Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 198

June 8-9, 2019: Jewish American Journeys: Michael Hoberman’s Books

[On June 1, 1916, Louis Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court, becoming the first Jewish American Justice. So this week I’ve highlighted the American stories of Brandeis and four other exemplary Jewish Americans, leading up to this special weekend tribute to one of our best Jewish Studies scholars!]In honor of both this week’s series and the New England American Studies Association conference (happening Saturday right here at Fitchburg State), a tribute to three wonderful works through which my colleague and friend (and longtime NEASA contributor) Michael has expanded the disciplines of Jewish Studies:1)      How Strange It Seems: The Cultural Life of Jews in Small Town New England (2008): Michael’s second book combines oral history and folklore studies (among other disciplinary lenses) to consider the voices, lives, stories, and contexts for Jewish New Englanders across the 20th century and into the 21st. I remember chatting with Michael about this project when I interviewed at FSU back in the spring of 2005, but to be honest I had no idea just how many different layers he would find to his focal subjects and their stories and histories. This book remains a model of oral history for me, among its many other significant meanings.2)      New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America (2011): I had the great good fortune of getting that FSU job, and thus of being Michael’s colleague as he pivoted to his third book project and a much more overtly historical frame. But Michael weds his broad historical topics and themes (such as the development of Puritan religious ideology, in direct conversation with other religious and communal perspectives such as the era’s Jewish Americans) with intimate engagement with individual voices and lives (often through rich close readings of letters, journals, and other primary sources), making this compelling book both a personal and a regional and national history (as well as a pioneering Jewish Studies analysis of these early American figures and stories).3)      A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History (2018): I’m sure it will come as no surprise that Michael once again pivoted to a new disciplinary lens for this most recent book, which analyzes a series of seminal Jewish American literary works and authors through the geographical and symbolic frames of land and home. Those frames, among many other aspects of the book, do connect it very fully to his prior works, however, creating a series of through-lines across which Michael has been building his own many acres of Jewish Studies real estate throughout this multi-decade career. I won’t pretend to be an expert, but for this AmericanStudier at least you can’t tell the story of 21st century Jewish Studies without a prominent spot for the works and perspective of Michael Hoberman. Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other Jewish Americans (or scholarly works) you’d highlight?

June 7, 2019: Jewish American Journeys: Philip Roth and Sarah Silverman

[On June 1, 1916, Louis Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court, becoming the first Jewish American Justice. So this week I’ll highlight the American stories of Brandeis and four other exemplary Jewish Americans, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of our best Jewish Studies scholars!]On humor, gender, and Jewish American artists.As I noted in this 2015 post (on Ann Basu’s wonderful scholarly book States of Trial: Manhood in Philip Roth’s Post-War America ), and as has continued to be the case in the years since, I’ve dedicated far more of my last decade or so of scholarly attention to Philip Roth than I would have ever predicted would be the case. There’s a lot I like about Roth’s writings, including to be sure his investigations (through but not limited to a Jewish American lens) of many of the historical and cultural questions that have come to define my own AmericanStudies interests. But he’s also one of the funniest writers about whom I’ve had the chance to write; many of my favorite American writers and works tend to be understandably short on laughs, which is of course generally necessary for their topics and themes but which is also ironic given my own love of all things humorous (including, my sons would demand I mention, a notable penchant for groan-inducing Dad Jokes).As my 2017 class on Mark Twain illustrated with some frequency, though, humor doesn’t always translate well across time periods and contexts. While I believe much of Roth’s humor does still resonate successfully in our 2019 moment (anybody who’s been or probably even just been around a teenage boy can testify to the cringe-worthy accuracy of some of the obscenely over-the-top early chapters in Portnoy’s Complaint [1969], for example), much of it also feels dated and problematic. That’s particularly true for the ways Roth depicts his female characters, from his hysterical (in both senses) Jewish American mothers to the hysterical (ditto) Jewish American significant others to the hysterical (samesies) shiksa love interests. His male characters and protagonists are of course themselves far from immune to his humorous and satirical lenses—but because they are generally his narrators (and almost always his central perspectives), we still gain access to their layers and nuances in a way that he frequently denies for his female characters. While humor often depends on stereotypes, that’s always a fine and fraught line to walk, and Roth too often crosses it to sexism and misogyny when it comes to his depictions of women.As usual, I would advocate for an additive model when it comes to such complex questions. That is, I think it’s still well worth reading Roth, both to critique him and his works when necessary and for all the other reasons I’ve gestured at here and elsewhere. But these problems with gender make it vitally important to engage with Jewish American female artists (who have often taken a backseat to Roth and his male peers), from historical figures like Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska (the subjects of Wednesday’s post) up to contemporary voices. There’s no shortage of wonderful such contemporary voices, but when it comes to Jewish American humor I would highlight the work and perspective of the amazingly talented Sarah Silverman. Silverman’s prolific career to date includes groundbreaking stand-up comedy, an impressively diverse (her voice work for Wreck-It Ralph’s Vanellope will make her an eternal favorite in this AmericanStudier’s household), and most recently the political satire TV show I Love You, America. With that latter work in particular Silverman has turned her comic lens on American cultural and social questions just as potently and successfully as did Roth in his best works, which both reveals the role of multimedia forms in 2019 and reminds us of that every individual artist can and should be complemented with the voices and works of other talented folks.Next journey tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Jewish Americans you’d highlight?

