Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 234

April 5, 2018: Theater in America: Hansberry’s Husband and Wife

[On April 6th, 1947, the first Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre—or the Tony Awards for short—were given in New York City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and moments in American theater—share your dramatic responses and thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post sure to get a standing O!]On Lorraine Hansberry’s realistic, flawed, and deeply moving young married couple.Walter and Ruth Younger, the young husband and wife at the center of Lorraine Hansberry’s seminal play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), are perhaps the least sympathetic of the Youngers, the drama’s major characters. To be sure, as in the case in any great dramatic work, all the characters have their flaws: but while the overly proud, widowed Mama (Lena) is also struggling to keep her family together; self-centered elitist Beneatha is impressively going to school to become a doctor; and naïve young Travis is just trying to grow up; Travis’s parents Walter and Ruth are defined mostly by their hot-and-cold marriage and Walter’s foolish and destructive get-rich-quick schemes. Some combination of those factors, Walter’s individual pipe dreams and the extremities to which their marital problems drive them both, could be said to lead to most of the family’s worst arguments and problems throughout the play.That could be said, but it’d be wrong, as the play’s final scenes reveal a much more systematic and significant culprit, putting the Youngers in the center of a broad and crucial biographical and historical context: the racial “covenants” that made it so difficult for African American and other minority families to move out of cities like Chicago and into suburban neighborhoods in the decades after World War II. While not as regimented or all-encompassing as the South’s system of Jim Crow segregation, the covenants did an equally thorough job of segregating their respective urban and suburban worlds, and proved a powerfully difficult impediment to the dreams of families like the Youngers. Systems like the covenants don’t explain away all of Walter’s irresponsibilities or Ruth’s enabling—again, no dramatic work as impressive as Hansberry’s treats its characters as mere ciphers—but they certainly better reveal the world in which these characters are trying to survive and succeed, and to an open-minded audience render Walter and Ruth significantly more sympathetic as a result.But in the final scene Hansberry takes the couple, and her play, one step further still. The Youngers have been approached by a representative from the neighborhood association of the suburban community into which they hope to move, a man who is offering them money in exchange for their withdrawing their purchase of that suburban home. In one of the play’s most traditional moments, not only in terms of gender roles but also because it embodies the spirit of Walter Sr., the family’s departed father, both Mama and Ruth allow Walter to make the decision; and Walter rises to the occasion, saying no to the lure of easy money and rejecting the offer. He gains a great deal of respect from Mama in the process, but perhaps even more significant is Ruth’s response: she seems to see in her husband for the first time in years the man she married, a man who can model for Travis a strong, proud, resilient African American identity and manhood in the face of some of the worst their society can throw at them. The moment and scene are tremendously moving for many reasons, but certainly at the top of the list is seeing the reconnection between this flawed and troubled but likewise resilient and impressive couple.The drama concludes tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other dramatic works or moments you’d highlight?

April 4, 2018: Theater in America: Depression Drama and Odets

[On April 6th, 1947, the first Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre—or the Tony Awards for short—were given in New York City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and moments in American theater—share your dramatic responses and thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post sure to get a standing O!]On activist drama, in- and outside of its approved spaces.Among the more unique and impressive of the Depression-era New Deal programs was the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). Created in 1935 as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Project included a number of innovative and compelling initiatives: the nation-wide Negro Theatre Project (NTP), including the famous New York Negro Unit that featured plays by Orson Welles, Arna Bontemps, and Countee Cullen (among others); the experimental, political, and controversial Living Newspaper productions; and more. In an era when it would have been easy to withdraw federal support for theatrical and creative works and performances, the FTP, like the WPA more broadly, instead made a compelling case for the communal and social value of such works.In the same year that the FTP was created, New York’s innovative Group Theatre company staged the first production of Clifford Odets’ play Waiting for Lefty (1935). Set amongst a group of New York cabdrivers taking part in a fictional strike, and featuring multiple moments in which characters break the fourth wall and directly address the audience, imploring them to take social and political action, Odets’ play is a thoroughly and strikingly activist work, one described in an early negative review as “a very dramatic equivalent of soap-box oratory.” Many of the FTP’s productions, especially the Living Newspaper performances, were without question political and activist—but Odets’ play, with its endorsements of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and other socialist moments, to my mind went further than any FTP productions did or (given the difference between federal and private theatre companies) likely could.It’d thus be easy, and not inaccurate, to see Odets and the Group Theatre in competition with, or at least offering a distinct alternative to, the FTP productions—and, again, to extend that comparison to make a broader distinction between federally supported and truly outsider theater. But at the same time, it’s pretty amazing to think of all that took place in New York City drama in 1935-6: with Odets’ play opening, the first New York Negro Unit productions (including both Welles’ Voodoo Macbeth and Bontemps and Cullen’s The Conjur Man Dies) mounted, the initial Living Newspaper performances (such as the Dust Bowl drama Triple-A Plowed Under ) ongoing, and more. All innovative, all activist, and all artistically challenging and engaging, these works complemented and were in conversation with each other at least as much as they contrasted, and reveal the impressive state of Depression-era American drama.The drama continues tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other dramatic works or moments you’d highlight?

