Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 194

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?

July 24, 2019: American Anthems: “This Land is Your Land”

[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 my folk music nominee for a new national anthem.
This is perhaps not a particularly bold position, but I have to say (as my first two posts in this week’s series have already indicated) that both our official and one of our unofficial but most prominent national anthems—“The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful,” respectively, are pretty terrible. I’m not assessing their musical qualities, both because that’s well outside of any areas of expertise of mine and because I don’t think that’s especially important when it comes to national anthems. I’m not even (shockingly, for me) analyzing their lyrics too specifically; certainly both are full of bombastic and hyperbolic moments, to say nothing of the deeply bizarre descriptions in “Beautiful” (“purple mountain majesties”? “the fruited plain”?), but that’s par for the course when it comes to anthems. No, when I say that these songs are pretty terrible, I mean as expressions of national identity.
I understand the ways in which a flag can come to stand in for a nation, although (as I wrote in this post on the Pledge of Allegiance) I think that such symbolism shouldn’t necessarily become too blindly accepted or passed down. But “Banner” focuses so fully on the flag that it has room for only the briefest and most generalizing kinds of engagement with the nation and community for which it’s supposed to stand—“the land of the free and the home of the brave” is a nice but pretty vacant sentiment, not least because I have to imagine that the British soldiers trying to take down that flag over Baltimore Harbor during the War of 1812 were probably just as brave as their American counterparts (and of course neither nation had yet abolished slavery at this time, so the competition for the land of the free was likewise tight). And while I agree with the main sentiment behind “Beautiful,” that there are lots of impressive natural landscapes under our spacious skies, the balance of its lines falls far too fully toward those fruited plans and not nearly enough toward the people who populate them. Again, such problems are in many ways inevitable when it comes to national anthems, but as Americans we do have an alternative, a national song that parallels many of these elements but defines our core identity much more satisfactorily: Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (1944).
The main and most frequently reprinted verses of Guthrie’s song, which he wrote in direct response to “God Bless America,” do focus largely on the nation’s natural landscapes and beauties, but unlike “Beautiful” Guthrie grounds that admiration very explicitly and powerfully in Americans’ experiences and perspectives, on two key levels: the speaker’s own vision of the nation as he traveled throughout it, “roamed and rambled and followed [his] footsteps”; and the song’s titular and most repeated sentiments, that all of that beauty is ours and yours, that it “belongs to you and me.” Within that context, the “voice” that sounds and chants those repeated lines, while just as spiritual as “God Bless America” and as overtly symbolic as the flag, speaks directly and concretely to these living, breathing, wandering Americans, to the speaker and to his traveling companion (you). Even in that most reprinted version of the song, then—the one that ends with the “California to the New York Island” verse—America becomes not only beautiful and symbolic but also human and communal, in the best senses.  But then there are the additional verses, which extend and deepen that human element: the earliest known recording of the song, a 1944 version held at the Smithsonian, includes a verse in which the speaker steps around a sign that reads “private property” to realize that “on the back side it didn’t say nothing”; and Guthrie’s original manuscript for the song included two more verses, one which begins “Nobody living can ever stop me / As I go walking that freedom highway” and the other where the speaker has “seen [his] people” standing “there hungry … by the relief office.” All three of these verses remind us of the stakes of a truly communal vision of American identity, make clear that such a vision—and an anthem that expresses it—require the fullest and bravest meanings of freedom and democracy.I know that the likelihood of 35,000 people standing in unison at Fenway Park and singing about condoning trespassing and witnessing lines at the relief office is not great. And I’m not unreasonable, I’d be more than happy with the rest of Guthrie’s song as the national anthem; it does everything that we expect of an anthem while better capturing the genuinely communal and shared experience of America that we should demand of one. Who’s up for a national campaign? After all, this song was made for you and me. Next anthemic post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other national songs you’d highlight?

