Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 193

August 5, 2019: Remembering Marilyn Monroe: Her Death

[On the early morning of August 5th, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her LA home, in a moment that quickly became as mythic as everything else about young Norma Jean Mortenson. So this week I’ll remember the iconic and singular Marilyn through posts on her life, career, and legacy as well as her tragic death.]On why Monroe’s death became so unnecessarily complicated, and what we might learn from that.Full disclosure: when I first began drafting this series, in place of “tragic death” at the end of the bracketed intro I wrote “mysterious death.” But then I did some further research into Monroe’s passing and realized that it was apparently not very mysterious at all: according to her doctors she had been dealing with “severe fears and frequent depressions” for some time and was on a number of prescribed medications; she had overdosed several times over the prior months (perhaps accidentally, perhaps not); and when her live-in housekeeper Eunice Murrayand psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Greenson discovered her body on that early August morning, she was surrounded by empty medicine bottles and had stunningly high levels of both chloral hydrate and pentobarbital in her blood and liver. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office and the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Team, working in conjunction with that psychiatrist as well as Monroe’s personal physician, quickly and logically enough classified Monroe’s death as a probable suicide.Case closed, right? For a time it seems to have been, although even in the early years certain segments of Monroe’s fans (or at least of celebrity-obsessed society) seem to have advanced alternative conspiracy theories, usually suggesting that Monroe was murdered (such as by Dr. Greenson; NB: both of those hyperlinks are to a pretty extreme such conspiracy theory website). But it was really with the release of Norman Mailer’s Marilyn: A Biography (1973) that the theories became truly widespread and even to some degree mainstream. In the book’s final chapter, the ever-controversial (and often unhinged) Mailer alleges that FBI and CIA agents conspired to murder Marilyn to cover up her supposed affair with Robert Kennedy. While that particular conspiracy theory remained beyond the pale for even most suspicious minds, Mailer’s book helped propagate overall questions about Monroe’s death, to the point that in 1982 the LA District Attorney John Van de Kamp opened a “threshold investigation”to determine whether a full criminal investigation was warranted (spoiler alert, it wasn’t). There are various lessons we might take away from that unfolding story, among them that Norman Mailer had far too much cultural power for a couple decades there (I like Armies of the Night , but c’mon now). But to my mind, the most significant lessons are ones closely linked to these quotes from the immediate aftermath of Monroe’s death: Jean Cocteau arguing that it “should serve as a terrible lesson to all those whose chief occupation consists of spying on and tormenting film stars”; and Laurence Olivier calling Monroe “the complete victim of ballyhoo and sensation.” While it’s possible to overstate our celebrity-obsessed current moment and the paparazzi culture it has spawned, I think those are very real and very destructive phenomena, and ones toward which Monroe represented an early and influential example. And more precisely, it seems to me that the untimely death of a celebrity is one of the juiciest topics for such feeding frenzies—but only, of course, if that death can be seen as controversial or mysterious. That’s why I changed that latter word in my series intro, and why we should continue to push back on all those conspiracy theories, past and present.Next Marilyn memories tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

