Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 202

April 22, 2019: Earth Day Studying: Animated Activisms

[The 49thannual Earth Day is April 22nd, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of environmental stories and histories. Share yours in comments to help us celebrate this wonderful and all too often underappreciated home of ours!]In honor of Earth Day, three examples of the link between animation and the environment:1)      Captain Planet and the Planeteers/The New Adventures of Captain Planet(1990-96): As a viewer and fan of the show since its first episodes, I might be biased, but it seems to me that Ted Turner and Barbara Pyle’s environmental edutainment program (or programs, since the show changed its name when Hanna-Barbera took over principal production in 1993) Captain Planet was one of the most radical and influential children’s shows of all time. The show’s consistent environmental activist themes and stories should be evidence enough for that claim; but if not, I would point to the 1992 episode “A Formula for Hate,” in which the villain sought to spread lies and paranoia about AIDS and thus to turn a town against an HIV-infected young man (voiced by Neil Patrick Harris). The pre-Boston March for Science talk I recorded through my role as the Scholar Strategy Network’s Boston Chapter Co-Leader focused on science and public activism, and I can’t imagine a clearer embodiment of that link than this Captain Planet episode.2)      FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992): 1992 was a banner year for environmental animation, as it also saw the release of FernGully, a joint Australian and American animated film (based on Diana Young’s children’s novel of the same name) about the growing threats to the world’s rainforests. Among its many achievements, FernGullysucceeded in bringing Cheech and Chong back together for the first time in six years; it also perhaps influenced the casting of John Woo’s Broken Arrow (1996), which likewise featured a pairing of Samantha Mathis and Christian Slater. They, like all of the film’s voice actors (including Robin Williams in his first animated film as Batty) worked for scale, as all were committed to the film’s environmental and conservationist messages. Indeed, I’d argue that Captain Planet and FernGully together reflect the leading role pop culture played in advancing those issues in the early 1990s—a trend worth remembering whenever we’re tempted to dismiss pop culture’s social or communal roles.3)      Princess Mononoke(1997): Legendary animation director Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 historical fantasy anime film illustrates that those cultural contributions to environmental activism were taking place around the globe. Like FernGully, Mononoke uses the genre of fantasy to tell its story of supernatural and human heroes working together to fight for an embattled natural world against encroaching forces. Often the genre of anime has been associated with futuristic and urban settings; but Miyazaki’s film, among others in the era, redirected the genre’s tropes and themes to the historical and natural worlds. Like Captain Planet and FernGully before it, Mononokewas an international hit (as well as a box office smash in Japan), with its English-language version becoming one of the most popular Hollywood adaptations of an anime or Japanese film of all time. In my experience, Earth Day really took off as a collective phenomenon in the 1990s—and if so, we might well have these pioneering 1990s animations to thank.Next Earth Day post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Earth Day stories or histories you’d highlight?

April 20-21, 2019: Patriots’ Day Texts: We the People

[Only a couple New England states celebrate Patriots’ Day, which officially pays tribute to the colonial Minutemen who helped begin the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord. But the holiday offers a chance to think about patriotism in America more broadly, which I’ve done this week, starting with my annual Patriots’ Day post, continuing through a series on critically patriotic texts, and leading up to this update on my new AmericanStudying book!]First (and not foremost, but I’m really in love with it so I’m starting with it nonetheless), We the People: The 500 Year Battle over Who is American has a cover image! Ain’t that pretty?Second, I just wanted to reiterate my desire to talk about this book anywhere and everywhere—before its August 15 release date, after that date, you name it. I’ve already gotten to give a number of great talks and have more lined up, at bookstores and libraries, at universities and historic sites, even in a prison classroom! But I’ll always be very happy to add more to the list, and to travel near and far for the chance to do so. So please feel free to pass along thoughts or suggestions or invitations, whether in comments here or by email or on Twitter or whatever works!Third, thanks!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