April 3, 2018: Theater in America: The Iceman Cometh

[On April 6th, 1947, the first Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre—or the Tony Awards for short—were given in New York City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and moments in American theater—share your dramatic responses and thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post sure to get a standing O!]On a dark and compelling portrait of hollow dreams, and where it comes up short.The late 1940s saw the first productions of an incredible trio of American dramatic works, each among its talented author’s, as well as the century’s and the nation’s, finest: Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (written in 1939 but first performed in 1946); Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desir e (1947); and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). I wrote a bit about Miller’s portrayal of identity, family, and the American Dream in this post; I hope to do the same for Williams’ play, and the equally compelling and groundbreaking 1951 film version, at some point down the road. But today I wanted to focus specifically on the coldest of the trio, in every sense: O’Neill’s funny and dynamic but ultimately bleak and cynical Iceman.Examined in relationship to O’Neill’s general métier, the kinds of extreme, psychological family melodramas exemplified by Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956) and Desire Under the Elms (1924), Iceman is positively comic by comparison. The dreamers and schemers who populate the play’s barroom setting are as drunken and deluded as O’Neill’s characters tend to be, but they’re also a lively and witty bunch, one-upping each other’s stories and attempted cons as they await the titular character and their collective icon, legendary salesman Theodore “Hickey” Hickman. To my mind, those diverse tones make Iceman O’Neill’s most successful work, not only at keeping an audience engaged throughout but also at capturing both the dreams and the nightmares, the myths and the realities, that so often comprise American identities, individual and communal. When Hickey’s story and identity collapse in the play’s final act, that is, the contrast between the ideal and the real is emphasized—for the other characters and for us—far more potently and effectively than would otherwise be the case.Yet Iceman is not without its shortcomings, and in many ways they’re as telling as its strengths. For one thing, the play’s depiction of women is even more limited than Death of a Salesman’s (as I discussed in that aforementioned post); Iceman’s prostitutes are quite literally cyphers on whom the much more complex male characters simply project their needs and myths, and that’s even more true of the absent female character (Hickey’s murdered wife) on whom much of the play’s climax hinges. But even if we take the play on its own terms, focus on those complex characters at its heart, I would argue that in their distinct but ultimately parallel stories O’Neill’s cynical coldness becomes self-fulfilling and thus self-defeating. That is, if every image is false, every story a myth, every dream a delusion, it becomes far less possible to invest in the significance of any one such story and hope—if they’re all “pipe dreams,” to use the play’s constant refrain, then no particular one of them, nor by extension any of ours, matters at all. That level of consistent cynicism is more than just unappealing to a critical optimist such as this AmericanStudier—it becomes more of a reflex than an analytical or thoughtful take on identity or America.The drama continues tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other dramatic works or moments you’d highlight?