August 3-4, 2019: July 2019 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]July 1: 4th of July Contexts: Slavery and the Declaration: A July 4thseries starts with important historical contexts for a frustrating founding text, and why the frustrations remain regardless.July 2: 4th of July Contexts: The Adams Letters: The series continues with the myths and realities of the Revolution revealed in the letters between John and Abigail Adams.July 3: 4th of July Contexts: Fireworks: The history, symbolism, and limitations of a July 4th tradition, as the series rolls on.July 4: 4th of July Contexts: Born on the 4th of July: Three cultural evolutions of a classic, complex American phrase.July 5: 4th of July Contexts: “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”: The stunning speech that challenges us as much today as it did 150 years ago.July 6-7: The 4th of July in 2019: The series concludes with a frustratingly timely weekend post celebrating the 4th and America in the Age of Trump.July 8: Alien America: Roswell: On the anniversary of the Roswell, well, whatever, a series on cultural images of aliens kicks off with Roswell conspiracy theories.July 9: Alien America: E.T. and Aliens: The series continues with friendly and hostile extraterrestrials, and the real bad guys in any case.July 10: Alien America: Brother from Another Planet: A quote we would do well to think about, and a film that could help us do just that, as the series rolls on.July 11: Alien America: ID4: The blockbuster film that’s American in the worst, but perhaps also a bit of the best, senses.July 12: Alien America: Close Encounters and Contact: The series concludes with two superficially similar films that feature very distinct portrayals of both aliens and America. July 13-14: An Aliens and America Addendum: A quick weekend follow up post on the “Storm Area 51” Facebook Event.July 15: Summer Camp Contexts: Camp Virginia: A summer camp studying series kicks off with the unique camp without which there’d likely be no AmericanStudier.July 16: Summer Camp Contexts: Hello Muddah: The series continues with the very American afterlife of a classic camp song.July 17: Summer Camp Contexts: Jewish Summer Camps: Ethnicity, community, and the preservation and revision of tradition, as the series camps on.July 18: Summer Camp Contexts: Playing Indian: The camp tradition that embodies a troubling American trend, and what we can do about it. July 19: Summer Camp Contexts: Friday the 13th: The series concludes with what camp has come to mean in American culture, and what to make of the change.July 20-21: Jeff Renye’s Guest Post: “As Above, So Below”: The Desire to Believe and Forbidden Knowledge in The X-Files: The prior week’s aliens and America series concludes with my latest Guest Post, from the great Jeff Renye!July 22: American Anthems: “America the Beautiful”: On the anniversary of its initial composition, an American anthems series kicks off with different forms of patriotism in “America the Beautiful.”July 23: American Anthems: “The Star-Spangled Banner”: The series continues with how historical contexts and cultural predecessors add layers to our troubling national anthem.July 24: American Anthems: “This Land is Your Land”: My folk music nominee for a new national anthem, as the series sings on.July 25: American Anthems: “God Bless America”: The importance, and the limits, of contextualizing an iconic anthem. July 26: American Anthems: “American Skin (41 Shots)”: Why my long-time favorite song is also a perfect anthem for the America I write about in my new book, We the People !July 27-28: 21st Century American Anthems: The series concludes with five recent songs (and a bonus recent poem) I would nominate as 21stcentury anthems!July 29: SiblingStudying: The Marx Brothers and the Stooges: In honor of my sister’s birthday, a siblings series kicks off with the two families who dominated American comedy in the mid-20th century.July 30: SiblingStudying: The Grimké Sisters: The series continues with two Southern sisters who exemplify the courage and power of abolitionism.July 31: SiblingStudying: The Wright Brothers: Three lesser-known stories of the brothers who changed the world, as the series flies on.August 1: SiblingStudying: William and Henry James: The inspirational and (to this AmericanStudier) familiar relationship between two close brothers.August 2: SiblingStudying: The Williams Sisters: The series concludes with how Claudia Rankine and Twitter have helped changed my perspective on the talented tennis duo.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

