Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 183

December 7-8, 2019: Future Constitutional Amendments?

[On December 6, 1865, the 13thAmendment to the Constitution was ratified. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied that crucial amendment and four others, leading up to this weekend post on three potential amendments to come!]On three ways the Constitution should probably be further amended (and by “should,” I want to be clear that I’m only talking about potential changes I support here!).1)      The ERA: I already wrote about the ERA as part of Wednesday’s post on the 19thAmendment, and of course that’s the thing with the ERA—it’s not at all new, having spent nearly five decades now languishing in limbo after passing both Houses of Congress in 1972. Yet far from making it less of a potential future amendment, I would argue that that history makes the ERA the next amendment that should be ratified and added to the Constitution. Frankly, it is entirely ridiculous that this straightforwardly equitable amendment (one that simply validates and reinforces the “All men are created equal” sentiment on which the nation was founded) has not been added long since, and that it’s apparently controversial enough to have stalled for so long. But there’s no time like the present, and what better way to inaugurate the centennial of suffrage than to finally pass the ERA?2)      The Electoral College: I really do believe that the ERA should be as non-controversial as an amendment can get, but I fully recognize that my 2nd and 3rd subjects for today are and will always be far more divisive. While the Constitution did many things, at its core it created the American form of democratic process and governance—and one core element of the process part was the creation of the electoral college as a system for electing the executive. Yet the way in which that system operates was significantly shifted by the 12th Amendment, reminding us that every aspect of the Constitution is and must be living and changeable. Moreover, there’s just no way to conflate what populous/less populous or large/small states meant in 1787 with what they mean in 2019, when (for example) California has a population of nearly 40 million and Wyoming a population of just over 500,000. To my mind, electors (however they are distributed) cannot possibly represent the will of those populations and individuals sufficiently, and an amendment to create some form of popular voting is necessary if the US government is ever again to reflect the American people. 3)      Guns: The same historical vs. contemporary point certainly applies here: while there are various ways to read and interpret the 2nd Amendment’s tortured grammar, the bottom line is that what “arms” meant in 1789 has precious little (if anything) to do with the weapons of war that have been decimating our communities and nation over the last decade. But to be honest, even if there were some way to teleport to the 1780s and we learned that George Mason and company intended for every American to be able to carry around a personal bazooka or some such, I would argue that the more important point is this: the amendment process was created precisely so the Constitution can evolve to address a continually evolving society. The Framers understood well that America in any future moment would look different from theirs, and designed this vital part of the Constitution in order to allow it to grow and shift along with the nation. In the 21st century, both guns and America have evolved to a point where our gun culture has to change if we are to continue moving toward that more perfect union promised by the Constitution—and since the 2nd Amendment exists, any significant such change will require its own amendment as well.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other Amendments you’d predict or argue for?

December 6, 2019: AmendmentStudying: On Not Taking the 13th Amendment for Granted

