Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 17

May 16, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: Student Tributes to Dad

[About halfwaythrough the Spring 2025 semester, . While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment,it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching inrelationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve everknown. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one momentfrom each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

I didteach one other course this semester, an Accelerated Online section of The ShortStory that started after Spring Break. But in lieu of a post focused on thatclass, I wanted to use this last post in the series to highlight a few Blueskythreads where folks—many of them former students—shared tributes to my Dad.

Thisoriginal one: https://bsky.app/profile/americanstudier.bsky.social/post/3ljgoh56ixk2y

Thisfollow-up: https://bsky.app/profile/americanstudier.bsky.social/post/3ljkjgk2xbs2b

and thisone from his former grad student Ryan Cordell: https://bsky.app/profile/ryancordell.org/post/3ljgpguto3224

He wasloved, as much as a teacher and mentor as he was as a husband, father,grandfather, and man.

Previewpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Springsemester reflections you’d share?

May 15, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: Graduate Research Methods

[About halfwaythrough the Spring 2025 semester, . While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment,it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching inrelationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve everknown. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one momentfrom each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

Thissemester featured myfirst-ever section of our Graduate Research Methods course, but I did modelthat new syllabus on two courses I’ve taught a number of times: Introto Literary Theory (another Grad class) and Approachesto English Studies (an undergrad one). Which meant we talked here and thereabout the approach/theory known as psychoanalytical, an approach that definedmy Dad’s early career (his dissertation/firstbook was a psychoanalytical reading of James Fenimore Cooper) and thatcontinued to inform his later interests in topicslike authorship. I’ll admit to being far less of a devotee of this approachthan my Dad, but I’ll also admit that when we returned fully to this class’sconversations after his passing, I made sure to think through when and howpsychoanalytical analysis could help, beyond what I would have been likely todo in another semester. For example, I think Dad’s ideas about the anxieties ofauthorship and audience have a lot to tell us about Langston Hughes, the poeton whom our middle unit in this course focused. I promise to keep an open mindabout this theoretical approach going forward, Dad.

Last reflectiontomorrow,

Ben

PS. Springsemester reflections you’d share?

May 14, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: First-Year Writing II

[About halfwaythrough the Spring 2025 semester, . While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment,it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching inrelationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve everknown. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one momentfrom each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

I’m suremy Dad taught First-Year Writing in his early years at the University ofVirginia, but because of the way that institution and English Department work,overall and in terms of seniority and so on, I believe it had been many manyyears since he had done so (he taught at Uva for 45 years, so I do mean manymany!). As a result, I certainly connect my Literature courses and teaching tohim more fully than I do my Writing sections (which I have at least one of, andoften as this semester two of, every semester). But when I returned to my FYWclassrooms on the Thursday of the week he passed, I had the chance to pay anovert tribute to my Dad and his work: as part of a unit on analyzing multimediatexts we read a MatthewZoller Seitz article on the “Magical Negro” stereotype, and so I got toshare with the students my Dad’s excellentanalysis of “Tomming” as both a precursor to that stereotype and a way toanalyze it in cultural works. And then we watched the Key & Peele sketch “Magical Negro Fight,”because it’s very relevant to that conversation but also because my Dad reallyloved all things Key & Peele. I can’t say exactly which of these momentsfelt most linked to my Dad, because in truth they all were, thoughtfully andhumorously and movingly.

Next reflectiontomorrow,

Ben

PS. Springsemester reflections you’d share?