August 2, 2019: SiblingStudying: The Williams Sisters

[On August 2nd, this AmericanStudier’s amazing younger sistercelebrates her birthday. So this week in her honor I’ll AmericanStudy interesting American siblings!]On two factors that have entirely changed my perspective on the tennis superstar sisters.I have to start this post with full disclosure: for many years, indeed most of their long and hugely successful careers in professional tennis, the Williams Sisters would have been most likely to show up in this space as part of my annual post-Valentine’s non-favorites series. There were quite a few things that rubbed me the wrong way about Venus and Serena Williams, but I would highlight two in particular. One is not at all on them: their father Richard Williams, who had always seemed (and still I will admit largely seems) to me to embody the worst kind of overbearing and self-centered tennis/sports parent. And the other was much more fully about them, and especially Serena, who (I long felt) could never lose a tennis match and credit her opponent in any way; she always seemed to be blaming herself and her play, suggesting that if she just played the way she could, it would be impossible for any opponent to give her a challenge. Given Serena’s unrivaled career success, that might well be an accurate assessment, but it still felt at best petty and at worst downright disrespectful to so consistently (as I saw it) talk about her opponents and matches in that way. So even a couple years, I would have viewed matches such as the 2017 Australian Open final between Venus and Serena as the worst thing that could happen in a women’s tennis tournament.My perspective has entirely changed in the last few years, however, and while I know that doesn’t and shouldn’t matter at all to the Williams Sisters, I do think that the two most central influences in shifting my point of view are interesting ones to AmericanStudy and are both relevant to 21st century American society and sports. The single most powerful influence has been the sections of Claudia Rankine’s poem Citizen (2015) dedicated both to narrating one particular controversial moment in Serena’s career and to portraying and analyzing perceptions of Serena’s identity (that New York Times Magazine piece by Rankine echoes and extends many of Citizen’s topics, if in a different genre of course) and her responses to them overall. Of course I had long recognized, when I took a step back from my personal feelings on Serena and the sisters, the crucial roles that both race and gender (in an intersectional combination) have always played in shaping our narratives of the Williams’. But it’s one thing to recognize something analytically, and another to feel it empathetically; and I have to admit that it was reading Rankine’s book that truly made it possible for me to emphathize with Serena (and Venus) and how such narratives and frames have affected (if in no way limited) them at each stage and moment. Perhaps I should have been able to do so without the book, but of course works of art can and do greatly amplify our capacity for empathy, and Rankine’s portrayal of Serena offered a wonderful case in point for me.The other main factor in shifting my perspective is a bit more complicated to write about, and a lot more 21st century. To put it simply, many of the scholars and figures whom I follow on Twitter—many of them women of color, but also certainly folks in every conceivable ethnic and identity category—are huge fans of Serena and Venus, and would often during and around tournaments Tweet about what the Williams Sisters meant to them. I’ll be the first to admit that Twitter often fails to live up to this ideal, but at its heart one of the things it best represents is a chance to listen to other people, to hear and learn from their voices and perspectives with an immediacy and (in its own digital way) intimacy that’s not possible (or at least not the same) in any other medium with which I’m familiar. I can’t pretend that the first few times I saw such pro-Williams Tweets, I wasn’t more annoyed than anything else; but fortunately I continued to see them, and starting listening to and learning from them. I’m not looking for a pat on the back for that, as again I was doing both what Twitter should allow us to do and, for that matter, what any human being should do in conversation with others. Instead, I want to highlight this effect as both a model of what a site and space like Twitter can do and mean, and as a particularly good example of how these 21st century communities can, again at their best, help open us up to perspectives and voices that it might be otherwise harder for us to truly hear and be shaped by. Thanks to such perspectives, as well as to Rankine’s wonderful poem, I now am nothing but excited for the Williams Sisters to have one more (or another—who knows how many more there might be?) Grand Slam tournament battle.July Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Sibling stories you’d highlight?

August 1, 2019: SiblingStudying: William and Henry James

[On August 2nd, this AmericanStudier’s amazing younger sistercelebrates her birthday. So this week in her honor I’ll AmericanStudy interesting American siblings!]On the influential and inspiring relationship between America’s most talented pair of brothers.Of all the topics I’ve researched, pondered, and analyzed over this blog’s nearly nine years, I don’t think I’ve spent anywhere near as much time thinking about any one of them (or maybe even all of them combined) compared to the relationship between two close (in age and every other sense) brothers. My sons are 15.5 months apart (I know I should just say 16, but no, those two additional weeks count!), and as far as I can tell, few if any aspects of their young lives (at least until my older son leaves for college) are going to be untouched by that fact, and by the complex interconnections it has already produced and continues to produce. Obviously I have my fondest hopes for what that will mean (exemplified right now by the way they hold hands as they walk into summer tennis camp together in the morning) and my scariest worries about it (such as my fear that if they drift apart it will have a profoundly negative influence on both of their futures), but no matter what, this is clearly going to be a defining relationship and influence in each of their lives.I’m not trying to put too much pressure on the boys, but you know who else were born almost exactly 15.5 months apart? William and Henry James, the brothers whose influences and talents extended into virtually every aspect of late 19th and early 20thcentury American and British society and culture. Perhaps the older William’s far-reaching investigations into medicine, psychology, philosophy, and religion impacted more conversations and communities than did the younger Henry’s work as an author of fiction, drama, travel writing, literary criticism, and autobiographies; but just as those branches of the sciences and social sciences would not have been the same without William’s impacts, so too were American and English literature and culture profoundly impacted by Henry’s works and ideas, style and themes. While I have no doubt that the brothers would gladly have quarreled over whose legacy was more significant, probably while at the same time making the case for each other’s importance, the truth is that the combination is more impressive, and more accurate to their collective legacies, than the competition.Perhaps the most overt and poignant tribute to that brotherly combination was written by Henry himself, in the opening chapters of his memoir A Small Boy and Others (1913). William had died a few years earlier, in 1910, and while any memoir is likely produced by a number of psychological factors, there’s no question that his brother was heavily on Henry’s mind as he wrote this one. The opening chapter, in fact, begins this way: “In the attempt to place together some particulars of the early life of William James and present him in his setting, his immediate native and domestic air, so that any future gathered memorials of him might become the more intelligible and interesting, I found one of the consequences of my interrogation of the past assert itself a good deal at the expense of some of the others.” It’s not at all clear at this point, nor for many chapters, whether the titular small boy is Henry or William; and since the text continues to focus on the pair of them for many more chapters (indeed more than half of the chapters), it could with just as much accuracy be titled Two Small Boys. Boys whose lives and legacies would likewise always and compellingly be interconnected.Last siblings tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Sibling stories you’d highlight?

