Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 168

June 4, 2020: Mass MediaStudying: The March of Time and Newsreels

[On June 1st, 1980, the Cable News Network (CNN) aired its first broadcast. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy cable news and four other significant evolutions in American mass media, leading up to a special post on one of the best scholarly studies of media and the Revolution!]On an iconic film series that helps us analyze an under-remembered, hugely influential media genre.Like any good AmericanStudier (and American historical fiction fan), my strongest association with the film medium known as the newsreel is John Dos Passos’ literary creation of newsreels as one of the key structural sections in his U.S.A. (1938) trilogy of historical novels. Well, some good AmericanStudiers might highlight instead the fictional newsreel about Charles Foster Kane that helps provide exposition in Orson Welles’ groundbreaking film Citizen Kane (1941). In truth, by the time both of those cultural representations were created, newsreels had been around for decades (the medium was invented by French filmmaker Charles Pathéin 1911) and had provided video footage for much of world history over that time. Indeed, it’s my understanding that a great deal of the most familiar video footage from the 1910s through at least the 1930s (such as the famous video of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster) was produced for newsreel films and series. It’s fair to say that you can’t tell the story of mass media in the early 20thcentury without including newsreels in a prominent place—but also that (at least in my experience) newsreels don’t tend to receive the attention that radio and early feature films do in our collective memories of the period. (As I was drafting this post, I learned about a newly published scholarly book, Joseph Clark’s News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle, that will hopefully help change that trend.)One of the longest-running and most influential newsreels was The March of Time (1935-1951). March was originally created in 1931 as a radio news documentary and dramatization series to complement Time magazine; for more on that radio program, which ran through 1945, see Cynthia Meyers’ award-winning 2018 American Journalism article. On February 1st, 1935, a film version of March debuted in 500 theaters across the country, narrated (as were the radio broadcasts) by iconic broadcaster every month for the next 16 years saw the release of a new short film in the series. The March films were up to twice as long (each was either 20 or 30 minutes in length) as standard newsreels, so perhaps it is more accurate to call them short films; but while there is certainly value in delineating different sub-genres within a particular form, I’d say that the difference is roughly synonymous to that of a novella vs. a novel. Both the latter are works of fiction, with a difference mainly of length (and without much distinction when it comes to the reading experience); similarly, shorter vs. longer newsreels seem to me to operate within the same overarching category and with the same main purposes and effects. And since March was one of the longest-running newsreels, linking it to that category (as the Academy Awards did in 1937, giving March an honorary Oscar “for its significance to motion pictures and for having revolutionized one of the most important branches of the industry—the newsreel”) can help us better remember and analyze the form overall.March covered at least 3-4 (and often 5-6) distinct topics in each short film, as illustrated by the episode guide compiled on its Wikipedia page. But one element that seems to have cut across most of those segments and episodes is an editorial perspective, a specific, clearly expressed point of view on the subject at hand (rather than an attempt at objectivity, complex and fraught as that concept always is). One of the most famous such perspectives was featured in the first segment of the series’ second film, which debuted on March 8th, 1935; that segment focused on Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, and used the term “fascism” to describe (accurately, but controversially in 1935) him and his regime. What that segment reveals is (it seems to me) a broader truth about the genre: that newsreels like the March series are not simply primary sources to help us recover stories and histories (although each of them is unquestionably a treasure trove of such materials); they also can help us understand how history unfolded, how events were influenced and shaped by the voices and narratives that engaged (and in at least some ways constructed) them. Obviously the March of Time was not responsible for Hitler and Nazi Germany; but its depiction helps us think about how different media responded to those forces, how audiences engaged those stories, and thus gives us a chance to better understand the world in which Hitler and Germany (and so many other 1930s and 40s events) took place.  Last mass media post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other mass media moments or movements you’d highlight?