April 2, 2018: Theater in America: Provincetown and Trifles

[On April 6th, 1947, the first Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre—or the Tony Awards for short—were given in New York City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and moments in American theater—share your dramatic responses and thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post sure to get a standing O!]On the moment, community, and play that signaled a dramatic shift.
Despite the way us English profs like to structure survey classes—and I’m as guilty of this one as anybody—literary history doesn’t tend to break up into neat or orderly time periods and movements. Other than the very explicitly self-identifying and –defined movements, like the Harlem Renaissance, for the most part these categories and trends comprise instead precisely our scholarly efforts to look back at complex and overlapping collections of writers and texts and styles and focal points and assemble them into more easily digested (and, yes, taught) bits. Doesn’t mean that the bits aren’t without value or can’t help us see our literary and cultural history, just that they can be pretty reductive or limiting, especially in how we see a particular author or text. But having said that, sometimes the moments when literature shifts from one style or movement or another are more overt and striking; when I had the chance to teach American Drama a few years back, I realized that the early 20th century, and even more exactly the founding of the Provincetown Players in the mid-1910s, represents exactly such a transitional moment.
Up through the end of the 19thcentury, American drama had been dominated by the melodramatic—the over-the-top villains, the doomed love stories, the comic relief characters, the big musical cues, the swordfights on stage, etc. European drama had been evolving into something much more socially realistic for some time, spearheaded by folks like Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, but as far as I can tell, that trend hadn’t reached our shores by the turn of the century. But in the summer of 1915, a group of young playwrights and performers vacationing in Provincetown, Massachusetts, led by a married couple, George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell—all of whom having experienced rejection and frustration in the mainstream theatrical world of the era—began sharing their works with each other; the following year Cook and Glaspell made the impromptu gathering into an official theatrical community, the Provincetown Players/Playhouse. The Players quickly became best known—and are still most significant in American literary and cultural history—for introducing the works of Eugene O’Neill, who is in many ways the poster child for the shift to a new social and psychological realism in American drama. But while his first plays debuted with them in the late 1910s, and his first hit ( The Emperor Jones ) in 1920, it is a one-act play of Glaspell’s from 1916 that truly to my mind signals the literary sea-change represented by Provincetown.
That play, Trifles, focuses on an event as melodramatic as they get: the murder of a rural farmer, found strangled with a noose in bed next to his sleeping wife; the wife denies any knowledge of the crime but is of course the principal suspect in her husband’s death. That Glaspell based this event on an actual crime that she had investigated and written about during a stint as a journalist in Iowa makes the play’s focus real but not necessarily realistic; she certainly could have created a melodramatic text from this starting point. But while the play does feature the murder mystery at its core, it does so in a profoundly realistic and powerful way: it is set solely in the farmhouse’s kitchen, and so the three male characters who are ostensibly investigating the crime (two local law enforcement representatives and the neighbor who found the body) are looking elsewhere and fruitlessly for most of the play; the two female characters, the wives of the sheriff and of the neighbor, stay in the kitchen and, through their informal investigations there as well as their conversations and developing understandings, unravel the details of the crime (and a great deal else). When the male neighbor says early in the play that “women are used to worrying over trifles,” he is thus not only entirely wrong about whose focus and knowledge are ultimately validated, but also ironically helping Glaspell communicate a central thesis of her new, realistic dramatic style: that it is in the trifles, the small details of (for example) a farmhouse’s kitchen, that life’s most central questions and identities and relationships can unfold and be captured.As with all the literary works on which I’ve focused in this space, the value of Glaspell’s play extends well beyond just scholarly conversations or even classrooms. For one thing, it’s an engaging and often engrossing character study and murder mystery, an example of how political art can also be appealing and popular (and in multiple iterations, as Glaspell later turned it into a great short story, “A Jury of Her Peers”). But it’s also a really striking reflection of a moment when American drama was changing, when a group of American artists recognized the significance of the far from trifling realities and lives and communities that had often been excluded from our literature, and began to create enduring works focused on them. The drama continues tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other dramatic works or moments you’d highlight?