July 31, 2019: SiblingStudying: The Wright Brothers

[On August 2nd, this AmericanStudier’s amazing younger sistercelebrates her birthday. So this week in her honor I’ll AmericanStudy interesting American siblings!]Three lesser-known stories of the brothers who helped change transportation and the world.1)      A Printing Press: In 1888, fifteen years before their pioneering flight and when Orville was still just a junior in high school, the brothers developed their first technological innovation, a printing press that they built themselves. They used it not only to publish their own newspapers in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio (first a weekly [ West Side News ] and then briefly a daily [ The Evening Item ]), but also produced publications for other friends and locals. One of them was a high school classmate of Orville’s and a blossoming young writer and poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar; the brothers’ printed his newspaper the Dayton Tattler for a time. Such personal and historical details not only remind us that the Wright Brothers moved through many stages of invention and profession before their aviation pinnacles, but also help situate them in their settings, both of place and time.2)      A Bicycle Shop: Like many talented inventors, the Wright Brothers were never satisfied to stay in one stage or field for long; just four years after they opened their press, they had moved on, opening their bicycle repair and sales shop the Wright Cycle Exchange in 1892. As detailed at wonderful length in Kate Milford’s historical YA novel The Boneshaker (which features a Wright Brothers bicycle in a prominent role), bicycles had become something of a craze in this period, and the brothers quickly realized that they could turn their technological prowess to designing new and improved bikes. By 1896, the Wright Cycle Company was producing its own brand of bikes, machines which would of course also feature prominently in their later aeronautical efforts. But while this business and pursuit offer a direct throughline toward the machine that would propel the brothers into the air at Kitty Hawk, it also links them to a transportation trend and history that were far more widespread and influential throughout the 1890s and well into the early 1900s.3)      A Museum Feud: The interesting and complex histories didn’t stop with that 1903 flight in Kitty Hawk, of course. One of the most compelling was the brothers’ multi-decade feud with the Smithsonian Institution, thanks to a rivalry with the institution’s secretary Samuel Langley over whose manned flying machine should be considered the first successful model. The museum chose to display Langley’s Aerodrome (which he had never gotten off the ground) much more prominently than the Wright Brothers’ model, and the brothers (especially Orville, as Wilbur died far too young in 1912) retaliated by lending their invention to the London Science Museum in 1928. There it remained until Orville’s death in 1948, when a long-negotiated truce allowed the Smithsonian to purchase the flyer and return it to the United States for the first time in decades. Among the many salient lessons from this controversial history is a reminder that museums are living and evolving spaces, reflecting the conflicts and struggles of their societies as much as their ideals and innovations. It’s hard to imagine an American Air & Space Museum without the Wright Brothers—but for a long time, thanks to the tangled history of aviation, that was precisely the case.Next siblings tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Sibling stories you’d highlight?