April 19, 2019: Patriots’ Day Texts: The Rise of David Levinsky

[Only a couple New England states celebrate Patriots’ Day, which officially pays tribute to the colonial Minutemen who helped begin the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord. But the holiday offers a chance to think about patriotism in America more broadly, which I’ll do this week, starting with my annual Patriots’ Day post, continuing through a series on critically patriotic texts, and leading up to an update on my new AmericanStudying book!]On a fascinating text that explores, extols, and explodes the rags to riches narrative.Abraham Cahan’s 1917 novel The Rise of David Levinsky is a very long book (530 pages in the edition I have at least), and so I can’t quite argue that all Americans should read it. But there’s a reason why it’s been on the syllabus for my American Novel to 1950 class since the first time I taught that course in one of my earliest semesters at Fitchburg State, and will likely remain on that syllabus for all future iterations: this is one of those rare works of classic literature that offers in equal measure reflections of its own time period and profoundly relevant commentaries for our own moment. It does so through a number of central threads and themes, including its portrayal of Jewish American immigration to the U.S. in the late 19th century and its depiction of protagonist David’s socially and psychologically complex romantic relationships with a number of important female characters (all in one way or another inspired by his equally complex relationship to his late mother, whom he literally and figuratively leaves behind in the old country of Russia). But perhaps no element of Cahan’s novel is more relevant to AmericanStudying, then and now, than its depiction of the American Dream.As its title suggests, Rise presents a story of success, a portrayal of the rags-to-riches narrative that had by this time become very well-established in American mythology. As David narrates in the book’s opening sentences, “Sometimes, when I think of my past in a superficial, casual way, the metamorphosis I have gone through strikes me as nothing short of a miracle. I was born and reared in the lowest depths of poverty and I arrived in America—in 1885—with four cents in my pocket. I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States.” The next sentences complicate that narrative, to be sure: “And yet when I take a lok at my inner identity it impresses me as being precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power, the amount of worldly happiness at my command, and the rest of it, seem to be devoid of significance.” But of course David does have all those things, quite precisely can have his cake while he also reflects thoughtfully on it, and thus the novel presents from its opening moments a clear and unavoidable tale of stunning success in many of the ways it has been and continues to be defined.Abraham Cahan was a lifelong and dedicated socialist and labor activist, however; and while Risedoesn’t delve into those topics in the same overt ways as a short story of his like “A Sweatshop Romance” (1909), it nonetheless offers such critiques of the same society and success it also embodies through its protagonist. It does so in part through David’s engagements with labor unions and the working class, conflicts that David views entirely through a purposefully (for the reader) limited lens of Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism. But it also does so through David’s enduring unhappiness: the novel’s last book, “Episodes of a Lonely Life,” expands on the opening paragraph and delves deeply into why David feels so isolated and incomplete despite his massive success and wealth. Through both of those elements—the depiction of competing, more or less collective visions of American society; and the portrayal of the limits of individual accomplishment in a society driven by the less collective vision—Cahan’s novel both critiques some of the Gilded Age excesses that continued to dominate America into the 20th century and imagines alternative possibilities and paths, even if its shallowly successful protagonist cannot quite connect to those alternate ideals.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other patriotic texts you’d highlight?

April 18, 2019: Patriots’ Day Texts: “The Land of the Free”