[On December 6, 1865, the 13thAmendment to the Constitution was ratified. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that crucial amendment and four others, leading up to a weekend post on three potential amendments to come!]Given how much all rational 21st century Americans agree that slavery was a dark stain on America’s identity, it might seem to have been inevitable that, with the Civil War concluded, slavery would be permanently abolished with a Constitutional Amendment. But here are three reasons why we should most definitely not see that amendment as a given:1)      How it happened: Steven Spielberg’s historical drama Lincoln(2012) is not without its flaws, but the film does an excellent job portraying the tense, difficult, extremely uncertain process by which Lincoln and his Congressional allies secured passage of the 13th Amendment. I don’t want to suggest for even a moment that the Civil War was not centrally about the issue of slavery—it was, full stop—but that didn’t mean that most Northerners, nor most political leaders, shared the same idea of what should happen with that issue as the war concluded. That what happened was a Constitutional amendment was thus anything but inevitable, and the process by which the amendment passed reflects both that uncertainty and the heroic lengths to which Lincoln and many others went to make it happen.2)      What happened next: The 13thAmendment was in many ways the most straightforward of the three so-called Reconstruction Amendments, and that fact, along with the many ways that the 14thand 15th Amendments have been extended, deepened, and (unfortunately) challenged in the 150 years since, might lead to it seeming the least significant of the three. But among the many ways (such as the rest of this post) that I would push back on that idea, I would note that neither the 14th nor the 15th Amendment would likely have been imaginable, much less possible, had the 13th not been passed. It’s not just that slavery might well have returned (on which see #3 in a moment), but that in any case there would have been no Constitutional or federal law defining African Americans as anything other than slaves. Without that first step, the rest of the path, fraught and incomplete as it has been, could not have existed.3)      What might have happened otherwise: I don’t actually believe that slavery could have returned in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War—but I absolutely believe it might have a couple decades later. I wrote at length in my first book, and have written in many places since, about the process by which American culture and society became by the 1880s (as Albion Tourgée succinctly put it) “distinctly Confederate in sympathy.” Indeed, as early as 1877 an editorial in the progressive magazine The Nation opined that with the end of Reconstruction, “the negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.” If (in the absence of a 13thAmendment) Southern states had wished to re-implement a slave system in the late 19th century, it’s very possible that neither law nor mainstream white society would have objected. And while segregation and its attendant histories have been called, with justice, (and while a seemingly small detail of the 13thAmendment itself frustratingly opened the door for some of the worst of those histories), the truth is that all that followed was, at least, not slavery—and we have the 13th Amendment to thank for it.Special post this weekend,BenPS. Thoughts on this Amendment? Others you’d highlight?

December 5, 2019: AmendmentStudying: Washington, DC and the 23rd Amendment

[On December 6, 1865, the 13thAmendment to the Constitution was ratified. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that crucial amendment and four others, leading up to a weekend post on three potential amendments to come!]On how the 1961 amendment echoes the city’s complex history, and how it helped shift it.From its earliest origins, the federal capital of Washington, DC has had a complex, contested identity, both within the American government and as a geographic entity. The capital was created out of both an informal political arrangement (the Compromise of 1790, in which Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson agreed that the federal government would pay all remaining state Revolutionary War debt in exchange for establishing a national capital in the South) and a couple of subsequent Congressional laws (the Residence Act, also of 1790, which formalized a 10-year plan to construct the capital; and later the , which officially designated the newly constructed city as part of the federal government and thus its citizens as part of neither Maryland nor Virginia). And the political and geographic evolution did not end there: in 1846, for example, the Virginia General Assembly (fearing that slavery would soon be abolished in the capital) voted to accept the area known as Alexandria (which had been incorporated into DC when the capital was officially organized) back into the state; Congress agreed, and with its July vote for this “retrocession” changed all those Alexandrians from citizens of DC (and thus without Congressional representation or electoral votes for president) to Virginians.The 23rdAmendment to the Constitution, which passed Congress in June 1960 and was ratified in March 1961, culminated more than 70 years of Congressional efforts to address some of the political inequities captured in my first paragraph’s final parenthesis. As early as 1890, a proposal was introduced to Congress to grant DC voting rights in presidential elections; the bill did not pass, but thanks to the efforts of Washington Evening Star journalist and editor Theodore Noyes and his Citizens’ Joint Committee on National Representation for the District of Columbia, activism of behalf of this political change for the capital continued throughout the 20th century. Yet while the 23rd Amendment did indeed grant electoral votes to the District, it did not provide Congressional representation for the city, an issue that remains contested to this day (as illustrated by DC’s tongue-in-cheek license plate slogan). Moreover, as of 1961 Washington, DC still did not have “home rule,” meaning that residents of the city could not elect their own mayor or city council. Although this had been the case throughout the city’s complex history, the rapidly increasing percentage of African American residents during the mid-20thcentury made the issue part of the Civil Rights Movement by the 1960s—a connection brought home vividly and painfully during the April 1968 riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.Five years after those riots and twelve years after the 23rd Amendment was ratified, Congress finally passed the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, giving DC residents the ability to elect both a mayor and a 13-member city council. In 1975, the city elected its first mayor, African American housing and civil rights leader Walter Washington; to date, seven of the city’s eight mayors have been African American, with the other, Adrian Fenty (who served from 2006 to 2010), having a mixed-race heritage. Each of these mayoral administrations deserves individual attention and analysis, of course; yet taken as a whole this history represents one of the most consistent and potent African American presences on the American political landscape. And I believe it’s fair to say that without the passage of the 23rd Amendment, and the national attention its ratification campaign brought to the issue of DC’s political representation and voice, the move toward Home Rule and the subsequent rise of the city’s African American political establishment might never have taken place (or at least have had far less visibility and effect). The 23rd Amendment is likely one of the least-remembered of the 27 current amendments, but its impact shouldn’t be underestimated. Last AmendmentStudying tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this Amendment? Others you’d highlight?