July 30, 2019: SiblingStudying: The Grimké Sisters

[On August 2nd, this AmericanStudier’s amazing younger sistercelebrates her birthday. So this week in her honor I’ll AmericanStudy interesting American siblings!]On the two sisters who exemplified the courage and power of American abolitionism.As I’ve argued before in this space, it might seem from our 21stcentury perspective as if it were relatively easy or at least didn’t take a great deal of courage to be an abolitionist in mid-19th century America, but that perception would be entirely wrong. William Lloyd Garrison being dragged through the streets of Boston is only the most overt of many similar examples of just how unpopular and even hated abolitionists and abolitionism were by many Americans (from every region). Yet even within a community defined by its courage and impressiveness, certain individuals and voices can still stand out, can truly exemplify the kinds of impassioned and heroic activism that represent the best of what Americans can be and do. And within the abolitionist community, two such individuals were the Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah.Virtually every detail and stage of the sisters’ lives defines their courage. Born to a prominent Charleston, South Carolina judge and his wife, part of an established and comfortable Southern family—and thus by definition in the period a slaveholding family—both sisters by their mid-20s had come to see the institution of slavery as a moral and national disgrace, and both chose self-exile (first to Philadelphia and then to many other Northern cities) from their family and home. Told repeatedly that women could and should not speak in public, particularly not to “promiscuous” (mixed-gender) audiences, the sisters gave shared speaking engagements throughout the north nonetheless; Sarah also wrote a series of “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes” to protest such gender biases. Notified that she could never return to Charleston or risk imprisonment and arrest, Angelina wrote an Appeal to the Christian Women of the South to make her case in that way. When she learned that educator and abolitionist Catherine Beecher supported colonization for freed slaves and other American blacks, Angelina wrote Letters to Catherine Beecher , calling out the colonization idea as just another kind of racism. And this all before they had lived in the North for ten years!Perhaps a single 1838 event best sums up the sisters’ courageous activism; I’ll quote the above-linked Gilder Lehrman Institute article on it: “Two days after their wedding, Angelina and Theodore [Weld] attended the anti-slavery convention in Philadelphia. Feelings ran high in the city as rumors spread of whites and blacks parading arm in arm down city streets, and by the first evening of the event, a hostile crowd had gathered outside the convention hall. Sounds of objects being thrown against the walls reverberated inside. But Angelina Grimke rose to speak out against slavery. ‘I have seen it! I have seen it!’ she told her audience. ‘I know it has horrors that can never be described.’ Stones hit the windows, but Angelina continued. For an hour more, she held the audience’s rapt attention for the last public speech she would give. The next morning, an angry mob again surrounded the hall, and that evening, set fire to the building, ransacked the anti-slavery offices inside, and destroyed all records and books that were found.” The sisters and Weld, like Garrison and many other abolitionists, continued their efforts for many decades—but an individual moment like this can make clear both the forces against which they strove and their determination to share their voices and arguments nonetheless.Next siblings tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Sibling stories you’d highlight?

July 29, 2019: SiblingStudying: The Marx Brothers and the Stooges

[On August 2nd, this AmericanStudier’s amazing younger sistercelebrates her birthday. So this week in her honor I’ll AmericanStudy interesting American siblings!]On the two groups of siblings at the heart of mid-20th century American comedy and popular culture.From the Booths to the Barrymores, the Douglas’s to the Bridges, on down to Will and Jada Pinkett Smith and their increasingly visible young ‘uns, multi-generational families have long been a staple in American popular culture (I’m setting aside the most famous such multi-generational pop culture family in 2019 America, the Kardashians, as a subject for another time). Whether you read the trend as one of many signs that American society is not nearly as class-less as we like to believe, as a symbol of our hankering for an equivalent to the British royal family, or as simply a reflection that it’s easier to get ahead if you know the right people, there’s no doubt that our cultural icons have often come as part of family units. Yet I’m not sure that any other cultural medium or any other historical moment have been dominated by competing families of entertainers as were the 1930s and 40s by the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges.The two families (which is a slightly inaccurate word for the Stooges, since Moe, Shemp, and Curly were brothers but Larry was unrelated to them) have interestingly parallel biographies: each group of brothers was born to Jewish American immigrant families in late 19th century New York; members of each began to perform in Vaudeville-type acts for the first time in 1912, and achieved their first real breakthrough successes about a decade later; and the similarly-titled films that truly launched each group both appeared within a year of each other, the Marx’s The Cocoanuts (1929) and the Stooges’ Soup to Nuts (1930). The families even feature individual brothers who helped originate the act but left the group at a relatively early point, Zeppo Marx and Shemp Howard. Yet despite these parallels, in my experience it’s very rare to find passionate fans of both the Marx Brothers and the Stooges—they seem today, as perhaps they did in their own era, to have found pretty distinct fan bases.It’d be easy to attribute that divide to the highbrow/lowbrow dichotomy, and certainly there’s no doubt that the two groups tended to employ very different kinds of comedy: the Marx’s using their scripts and wordplay first and foremost, the Stooges their physical comedy and violence (although certainly Harpo Marx was entirely a physical comic, and in other ways too this division would break down upon close examination). Yet I would say that the two groups also exemplify two very distinct directions for American comedy and popular culture after Vaudeville, both employing developing technologies but in quite different ways: Cocoanuts was one of the first sound films, and throughout their career the Marx Brothers used this new medium of sound film to great effect; whereas most of the Stooges’ classic works were shorts, and while such pieces were often featured before or with other films they were also tailor-made for the new medium of television as it developed in the decades to come. Both films and television remain central media for American comedy, of course, but they work and connect to audiences in fundamentally different ways, and the Marx’s and Stooges can help us analyze those trends at their earlier moments.Next siblings tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Sibling stories you’d highlight?