[Only a couple New England states celebrate Patriots’ Day, which officially pays tribute to the colonial Minutemen who helped begin the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord. But the holiday offers a chance to think about patriotism in America more broadly, which I’ll do this week, starting with my annual Patriots’ Day post, continuing through a series on critically patriotic texts, and leading up to an update on my new AmericanStudying book!]On two critically patriotic texts that together produce one of our best recent cultural works.Despite their being one of my favorite 21st century bands, it seems that I’ve only written about The Killers in one paragraph of one post in this blog’s first 8.5 years. And that paragraph itself reveals the main reason why they haven’t shown up much here: not only has their music not generally engaged in the kinds of social or political commentary that typically lands musicians on the “pages” of AmericanStudies; but indeed they’ve offered critiques of those artists who do provide such commentary, at least in front man Brandon Flowers’ October 2006 criticisms of Green Day’s American Idiotalbum and tour that I referenced in that prior post. Of course no musical artist (or artist period) is required to do or feature any particular thing in their work; but unsurprisingly, many of my favorite artists (in all media) do include such social threads and themes more consistently in their works, so I can’t say I haven’t hoped that The Killers might not do so (and haven’t perhaps at times tried to read contemporary social issues into songs like 2012’s “Battle Born” that don’t necessarily entirely bear out such readings).Well, in January of this year I got my wish, and indeed got way more than I could have predicted or imagined. That’s when The Killers released “Land of the Free,” their new single and a song that offers one of the most overt and compelling critically patriotic takes on American identity I’ve encountered in pop culture in a long while. “Land” shares much more than most of a title with one of my favorite American short stories, Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free (1912)”: like that story, the song opens with idyllic images of immigration and the American Dream, and then moves into a series of increasingly biting, critical depictions of the gaps between such national ideals and the lived realities and experiences for far too many Americans (if not indeed us all). The song features a number of such social issues, from racism, police profiling, and mass incarceration to mass shootings and gun violence. But its final verse returns to those opening themes of immigration for perhaps the most ironic engagement with the title phrase and ideal: “Down at the border, they’re gonna put up a wall/Concrete and Rebar steel beams/High enough to keep all those filthy hands off/Of our hopes and our dreams/People who just want the same things we do/In the land of the free.” Such moments and lyrics would be more than enough to land “Land of the Free” in this week’s series, and on the short list of my favorite recent songs and works. But there’s a whole additional layer, one provided by filmmaker Spike Lee (!)’s stunning music video (really a short film unto itself in many ways). From what I can tell, Lee and his crew spent quite a bit of time with one or more of the migrant “caravans” that have received such over-the-top political and media attention over the last year, and the result is a short film that offers both profoundly humanizing depictions of those would-be asylum seekers and powerfully frustrating portrayals of the resistance and tear gas with which they have been met at the US-Mexico border. That film certainly embodies the song’s final verse, capturing both its critique of current policies and its patriotic recognition that these potential immigrants embody our national identity and ideals. But it’s also, again, a cultural work in its own right, and a striking addition to the career and oeuvre of one of our most consistently thoughtful, complicated, and critically patriotic filmmakers and artists.Patriotic series continues tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other patriotic texts you’d highlight?

April 17, 2019: Patriots’ Day Texts: “Let America Be America Again”

[Only a couple New England states celebrate Patriots’ Day, which officially pays tribute to the colonial Minutemen who helped begin the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord. But the holiday offers a chance to think about patriotism in America more broadly, which I’ll do this week, starting with my annual Patriots’ Day post, continuing through a series on critically patriotic texts, and leading up to an update on my new AmericanStudying book!]On how Langston Hughes’s fiery poem helps us challenge a superficially similar slogan.On the surface, Donald Trump’s campaign (and administration) slogan “Make America Great Again” might seem to fit the bill for the concept of critical patriotism on which both this series and much of my recent work focus. Even if you’re not a longstanding reader of this blog, or friend of mine, or someone who knows me in any capacity whatsoever, however, you’re likely aware that there is precisely nothing about Trump’s slogan that appeals to me. Obviously that has a good deal to do with the person and campaign and administration behind it, but even in terms of the phrase itself, I would say that I disagree strenuously with its interpretation of three of the four words. That is, Trump’s vision of America, his sense of what has made the nation great, and his understanding of a past to which we should aim to return, are all to my mind equally constructed, mythic, and white supremacist. All of that means that his vision of how we should achieve the phrase’s goals is also, as the last 2+ years have more than amply demonstrated, pretty divisive and destructive and horrific, meaning I suppose that I even disagree with his particular version of the word “make.”The first stanza of Langston Hughes’s 1936 poem “Let America Be America Again” suggests a similarly mythic vision of America: “Let America be America again./Let it be the dream it used to be./Let it be the pioneer on the plain/Seeking a home where he himself is free.” But the next, one line, parenthetical stanza immediately and brutally undermines that opening: “(America never was America to me.)” That bracing rebuke echoes one of the most striking individual images from the 2016 presidential campaign: the young African American woman, Krystal Lake, whose “America Was Never Great” hat went viral in May 2016. Hughes’s poem certainly expresses that perspective, especially in these parenthetical asides that build to the longest and most overt: “(There’s never been equality for me,/Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’)” As I wrote in the above hyperlinked piece on Lake’s viral hat, I entirely understand and sympathize with this perspective, and would never pretend that I could speak for Lake, or Hughes, or anyone who might justifiably express this vision of American history and identity; but I do personally find that vision too dismissive of the greatness of figures like Hughes and so many others who have written and spoken and worked and advocated for the best of America.And while Hughes’s poem begins with and certainly does justice to that critical perspective, it also and to my mind most importantly moves very fully in its second half into a critically patriotic vision of the nation as well. That happens most potently in the second repetition of the title phrase: “O, let America be America again—/The land that never has been yet—/And yet must be—the land where every man is free.” And the poem’s critical patriotism culminates in the penultimate stanza, which repeats but crucially revises the first parenthetical rebuke: “O, yes,/I say it plain,/America never was America to me,/And yet I swear this oath—/America will be!” Hughes’s dense and stirring poems include a great deal more than just the threads I’ve highlighted here, but at its core it is precisely one of the plainest and most powerful expressions of both elements of the concept of critical patriotism. Its last line, “And make America again!,” might seem quite close to Donald Trump’s infamous slogan, but I literally can’t imagine a more crucially contrasting text and vision. Patriotic series continues tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other patriotic texts you’d highlight?