June 3, 2020: Mass MediaStudying: Frederic Remington and Wartime Journalism

[On June 1st, 1980, the Cable News Network (CNN) aired its first broadcast. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy cable news and four other significant evolutions in American mass media, leading up to a special post on one of the best scholarly studies of media and the Revolution!]On what happens when the pen and the sword work together.
For obvious reasons, folks in my profession are big fans of the cliché that the pen is mightier than the sword. Or, more exactly, of the reading of that phrase in which the pen and the sword are opposed, and thus the narrative in which words and writing can, in one way or another, triumph over or at least outlast weapons and war. None of us are naïve enough to think that the pen can win in a direct confrontation, but in this reading of the phrase, the words and writing are the slower but steadier and ultimately stronger influences, the ones that can revise and reshape and remake histories and stories (even those of war at its worst). I don’t disagree with that perspective—I wouldn’t do what I do if I didn’t put that kind of faith in the power of words—but there’s another possible reading of the phrase, one that is much less attractive for us fans of the pen: in this reading, the pen and the sword are both trying to achieve the same objectives, are both weapons of war, and the phrase simply suggests that the pen is ultimately a more powerful such weapon.
One of the best and most troubling proofs for that reading comes from the late 1890s and the build-up to the Spanish American War. I’ve written frequently here about the US’s imperialistic endeavors that partly coincided with and definitely expanded as a result of this war, especially the bloody and tragic mess in the Philippines; but the Spanish American War itself likewise was, if not particularly bloody (from an American perspective, anyway), almost certainly tragically unnecessary. Although the war represented in many ways the culmination of decades-long trends on multiple levels—from Cuba’s efforts for independence from Spain to those aforementioned growing American imperialistic goals—its most proximate cause was the February 1898 sinking of the U.S.S. Maine, a warship that had been sent to Havana to monitor ongoing social unrest there. At the time, the narratives of that incident, as advanced for example in the hugely popular newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer (both vocal advocates of imperialistic expansion and thus of war with Spain), emphasized the strong likelihood that the ship’s powder magazines had exploded due to an external attack (from the Spanish forces, was the constant implication), and the subsequent “Remember the Maine” battle-cry greatly pushed public opinion in support of the war. (Later investigations, which will never be much more than speculative, have made clear that the explosion could have been internally triggered, and at least that there was no specific evidence for any particular cause.)
The pens of Hearst and Pulitzer and their employees thus certainly helped make the war palatable and so perhaps possible. The most troubling such pen was that of a man who had long since used it to make an iron-clad reputation as one of the most talented and nuanced artists and illustrators of his era: Frederic Remington. Remington had been producing his drawings and paintings of the West and the frontier for almost fifteen years by this time; those works did partly contribute to the origins and extensions of a Wild West mythos, but in his renderings of Native American subjects (for example) Remington displayed a cultural awareness and sensitivity that far exceeded many of his Wild West mythmaking peers (such as Buffalo Bill). But in early 1897 Remington was sent to Cuba by his friend and sometime employer Hearst to witness and capture Spanish abuses and atrocities there; Hearst’s famous instruction to him, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war” may well be apocryphal (as per that hyperlinked article), but there’s no question that Remington’s assignment was to illustrate the sensationalist coverage of the situation and help push the US closer to war, and Remington did not leave Cuba until he had what he believed was sufficient material to illustrate those stories. That he would, a year later, portray Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders during their over-glorified charge up Cuba’s San Juan Hill, the event that cemented both the narratives of the US’s war effort and Roosevelt’s national reputation, only highlights how much Remington’s pen became in these years a direct corollary to the sword.The Spanish-American War might well have happened even if Remington—or any of these journalists—had never raised a pen; history is rarely if ever reducible to single influences or causes. But on the other hand, it’s difficult to overstate the importance of public opinion when it comes to the US’s war policies in this era—it was less than two decades later, after all, that Woodrow Wilson would win reelection on the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war.” And while the war’s influences and trajectory will, like what happened to the Maine, remain open to historical interpretation and analysis, there is no disputing that in this case, many of our most prominent pens were drafted into combat. Next mass media post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other mass media moments or movements you’d highlight?