December 4, 2019: AmendmentStudying: The 19th Amendment and the ERA

[On December 6, 1865, the 13thAmendment to the Constitution was ratified. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that crucial amendment and four others, leading up to a weekend post on three potential amendments to come!]On how the long, hard road to women’s suffrage might parallel a current political journey.A bill proposing a Constitutional amendment that read “The right of citizens to vote shall not be abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex” was first introduced into the Senate (by California Senator Arlen Sargent, a friend and ally of suffrage activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony) in January 1878. The bill met with lukewarm reception at best from Sargent’s fellow Senators, however, and never made it out of hearings in the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections. It would be reintroduced by one like-minded Senator or another every year for the next 41 years before finally being successfully proposed (as a Joint Resolution of Congress) in May 1919, but the long road continued even after that point. Indeed, it was not until August 18th, 1920 that the proposed amendment received its 36thstate ratification (Tennessee, thanks in significant measure to the private plea of the elderly mother of one state legislator), the two-thirds majority needed to be ratified and become the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.It’s not just that the suffrage amendment had such a long and uphill journey to passage and ratification, though. After all, I would bet most thoughtful 21stcentury Americans could imagine how such a sweeping political change (some 10 million new voterswere immediately enfranchised when the 19th Amendment was ratified) might be controversial, even if nearly all of us (ahem) would of course now support it wholeheartedly. But what is likely far more difficult to imagine—and thus to remember, although as I argue in this Saturday Evening Post piece we certainly must remember it, for its own sake and as part of a long, dark American history—is just how consistently virulent and violent was the opposition to women’s suffrage (and specifically to those activists advocating it). As late as March 1913, a suffrage march organized alongside Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration was attacked by an angry mob who cursed, spit upon, and physically assaulted many of the (overwhelmingly female) marchers, while DC police looked on. Suffrage activists were far from victims, I hasten to add—it was precisely their efforts that finally secured the vote—but these histories of violence do add one more striking layer to our understanding of how long and hard this half-century journey was.In 1923, three years after the 19th Amendment’s ratification, activist Alice Paul drafted a new amendmentguaranteeing full equality of rights under the law regardless of sex. This Equal Rights Amendment (or ERA) was introduced into Congress every year between 1923 and 1972, when it finally passed and was sent to the states for ratification. When the time limit for ratification expired in 1982, however, only 35 of the 38 required states had ratified the ERA; the amendment has been re-introduced into every Congress since but has not yet been passed again. For those of us who support the ERA, this history of stagnation, slow and partial and ultimately incomplete progress, and repeated effort without resolution could easily feel deeply frustrating, could turn us off to the possibilities of political movement on such an amendment and issue. Yet without minimizing those frustrations and realities, I would note that the history of women’s suffrage and the road to the 19th Amendment reveal the need and value of continuing to fight for equality and justice, even—indeed, especially—when that journey is a long and difficult one. Those fighting to secure passage and ratification of the ERA are doing precisely that, and they have history on their side.Next AmendmentStudying tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this Amendment? Others you’d highlight?