July 27-28, 2019: 21st Century American Anthems

[On July 22, 1893, Wellesley Professor Katharine Lee Bates first composed the words to what would become “America the Beautiful.” So this week I’ve AmericanStudied “America” and other national songs, leading up to this special weekend post on 21C nominees for new anthems!]Five recent songs that I would nominate as new national anthems (with a bit on why if I haven’t already written about them at length in hyperlinked posts):1)      Gary Clark Jr., “This Land” (2019)2)      The Killers, “Land of the Free” (2019)3)      Halsey, “New Americana” (2015):  The song that launched Halsey’s evolving career offers only a couple specific case studies in the “we” it defines as “the new Americana,” and they’re interesting if a bit obvious (a self-loathing young socialite, a gay football player). Instead, it’s the two lines in the chorus (along with that titular identification) that I find most interesting as a succinct representation of a 21st century national identity: “High on legal marijuana/Raised on Biggie and Nirvana.” Not sure exactly what that adds up to, but like all anthems, it’s a powerfully symbolic statement of who we are.4)      John Legend and Common, “Glory”(2015): Even if this song were just what it seems to be, the musical accompaniment to Ava DuVernay’s wonderful film Selma, that would be enough to merit inclusion on this list: Black History is American History, as a certain AmericanStudier has been known to argue. But I’m not sure any lines better sum up where we are and where we’re trying to get, and what role music itself can play, more than these in Common’s second verse: “We sing, our music is the cuts that we bleed through/Somewhere in the dream we had an epiphany/Now we right the wrongs in history/No one can win the war individually/It takes the wisdom of the elders and young people's energy/Welcome to the story we call victory/The comin' of the Lord, my eyes have seen the glory.”5)      Steve Earle, “Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do) (2008): It will surprise precisely no one who knows me that most of this list has been pretty optimistic, or at least represent expressions of a critical optimism that envisions a more perfect union. That seems to me to be a pretty good goal for a national anthem; but at the same time, I’d have to have been born yesterday not to recognize the concurrent need for some cynicism and more overt critique of our present moment. Well, Earle’s pissed-off anthem delivers those in spades, from its biting opening lines (“Look at ya/Yeah, take a look in the mirror now tell me what you see/Another satisfied customer in the front of the line for the American dream”) to its titular definition (“Four score and a hundred and fifty years ago/Our forefathers made us equal as long as we can pay/Yeah, well maybe that wasn't exactly what they was thinkin'/Version six-point-oh of the American way”). So let’s sing songs of hope, but ones of righteous anger too, as we seek new anthems for our 21stcentury American moment.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other national songs you’d highlight?

PPS. After I had scheduled this, I got the excellent suggestion on Twitter to include Ada Limon's poem "A New National Anthem"!