June 2, 2020: Mass MediaStudying: William Leggett and Early Republic Journalism

[On June 1st, 1980, the Cable News Network (CNN) aired its first broadcast. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy cable news and four other significant evolutions in American mass media, leading up to a special post on one of the best scholarly studies of media and the Revolution!]On four New York-based periodicals through which the early 19thcentury author (about whom I first learned in Gore Vidal’s Burr) helps illustrate an evolving era in American media.1)      The Critic: After stints at Georgetown College and in the U.S. Navy (out of which he was court martialed for dueling!), Leggett (1801-1839) returned to his hometown of New York to try his hand at journalism. He worked as a theater critic for the New York Mirror and an editor for the very short-lived Merchants’ Telegraph , and then in 1828 started his own literary journal, the Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature, Fine Arts, and the Drama . Critic was also short-lived, as Leggett was only able to publish it through June 1829. But it, like all of these early-career ventures of Leggett’s, reflects the active and exciting nature of New York and American media and publication in this 1820s moment, a community and era in which established titans like Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant worked alongside young writers like Leggett, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lydia Maria Child. 2)      The New York Evening Post: It was Bryantwho helped Leggett move into the next, more stable stage of his journalistic career. In the late 1820s Bryant was editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post , a newspaper that had been founded as a broadsheet by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 and that by this period was one of the nation’s preeminent daily papers. Bryant invited Leggett to write for the Post in 1829, and over the next few years Leggett contributed a number of literary reviews and political editorials; he became so closely linked to the paper that when Bryant traveled to Europe through much of 1834 and 1835, he made Leggett the editor in his absence. Compared to the other periodicals I’ll highlight here, the Post has endured as thoroughly as any American periodical (indeed, it describes itself as the nation’s longest-running paper), and it also reflects the way in which, in Early Republic America, virtually every prominent creative author (and writer of any kind, including political ones like Leggett) was closely linked to one or more periodicals. 3)      The Plaindealer and The Examiner: Leggett’s outspoken political opinions on Jacksonian America, as well as his generally antagonistic nature (remember that court martial for dueling!), eventually got him and the paper in sufficient trouble that in 1836 Bryant returned from Europe and removed Leggett as editor (and from the Post’s roster entirely). Over the next two years Leggett founded two more periodicals of his own, the Plaindealer in 1836 and the Examiner in 1837; both were intended to offer him space to share his voice and perspective freely, but both struggled to find an audience and folded within a few months. The resulting poverty didn’t help Leggett’s longstanding health problems (he had suffered from yellow fever while in the navy), and in 1839, just 38 years old, he died. While these failed papers likewise reflect the activity and variety of Early Republic periodicals, they also illustrate the era’s limits, perhaps especially for writers with strong, controversial perspectives like that of William Leggett. Next mass media post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other mass media moments or movements you’d highlight?