June 6, 2019: Jewish American Journeys: Hank Greenberg

[On June 1, 1916, Louis Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court, becoming the first Jewish American Justice. So this week I’ll highlight the American stories of Brandeis and four other exemplary Jewish Americans, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of our best Jewish Studies scholars!]On why we should better remember one of the first and greatest Jewish American athletes.Like Jackie Robinson, in whose story Greenberg played a small but important role (on which more below), Henry “Hank” Greenberg wouldn’t need anything outside of his baseball talents and successes to be remembered as a titan of the sport. One of the greatest sluggers in baseball history, in an era when home runs were pretty hard to come by (and despite losing four prime years of his career to military service, on which more below), Greenberg was a two-time AL MVP in his nine seasons with the Detroit Tigers (1933-1940 and 1945-1946), a four-time AL home run champion, holds the American League record for the most RBIs in a single season (183, in only 154 games), and was the first player to hit 25 or more home runs in a single season in both leagues (doing so with Pittsburgh in the NL in 1947, his final season in baseball, at the age of 36), among many other accomplishments. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1956, and again, should be remembered first and foremost as one of his sport’s premier stars for a decade.Yet also like Robinson, Greenberg was a pioneer as well as a star: the first Jewish American baseball player, and the first Jewish American star in any of the major sports. One of four children of David and Sarah Greenberg, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Romania who owned a New York textile plant, Greenberg was born Hyman Greenberg in Greenwich Village in 1911. Although he was not denied entrance to the major leagues because of his ethnicity (indeed, he made his debut at 19, the youngest player in the league at the time), Greenberg did face persistent bigotry and discrimination; in one particularly striking incident, during the 1935 World Series an umpire had to clear out the entire Chicago Cubs dugoutbecause they would not stop yelling anti-Semitic slurs. Moreover, his religion and culture presented unique challenges over the course of his career, as exemplified by his famous 1934 decision not to play in a game on Yom Kippur; he balanced that decision by choosing to play on Rosh Hashanah, in a game in which he hit two home runs and led the Tigers to a 2-1 victory, and Detroit Free Press columnist Edgar Guest honored Greenberg’s talents and Yom Kippur decision with a celebratory poem.Greenberg was more than just a star and a pioneer, however; he was also an inspiring American, on multiple levels. Most obvious, and certainly noteworthy, was his World War II service: initially deemed 4F for flat feet, Greenberg requested a reexamination and was allowed to enlist in 1940; when he was honorably discharged a year later due to age, he re-listed; and by the war’s end he had served a total of 47 months, the longest of any major leaguer. Yet just as inspiring were some of Greenberg’s deeply American moments on the homefront. Not only was he one of the only opposing players to welcome Jackie Robinson to the majors in 1947 (Greenberg’s last season), Robinson also credited Greenberg specifically with helping him through that particularly challenging first season. And long after their retirements, Greenberg and Robinson were two of the only players (past or present) to testify on behalf of Curt Flood’s efforts to eliminate the reserve clause, efforts that led to the creation of free agency and a far more equitable system for players. For all these reasons, I would put Hank Greenberg alongside Jackie Robinson as two of baseball’s most influential and inspiring as well as greatest stars.Last journey tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Jewish Americans you’d highlight?