April 16, 2019: Patriots’ Day Texts: “This Land”

[Only a couple New England states celebrate Patriots’ Day, which officially pays tribute to the colonial Minutemen who helped begin the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord. But the holiday offers a chance to think about patriotism in America more broadly, which I’ll do this week, starting with my annual Patriots’ Day post, continuing through a series on critically patriotic texts, and leading up to an update on my new AmericanStudying book!]On three layers to Gary Clark Jr.’s raw and compelling new song (and video). When I finally got around to checking out Gary Clark Jr.’s “This Land” in late January, after I had seen it highly recommended by reliable voices for at least a couple weeks, what immediately blew me away was the chorus: “I remember when you used to tell me/‘Nigga run, nigga run/Go back where you come from/ Nigga run, nigga run/Go back where you come from/We don’t want you, we don’t want your kind/We think you’s a dog born’/Fuck you, I’m America’s son/This is where I come from.” I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a more succinct expression of the debate between the exclusionary and inclusive definitions of America on which my forthcoming book focuses: Clark apparently was prompted to write the song when he was confronted by a particular horrific version of the exclusionary attitude, when he was attacked and called the n-word in front of his young son; and his choice to quote that perspective directly and then respond so forcefully in the chorus is thus at the heart of the song’s reason for being as well as its resulting identity and meanings. The song’s lyrics (there and throughout) are more than powerful enough to speak for themselves, but the striking video, directed by filmmaker Savanah Leaf, contributes additional and equally potent layers as well. It does so most visibly and consistently through its use of Southern gothic imagery, starting with the decaying former plantation (flying an upside-down American flag) in which Clark is located for most of the video. Thanks in no small measure to Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade (2016), among other prominent cultural influences and images (including the new, third season of True Detective), the Southern gothic has returned to American popular culture with a vengeance in recent years. Leaf’s video for Clark’s song builds on those longstanding and evolving influences, weds them to more overt depictions of racial violence (especially nooses) than is sometimes the case in the symbolic gothic, and centers them all on repeated and stunning images of the Confederate flag (along with the MAGA hat one of the two most contested American symbols of the last decade). This is Southern gothic with a very pointed 2019 twist.That might all seem more critical than critically patriotic, of course, and both “This Land” and its video have that more justifiably angry side to be sure. But I would argue that the video and Clark do put even the darkest images in service of depictions of and arguments for the future, and the video especially does that through one central choice: besides Clark, every other person in the video is a young African American kid. As that hyperlinked interview reflects, that choice was certainly inspired by the role that Clark’s own young son played in the experiences that prompted the song (as well as in every aspect of Clark’s life for the last four years, of course). And I suppose one could argue that watching these young African Americans confront images of racism, past and present, is its own form of darkness and anger. But I believe that the video’s use of kids, and particularly the culminating images of those kids watching and singing around a bonfire for the various neo-Confederate images, offers instead a portrayal of a future in which the next generations, those America’s sons and daughters, can create a different set of narratives and communities. I can’t imagine a more important and inspiring vision of critical patriotism than that!Patriotic series continues tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other patriotic texts you’d highlight?