July 23, 2019: American Anthems: “The Star-Spangled Banner”

[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 a historical context and predecessor that adds an interesting layer to our troubling anthem.Thanks in large part to Colin Kaepernick’s protests and their linkage of the national anthem to questions of race and equality, a good deal of recent attention has been paid to Francis Scott Key’s largely forgotten third versefor “The Star-Spangled Banner” (to be clear, only the first verse is sung at most occasions). While music historiansdiffer on exactly what that verse’s brief and somewhat oblique reference to slavery means, it seems pretty clear to this AmericanStudier—especially when coupled with Key’s also largely forgotten status as an early 19th century slave-owner—that Key was at the very least leaving enslaved African Americans out of his mythologized celebration of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” I’m already very much on record as not-a-fan of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and none of these close reading and historical contexts make me any more likely to belt out Key’s anthem (even if I could perform the notoriously challenging song).Those aren’t the only contexts for Key’s song, however, and a very different one offers a distinct way to historicize and AmericanStudy the anthem. “The Star-Spangled Banner” wasn’t the first set of lyrics that Key had set to the tune of John Stafford Smith’s popularBritish work “The Anacreontic Song”—nearly a decade before, Key set to the same music his song “When the Warrior Returns” (1805), a tribute to Stephen Decatur and Charles Stewart, two military leaders returning to the U.S. from the 1801-1805 First Barbary War in North Africa. Originally published in the Boston newspaper the Independent Chronicle on December 30, 1805, “When the Warrior Returns” precedes the national anthem in more than just tune, especially in the line, “By the light of the Star Spangled flag of our nation” but also in the repeated closing couplet, “Mixed with the olive, the laurel shall wave/And form a bright wreath for the brows of the brave.” Clearly Key was not about a little recycling when it came to his patriotic song-composing efforts.Remembering this prequel to “The Star-Spangled Banner” offers another and more important historical context, however. As I wrote a couple months back for my Saturday Evening Post column, the War of 1812 itself can be analyzed less as a heroic defense of America from British invasion (which had largely comprised my limited understanding of it) and more as an international conflict closely tied to U.S. territorial expansion. Engaging those sides of the War of 1812 might also help Americans add the entirely forgotten Barbary Wars to our collective memories, since those Mediterranean conflicts (and especially the 1815 Second Barbary War) hinged on many of the same international, territorial, and nautical issues and debates that helped cause the strife with England. Which is to say, “The Star-Spangled Banner” didn’t just represent an evolving, Early Republic patriotic vision of American identity—it also and not coincidentally represented an extension and deepening of U.S. presence and influence on the global stage. George Washington might have warned his countrymen in his 1797 Farewell Address of “foreign entanglements,” but our national anthem reflects just how fully entangled we would become over the next couple decades.Next anthemic post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other national songs you’d highlight?

July 22, 2019: American Anthems: “America the Beautiful”

[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 three forms of patriotism found in one iconic song.From its title to its final “sea to shining sea,” much of Katharine Bates’s “America the Beautiful” embodies a straightforward, celebratory version of patriotism. Those celebrations focus, as they often do, on mythic images of the nation’s natural wonders—that is, while natural elements such as “spacious skies” and “waves of grain” are of course genuinely part of the American landscape, phrases such as “purple mountain majesties” reveal that Bates is viewing those natural elements through tinted lenses. Elsewhere in this space I’ve called this straightforwardly celebratory version of patriotism the “easy” kind, but it’s fair to say that it also often relies on these kinds of hyperbolic images, a sense of the nation’s genuine wonders that uses mythic descriptions of those elements rather than simply highlighting their actual details. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with exaggerated descriptions, of course; but it’s telling that a song focused on the nation’s natural beauties can’t simply describe those beauties accurately or without also relying on such mythic images.While such mythic images might make it harder to see and engage with the nation’s darker realities, I think it’s a second version of patriotism, one also found in Bates’s lyrics, that more fully limits our ability to be critical patriots. Bates’s second verse is less frequently sung but particularly telling, as it opens, “O beautiful for Pilgrim feet, whose stern impassioned stress/A thoroughfare for freedom beat, across the wilderness.” It’s not surprising that an 1890s poem would identify the Pilgrims as an American origin point, but Bates goes further here, both in connecting that community to “freedom” (despite their already well-known efforts to limit it among themselves) and especially in describing the America they encountered as a “wilderness.” Bates famously first wrote these words during a trip to Colorado’s Pike’s Peak, an area that had (like much of the West) within the prior couple decades been stolen from native peoples. While this is only a couple lines in the song overall, it links Bates’s imagined beautiful nation to a white supremacist version of patriotism, one from which Native Americans have been removed as thoroughly and wrongly as they were from lands like Colorado’s.There’s no way to read “America the Beautiful” without recognizing the presence of those celebratory and white supremacist forms of patriotism, but reading it only through those lenses would nonetheless be an over-simplification. Besides the Pilgrims, the song’s other specific historical community are Civil War soldiers, those “heroes” who “proved, in liberating strife/Who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life.” And in its final couple verses, “America” links that recent sacrifice to a broader, critically patriotic perspective, a “patriot dream that sees beyond the years/Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears.” While the lyrics don’t specify the contemporary causes of those tears (understandable in a brief, anthemic text), lines like this nonetheless communicate the gap between Bates’s current nation and the idealized one for which her text strives. Which comprises a distinct, important critically patriotic complement to the song’s mythic and celebratory sides, and makes this a genuinely multi-layered national anthem.Next anthemic post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other national songs you’d highlight?