June 5, 2019: Jewish American Journeys: Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska

[On June 1, 1916, Louis Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court, becoming the first Jewish American Justice. So this week I’ll highlight the American stories of Brandeis and four other exemplary Jewish Americans, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of our best Jewish Studies scholars!]On the many distinctions and telling similarity in two compelling Jewish American books.
One evening about eight years ago, my younger son taught me more about the Jewish holiday of Purim, in a couple-minute, mostly understandable and criminally cute narrative based on stories they learned in their Jewish Community Center preschool, than I had learned in my prior thirty-plus years of life. There are various ironies of my personal and familial identity illustrated by that anecdote, including the reason for all eight of my maternal great-grandparents’ immigrations to America (to escape anti-Semitic pogroms in late 19th century Eastern Europe), the complicated religious and cultural continuities and changes across my maternal grandparents’ lives and then especially my Mom’s, my own relationship to this Jewish American heritage, and, most ironically and yet most tellingly of 21st century America, the simple fact that my sons, who are a quarter Jewish American and a quarter English-German American and half Chinese American, have (as attendees of that JCC preschool for a few years) already learned and engaged with and performed more of Jewish culture and story in their first decades of life than I ever have and likely ever will.
While all of that is, of course, first and foremost about myself and my multi-generational American family and identity, past, present, and future, it can also connect to an interesting pair of youthful literary characters—one real and autobiographical, one invented and fictional, but both Jewish American children whose lives and voices have a great deal to tell us about family, faith, and our national identities and stories—created by talented women writers in the early 20th century. Young Mary Antinis the protagonist of Antin’s cultural autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), a book that takes its readers from the Pale of a Russian village to a nearly unequivocal celebration of the American Dream as this particular family and narrator find and live it; young Sara Smolinsky is the narrator and heroine of Anzia Yezierska’s realistic and modernist novel Bread Givers (1925), a work which begins with its ten year old narrator and her family already in New York and chronicles especially the cross-generational struggle between Sara and her domineering scholarly father Reb. Like their works and tones, the two writers seem in many ways fully distinct: Yezierska published half a dozen novels and multiple collections of short stories in a long and successful literary career that led her to Hollywood and a romantic relationship with John Dewey; Antin’s few published works, including the autobiography and one other book, They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914), a political argument for tolerant immigration policies, appeared within a few years of each other, after which she traveled for a few more years giving speeches about immigration before largely disappearing from the public eye.
They are indeed two very different Jewish American women and authors, and these books, like their others, certainly deserve to be read and analyzed on their own terms. Yet one very interesting and telling similarity lies in the emphasis that both authors and texts place on the wisdom and awareness possessed by their very young protagonists. (A feature shared by another, slightly later Jewish American novel, Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep [1934].) These young women are, of course, being created by older authors, and yet I would argue that neither the thirty-something Antin nor the forty-something Yezierska implies that young Mary’s or Sara’s perception and prescience are creations of their older selves. Instead, it is precisely these protagonists’ youth, and concurrent their explicitly hybrid Jewish American identities, when contrasted with the older voices and more static identities illustrated by both their more Old World-centered family members and their initial encounters with native Americans, that seems to give Mary and Sara their unique and impression perspectives, their visions (whether, again, more positively or negatively) of the communities (familial, spiritual, cultural, and national) in which they are growing up. A compelling lesson for all Americans, and one more reason to read these unique works by two hugely talented Jewish American writers. Next journey tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Jewish Americans you’d highlight?