March 31-April 1, 2018: March 2018 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]March 5: Boston Massacre Studying: Soldiers in the City: On the anniversary of the Boston Massacre, a series starts with two ways to contextualize the dynamic that precipitated the event.March 6: Boston Massacre Studying: Crispus Attucks: The series continues with adding layers to collective memories, and what we do when we can’t know for sure.March 7: Boston Massacre Studying: John Adams: A Founding Father’s frustrating role in the massacre’s aftermath, and why it still matters.March 8: Boston Massacre Studying: Christopher Monk: The massacre’s sixth casualty and the vagaries of historical memory, as the series rolls on.March 9: Boston Massacre Studying: Collective Memory Media: The series concludes with three forms of media that have contributed to our collective memories of the massacre.March 10-11: Boston Massacre Studying: My Sons’ Thoughts: One of my favorite Guest Posts ever, featuring thoughts from my sons’ experiences learning about the massacre!March 12-18: Spring Break: It wasn’t really Spring, but the blog took a break nonetheless—and asked for your ideas, which you can still share in comments!March 19: Black Panther Studying: The Original Comic: A series on the blockbuster film starts with the 1960s comic and Black Power.March 20: Black Panther Studying: Erik Killmonger: The series continues with the fascinating debates over the film’s most American character. March 21: Black Panther Studying: Everett Ross: The film’s unfortunate change to a longstanding comic character, and his important role nonetheless.March 22: Black Panther Studying: Gender and Violence: Two distinct but interconnected associations of gender and violence in the film, as the series rolls on.March 23: Black Panther Studying: Liberia, Garvey, and Wakanda: The series concludes with historical and cinematic American visions of Africa.March 24-25: Black Panther Studying: Ryan Coogler’s Films: A special weekend post on three choices that emblematize filmmaker Ryan Coogler’s unique and vital American voice.March 26: Baseball Stories: Play for a Kingdom: An Opening Day series starts with baseball, America, and the Civil War.March 27: Baseball Stories: The Given Day: The series continues with Babe Ruth, symbolism, and race in America.March 28: Baseball Stories: Field of Dreams and The Brothers K: Whether baseball can help heal generational divides, as the series rolls on.March 29: Baseball Stories: South Street: Pessimism, optimism, realism, and baseball in David Bradley’s tragicomic novel.March 30: Baseball Stories: Boston Strong: The series concludes with the communal roles, and limits, of sports in the aftermath of tragedy.Next series starts Monday, BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

March 30, 2018: Baseball Stories: Boston Strong

[For this year’s Opening Day series, I’ll be highlighting individual baseball stories and AmericanStudying their contexts and meanings. Play ball!]
On the communal roles, and limits, of sports in the aftermath of tragedy.
It’s difficult (if not impossible) to argue with the idea that the 2013 Boston Red Sox became inextricably intertwined with the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. From David Ortiz’s F-bomb heard ‘round the world to the Sports Illustrated cover celebrating the Sox’s run to a World Series championship, and in countless instances in between and since, the baseball season’s surprise team was connected to the year’s most striking tragedy. And, more exactly and more crucially, the team’s success was linked to the phrase that became ubiquitous after the Marathon and that was utiilized on that SI cover: Boston Strong. The phrase became so tied to the Sox that Fenway Park’s landscapers even began mowing it into the field itself during the playoffs.
It would be at least as difficult to argue that such associations were or are problematic, or that the Sox didn’t play a communal role in helping Boston move forward after one of the worst days in the city’s history—and I don’t plan to try. Indeed, as someone who is profoundly interested in communal memories and narratives, and especially in how we deal with and move forward through our darkest histories, I found a great deal to admire in how Boston has done so in this case. There are of course no perfect answers for how we grapple with darkness, and there are flaws with any and all options, but it seems clear in this instance—as in other recent ones, such as in New York in the aftermath of 9/11—that sports had a meaningful role to play. After all, the Sox are Bostonians and citizens too, grappling (as Ortiz’s comments demonstrated) with the same questions and traumas; it’s easy to think of professional athletes as super-human, but situations like these tend to reveal our shared humanity, and there are few more significant revelations.
If I were to analyze one limitation to what sports can do and offer in such circumstances, I would do so in direct relationship to my one issue with the Boston Strong phrase: its emphasis on entirely positive responses and stories, in explicit exclusion of other, more complex and dark ones. For example, it’s fair to say that the bombings—like any such event—inspired a host of negative emotions and responses, from fear and panic to bigotry and divisiveness. Admitting and engaging with those negatives wouldn’t in any way mean that we’d have to characterize the city or community through them—simply that we need to note that shared humanity includes some of our most painful or troubling as well as our best and most inspiring qualities. And while sports are good for many things, I don’t know that they can do much to help us engage with our darkest qualities—even if the Sox hadn’t won the championship, that is, the narrative of their season would have been an inspiring and uplifting one. Rightly so, perhaps; but there’s also a need for other stories and histories, ones that can’t be mowed onto the outfield grass but that are part of us nonetheless.March Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other baseball stories or histories you’d highlight?