July 20-21, 2019: Alien America: Jeff Renye’s Guest Post: “As Above, So Below: The Desire to Believe and Forbidden Knowledge in The X-Files”

[On July 8th, 1947, somethinghappened in Roswell, New Mexico. It was probably just a weather balloon (or like a really big condor), but ever since a not-insignificant community of Americans have believed that an alien landed there and was covered up by the US government. So last week I AmericanStudied Roswell and other cultural representations of aliens in America, leading up to this special Guest Post, from a repeat and one of my favorite Guest Posters, on one of the most famous and influential such representations ever, The X-Files!]
“Somebody’s always paying attention, Mr. Mulder.”  —The X-Files, 1.09 “Fallen Angel”
At the end of the cold open for each episode of The X-Files, the show’s tagline appears superimposed atop a twilit, storm-wracked mountain range: THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.  A common, generalized hope in the Western world for education is that a measure of truth and understanding will be found via the skills that one learns within whatever series of formal and/or informal systems that one participates in as a course of study.  Further, often aligned with this hope is a belief that an innate good exists in the pursuit of knowledge that can be applied, for personal, social, and other forms of profit—and, though under ever-present pressure from administrative action, a value in knowledge for its own sake.  Such is a simple, if not too-inaccurate, working definition of a liberal education: if not to be liberated from all error and the harms of poor reasoning, then at least to learn from the mistakes, fallacies, and flawed logic of your predecessors and their efforts, to acknowledge their successes, and to do better.  And, in the act of doing better, to extend the store of human knowledge and ask the next set of questions.
In an 1835 speech on the floor of the Pennsylvania State House in Harrisburg, Thaddeus Stevens gave an impassioned, and successful, plea for the continued funding of the state’s nascent public school system, then under a direct threat a mere year into its existence.  At one point, the legislator told his colleagues, “If education is of admitted importance to the people under all forms of government, and of unquestioned necessitywhen they govern themselves, it follows of course that its cultivation and diffusion is a matter of public concern, and a duty which every government owes to its people.”  (Emphasis is Stevens’.)
The current moment in the U.S. should serve to remind us of the stakes when there is a failure to diffuse high-quality education in the varied domains of public discourse and in private life: abundant information (data, overwhelming amounts of data), misinformation, and fakery exist next to and entwine coeval to one another.  Attempts to discern the origins of some sources for deliberate misinformation can lead far beyond the country’s borders to unlikely places and uncover mixed motivations.  
To keep the focus here on the American cultural and political landscape that has unfolded since the initial run of The X-Files (1993-2002), the domestic counters kept on high-ranking public officials, in particular the President, reveal the clear and present danger to the integrity of communication: The flow of information arrives with extreme, persistent bias.  When journalists tally the misinformation, prevarication, distortion, and lies told by the nation’s leadership, we ought to realize the critical importance of source evaluation and the need to insist on claims that are evidence-based and consider their context and intent.
The prosaic and sustained ignorance exhibited in the executive branch’s statements might be proof enough that no profound conspiratorial cabal exists (whether the so-called 7th Floor Group, the attendees at Bohemian Grove, etc.) beyond the usual networking of the elite whose operatons are long-established by the work of Bill Domhoff.  But that would be only one perspective.  An obverse view is that the federal government’s public face is meant as some means of misdirection to distract for the sake of shadow forces to carry out their work, which sounds very much like a fictional plot. 
In The X-Files, the key formula of the show partners the believer F.B.I. Special Agent Fox Mulder with scientist and sceptic Special Agent Dana Scully, who are sometimes helped by insiders of the Deep State, like the characters Deep Throat and Mr. X.  Both Mulder and Scully, for all the procedural differences that the writers assigned to them in the early seasons, would likely agree on the benefits of a textbook such as How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age by Theodore Schick, Jr. and Lewis Vaughn .  (On the point of the odd couple partnership, of a believer with a skeptic, see the episodic novel by Arthur Machen The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations, where decidedly amateur investigators pursue incidents of the unexplained and occult.)
The search for and the preservation of evidence often led to frustration for agents and audience alike.  “Again, Scully, nothing but evidence...and again, no evidence at all,” an exasperated Mulder says to Scully after he must leave behind important recordings and printouts in the show’s Season 2 opening episode, “Little Green Men.”  The world in which these agents operate echo our own outside the screen because, in addition to the obvious televisual influences of shows like Kolchak the Night Stalker and The Twilight Zone, Chris Carter and lead writers James Wong and Glen Morgan drew upon government history and lore.  In California’s Mojave Desert the Airforce Flight Test Base at Edwards Air Force Base has used the motto Ad Inexploratora, “Into the Unknown.”  The experimental work done there and at other military installations find their dark counterpart in the alien conspiracy arc threaded through the entire run of The X-Files.  In Trevor Paglen’s book I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me , the author, by way of a collection of military patches primarily from the world of aerospace military service history, includes an apt image: a patch with the earth in a contrast of black and gray, meant to signify the “black world” in which classified actions take place.  It is in that world that our special agents in TheX-Files attempt to find and return with the truth, from somewhere out there.