June 1, 2020: Mass MediaStudying: CNN and Cable News

[On June 1st, 1980, the Cable News Network (CNN) aired its first broadcast. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy cable news and four other significant evolutions in American mass media, leading up to a special post on one of the best scholarly studies of media and the Revolution!]On how CNN’s turning point reflects both what 24-hour cable news can offer and one of the medium’s central flaws.CNN launched at 5pm Eastern Time on June 1st, 1980, but it was just over a decade later that the 24-hour cable news network truly became a dominant force in news media and global society. On January 16th, 1991, Bernard Shaw (who had been CNN’s first news anchor in June 1980 and remained one of its most prominent figures in 1991) announced live on air, from Baghdad’s al-Rashid Hotel, the moment when U.S. and coalition forces began the bombings that would launch the First Gulf War. As Shaw narrated that momentous occasion, “This is Bernie Shaw. Something is happening outside. ... Peter Arnett [a reporter also stationed at the hotel], join me here. Let's describe to our viewers what we're seeing... The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated. ... We're seeing bright flashes going off all over the sky.” Although the network was not able to broadcast pictures of those earliest moments of the war, the live audio reports from Shaw, Arnett, and their colleagues were carried by TV networks around the world, resulting in a ground-breaking audience of more than a billion global viewers over the course of CNN’s Gulf War coverage.Of course this was not the first war where media coverage played a significant role—Walter Cronkite’s nightly broadcasts and shifting perspective during the Vietnam War have often been credited with changing both public opinion and the U.S. government’s own choices, after all. But those broadcasts (like most TV news prior to the cable era) had entered viewer’s homes and consciousnesses once a day, making them parallel to daily newspapers and other traditional forms of news and media. In contrast, CNN’s most significant innovation was that it reported and covered the news 24 hours a day; and while that innovation had been present since June 1980, it was with the Gulf War that its possibilities and effects truly began to be visible. No longer did American (or global) audiences have to wait for a daily newspaper delivery of a 5pm broadcast to learn what was happening in this unfolding war; now any time they wanted they could turn on their televisions and get a sense of those events from reporters who were on the ground in the center of the affected region. The internet (on which more later in the week) is often seen as a game-changer when it comes to global immediacy and interconnectedness, but cable news was pushing us in that direction a couple decades earlier.That same ground-breaking 24-hour availability and immediacy, however, has to my mind proven to be one of cable news’ most significant flaws. Perhaps during the Gulf War and related extreme historical moments there is enough news to fill all that time (although even then my guess is that there wasn’t), but at most other moments it seems to me that there is something like a total hour or two of truly meaningful news to be broken and analyzed in a given day. Partly that has meant that the cable news networks spend a lot of time talking about and around the same topics, as well as creating (often troubling) original content like MSNBC’s fondness for prison shows. But I believe that the need for 24 hours of “news” has also led to the news networks turning every.single.minor.moment into “breaking news” or the like, which has increasingly dulled our collective sense of actual significance and potential outrage at a time when we desperately need those perspectives for particular stories. Moreover, because that news can’t be “breaking” constantly, this trend has contributed greatly to our 24-hour news cycle culture, making it even harder to sustain attention and outrage for those stories which genuinely deserve it. Everything all the time can, sometimes, be nothing at all, a contradictory but crucial lesson of CNN and its cable news heirs. Next mass media post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other mass media moments or movements you’d highlight?

May 30-31, 2020: May 2020 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]May 4: American Epidemics: The 1918-20 Influenza Pandemic: My first direct engagement with COVID-19 starts with lessons from the most parallel historical pandemic. May 5: American Epidemics: Yellow Fever: The series continues with the epidemic that almost changed the course of American history, and why it didn’t.May 6: American Epidemics: Xenophobic Fears: The long history of associating disease with immigrant communities, as the series rolls on. May 7: American Epidemics: Typhoid Mary: An iconic, complex, and somewhat misunderstood figure, and her symbolic American contexts. May 8: American Epidemics: The Measles: The series concludes with three telling stages to a frustratingly persistent disease. May 9-10: American Epidemics: COVID-19: A special post, on two very different sides to life in a pandemic and the crucial, fraught questions that remain. May 11: Spring 2020 Tributes: Lisa Gim and My English Studies Department: A very different semester recap series kicks off with a tribute to my department chair and colleagues. May 12: Spring 2020 Tributes: Librarians: The tributes continue with the inspiring and vital work being done by librarians, at FSU and everywhere.May 13: Spring 2020 Tributes: Kisha Tracy and Collective Efforts: A colleague who truly models how much we’re all in this together, as the tributes roll on. May 14: Spring 2020 Tributes: Aruna Krishnamurthy and Unions: My colleague and friend who embodies how much we all need unions and solidarity, in times like these as in every moment.May 15: Spring 2020 Tributes: Social Media Communities: The series concludes with the communities and conversations that kept me going during this locked down spring. May 16-17: Spring 2020 Reflections: One more Spring semester recap, three takeaways of mine from the most unprecedented teaching experience of my career. May 18: LibraryStudying: The Library Company of Philadelphia: A series for the NYPL’s anniversary starts with a groundbreaking, democratizing American library. May 19: LibraryStudying: The Boston Public Library: The series continues with three distinct but interconnected influences on the BPL’s development. May 20: LibraryStudying: Childhood Libraries: Standout moments from my own childhood experiences and seeing them echoed and extended by my sons, as the series reads on. May 21: LibraryStudying: Little Free Libraries: Why it’s hard to criticize a recent bibliographic trend, and one way I would do so nonetheless. May 22: LibraryStudying: Working at Libraries: The series concludes with three moments where libraries and archives have contributed greatly to my writing and career. May 23-24: LibraryStudying: The NYPL: For its anniversary, how three historic New Yorkers contributed to the NYPL’s evolution. May 25: Remembering Memorial Day: A Memorial Day series kicks off with my annual post on remembering the holiday’s Decoration Day origins. May 26: Decoration Day Histories: Frederick Douglass: The series continues with a fiery 1871 speech that expressed the worst and best of Decoration Day.May 27: Decoration Day Histories: Roger Pryor: The invitation and speech that mark two frustrating shifts in American attitudes, as the series speaks on. May 28: Decoration Day Histories: “Rodman the Keeper”: An under-appreciated literary work that helps us remember how the holiday remained constant for certain Americans. May 29: Decoration Day Histories: So What?: The series concludes with three reasons to remember Decoration Day alongside Memorial Day. Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