May 13, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: American Literature II

[About halfwaythrough the Spring 2025 semester, . While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment,it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching inrelationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve everknown. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one momentfrom each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

Continuingthe thread from yesterday’s post, the other class I taught on that Mondaymorning was American Literature II, the second-half American Lit survey. Thatday we were located close in time to Langston Hughes, amidst our Unit on Modernismand the Early 20th Century, and specifically were on day three (of four)with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (we also briefly added in asupplemental text, SherwoodAnderson’s “Hands,” as we often do in a survey course). That discussioncovered a number of turning points in the novel, including the extended flashbackin Chapter VI where Nick Carraway narrates the moment when young James Gatzabandons his prior self and heritage to create the new identity of Jay Gatsby. Andas we talked about it, I couldn’t help remembering one of the (many) argumentsmy Dad and I have had about literature over the decades, in this case aboutwhether Gatz’s parents/heritage are implied to be ethnic (read: non-white) in anyway. My Dad thought no, I thought yes; as usual I don’t know that I shifted hisperspective at all, but as always I know that the debate sharpened my ownreading and analysis. Not sure there’s much in my ideas that he didn’t contributeto one way or another!

Next reflectiontomorrow,

Ben

PS. Springsemester reflections you’d share?

May 12, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: Major American Authors of the 20th Century

[About halfwaythrough the Spring 2025 semester, . While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment,it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching inrelationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve everknown. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one momentfrom each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

We lost myDad on a Sunday morning; on Monday morning, I taught two American Literaturecourses over Google Meet. I hope that doesn’t seem insensitive or unfeeling; Iassure you it was quite the opposite, not least because I was teaching at myDad’s desk in his study, with his books and papers and so much else of hisamazing career and life around me. In Major American we were beginning our secondweek with Langston Hughes, and discussing in particular his stunning book-lengthpoem/collection “Montage of aDream Deferred” (1951). At the heart of that collection, in its literalcenter but also I would argue its philosophical core, is “Themefor English B,” one of Hughes’s most explicitly autobiographical poems anda text focused on an English classroom and assignment. As we talked about “Theme”during that class, and especially as I reflected for a bit on the limits andthe possibilities of teaching and writing alike before we move to another focaltext, I certainly felt like my Dad, a lifelong writer and teacher and criticaloptimist about all things literary, was there in the conversation with us.

Next reflectiontomorrow,

Ben

PS. Springsemester reflections you’d share?

May 10-11, 2025: A Works Progress Administration for the 21st Century

[On May 6th,1935, Franklin Roosevelt established the WorksProgress Administration [WPA]. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied ahandful of WPA histories, leading up to this weekend post on why we need a 21stcentury revival!]

I’m notgonna lie, I planned the main focal points for this series long ago, before thestart of the new Trump administration (another inside baseball blog detail)—andgiven that the new administration’s #1 priority has been cutting federal jobsand programs and departments, it seems beyond silly to even suggest somethinglike a Works Progress Administration in 2025.

But here’sthe thing: I’ve spent a good bit of the last decade-plus of my career arguingthat we can’t cede concepts, ideas, ideals over to the MAGA types. Not patriotism,not America,and, yes, not federalworkers. So there’s no way I’m gonna let Elon Musk, his DOGE lackeys, andthe ostensible President dictate how we think about federal workers andprograms in any way, much less in the worst possible ways that they’ve beenarguing for in both words and actions over the last few months. Not when we’vegot so many models of the best of federal workers and of America through them,with the WPA a whole host of prime examples.

So yes, Ideeply believe we need a new WPA for the 21st century. The fact thatwe most definitely will not get it during this administration only makes memore certain that we need to argue and fight for it, and all such ideas thatrepresent our highest ideals, moving forward.

Semesterreflections series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

May 9, 2025: The Works Progress Administration: Wartime Evolutions

[On May 6th,1935, Franklin Roosevelt established the WorksProgress Administration [WPA]. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy ahandful of WPA histories, leading up to a weekend post on why we need a 21stcentury revival!]

On twodistinct but interconnected ways the WPA evolved in the early war years (beforeRooseveltdiscontinued it in December 1942), and what we can make of the combination.