How we view television has undergone a significant change since the initial broadcast of The X-Files, and while the show has returned in the streaming era amid a fragmented American cultural landscape its critical and popular success has not.  We now can stream a full season in one sitting as parodied by the Simpsons on the phenomenon of Stranger Things with its story structure made for consumption via binge viewing.  In the days of network television prior to streaming, to watch the full run of the first season of The X-Files took from September 1993 through the early Spring of 1994.  The combination of the show’s extraterrestrial conspiracy mythos and the “monster of the week” one offs form a cumulative effect that has resonance with one of William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “What is now proved was once only imagin’d.”  The desire for proof, in the form of tangible evidence, led Mulder and Scully to strange places—a Fortean fever dream for end of the millennia paranoia.
The X-Files showcases the storage of forbidden knowledge by individuals and the instructions that they serve.  The show’s first season frames this narrative reality as the pilot episode and the season finale each feature one of the agents’ antagonists, the Cigarette Smoking Man, making a visit to deposit evidence in a warehouse somewhere beneath the Pentagon (as the helpful image of a map on the door indicates).  Such a storage facility is found in the final scene of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark and in the show Warehouse 13, which fully uses the premise of the federal government’s storehouse of secrets, albeit with a more lighthearted touch and tone than most of what is found in The X-Files.
Some final thoughts on this brief consideration of The X-Files include a current headline and a hypothesis bandied about by academics and devoted amateurs.  In the summer of 2019, something worthy of an X-Files parody exists with the purported plan that has appeared online for a civilian raid on a U.S. military installation that gets name dropped multiple times by Fox Mulder: “More Than 1 Million People Agree To ‘Storm Area 51,’ But The Air Force Says Stay Home.”  As for the show’s tagline that the truth is “out there,” some recent ideas have centered on something referred to as the exisntence of the ultraterrestrial.  For more information on this point, check out the MonsterTalk podcasted episode “Alien Intrusion and the Ultraterrestrial Hypothesis.”  In this episode, the hosts and their guests discuss the Ultraterrestrial Hypothesis (UTH) and its growing influence in paranormal circles.  This hypothesis gets called on for some heavylifting as it has been applied as a means to explain UFO phenomena, Mothman, Bigfoot, fairies, ghosts and other experience that purportedly defy scientific demonstrability. Archaeologist Jeb Card talks at length about what he names his Paranormal Unified Field Theory (PUFT).  Fox Mulder would have this episode in his queue.[Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this show or other representations of aliens (in America or otherwise) you’d highlight?]