May 29, 2020: Decoration Day Histories: So What?

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]On three ways to argue for remembering Decoration Day as well as Memorial Day.If someone (like, I dunno, an imaginary voice in my head to prompt this post…) were to ask me why we should better remember the histories I’ve traced in this week’s posts—were, that is, to respond with the “So what?” of today’s title—my first answer would be simple: because they happened. There are many things about history of which we can’t be sure, nuances or details that will always remain uncertain or in dispute. But there are many others that are in fact quite clear, and we just don’t remember them clearly: and the origins and initial meanings of Decoration Day are just such clear historical facts. Indeed, so clear were those Decoration Day starting points that most Southern states chose not to recognize the holiday at all in its early years. I can’t quite imagine a good-faith argument for not better remembering clear historical facts (especially when they’re as relevant as the origins of a holiday are on that holiday!), and I certainly don’t have any interest in engaging with such an argument.But there are also other, broader arguments for better remembering these histories. For one thing, the changes in the meanings and commemorations of Decoration Day, and then the gradual shift to Memorial Day, offer a potent illustration of the longstanding role and power of white supremacist perspectives (not necessarily in the most discriminatory or violent senses of the concept, but rather as captured by that Nation editorial’s point about the negro “disappearing from the field of national politics”) in shaping our national narratives, histories, and collective memories. In my adult learning class this past semester I argued for what I called a more inclusive vs. a more exclusive version of American history, one that overtly pushes back on those kinds of narrow, exclusionary, white supremacist historical narratives in favor of a broader and (to my mind) far more accurate sense of all the American communities that have contributed to and been part of our identity and story. Remembering Decoration Day as well as Memorial Day would represent precisely such an inclusive rather than more exclusive version of American history.There’s also another way to think about and frame that argument. Throughout the last few years, conservatives have argued that the new Common Core and AP US History standards portray and teach a “negative” vision of American history, rather than the celebratory one for which these commentators argue instead. As those hyperlinked articles suggest, these arguments are at best oversimplified, at worst blatantly inaccurate. But it is fair to say that better remembering painful histories such as those of slavery, segregation, and lynching can be a difficult process, especially if we seek to make them more central to our collective national memories. So the more we can find inspiring moments and histories, voices and perspectives, that connect both to those painful histories and to more ideal visions of American identity and community, the more likely it is (I believe) that we will remember them. And I know of few American histories more inspiring than that of Decoration Day: its origins and purposes, its advocates like Frederick Douglass, and its strongest enduring meaning for the African American community—and, I would argue, for all of us.May recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