I hadn’treally thought about it this way until researching this series, but thanks tothe WPA (and other New Deal programs, but especially the WPA) the U.S. was far betterprepared for the transition into a nation at war than otherwise would have beenthe case. As historian Nick Taylor puts it in his book American-Made:The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (2008), “Only the WPA, having employed millionsof relief workers for more than five years, had a comprehensive awareness ofthe skills that would be available in a full-scale national emergency. As thecountry began its preparedness buildup, the WPA was uniquely positioned tobecome a major defense agency.” Long before Pearl Harbor, it did indeed occupy thatposition, with between 600,000 and 700,000 WPA workers transitioning to defenseprojects in the second half of 1940. And after the U.S. formally entered thewar, those efforts only ramped up across the country, as literally illustratedby this photograph of WPA researchers preparing an air raid warning map forNew Orleans on December 11, 1941.

Of course, “defense” came to mean something much more specific and farmore divisive and discriminatory in the days and weeks and months after PearlHarbor, and unfortunately the WPA also occupied a central position and role inthose far different wartime efforts. Indeed, the WPA’s last major project,undertaken throughout its final year of existence, was the construction, maintenance,and staffing of the concentration camps at which Japanese Americans were incarcerated.The infamous Manzanar RelocationCenter in California, for example, was estimated to be “manned just about100% by the WPA.” And Harry Hopkins himself, subject of a good deal of deservedpraise in earlier posts in this series, praisedwartime WPA administrator HowardO. Hunter for the ”building of those camps for the War Department for theJapanese evacuees on the West Coast.” The camps were a federal construction project,and a tragically sizable one at that, so it stands to reason that the WPA wouldundertake this effort—but at the same time, this is another side of the WPA Ihadn’t known about prior to researching this series, and certainly not one Iwas happy to discover.

Obviously I’m not going to be able to boil all this down in any succinctway in this final paragraph, but I’ll say this: I’ve written and talked andthought a great deal in recent years about the worstand best of America (a phrase I found myself using constantly in my recent podcast, for example);and I can’t really imagine a more clear and dramatic representation of that phrasethan the WPA, the same social relief organization that helped save so manyAmericans and the nation as a whole to boot, working on one of the most exclusionaryand horrific projects in America’s collective history. Our history is so messy,and, as Trip from Glory put it so evocatively, “ain’t nobody clean.” I could end every serieson this blog with a version of that sentiment, and maybe I should.

Specialpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

May 8, 2025: The Works Progress Administration: Iconic Individuals

[On May 6th,1935, Franklin Roosevelt established the WorksProgress Administration [WPA]. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy ahandful of WPA histories, leading up to a weekend post on why we need a 21stcentury revival!]

On threeiconic and inspiring figures linked to the WPA (alongside the many many artistswho became associated with it, like JohnSteinbeck and ZoraNeale Hurston!).

1)     HarryHopkins: I wrote a bit about Hopkins in yesterday’s post, referencing hisexcellent quote about artists needing to eat too. But Roosevelt’s CommerceSecretary was influential and instrumental inthe New Deal far beyond just its artistic and cultural programs, and one ofthe main ways he did so was as aprincipal architect of the Works Progress Administration. By that time Hopkinshad had a longand varied career, all of which I’m sure played into his New Deal and WPAefforts, but I would especially highlight his first professional jobs, asa social worker, including his stint as executive secretary of the Board ofChild Welfare. The WPA made clear that federal social programs were crucialforms of social work, and I have to believe a good bit of that emphasis camefrom Hopkins.

2)     JohnGaw Meem: The WPA’s programs and jobs spanned many different aspects ofsociety and culture, but at its heart were architecturalprojects, including countless building and transportation projects thatremain in use to this day. Those projects required tons of workers across awide variety of roles, among them the architects and other creatives whoimagined and designed these buildings, bridges, and more. One particularlyimpressive example of a WPA-supported architect was John Gaw Meem,the New Mexico architect who helped keep traditional Southwesternarchitecture and art (influenced by Mexican, indigenous, and Anglo presencesalike) alive and thriving in the 20th century. It’s impossible toknow how many such architects and artists might not have been able to continuetheir work without the WPA and the New Deal, but it’s clear that our societyand nation would be infinitely impoverished if we didn’t have the work they produced.