July 19, 2019: Summer Camp Contexts: Friday the 13th

[This week my sons return for their second stay at an overnight camp. That gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for some Summer CampStudying! Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]On what camp has come to mean, and what to make of the change.I’ve traced a number of different contexts for and meanings of summer camp in this week’s series, but the truth is that, for anyone who grew up in the 1980s as I did, there’s one particularly clear camp connection I haven’t yet mentioned: death. Brutal, bloody, inventive and inevitable death. The series of Friday the 13th films, which began with 1980’s Friday the 13th and saw seven sequels released in the 1980s alone, created in Camp Crystal Lake a horrific doppelganger to the extremely unhappy camp experiences captured in “Hello Muddah” (although, to be fair, the childish campers themselves were never Jason Voorhees’ targets). And thanks to that franchise’s unparalleled and consistent box office success, numerous other horror and slasher films mined the same territory over those years (and beyond), turning summer camp into one of the celluloid settings in which attractive teenagers were most likely to be gruesomely murdered. So what do we make of this shift in, or at least striking addition to, the cultural images and meanings of summer camp? While, again, the youthful campers themselves were not typically endangered in these films, they were most definitely surrounded by and witnesses to the horror—which, if we connect Friday the 13th with the babysitting scenario at the heart of its most obviously influential predecessor, John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), is a common thread across these defining early slasher films. It’s hard not to see this consistent emphasis, the presence of young children observing the monsters and their unfolding horrors, as a commentary on—or, at the very least, a reflection of—a society in which images of childhood innocence were giving way to darker visions and fears. Indeed, the Friday the 13thseries took that idea one step further still, creating in the unique character of Tommy Jarvis a multi-film narrative of a young child impacted and then significantly changed by his observations of and encounters with Jason Voorhees.Moreover, it’s equally difficult not to connect those ideas of childhood observation and change to the experience of watching these films. One of my own most unsettling memories is of watching my first Friday the 13th film, Part VI, at the home of a middle school friend; it might sound too pat to be true, but the moment and line I remember most vividly is when one of the young campers sees Jason outside a cabin window and tells the (doomed) counselors that she has seen “a monster.” On the other hand, I don’t want to overstate this effect—I attended overnight camp a couple of years later, and I can honestly say that I didn’t think about Friday the 13th a single time during my week’s stay, nor did such images lessen the fun I had at the camp. So perhaps it’s most accurate to say that summer camp, like so many aspects of late 20th and early 21st century American society, contains multitudes, competing and even contrasting images and narratives, historical and contemporary, cultural and social, that nonetheless coexist in our collective consciousness.Last camp context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?

July 18, 2019: Summer Camp Contexts: Playing Indian

[This week my sons return for their second stay at an overnight camp. That gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for some Summer CampStudying! Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]On the camp tradition that embodies a troubling American trend, and what we can do about it.I’ve tried from time to time, mostly in the posts collected under the category “Scholarly Reviews,” to cite works of AmericanStudies scholarship that have been particularly significant and inspiring to me. But it’s fair to say that I’ve only scratched the surface, and I’ll keep trying to find ways to highlight other such works as the blog moves forward. One such work is Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian (1998), a book which moves from the Boston Tea Party and Tammany Hall to late 20th century hobbyists and New Age believers (among many other subjects) to trace the enduring American fascination with dressing up as and performing exaggerated “Indian” identities in order to construct and engage with individual, communal, and national identity. In one of his later chapters, Deloria considers Cold War-era practices of “playing Indian” through which children’s social experiences and burgeoning American identities were often delineated—and right alongside the Boy Scouts and “cowboys and Indians” play, Deloria locates and analyzes summer camps. In the example cited in that last hyperlink, Missouri’s Camp Lake of the Woods held an annual “Indian powwow” for its campers—the tradition dates back at least to the 1940s, and apparently continued well into the late 20th century. (I’m assuming it no longer occurs, although I haven’t found evidence one way or another.) By all accounts, including Deloria’s research and analysis, such summer camp uses of “Indian” images and performances were widespread, if not even ubiquitous, as camps rose to their height of national prominence in the 1950s and 60s. Even if we leave aside the long and troubling history that Deloria traces and in which these particular performances are unquestionably located, the individual choice remains, to my mind, equally troubling: this is childhood fun created out of the use of exaggerated ethnic stereotypes, community-building through blatant “othering” of fellow Americans, and a particularly oppressed and vulnerable community at that; to paraphrase what I said in my post on the racist “Red Man” scene in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953), I can’t imagine these camps asking their campers to “play” any other ethnic or racial group. The performances were obviously not intended to be hurtful, but it’s difficult, especially in light of Deloria’s contextualizing, to read them in any other way.So what, you might ask? Well for one thing, we could far better remember these histories—both the specific histories of playing Indian in summer camps, and the broader arc of playing Indian as a foundational element in the construction of American identity and community across the centuries; Deloria’s book would help us better remember on both levels. For another thing, it would be worth considering what it means that so many American children experienced and took part in these performances, how that might impact their perspectives on not only Native Americans, but ethnic and cultural “others” more generally. And for a third thing, it would also be worth examining our contemporary summer camps and other childhood communities—certainly the most overt such racism has been almost entirely eliminated from those space; but what stereotypes and images, performances and “others,” remain? Summer camps are fun and games, but they’re also as constitutive of identities as any influential places and material cultures can be—as Deloria reminds us, play is also dead serious, and demands our attention and anaylsis.Last camp context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?