May 28, 2020: Decoration Day Histories: “Rodman the Keeper”

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]On the text that helps us remember a community for whom Decoration Day’s meanings didn’t shift.In Monday’s post, I highlighted a brief but important scene in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short story “Rodman the Keeper” (1880). John Rodman, Woolson’s protagonist, is a (Union) Civil War veteran who has taken a job overseeing a Union cemetery in the South; and in this brief but important scene, he observes a group of African Americans (likely former slaves) commemorate Decoration Day by leaving tributes to those fallen Union soldiers. Woolson’s narrator describes the event in evocative but somewhat patronizing terms: “They knew dimly that the men who lay beneath those mounds had done something wonderful for them and for their children; and so they came bringing their blossoms, with little intelligence but with much love.” But she gives the last word in this striking scene to one of the celebrants himself: “we’s kep’ de day now two years, sah, befo’ you came, sah, an we’s teachin’ de chil’en to keep it, sah.”“Rodman” is set sometime during Reconstruction—perhaps in 1870 specifically, since the first Decoration Day was celebrated in 1868 and the community has been keeping the day for two years—and, as I noted in yesterday’s post, by the 1876 end of that historical period the meaning of Decoration Day on the national level had begun to shift dramatically. But as historian David Blight has frequently noted, such as in the piece hyperlinked in my intro section above and as quoted in this article on Blight’s magisterial book Race and Reunion (2002), the holiday always had a different meaning for African Americans than for other American communities, and that meaning continued to resonate for that community through those broader national shifts. Indeed, it’s possible to argue that as the national meaning shifted away from the kinds of remembrance for which Frederick Douglass argued in his 1871 speech, it became that much more necessary and vital for African Americans to practice that form of critical commemoration (one, to correct Woolson’s well-intended but patronizing description, that included just as much intelligence as love).In an April 1877 editorial reflecting on the end of Reconstruction, the Nation magazine predicted happily that one effect of that shift would be that “the negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.” Besides representing one of the lowest points in that periodical’s long history, the editorial quite clearly illustrates why the post-Reconstruction national meaning of Decoration Day seems to have won out over the African American one (a shift that culminated, it could be argued, in the change of name to Memorial Day, which began being used as an alternative as early as 1882): because prominent, often white supremacist national voices wanted it to be so. Which is to say, it wasn’t inevitable that the shift would occur or the new meaning would win out—and while we can’t change what happened in our history, we nonetheless can (as I’ll argue at greater length tomorrow) push back and remember the original and, for the African American community, ongoing meaning of Decoration Day.Last Decoration Day history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