3)     HallieFlanagan: Yesterday’s post focused on the WPA’s artistic and culturalprograms, those comprised by the Federal Project Number One. Harry Hopkins wasinstrumental in creating those programs overall, and not coincidentally one ofhis college classmates and friends at Iowa’s GrinnellCollege, Hallie Flanagan, became a central figure in these artistic programs,and specifically the FederalTheatre Project. Flanagan eventually became a successful target of theconservative fears and attacks I also highlighted yesterday, but I don’t wantto give them further credence by dwelling on them at least here. Instead, Iwant to note just how fully she and the FTR supported the work of Americandrama, from the political and social realism of the great Clifford Odetsto the Modernist experimentation of young Orson Wellesto a central emphasis on AfricanAmerican playwrights and productions (through the Negro Theatre Project).Contra those conservatives, I can’t imagine a more essentially and inspiringlyAmerican figure than Hallie Flanagan.

Last WPApost tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

May 7, 2025: The Works Progress Administration: The Arts

[On May 6th,1935, Franklin Roosevelt established the WorksProgress Administration [WPA]. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy ahandful of WPA histories, leading up to a weekend post on why we need a 21stcentury revival!]

On threequotes that together help sum up the creation and arc of the WPA’s vital artistic and culturalprograms.

1)     “Hell, they’ve got to eat, too”: FDR’sSecretary of Commerce HarryHopkins was one of the most vocal and influential architects of both theNew Deal overall and the cultural programs comprised by Federal ProjectNumber One specifically. And I really love Hopkins’s blunt quote aboutwhy a New Deal organization like the WPA should fund artists and their work. Asthe second quote will reveal, that wasn’t the only motivation behind creating FederalProject Number One, but it’s a really important emphasis nonetheless: that artistsare both workers and people like everyone else, and needed the same collectivesupport that all Americans did during the Depression.

2)     “The immediate concern of the idealcommonwealth”: Again, there were also other, more philosophical layers to the creationof Federal Project Number One, and they were nicely summed up in the program’smission statement, and particularly the second of its main two main ideas: “thatthe arts, no less than business, agriculture, and labor, are and should be theimmediate concern of the ideal commonwealth.” Of course I entirely agree, andmy favorite word in that quote is “immediate”: that the arts are in no way aluxury or a higher-order concern, but a vital focus, never more so than in ourdarkest moments.

3)     “A dangerous promotion of race mixing”: Suchwas oneof the attacks directed at the Federal Theatre Project by conservatives inCongress, attacks that led not only to the defunding of that project andFederal Project Number One in 1939, but in many ways the end of the New Dealoverall. On the one hand, those attacks and fears were as nonsensical as theyalways have been, will be, and are. But on the other hand, it’s most definitelythe case that artistic and cultural works do help us move toward a more perfectunion, one that is genuinely inclusive and fully reflects our foundational anddefining diversity. For the years that they existed and thrived, the WPA’s artsprograms embodied and amplified that crucial goal.

Next WPApost tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

May 6, 2025: The Works Progress Administration: My Column on Federal Workers

[On May 6th,1935, Franklin Roosevelt estab-lished the WorksProgress Administration [WPA]. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy ahandful of WPA histories, leading up to a weekend post on why we need a 21stcentury revival!]

After Ibegan drafting this blog series (inside baseball incoming for how long in advanceI often draft blog series!), I decided to dedicate one of my SaturdayEvening Post Considering History columnsto federal workers under the New Deal, including a good bit of focus on theWPA. I’d love for you all to check that column out, so I’ll offer thathyperlink in lieu of today’s post and see you tomorrow for more WPA Studying!

Next WPApost tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?