December 3, 2019: AmendmentStudying: Santa Clara County and the 14th Amendment

[On December 6, 1865, the 13thAmendment to the Constitution was ratified. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that crucial amendment and four others, leading up to a weekend post on three potential amendments to come!]On the seemingly offhand sentences through which the Supreme Court radically revised American law, history, and community.In the spring of 1886, the Supreme Court heard a trio of cases related to California’s taxation of railroad corporations and properties, cases collectively entitled Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). The cases’ specifics hinged on small and (to this AmericanStudier) relatively uninteresting questions of (for example) whether fences adjoining railroad tracks were considered part of those tracks for purposes of land categorization and taxation, and the Court’s decision, written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, similarly focused on those small (if, of course, significant to the affected parties) questions. But it was in a “headnote” to that decision, transcribed by a court reporter and attributed to Chief Justice Morrison Waite, that the Court went far beyond those specific questions and helped change the course of American law and society.In that headnote, Waite stated, “The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.” The note was not part of the Court’s official decision, but the reporter (J.C. Bancroft Davis, a former railroad company president) included it immediately preceding the decision in his transcription for the official Court record. He did so, it’s worth adding, only after writing to Waite to inquire whether it did indeed represent the Court’s collective perspective; Waite responded that it did, and the sentences became part of the decision’s text and permanent identity from then on. Such a headnote would have no legal standing or precedent—yet nonetheless, by all accounts and all available evidence this informal opinion, that corporations were the equivalent of people under the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause, became far more impactful than anything in the decision’s formal text.Santa Clara thus represented a watershed moment in the evolving narrative of “corporate personhood,” one that saw its latest statement during the 2012 presidential primaries, in Mitt Romney’s oft-quoted remark at the Iowa State Fair that “corporations are people, my friend.”Yet I would also argue that Waite’s headnote illustrates another of the Court’s striking powers, one perhaps not part of its original Constitutional mandate but certainly part of how the Court’s role has evolved over the centuries since: the power to revise, to change our national understanding of key issues and questions. It did so here not only in the 14th Amendment’s language (which focused entirely on “persons” and “citizens”) but also, if far more subtly, on its contexts. The Amendment, after all, was drafted first and foremost to ensure full citizenship and equal protection for freed and former slaves—for persons, that is, who had suffered at the hands of one of America’s most sweeping capitalist and, dare I say it, corporate entities, the slave system. To read that Amendment’s effects to include protection for corporations was thus, to my mind, a stunning revision.Next AmendmentStudying tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this Amendment? Others you’d highlight?

December 2, 2019: AmendmentStudying: “Summertime Blues” and the 26th Amendment

[On December 6, 1865, the 13thAmendment to the Constitution was ratified. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that crucial amendment and four others, leading up to a weekend post on three potential amendments to come!]On how a classic summer song connects to a generation-shifting amendment.I listened to a lot of early rock and roll growing up (something about having a couple baby boomers for parents during the era that first defined the concept of “classic rock” and produced countless “Best of the 1950s”type collections, I suppose), and few songs stood out to me more than Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” (1958). I don’t know that any single song better expresses the clash of youthful dreams and adult realities on which so much of rock and roll and popular music more generally have been built, and I definitely believe that Cochran and his co-writer (and manager) Jerry Capehearthit upon the perfect way to literally give voice to those dueling perspectives: in the repeated device through which the speaker’s teenage desires are responded to and shot down by the deep voices of authority figures, from his boss to his father to his senator.Coincidentally, Cochran himself died very young, at the age of 21, in an April 1960 car accident while on tour in England. Cochran’s death came just over a year after the tragic plane crash that took the lives of three other prominent young rock and rollers, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. There’s obviously no direct relationship between these two accidents, nor would I argue that these artists’ youthful deaths were the cause of their popularity (all four were already popular prior to the accidents). But on the other hand, I think there’s something iconic, mythic even, about rock and rollers dying young—or about, more exactly, our narratives and images of such figures—and I believe it’d be difficult to separate those myths from the idealistic and anti-authoritarian attitudes captured in Cochran’s biggest hit. That is, it feels throughout “Summertime Blues” as if the speaker’s youthful enthusiasm is consistently being destroyed by those cold adult responses—and melodramatic as it might sound, the loss of childhood dreams can certainly be allegorized through the deaths of the kinds of pop icons who so often symbolize youth.Yet of course most young people continue to live in, and thus impact, the world far after their youthful dreams have ended (“Life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone,” to quote another youthful anthem), and in a subtle, unexpected way Cochran’s song  reflects that human and historical reality as well. When Cochran’s speaker tries to take his problem to more official authorities, he is rejected by his senator for a political reason: “I’d like to help you, son, but you’re too young to vote” is the reply. In 1958, when “Summertime Blues” was released, the national legal voting age was 21, and so the 20 year old Cochran could not vote; but over the next decade a potent social and legal movement to lower the voting age would emerge, in conjunction with the decade’s many other youth and activist movements, and in 1971 Congress passed and the states ratified the 26th Amendment, which did indeed lower the eligible age for voting to 18. Being able to vote certainly doesn’t eliminate all the other problems of teenage life and its conflicts with adult authority—but it does remind us that neither the gap nor the border between youth and adulthood are quite as fixed or as absolute as our myths might suggest.Next AmendmentStudying tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this Amendment? Others you’d highlight?