May 27, 2020: Decoration Day Histories: Roger Pryor

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]On the invitation and speech that mark two shifts in American attitudes.In May 1876, New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music invited Confederate veteran, lawyer, and Democratic politician Roger A. Pryor to deliver its annual Decoration Day address. As Pryor noted in his remarks, the invitation was most definitely an “overture of reconciliation,” one that I would pair with the choice (earlier that same month) of Confederate veteran and poet Sidney Lanier to write and deliver the opening Cantata at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Indeed, reunion and reconciliation were very much the themes of 1876, threads that culminated in the contested presidential election and the end of Federal Reconstruction that immediately followed it (and perhaps, although historians have different perspectives on this point, stemmed from that election’s controversial results). In any case, this was a year in which the overtures of reconciliation were consistently heard, and we could locate Pryor’s address among the rest.Yet the remarks that Pryor delivered in his Decoration Day speech could not be accurately described as reconciliatory—unless we shift the meaning to “trying to reconcile his Northern audiences with his Confederate perspective on the war, its causes and effects, and both regions.” Pryor was still waiting, he argued, for “an impartial history” to be told, one that more accurately depicted both “the cause of secession” and Civil War and the subsequent, “dismal period” of Reconstruction. While he could not by any measure be categorized as impartial, he nonetheless attempted to offer his own version of those histories and issues throughout the speech—one designed explicitly, I would argue, to convert his Northern audience to that version of both past and present. Indeed, as I argue at length in my first book, narratives of reunion and reconciliation were quickly supplanted in this period by ones of conversion, attempts—much of the time, as Reconstruction lawyer and novelist Albion Tourgée noted in an 1888 article, very successful attempts at that—to convert the North and the nation as a whole to this pro-Southern standpoint.In my book’s analysis I argued for a chronological shift: that reunion/reconciliation was a first national stage in this period, and conversion a second. But Pryor’s Decoration Day speech reflects how the two attitudes could go hand-in-hand: the Northern invitation to Pryor could reflect, as he noted, that attitude of reunion on the part of Northern leaders; and Pryor’s remarks and their effects (which we cannot know for certain in this individual case, but which were, as Tourgée noted, quite clear in the nation as a whole) could both comprise and contribute to the attitudes of conversion to the Southern perspective. And in any case, it’s important to add that both reconciliation and conversion differ dramatically from the original purpose of Decoration Day, as delineated so bluntly and powerfully by Frederick Douglass in his 1871 speech: remembrance, of the Northern soldiers who died in the war and of the cause for which they did so. By 1876, it seems clear, that purpose was shifting, toward a combination of amnesia and propaganda, of forgetting the war’s realities and remembering a propagandistic version of them created by voices like Pryor’s.Next Decoration Day history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

May 26, 2020: Decoration Day Histories: Frederick Douglass

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]On one of the great American speeches, and why it’d be so important to add to our collective memories.In a long-ago guest post on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic blog, Civil War historian Andy Hall highlighted Frederick Douglass’s amazing 1871 Decoration Day speech (full text available at that first hyperlink). Delivered at Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery, then as now the single largest resting place of U.S. soldiers, Douglass’s short but incredibly (if not surprisingly) eloquent and pointed speech has to be ranked as one of the most impressive in American history. I’m going to end this first paragraph here so you can read the speech in full (again, it’s at the first hyperlink above), and I’ll see you in a few.Welcome back! If I were to close-read Douglass’s speech, I could find choices worth extended attention in every paragraph and every line. But I agree with Hall’s final point, that the start of Douglass’s concluding paragraph—“But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause. We must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic”—is particularly noteworthy and striking. Granted, this was not yet the era that would come to be dominated by narratives of reunion and reconciliation between the regions, and then by ones of conversation to the Southern perspective (on all of which, see tomorrow’s post); an era in which Douglass’s ideas would be no less true, nor in which (I believe) he would have hesitated to share them, but in which a Decoration Day organizing committee might well have chosen not to invite a speaker who would articulate such a clear and convincing take on the causes and meanings of the Civil War. Yet even in 1871, to put that position so bluntly and powerfully at such an occasion would have been impressive for even a white speaker, much less an African American one.If we were to better remember Douglass’s Decoration Day speech, that would be one overt and important effect: to push back on so many of the narratives of the Civil War that have developed in the subsequent century and a half. One of the most frequent such narratives is that there was bravery and sacrifice on both sides, as if to produce a leveling effect on our perspective on the war—but as Douglass notes in the paragraph before that conclusion, recognizing individual bravery in combat is not at all the same as remembering a war: “The essence and significance of our devotions here today are not to be found in the fact that the men whose remains fill these graves were brave in battle.” I believe Douglass here can be connected to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and its own concluding notion of honoring the dead through completing “the unfinished work”: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.” That work and task remained unfinished and great long after the Civil War’s end, after all—and indeed remain so to this day in many ways. Just another reason to better remember Frederick Douglass’s Decoration Day speech.Next Decoration Day history tomorrow,BenIPS. What do you think?