July 17, 2019: Summer Camp Contexts: Jewish Summer Camps

[This week my sons return for their second stay at an overnight camp. That gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for some Summer CampStudying! Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]On ethnicity, community, and the preservation and revision of tradition.In the nine first-year writing courses I taught as an adjunct at both Boston University and UMass Boston, I focused on one aspect or another of immigration and American identity; as a result, I found that the conversations and work in those courses circled around again and again to some key topics and themes. Many were what you would expect: the old and new worlds; assimilation and acculturation; hyphens and hybridity; multi-generational continuities and changes. But nearly as frequent were our discussions of ethnic communities and neighborhoods in the U.S., the areas early scholars of immigration dubbed —we talked a good deal about the limitations and strengths of such enclaves, the ways in which they can on the one hand foster isolation and separation (and even ghetto-ization), sub-standard living conditions and inequal schools, prejudice and ignorance toward immigrant groups, and other issues; but at the same time can preserve specific cultural identities and customs and languages, build community and support across generations, become potent new world homes for immigrant communities.In the late 19thand early 20th centuries, following the era’s sizeable waves of Jewish immigration to the United States, many of those arrivals settled in such ethnic enclaves, most famously in the tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan (as described at great length in early 20th century literary works such as Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky [1917] and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers [1925]). While some of those neighborhoods and communities persist to a lesser degree, they have mostly dissipated over the subsequent century, as Jewish Americans have spread out across the country. Yet like members of most ethnic and cultural, as well as most religious, communities, many Jewish Americans have worked for continuity despite these historical and social changes, particularly by passing along customs and beliefs, traditions and ideals, to their younger generations. Education and activities, schools and community and cultural centers, have provided vehicles for such preservation of culture—but another, complex, and I believe more easily overlooked, such vehicle has been the Jewish summer camp.For more than half a century, Jewish schoolchildren (and of course some non-Jewish schoolchildren) have spent portions of their summers at sites such as Wisconsin’s Camp Ramah, Camp Woodmere in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, and New Hampshire’s Camp Tevya, among many others. In many ways these camps have facilitated and continue to facilitate a preservation of Jewish culture and community across the generations: with Hebrew and Talmud instruction, historical and social lessons, and other communal activities and connections. Yet at the same time, if we parallel such camps with those attended by American schoolchildren from all cultures and communities (and it seems clear that these camps have also featured all of the stereotypical camp activities: boating and hiking, capture the flag and campfires, and so on), we could argue the opposite: that they have offered another avenue through which Jewish American kids have connected to a broader, non-denominational American society and experience, one shared by all their peers. A tension between ethnicity and acculturation, tradition and revision, the Talmud and campfire sing-alongs—what could be more American than such dualities?Next camp context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?