November 30-December 1, 2019: November 2019 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]November 4: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: Origin Points: An anniversary meta-series kicks off with the more overt and more subtle reasons why I began AmericanStudier.November 5: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: Personal Benefits: The series continues with three of the many ways I’ve benefitted from blogging.November 6: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: Sharing Your Voices: Three stages in my evolving and increasingly central goal of featuring other voices on the blog, as the series rolls on.November 7: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: Other Online Gigs: Tracing a parallel online writing personal history, across my three most extended such gigs.November 8: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: What’s Next: The series concludes with plans for the blog’s future, and a plea for your input!November 9-10: Must-Read Scholarly Blogs: A special weekend post on some of the individual and group scholarly blogs that have inspired and continued to inspire my own!November 11: Veterans’ Week: A Veteran Performance: A Veterans’ Day series kicks off with the film and performance that help us consider the full spectrum of veterans’ experiences.November 12: Veterans’ Week: Band of Brothers: The series continues with commemoration and remembrance in the WWII miniseries.November 13: Veterans’ Week: “The Red Convertible”: The powerful short story that helps us consider both PTSD and Native American veterans, as the series rolls on.November 14: Veterans’ Week: African Americans in World War I: Two opposed yet interconnected ways to better remember a community of veterans.November 15: Veterans’ Week: Veterans Against the War(s): The series concludes with a longstanding veterans’ community we hardly ever recognize, and my personal connection to it.November 16-17: Kent Rose’s Guest Post: How I Got to Nelson Algren: My latest Guest Post, featuring the great singer/songwriter Kent Rose on his experiences with a largely forgotten novelist.November 18: Local Color Stories: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”: On the anniversary of its publication, Twain’s story and its use of a frame narrator/structure kicks off a series on American local color fiction.November 19: Local Color Stories: “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”: The series continues with the far more serious story that both relies upon and challenges stereotypes.November 20: Local Color Stories: “The Revolt of Mother”: A writer and story that are anything but slight or narrow, as the series rolls on.November 21: Local Color Stories: “Under the Lion’s Paw”: How a 130-year old short story can speak as profoundly to our own moment as it did its own.November 22: Local Color Stories: “The Goophered Grapevine”: The series concludes with my favorite author and the dangers and possibilities of working with a hugely popular genre.November 23-24: Teaching Local Color: A special weekend post, on how three classes of mine illustrate three distinct pedagogical roles for local color stories.November 25-29: Sabbatical Thanks: For Thanksgiving, three of the reasons I’m so thankful for my Fall 2019 sabbatical, from a book tour to a new book to afternoons with my sons.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