May 25, 2020: Remembering Memorial Day

[Before a series on Decoration Day, the holiday that preceded and evolved into Memorial Day, a special post on shifting our collective memories of the holiday’s histories.]
On what we don’t remember about Memorial Day, and why we should.
In a long-ago post on the Statue of Liberty, I made a case for remembering, and engaging much more fully, with what the Statue was originally intended, by its French abolitionist creator, to symbolize: the legacy of slavery and abolitionism in both America and France, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the memories of what he had done to advance that cause, and so on. I tried there, hopefully with some success, to leave ample room for what the Statue has come to mean, both for America as a whole and, more significantly still, for generation upon generation of immigrant arrivals to the nation. I think those meanings, especially when tied to Emma Lazarus’ poem and its radically democratic and inclusive vision of our national identity, are beautiful and important in their own right. But how much more profound and meaningful, if certainly more complicated, would they be if they were linked to our nation’s own troubled but also inspiring histories of slavery and abolitionism, of sectional strife and Civil War, of racial divisions and those who have worked for centuries to transcend and bridge them?
I would say almost exactly the same thing when it comes to the history of Memorial Day. For the last century or so, at least since the end of World War I, the holiday has meant something broadly national and communal, an opportunity to remember and celebrate those Americans who have given their lives as members of our armed forces. While I certainly feel that some of the narratives associated with that idea are as simplifying and mythologizing and meaningless as many others I’ve analyzed here—“they died for our freedom” chief among them; the world would be a vastly different, and almost certainly less free, place had the Axis powers won World War II (for example), but I have yet to hear any convincing case that the world would be even the slightest bit worse off were it not for the quarter of a million American troops who lives were wasted in the Vietnam War (for another)—those narratives are much more about politics and propaganda, and don’t change at all the absolutely real and tragic and profound meaning of service and loss for those who have done so and all those who know and love them. One of the most pitch-perfect statements of my position on such losses can be found in a song by (surprisingly) Bruce Springsteen; his “Gypsy Biker,” from Magic (2007), certainly includes a strident critique of the Bush Administration and Iraq War, as seen in lines like “To those who threw you away / You ain’t nothing but gone,” but mostly reflects a brother’s and family’s range of emotions and responses to the death of a young soldier in that war.
Yet as with the Statue, Memorial Day’s original meanings and narratives are significantly different from, and would add a great deal of complexity and power to, these contemporary images. The holiday was first known as Decoration Day, and was (at least per the thorough histories of it by scholars like David Blight) originated in 1865 by a group of freed slaves in Charleston, South Carolina; the slaves visited a cemetery for Union soldiers on May 1st of that year and decorated their graves, a quiet but very sincere tribute to what those soldiers have given and what it had meant to the lives of these freedmen and –women. The holiday quickly spread to many other communities, and just as quickly came to focus more on the less potentially divisive, or at least less complex as reminders of slavery and division and the ongoing controversies of Reconstruction and so on, perspectives of former soldiers—first fellow Union ones, but by the 1870s veterans from both sides. Yet former slaves continued to honor the holiday in their own way, as evidenced by a powerful scene from Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Rodman the Keeper” (1880), in which the protagonist observes a group of ex-slaves leaving their decorations on the graves of the Union dead at the cemetery where he works. On the one hand, these ex-slave memorials are parallel to the family memories that now dominate Memorial Day, and serve as a beautiful reminder that the American family extends to blood relations of very different and perhaps even more genuine kinds. But on the other hand, the ex-slave memorials represent far more complex and in many ways (I believe) significant American stories and perspectives than a simple familial memory; these acts were a continuing acknowledgment both of some of our darkest moments and of the ways in which we had, at great but necessary cost, defeated them.Again, I’m not trying to suggest that any current aspects or celebrations of Memorial Day are anything other than genuine and powerful; having heard some eloquent words about what my Granddad’s experiences with his fellow soldiers had meant to him (he even commandeered an abandoned bunker and hand-wrote a history of the Company after the war!), I share those perspectives. But as with the Statue and with so many of our national histories, what we’ve forgotten is just as genuine and powerful, and a lot more telling about who we’ve been and thus who and where we are. The more we can remember those histories too, the more complex and meaningful our holidays, our celebrations, our memories, and our futures will be. Next Decoration Day post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?