June 4, 2019: Jewish American Journeys: Abraham Cahan

[On June 1, 1916, Louis Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court, becoming the first Jewish American Justice. So this week I’ll highlight the American stories of Brandeis and four other exemplary Jewish Americans, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of our best Jewish Studies scholars!]On the pioneering Jewish American author who crossed numerous genre and social boundaries.
There are a lot of compelling reasons to tear down the walls that, for much of the 20th century at least (and I would say still frustratingly frequently in the 21st century), were erected between different academic majors and scholarly disciplines: literature, history, journalism, political science, and so on. At the broadest levels, the simple reality is that American culture and society and identity comprises an interconnected mixture of all those areas, and many others besides; so if the concept of AmericanStudies means anything, it certainly means a methodology and understanding that brings those distinct disciplines into conversation with each other. Yet there’s also a more specific and perhaps even more salient argument against such disciplinary divisions: many if not most individual authors (like most individuals period) don’t adhere to them in their careers and lives; and the more we try to force those authors into one category or another, the more we elide the diversity and depth, and thus the real value, of their works and voices.
An exemplary case in this point is that of Abraham Cahan(1860-1951). I first encountered Cahan through his fiction, generally considered the first works of Jewish American fiction (at least the first published in English); and particularly through his epic masterpiece of immigration and Jewish American life, the New York ghetto, the shifting meanings of the Talmud and other Jewish traditions in the Old and New Worlds, and the worlds of sweatshops and the garment industry, The Rise of David Levinksy (1917). If Cahan were only remembered for such works, or even solely for Rise, I believe he’d still be well-remembered: the novel is both an incredibly detailed and compelling realistic portrayal of those and many other social themes and topics and a complex psychological depiction of its title character; David’s perhaps unreliable first-person narration thus serves both as our guide through these social experiences and worlds and as a central subject in its own right, one we have to analyze as well as hear. The book thus serves as a great transitional text between the realist and modernist eras in American fiction, as well as a powerful social document and primary source; in and of itself it allows us to cross disciplines, to consider aspects of history and politics, economics and religion, ethnicity and assimilation, and many others as well as its literary elements and details.
Yet Cahan did not limit his engagement with those questions to his fictional works, and likewise no reading of him is complete if it remains so circumscribed. For example, Cahan served for more than forty years (1903-1946) as the editor of the Yiddish-language daily newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts), and as part of that role he himself wrote an advice column he called A Bintel Brief ; without any doubt the sum total of words he produced for that column far outstrips even the 800-page Rise, and in the course of those columns he covered a far greater range of topics and questions, and of course his perspective and writing evolved and deepened far more than they could in any individual novel. There is at least one more hugely prominent genre in Cahan’s career: while the Forward’s politics were explicitly radical (it was founded by the same Jewish socialist organizations to which Cahan belonged from very early after his immigration to America in 1881), the Bintel Brief tended to address topics other than political ones; so was in numerous other publications and pamphlets, including the Socialist Labor Party of America’s Yiddish-language paper, Arbeiter Zeitung (Workers’ News), that Cahan produced his voluminous radical texts. And that’s to say nothing of the five-volume autobiography he wrote in Yiddish (with the first three volumes translated into English) in his later years.From a purely literary critical perspective, being aware of—and ideally reading at least excerpts from—these other works greatly informs an analysis of Cahan’s fiction, makes clear both the differences in his styles and goals across these genres and the social and political contexts in which he was always working. But from an AmericanStudies—and an American—perspective, such awareness is even more key; it’s in his full range of efforts that Cahan can illuminate so fully a plethora of national themes, from immigration and ethnicity to labor and reform, from multilingualism to early 20th century urbanization. Cahan, like America, knew no disciplinary boundaries—and neither, ultimately, should we. Next journey tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Jewish Americans you’d highlight?