July 26, 2019: American Anthems: “American Skin (41 Shots)”

[On July 22, 1893, Wellesley Professor Katharine Lee Bates first composed the words to what would become “America the Beautiful.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy “America” and other national songs, leading up to a special weekend post on 21C nominees for new anthems!]On two reasons why my long-time favorite song is also a perfect American anthem.I’ve written on at least two prior occasions in this space, as well as at length in the opening of my second book, about Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots)” (2000; I still prefer that live version to any subsequent one, although this post-Trayvon Martin performance from 2012 comes very close for sure). But I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned in this space a very cool complement to my own love for the song: my younger son’s early and continuing affection for it as well. Of course that began with my playing it for the boys, but I’ve played plenty of songs for them, and it was “American Skin” that really grabbed my son and has endured across many years and many other shifts in musical taste. To hear him sing along to my favorite lines—“We’re baptized in these waters/And in each other’s blood”—has been one of those singularly moving moments that parenting can offer, and reflects the song’s multi-generational appeal and audience.So that’s one way Springsteen’s song can be seen as a contemporary American anthem. But another is the reason I’m highlighting it today: earlier this month my new book, We the People: The 500-Year Battle over Who is American , was published. I’ve been thinking about the book’s two central threads, competing yet interconnected exclusionary and inclusive visions of American identity, pretty much nonstop for the last couple years, and I’m not sure I’ve encountered a cultural work that more succinctly and powerfully highlights both of them than does “American Skin.” Even the title alone features both ends of the spectrum: Amadou Diallo was killed because of the color of his skin and what it meant to certain other Americans; but by calling it his “American skin,” Springsteen reminds us that those racist and exclusionary attitudes do not and cannot deny Diallo his full participation in an American community and identity. That we still so desperately need to hear that message is just one more reason to keep listening to “American Skin (41 Shots).”Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other national songs you’d highlight?

July 25, 2019: American Anthems: “God Bless America”

[On July 22, 1893, Wellesley Professor Katharine Lee Bates first composed the words to what would become “America the Beautiful.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy “America” and other national songs, leading up to a special weekend post on 21C nominees for new anthems!]On the importance, and the limits, of contextualizing an iconic anthem.I’ll get to my own couple of paragraphs and analyses in a moment, but I have to dedicate one paragraph in a post on “God Bless America” to Sheryl Kaskowitz’s wonderful book God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song (2013). I had the chance to hear an early version of Kaskowitz’s work as part of a New England ASA conference back in 2011 (or maybe it was 2010—I’ve been part of a lot of NEASA conferences!), and it was already obvious that her project was going to offer compelling and crucial reinterpretations of this seemingly familiar American text. The book more than paid off that early promise, and is one of my favorite AmericanStudies scholarly texts of the last decade, readable and engaging and provocative and highly relevant in equal measure. You can get a preview of it here, and I promise that it’s well worth your time in full.There are a lot of reasons why that’s the case, but I would argue that one of the book’s most significant effects is the best kind of scholarly revision. I have to imagine that most Americans, even those who AmericanStudy for a living, thought of “God Bless America” much as I had—as a pretty simple and saccharine musical complement to a bumper-sticker sentiment. But as Kaskowitz reveals (or reminds us, but these were largely forgotten histories before she explored them in her project), from the song’s first 1918 version by the Russian Jewish immigrant songwriter Irving Berlin through its 1938 revision by Berlin and Armistice Day debut performance by Kate Smith into its World War II evolutionand beyond, “God Bless America” exemplified a great deal of complex and crucial early 20th century American and world history. Among other effects of better remembering those complex histories, I would argue that they highlight a frustrating limit to the recent “cancelling” of Kate Smith, which largely fails to engage with the nuanced, often contradictory histories of American popular music that her life and work reflect and that “God Bless America” certainly sums up.So the story behind “God Bless America” is a lot more complicated and multi-layered than it might seem—but as for the song and its sentiment, I’d still say they are frustratingly limited in a specific and important way. While of course in most ways my identity closely aligns with mythic narratives of “American” identity, as I wrote in this post there’s one area where I significantly diverge: as an atheist in a nation that (particularly since the mid-20th century, as Kevin Kruse has amply demonstrated) has gone out of its way to emphasize again and again phrases like “under God” and “in God we trust.” As I hope this week’s posts have consistently illustrated, every choice of an anthem or national song certainly represents a vision of that nation’s identity and community, and likely inevitably excludes as well as includes along the way. But of all our prominent national songs, “God Bless America” nonetheless stands out for its thoroughgoing embrace of images of America and Americans as fundamentally religious, its expression of a communal belief with which those of us who do not believe would have a profoundly difficult time connecting. That doesn’t elide the song’s interestingly multi-layered story and history, but it does make it one with which this AmericanStudier won’t be quick to sing along.Last anthemic post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other national songs you’d highlight?