explore an uncomfortable truth likewise revealed by the Washington’s birthday 1939 New York rally—that American Nazis could, and did, make the case that their beliefs and movement aligned with foundational elements of American identity. One more historical echo of this profoundly, painfully historical (and, yes, frustratingly salient) alternate history novel. Next NaziStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

September 15, 2020: Nazis in America: Ford, Lindbergh, and Coughlin

[On September 20, 1945, the first group of Nazi scientists repatriated to the US under Operation Paperclip arrived at a landing point in Boston Harbor. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of histories and stories of American Nazis, leading up to a special post on that fraught anniversary.]On three famous figures who reflect the breadth and depth of American support for Nazis.1)      Henry Ford: The automobile inventor and entrepreneur wasn’t just an American Nazi supporter—he was apparently an influence on Adolf Hitler himself. Between 1920 and 1927, Ford and his aide Ernest G. Liebold published The Dearborn Independent , a newspaper that they used principally to expound antisemitic views and conspiracy theories; many of Ford’s writings in that paper were published in Germany as a four-volume collection entitled The International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem (1920-1922). Heinrich Himmler wrote in 1924 that Ford was “one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters,” and Hitler went further: in Mein Kampf (1925) he called Ford “a single great man” who “maintains full independence” from America’s Jewish “masters”; and in a 1931 Detroit News interview, Hitler called Ford an “inspiration.” In 1938, Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, one of Nazi Germany’s highest civilian honors. 2)      Charles Lindbergh: As I mentioned in this post on Lindbergh, the aviation pioneer likewise received a Cross of the German Eagle in 1938, this one from German air chief Hermann Goering himself. Over the next two years, Lindbergh’s public opposition to American conflict with Nazi Germany deepened, and despite subsequent attempts to recuperate that opposition as fear over Soviet Russia’s influence, Lindbergh’s views depended entirely on antisemitic conspiracy theories that equaled Ford’s. In a September 1939 nationwide radio address, for example, Lindbergh argued, “We must ask who owns and influences the newspaper, the news picture, and the radio station, ... If our people know the truth, our country is not likely to enter the war.” Seen in this light, Lindbergh’s role as spokesman for the America First Committee makes clear that that organization’s non-interventionist philosophies could not and cannot be separated from the antisemitism and Nazi sympathies of Lindbergh, Ford, and all those who took part in the 1939 Madison Square Garden rally. 3)      Father Coughlin: As the tens of thousands of attendees at that rally illustrate, American Nazism was much more than just a perspective held by elite anti-Semites—it was very much a movement. And like so many problematic social movements, it featured a demagogic voice to help spread its alternative realities—in this case, the Catholic priest turned radio host Charles Edward Coughlin. Like any media figure who worked for many years, Coughlin said different things at different times; after the 1939 rally, for example, he sought to distance himself, arguing in his weekly address, “Nothing can be gained by linking ourselves with any organization which is engaged in agitating racial animosities or propagating racial hatreds.” But by that time, Coughlin had been publicly supporting both Nazi Germany and antisemitic conspiracy theories for years; his weekly magazine, Social Justice , ran for much of 1938 excerpts from the deeply antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion (as that link illustrates, a text that contributed directly to the Holocaust). Both Social Justice and Coughlin’s radio show were hugely popular, illustrating that American Nazism and antisemitism were in the 1930s (as they frustratingly seem to be today) widespread views. Next NaziStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?