April 15, 2019: Patriots’ Day

[Only a couple New England states celebrate Patriots’ Day, which officially pays tribute to the colonial Minutemen who helped begin the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord. But the holiday offers a chance to think about patriotism in America more broadly, which I’ll do this week, starting with my annual Patriots’ Day post and leading up to an update on my new AmericanStudying book!]
On the only time and way we can be patriotic.
One of my favorite literary exchanges of all time, and the one with which I began the Introduction to my fourth book, occurs in the opening chapter of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones(1996; the first book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series that has been adapted into the popular HBO show). Seven year-old Brandon “Bran” Stark is riding home with his father and brothers from his first experience witnessing one of his father’s most difficult duties as a lord, the execution of a criminal; his father insists that if he is to sentence men to die, he should be the one to execute them, and likewise insists that his sons learn of and witness this once they are old enough. Two of Bran’s brothers have been debating whether the man died bravely or as a coward, and when Bran asks his father which was true, his father turns the question around to him. “Can a man be brave when he is afraid?” Bran asks. “That is the only time a man can be brave,” his father replies.
On the surface the line might seem obvious, an appeal to some of our very trite narratives about courage in the face of danger and the like (narratives that operate in explicit contrast to the ideas of cowardice with which I engaged in this post). But to my mind the moment, like all of Martin’s amazingly dense and complex series, works instead to undermine our easy narratives and force us to confront more difficult and genuine truths. That is, I believe we tend to define bravery, courage, heroism as the absence of fear, as those individuals who in the face of danger do not feel the same limiting emotions that others do and so can rise to the occasion more fully. But Martin’s truth is quite the opposite—that bravery is instead something that is found through and then beyond fear, that it is only by admitting the darker and more potentially limiting realities that we can then strive for the brightest and most ideal possibilities. I find that insight so potent not only because of its potential to revise oversimplifying narratives and force us to confront a complex duality instead, but also because it posits a version of heroism that any individual can achieve—if everyone feels fear in the face of danger, then everyone has the potential to be brave as well.
HBO recently premiered the final season of their award-winning series A Game of Thrones; the first season covered all of that first book of Martin’s, the second moved on to book two, and so on for subsequent seasons. I’ve only ever watched season one and had mixed feelings that kept me from going further at this point, but no matter what the series has brought Martin’s works and themes to a far wider audience. But if that’s one reason why I’m thinking about this exchange today, the other is of course this Massachusetts (and Maine)-specific holiday: Patriots’ Day. As with our narratives of courage and heroism, I believe that far too many of our ideals of patriotism focus on what I would call the easy kind: the patriotism that salutes a flag, that sings an anthem, that pledges allegiance, that says things like “God bless America” and “greatest country in the world” by rote. Whatever the communal value of such patriotism, it asks virtually nothing of individuals, and does even less to push a nation to be the best version of itself (if anything, it argues that the nation is already that best version). So in parallel to Martin’s line, I would argue for the harder and more genuine kind of patriotism, the kind that faces the darkest realities and strives for the brightest hope through that recognition, the kind that, when asked “Can an American be a patriot if he/she is critical of his/her country?,” replies, “That is the only time an American can be a patriot.”Patriotic series continues tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