June 3, 2019: Jewish American Journeys: Louis Brandeis

[On June 1, 1916, Louis Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court, becoming the first Jewish American Justice. So this week I’ll highlight the American stories of Brandeis and four other exemplary Jewish Americans, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of our best Jewish Studies scholars!]On three social and legal legacies of the “People’s Lawyer.”To start with a bit of inside baseball info: I’m drafting this post the day after the news story broke about a widespread and nefarious scam through which wealthy parents fraudulently sought to get their kids into elite universities. That story has produced various subsequent conversations, including many focused on the problems with both the concept of “elite” education and those who generally gain access to it. As a Harvard alum myself, I fully agree with those critiques, but I’ll add this: sometimes egalitarian greatness can still emerge from such frustratingly elitist settings. And Louis Brandeis (1856-1941), who enrolled in Harvard Law School at the strikingly young age of 18, seems to have been just such a case: throughout his legal career Brandeis became known as the “People’s Lawyer,” due not only to his commitment to progressive causes and social justice, but also and especially to his frequent practice of not receiving payment so as not to have any conflicts of interest in his pursuit of those goals. Given that Brandeis began practicing law at the height (or depth) of the Gilded Age, that profoundly egalitarian ethos was both all the more striking and a vital alternative to some of the era’s dominant narratives (including in the realm of law).Moreover, Brandeis contributed significantly to one of the Progressive Era’s most direct critiques of those Gilded Age narratives: the attacks on corporations and the hierarchical and destructive economic and social systems they too often embodied and extended. He did so through a number of sustained efforts across his career, including vocal support (and legal buttressing) for the antitrust movement of the late 19th and early 20thcentury. But he summed this philosophy up in a series of rigorously researched and passionately argued 1913 and 1914 Harper’s Weekly articles that became his 1914 book Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It . Besides its contemporary importance (and its frustratingly continued salience to our own era of “too big to fail” and the like), Brandeis’s book also helped push back against the period’s widespread anti-Semitic slurs (also still far too common in our own moment) that sought to link images of rapacious bankers with bigoted visions of Jews controlling the world. Such slurs shouldn’t have to be responded to at all, of course—but as recent events have illustrated, they can’t be ignored, and works and voices like Brandeis’s help reveal them for the nonsensical ugliness that they were and are.Brandeis’s legal philosophies, both before and during his multi-decade stint on the Supreme Court, have likewise left important legacies that continue to echo down into our 21st century society. On the high court that included a series of important 1920s cases on free speech (often, as in that case, decided in opposition to that freedom, with Brandeis dissenting significantly) and a series of 1930s ones that sought to balance the decade’s New Deal programs with limits on federal power and presidential overreach. But long before his Supreme Court tenure, Brandeis was one of the first legal thinkers to articulate the vital concept of a “right to privacy.” He did so first in a December 1890 Harvard Law Review article(co-authored with his lifelong friend and legal partner Samuel Warren), which he then followed up by working on numerous cases that further developed, clarified, and solidified this pivotal 20thcentury legal idea. Even if Brandeis had remained a Boston-area lawyer, this article and concept would have been more than enough to secure his legal and social legacies—but instead they represent just one highlight in the long and illustrious career of the first Jewish American Supreme Court Justice.Next journey tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Jewish Americans you’d highlight?