November 25-29, 2019: Sabbatical Thanks

[My sabbatical this Fall has been hugely beneficial and just plain awesome in a number of ways. So for this year’s installment of my annual Thanksgiving series, I wanted to highlight a few of the things for which I’ve been especially Thanks-full. Share your own Thanks in comments if you want!]On three vital things this sabbatical has given me.1)      Book Promotion: I’ll highlight some specific takeaways from a handful of the Fall’s many awesome book talks in a series in a few weeks, so here I just wanted to note the simple and crucial fact that I would never have been able to travel to many (probably most) of these talks without the time and flexibility provided by my sabbatical. Given how important I find such talks to promoting and sharing a book, to helping it find audiences and readers as any of us who write hope that our projects will, I would say that this is both one more way in which I am very lucky to have a tenured faculty position and something that we should be advocating for for all our colleagues and peers. Publication is one scholarly and professional goal and deserves its own support of course; but promotion beyond publication is another and an equally important goal, a fact of which I’ve become more and more aware over the years and which this fortunate Fall has very much driven home.2)      Future Plans: For one of those talks in particular, for the Southgate Women’s Circle Breakfast, I shared not We the People but the first public talk on my proposed next project: Of Thee I Sing: The History of American Patriotisms. That proposal remains in progress (you’ll be among the first to know if and when it moves forward, of course!), but I’m very excited to have had the chance this Fall to start thinking about that next project, one that I hope can land with the same wonderful Rowman and Littlefield American Ways series in which We the People appeared. I think it’s fair to say that when we’re teaching a 4-4 load (or more), much of our ability to think and plan is dedicated to that present pedagogical work, and rightly so. So I’m very thankful to have had some time this Fall to think about what comes next, not only in terms of this scholarly project, but for other ongoing aspects of my work as well, including for NeMLA, the Scholars Strategy Network’s Boston Chapter, and more. 3)      Vital Perspective: To be honest, though, my central focus this Fall has been on none of those professional efforts. For whatever reason—perhaps the fact that my sons are both at the same middle school now, in 8th and 7th grade; perhaps my summer move back to the town where I lived when they were babies—I spent much of the Fall thinking about the dwindling number of autumns we have together before they’re on to all that’s next. Fortunately, my sabbatical also gave me the perfect response to such thoughts: I’ve been able to get the boys from school just about every afternoon (when I’m not traveling, anyway), and to have so many of these precious afternoons with them during the weeks when they’re at their Mom’s as well as during our scheduled weeks together. I don’t want to speak for them, but I hope and believe that they’ll remember this time as they grow older—and I know I will remember and treasure it, and am beyond thankful to have had these afternoons.November recap this weekend,BenPS. What are you all thankful for? I’m also very thankful for you as readers, conversation partners, and colleagues in AmericanStudying!

November 23-24, 2019: Teaching Local Color

[On November 18, 1865, Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published in The New York Saturday Press (under its original title, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”). So this week I’ve AmericanStudied “Frog” and four other local color short stories, leading up to this special weekend post on teaching such American texts.]On three classes that illustrate three different pedagogical uses for local color stories.1)      The Survey: The text from this week’s series that I’ve taught most frequently is “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”—in my American Lit II survey class I complement our longer readings with interspersed, shorter supplemental works; since my initial (Spring 2006!) syllabus Harte’s story has served as the first such supplemental text in our opening (late 19thcentury) unit, complementing Huck Finn. In that role, Harte’s story serves as a stand-in for local color overall, helping us discuss that movement as a key part of American literature and society in that late 19th century time period. While we certainly also discuss more specific and distinct aspects of the story, it’s fair to say that the overall discussion is nonetheless framed by that literary historical question, by conversation about what Harte’s story can help us understand about the concept of “local color writing” as a genre and a movement.2)      America in the Gilded Age: I’ve had the chance to teach a class with this title (based loosely around my first book) four times, first as an English Studies Junior/Senior Seminar and then three times as our Honors Literature Seminar. The latter syllabus in particular features the Harte, Freeman, and Garland stories from this week’s series (along with other texts by Twain and Chesnutt), as well as a few other works that likewise could be classified as local color fiction. That quantity allows us to think (as the semester develops) about local color with more nuance and depth, really considering both similarities and differences across this group of contemporary authors and texts. But at the same time, the ubiquity of local color writing both in the Gilded Age and on the syllabus means that we can in each individual discussion move beyond that frame to think more specifically about the text in front of us—what local worlds it depicts to be sure, but also many other literary and historical elements and threads.3)      Special Author: I believe the only time I’ve taught “Jumping Frog” was in my Fall 2017 Special Author: Mark Twain course. My syllabus for that class moved both chronologically and generically, and for both reasons we started with a unit on Twain’s early journalistic and local color stories. Reading a story like “Jumping Frog” early in the semester made it possible to trace those journalistic and local color elements across much of the rest of Twain’s career and our syllabus, even those texts (like his more socially realisticand/or satirical later works) that might seem quite different from those early genres. But that setting also allowed for distinct readings of “Jumping Frog” than might otherwise have been the case—for example, one of our most central through-lines across the semester was humor, and so in that class we focused on how “Jumping Frog” and all of Twain’s local color stories (and perhaps the genre as a whole, or at least one key thread within it) work as humor far more than I imagine we would in a survey course. Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Other local color stories, or teaching experiences, you’d highlight?