April 13-14, 2019: StatueStudying: Charlottesville Statues and Memorials

[On April 9th, 2003 a group of both Iraqi civilians and U.S. military forces together toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, a hugely symbolic moment that highlights the role statues can play in our communal spaces and identities. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied that moment and four other statues, leading up to this weekend post on my own continuing thoughts on Confederate statues like those in my hometown.]On two distinct spaces where Charlottesville seeks to remember, and one hope moving forward.Nearly two years after the chaotic and violent rally in (if not to my mind truly focused on) Cville’s Lee Park, the statue of Robert E. Lee (and a neighboring one of Stonewall Jackson near the town courthouse) remains where it has stood for about a century. The city has changed the park’s name to Emancipation Park, a largely symbolic (and perhaps relatively unknown, at least outside of Cville itself) gesture but certainly a change nonetheless. For a time, the Lee and Jackson statues were covered by tarps; protesters kept removing the tarps under cover of darkness, however, and eventually a judge ruled that the tarps could not stay on indefinitely (since their stated purpose was “mourning,” which he ruled has an expiration date) and so they have been taken away. Now the statues are surrounded by metal fences that both keep visitors or vandals from getting too close and change the view from simply that of a marble memorial to a Confederate officer to something more overtly fraught and contested. In all those and other ways, Lee Park’s construction of public memory has continued to evolve over the last couple years, although I don’t know whether the park, Charlottesville, or we all are any closer to a truly meaningful reckoning with the questions and histories at play there.On the other side of Charlottesville’s historic Downtown Mall is a very different and much more inspiring public memorial. In the worst moment of the August 12 violence, 32 year old paralegal and social justice activist Heather Heyer was killed when white supremacist James Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of protesters (at least 19 others were injured by this act of domestic terrorism). Just over four months later, the where Heyer was killed Heather Heyer Way, and in the months since the space has become an impromptu but very moving memorial to Heyer. The brick walls on both side of the street are covered with chalk messages, many paying direct tribute to Heyer (or expressing condolences to her family) but many others advancing broader thoughts and ideas that echo and extend the ideals for which Heyer fought and was still fighting when she was killed. I don’t doubt that the site has seen incidents of vandalism or hate speech, but on the two separate occasions when I visited (in May and August of 2018, respectively) I’ve encountered only those more commemorative and celebratory kinds of statements. While of course the very existence of the Heather Heyer memorial reflects fraught, tragic, and horrific histories and realities, the space itself offers some of the best of what both public memory and collective voices can offer. So where does Cville go from here? It’s far too simple to say that we can or should just follow the lead of or focus solely on the Heather Heyer memorial, for many reasons including the fact that Lee Park (whatever we now call it) continues to exist and demands our engagement as well. No amount of chalk messages, however thoughtful, can suffice for that historical, cultural, and contemporary dialogue. But at the same time, I’d say that the Heyer memorial is a pretty compelling example of critical patriotism and critical optimism—building off of a dark history, demanding that we remember it, but also using that place of public memory as a space to argue for the best of what we’ve been and are and can be. I’m not going to pretend that there’s any use of Lee Park that would satisfy the types who came to Cville in August 2017 to spread their hate and violence, nor for that matter do I have any interest in appeasing (or even talking with) that group of white supremacist neo-nazi assholes. But for the more thoughtful and sane of us (a group that the critical optimist in me still believes outnumbers the assholes, although I have my moments these days…), I can see great value in using such historical spaces in precisely that way—commenting on the prior histories, to make sure we acknowledge and engage with their presence and effects; but adding layers of collective voice and inspiration, to make sure we recognize that we are not bound by the worst of our past. If that can be one legacy of August 12th, it would be a potent and crucial one.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Thoughts on these statues, or other statues you’d highlight and analyze?

April 12, 2019: StatueStudying: The Spirit of Detroit and the Cleveland War Memorial Fountain

[On April 9th, 2003 a group of both Iraqi civilians and U.S. military forces together toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, a hugely symbolic moment that highlights the role statues can play in our communal spaces and identities. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and four other statues, leading up to a weekend post on my own continuing thoughts on Confederate statues like those in my hometown.]On the inspiring messages and missing histories of two linked statues.Sculptor Marshall Fredericks(1908-1998) lived for much of the 20th century, and for much of the century’s second half was the nation’s preeminent creator of public statues and monuments. He created his first such public sculpture, the Levi L. Barbour Memorial Fountain on Detroit’s Belle Isle, in the 1930s, but it was after his time in the Air Force during World War II that Fredericks completed the majority of his numerous, prominent public projects. These include Christ on the Cross at the Indian River (Michigan) Catholic Shrine; The Freedom of the Human Spirit for the 1964 New York World’s Fair (now relocated to near the US Tennis Association’s Arthur Ashe Stadium); the Man and the Expanding Universe Fountain at the US State Department’s Washington, DC headquarters; and the two Midwestern statues on which I’ll focus for the remainder of this post: the Spirit of Detroit at the city’s Coleman A. Young Municipal Center; and the Cleveland War Memorial Fountain: Peace Arising from the Flames of War (also known as the Fountain of Eternal Life).Both of these beautiful public statues/memorials feature inspiring, spiritual messages that clearly reflect Fredericks’ perspective and voice. Spirit of Detroit, dedicated in 1958, features a plaque that reads, “The artist expresses the concept that God, through the spirit of man is manifested in the family, the noblest human relationship”; in his left and right hands the figure holds symbolic representations of God and the human family, respectively. The War Memorial Fountain, dedicated six years later in 1964, features a central figure escaping the flames of war and reaching for peace, and surrounds him with (per Fredericks’ own statements about the statue) symbolic representations of an interconnected world: a bronze sphere that (like the sphere in the left hand of Spirit) reflects spiritual beliefs and stories; and four granite carvings that embody the world’s civilizations. These overarching messages and ideas would be important and inspiring in any setting, but certainly especially were in the depths of the Cold War, the strife and divisions of the 1960s, and other historical and cultural contexts of that post-war period.There’s nothing wrong with public memorials and art that present such overarching messages and themes, such universe images and ideals. Yet at the same time, my favorite public statues/memorials, like the Salem Witch Trials Memorial, link broader themes to specific, local histories and conversations, and on that level I’m not sure these two Fredericks statues quite succeed. The War Memorial did include on its framing rim a tribute to the 4000 Greater Clevelanders who gave their lives in WWII and the Korean War (and has since been expanded to include casualties and veterans of other wars as well), which is a definite and important local connection. But outside of those names (and of course every city sent its own soldiers to those and other wars), I would say that both statues could be moved to other sites or cities and have precisely the same messages and themes, largely unaffected by the different contexts. For a war memorial perhaps that’s fitting, as war implicates and affects us all, and task of remembering and mourning is a truly shared one. But for a statue named Spirit of Detroit, I would argue that at least a bit more specific engagement with that particular city’s histories and stories, community and identity, would be a positive addition, one that could complement the inspiring overarching messages and present viewers with a sense of this unique American space at the same time.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other statues you’d highlight and analyze?