July 16, 2019: Summer Camp Contexts: Hello Muddah

[This week my sons return for their second stay at an overnight camp. That gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for some Summer CampStudying! Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]On the very American afterlife of a classic camp (sorry) song.In 1963, comedy writer and TV producer Allan Sherman wrote (along with musician and songwriter Lou Busch) the comic novelty song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp).” The hyperbolic lyrics were based on the less-than-ideal experiences of Sherman’s son Robert at New York’s Camp Champlain (Robert had such a miserable camp experience that he was eventually expelled!), and captured pitch-perfectly both the exaggerations and extremes (and vicissitudes) of a young person’s perspective and the mythic presence of summer camp in our childhood and national imagination. The song was such a hit (occupying the #2 spot on the Billboard singles list for three August weeks) that Sherman wrote and performed a sequel on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson less than a year later, cementing the song’s status as the nation’s unofficial summer camp anthem.It was in 1965, however, that the multi-faceted American story of “Hello Muddah” began to unfold in full. In that year Milton Bradley released a Camp Granada board game, advertised by a TV commercial featuring yet another version of the song performed by Sherman himself. Moreover, the 1965-66 TV schedule featured the first and only season of Camp Runamuck , an NBC sitcom based on the song (including character names and plot details drawn from the lyrics). Those cultural and material extensions of the song have been amplified, in the decades since, by a children’s book, an acclaimed Off-Broadway musical revue, and numerous pop culture allusions and references. Indeed, while the original version of the song continues to exist (even in the pre-YouTube days of my childhood I remember hearing it somewhere), it’s fair to say that “Hello Muddah” has become in many ways more of a brand than a text, revised and reframed and made new for all these distinct cultural and commercial purposes.That process, by which an individual and isolated artistic work gets adopted into the multi-faceted, multi-media mélange that is American popular culture and society, is anything but new, as my Dad’s pioneering website Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture makes clear. But as that website itself illustrates, this kind of American cultural evolution has become significantly more visible, and more exactly recordable and traceable, in our 21st century digital moment. I won’t lie, I didn’t know anything about the “Hello Muddah” board game and TV show until I started researching this post—but now they, like the many permutations of the song itself (which I have a dim memory of singing during my own, thankfully far less extreme and far more positive, experience at Virginia’s overnight Camp Friendship as a middle schooler in the late 1980s), have become part of my own evolving American perspective and identity.Next camp context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?

July 15, 2019: Summer Camp Contexts: Camp Virginia

[This week my sons return for their second stay at an overnight camp. That gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for some Summer CampStudying! Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]On the unique summer camp without which there’d be no AmericanStudier.
The van was, to the best of my recollection, entirely ordinary. Just a van. The movies that we watched while driving in that van were, although I can only remember one specific title (the forgotten ‘80s classic Space Camp [1986]), nothing earth-shattering either. Just mediocre kids’ entertainment. The lunches that we ate at our various destinations, likewise. The counselor to camper ratio was, while probably well within state requirements, nothing special; I think there were around 12 of us at a time, and just the one counselor. As summer camps go, these basic details might make this one sound pretty average at best. But Camp Virginia most definitely changed my life.
Recently a colleague asked me what had inspired my dual passions for American literature and American history, and in my answer I focused on a couple core elements of my childhood: being raised by two parents who cared deeply about reading and writing; and growing up in Virginia, surrounded by all that history (especially of the Revolutionary and Civil War eras). But when it comes to the latter, of course many tens of thousands of kids grew up in Virginia during the same period as I, and I doubt that many of them were similarly inspired by its treasure troves of historical goodness. And while my parents without question would have introduced me to those troves, the most foundational introductions were those provided by Mr. Kirby. Ronald Kirby was my fourth-grade teacher at Charlottesville’s Johnson Elementary School, and I’m sure he did a great job in that role, but for me he’ll always be the founder, sole counselor, chauffeur, lunch maker, movie selector and starter, 7-11 bathroom demander (a long and funny story that I can’t possibly replicate here, but it’s a good one, trust me), and above all guide and teacher and historian and mentor, of Camp Virginia.
Every summer (well, I did it for two straight summers, but I think he ran it every summer for many years before and after that as well), Mr. Kirby would offer week-long Camps, each one focused on a different historical topic (mainly the Revolution and the Civil War, but I imagine there were variations and other topics too). Each day we’d drive to a couple of historical sites, and while I do still (kinda) remember the van and the movies and the lunches, it’s those visits and sites that really stand out for me. But not even the sites, many of which I’ve been to numerous other times as well. It’s the aura that stands out for me, the ambience, the ways that Mr. Kirby could, with a well-chosen anecdote or detail, with attention to a particular spot or artifact or story, with his very enthusiasm and passion and interest, undimmed after however many years and visits and campers, make the history come alive for me and, in so doing, make me come more fully alive as a student, a historian, a Virginian, an American. It’s no exaggeration to say that at the end of those weeks I was hooked, was destined for a life (in whatever profession or discipline) in which history would always be a major destination.I don’t have any idea how much Camp Virginia cost—and I have to figure that Mr. Kirby barely broke even, what with the van and gas and admissions fees and the like—but if I learn of anything even vaguely similar as my boys grow up, there’s nothing I wouldn’t pay to give them the same kinds of experiences. It’s not about loving history per se—of course I’d love if they do, but they’ve got to find their own passions, influenced I’m sure by mine and their Mom’s and New England and many other factors but ultimately and very rightly their own—but about coming alive, about being brought to places that change their worlds and broaden their horizons and help shape them into the men they’ll become. Not bad for an ordinary van. Next camp context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?