November 22, 2019: Local Color Stories: “The Goophered Grapevine”

[On November 18, 1865, Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published in The New York Saturday Press (under its original title, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy “Frog” and four other local color short stories, leading up to a special weekend post on teaching such American texts.]On the dangers and possibilities of working within a hugely popular genre.I’ve written about Charles Chesnutt a great deal in this space, much of it through the lens of his best work and my favorite American novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901). But in this Valentine’s week post, I used the more intimate side of Chesnutt that we find in his journals to highlight his striking and important goals and ambitions for his writing career as a whole. While I would argue that Marrow alone is sufficient evidence that he achieved those goals, the frustrating truth is that Chesnutt’s writing career was cut short (he published virtually nothing for the final 25 years of his life); while there are multiple factors which contributed to that situation, one major cause was the gaps between his ambitions and the realities of the late 19th and early 20th century publishing world and literary marketplace. Much like Paul Laurence Dunbar, the popularity and demand for whose dialect poetry made it more difficult for him to publish works in other styles and forms, Chesnutt found to his frustration that many of his editors, publishers, and audiences wanted from him only a particular, stereotypical and limited version of African American writing and life.Much of that came from outside Chesnutt and was entirely beyond his control, of course. But in one complicated way he did contribute to that pigeon-holing process: by writing and publishing a number of early stories that seemed to fall squarely within an existing, popular, stereotyping genre: the local color movement known as the “plantation tradition.” These stories, which were published throughout the 1880s and 90s and many of which were collected in The Conjure Woman (1899), featured many of the plantation tradition’s central elements: a Northern white narrator who journeys to the South; a formerly enslaved African American storyteller from whom that narrator learns about that region; threads of folklore and the supernatural interwoven with those cultural and social contexts. Indeed, so closely did Chesnutt’s conjure tales seem to resemble those included in Joel Chandler Harris’s foundational plantation tradition text Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1881) that Houghton Mifflin chose to put two grinning rabbits on either side of the African American storyteller on the Conjure Woman’s cover (despite no such rabbits appearing anywhere in the text); not Chesnutt’s choice, and an example of his frustrating relationship to publishers and publication to be sure, but also a reflection of the genre in which he firmly located these early works.Yet as always with Chesnutt, his decision to do so was thoughtful and important. And if we read his first published conjure tale, “The Goophered Grapevine” (which appeared in The Atlantic in 1887 before becoming the opening story of The Conjure Woman), we can see just how much he used the plantation tradition genre in order to challenge and explode many of its stereotypical elements. For one thing, the stories of slavery told by Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius are consistently much darker than those told by Uncle Remus and his ilk, and the supernatural elements only serve to highlight and heighten those realistic depictions of slavery’s horrors. And for another, the relationship in the present between Julius and John (the outside white narrator) is likewise more nuanced and realistic than in most plantation tradition works—while there forms a gradual fondness between the two (along with John’s wife Annie) as the conjure tales progress, Julius also uses his acts of storytelling to advance his own agenda, often (as in “Grapevine”) in implicit but clear contrast to John’s goals. All of which is to say, if we read Chesnutt’s local color stories on their own terms, rather than giving in to the publishing perspectives that too often limited his reception and career, we find in them crucial commentaries on and challenges to local color writing itself.Special post this weekend,BentiPS. Thoughts on this story? Other local color stories you’d highlight?