April 11, 2019: StatueStudying: Christ of the Ozarks

[On April 9th, 2003 a group of both Iraqi civilians and U.S. military forces together toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, a hugely symbolic moment that highlights the role statues can play in our communal spaces and identities. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and four other statues, leading up to a weekend post on my own continuing thoughts on Confederate statues like those in my hometown.]On a few illuminating contexts for a ginormous American statue.Near Eureka Springs, Arkansas, at the top of the strikingly named Magnetic Mountain, stands a 65.5 foot-tall statue of Jesus. “Christ of the Ozarks” was erected by retired clergyman and political organizer Gerald L.K. Smith as part of a planned religious theme park on his sprawling estate that he called collectively his “Sacred Projects” (that overall project largely didn’t pan out, although Smith did also build a 4100-seat amphitheater where performances of “The Great Passion Play” are to this day featured almost nightly from May through October each year and have become one of the nation’s most-attended theatrical events). The statue, designed primarily by sculptor Emmet Sullivan and completed in 1966, faces the town of Eureka Springs as a blessing on and thank you to the town for allowing Smith to construct such a giant monument. I haven’t seen confirmation of this, but I have to believe it’s the second largest statue in the U.S. that portrays a single human subject, trailing only Monday’s subject the Statue of Liberty (and of course Jesus Christ was an actual historical figure as well as a symbolic one like Lady Liberty). When we learn more about the personal and social histories of both Smith and Sullivan, the symbolic American meanings of “Christ of the Ozarks” deepen significantly. Smith initially rose to national prominence working with Huey Long in Louisiana; he quit his ministry in order to help run Long’s Share Our Wealth campaign, and took it over entirely after Long’s 1935 assassination. But while Long focused more overtly on issues of class and poverty, Smith was more dedicated to the cause of white supremacy, and gradually moved more fully into that realm. Those efforts culminated during World War II, in the course of which he founded the anti-Semitic America First Party and ran for President in 1944, denied the Holocaust, lobbied for the release of the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, and generally became one of America’s most extreme white supremacist voices. I don’t mean to suggest that white supremacy and Evangelical Christianity are necessarily linked, but they certainly have often been, as we’re seeing again with the strikingly resilient evangelical support for our most overtly white supremacist president. At the very least it’s an important and telling fact that the nation’s largest monument to Christianity was constructed by one of the most extreme white supremacists of at least the last century.Emmet Sullivan, the sculptor of “Christ of the Ozarks,” fortunately was not as far as I can tell an extreme white supremacist (or even a white supremacist at all). Instead, his telling American contexts are to two quite distinct South Dakota artistic and cultural projects. Born in Montana, Sullivan’s first significant project was his work as one of the sculptors of Mount Rushmore in the late 1920s and 1930s. During those same years, Sullivan received his first sizeable solo project, designing and sculpting the five mammoth dinosaurs (sorry paleontologists, I know that’s a frustrating pairing of words) at Rapid City’s Dinosaur Park. Despite their relative proximity, these two sculptures might seem not only different but ever opposed, with one based on American history and the other on distant and unrelated prehistories of the continent. But I would say that both depict actual historical figures in larger than life and somewhat caricatured ways, reflecting more their symbolic value than any details of their historical identities. And in that sense, there might be a compelling continuity between those projects and Sullivan’s last prominent one (completed just four years before his death), “Christ of the Ozarks.”Last statue tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other statues you’d highlight and analyze?