June 1-2, 2019: May 2019 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]April 29: Rodney King in Context: Rodney King: On the anniversary of the King verdict, a series on related histories begins with King himself beyond the stereotypical soundbites. April 30: Rodney King in Context: The LAPD: The series continues with two mid-20thcentury riots that together anticipated the King story.May 1: Rodney King in Context: Korean American Businesses: An ethnic and communal space that was complicatedly pulled into the King riots, as the series rolls on. May 2: Rodney King in Context: Anna Deavere Smith’s Dramas: Two one-woman shows that are as evocative and historically informative on the page as on the stage.May 3: Rodney King in Context: The People vs. O.J. Simpson: The problems and possibilities of shoehorning historical footage into historical fictions. May 4-5: Rodney King in Context: “Race Riots”: The series concludes with the need to remember specific riots while pushing back on the whole phrase and concept. May 6: Travel Writing: Good Newes from New England: A travel writing series kicks off with what separates and links colonial propaganda from travel literature.May 7: Travel Writing: Sarah Kemble Knight: The series continues with what a unique 18th century travel narrative helps us understand about the period.May 8: Travel Writing: Thoreau’s Cape Cod: Two complementary reasons to read Thoreau’s often overlooked travel book, as the series journeys on.May 9: Travel Writing: The Boston Cosmopolitans: Two positive American effects of an elite community’s international travels. May 10: Travel Writing: Exiles’ Returns: The series concludes with the promise and perils of returning home after many years away.May 11-12: “I Stand Here Ironing” and the Challenges of Motherhood: A special Mother’s Day post on a short story that helps us remember and celebrate one of society’s toughest and most vital roles.May 13: Spring Semester Reflections: Hurston and Beyoncé in 20C Af Am Lit: A Spring recap series kicks off with a pairing that helped me add African American women’s voices into my class more fully.May 14: Spring Semester Reflections: Espada and Cisneros in Ethnic American Lit: The series continues with two distinct but complementary ways to challenge exclusionary propaganda. May 15: Spring Semester Reflections: Chopin and Far in American Lit II: The delightful surprises that come from juxtaposing texts, as the series rolls on.May 16: Spring Semester Reflections: Celeste Ng in Capstone: How a class full of readers and writers can offer distinct and valuable takes on a familiar text.May 17: Spring Semester Reflections: Short Stories in my Adult Learning Class: The recap series concludes with three of the wonderful stories highlighted in my ALFA course.May 18-19: Summer and Fall Book Plans: A special post on my plans and goals for my forthcoming book (now due out a full month earlier, on July 15!).May 20: As American as Blue Jeans: Levi Strauss: On the anniversary of their patent, a blue jeans studying series kicks off with three exemplary American sides to their co-inventor.May 21: As American as Blue Jeans: Cowboys: The series continues with myths, realities, and an iconic American type.May 22: As American as Blue Jeans: James Dean: How blue jeans do and don’t help us remember the iconic actor, as the series rolls on.May 23: As American as Blue Jeans: Jean Jackets: Three famous denim jackets that embody three recent eras.May 24: As American as Blue Jeans: Advertisements, Then and Now: The series concludes with what two older and two contemporary ads tell us about continuities and changes over time.May 25-27: Remembering Memorial Day: My annual Memorial Day special post, on why and how to remember the holiday’s origins and meanings more fully.May 28: Decoration Day Histories: Frederick Douglass: A Decoration Day series kicks off with Douglass’s stirring 1871 speech.May 29: Decoration Day Histories: Roger Pryor: The series continues with an invitation and shift that mark two troubling changes in American attitudes.May 30: Decoration Day Histories: “Rodman the Keeper”: A local color short story that helps us remember a community for whom the holiday didn’t change, as the series rolls on.May 31: Decoration Day Histories: So What?: The series concludes with three ways to argue for remembering Decoration Day as well as Memorial Day.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics like you’d to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

May 31, 2019: Decoration Day Histories: So What?

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

May 30, 2019: Decoration Day Histories: “Rodman the Keeper”

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

May 29, 2019: Decoration Day Histories: Roger Pryor

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