March 29, 2018: Baseball Stories: South Street

[For this year’s Opening Day series, I’ll be highlighting individual baseball stories and AmericanStudying their contexts and meanings. Play ball!]
On pessimism, optimism, realism, and baseball.
David Bradley’s debut novel South Street (1975) is many things, often at the same time: a tragicomic farce of urban life; a romance; a crime novel; a biting satire; a raucous celebration. It opens with one of the most well-executed set-pieces you’ll ever read, features numerous unique and memorable characters, portrays its slice of Philadelphia with hyperbole and yet (to my mind) authenticity, and made me laugh out loud on more than a few occasions while keeping me in genuine suspense about the resolution of its central plotlines. Which is to say, there are lots of very good reasons to read this under-rated American novel, and lots of concurrent ways to AmericanStudy it. But among them is the unique and telling use to which it puts the Philadelphia Phillies games that serve as a near-constant backdrop in the South Street bar that’s the novel’s central setting.
On one level, the baseball games are literally and figuratively another of the novel’s jokes—the Phillies are always losing, and every new arrival to the bar simply inquires by how much they happen to be losing on this particular night. On the one night when they’re actually, miraculously ahead, the heavens refuse to cooperate, the game gets rained out, and the prospective victory is lost. Yet if these perennial losers would seem to validate the characters’ (and novel’s) most cynical and pessimistic views of their world and future, there’s a complication: the bar owner, Leo, keeps turning the games on, optimistically insistent that this time might be different. That dance, between pessimism and optimism, no joy in Mudville and Mighty Casey’s eternal possibilities, “dem bums” and “there’s always next year!,” is at the heart of much sports fandom, it seems to me—and much of American history, culture, and identity besides.
So does Bradley’s novel simply vacillate between the poles, just as it does between comedy and tragedy, humor and pathos, farce and slice of life? Not exactly, although it does make all those moves and more. I would also argue that in his portrayal of those hapless yet somehow still hopeful Phillies, Bradley has created a powerfully realistic image—not just of sports fandom, or of human nature, but of the African American community and its conflicted, contradictory, but sustained and crucial relationship to the nation. Ta-Nehisi Coates has written frequently and eloquently about the defining presence of racism and white supremacy in the American story, and how much such forces have made America a losing game for its African American citizens. Yet, undeniably and inspiringly, the vast majority of African Americans have long refused—and continue to refuse—to give in to the pessimism, have found ways to maintain an optimism about America and the future that is mirrored in Leo’s nightly return to the Phillies. There’s always next year, indeed.
Last baseball story tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other baseball stories you’d highlight?

March 28, 2018: Baseball Stories: Field of Dreams and The Brothers K

[For this year’s Opening Day series, I’ll be highlighting individual baseball stories and AmericanStudying their contexts and meanings. Play ball!]
On divisive decades and histories, and whether baseball can bring us together.
I don’t know that the events and changes of the 1960s necessarily had to divide Americans so fully, or even that they did divide us quite as much as our narratives and histories usually suggest—but the fact that the narratives and histories emphasize the divisions as consistently and thoroughly as they do is itself a telling reminder of the decade’s divisiveness, in our memories if nothing else (and of course there were also many such divisions at the time without question). And while the divisions are often framed, in our 21stcentury narratives, as between liberals/progressives and conservatives, it seems to me that it would be just as accurate to describe the decade’s divisions (particularly in terms of cultural trends outside of specific social and political movements; things like, y’know, sex, drugs, and rock and roll) as between generations, and thus, much of the time, as between parents and children.
It’s through precisely such parent-child divisions that two prominent late 20thcentury stories about baseball and the ‘60s portray the era. The (SPOILER) final reveal of the film Field of Dreams (1989) is that its corn-y catchphrase “If you build it, he will come” refers not to the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson, but instead to the equally spectral but far more intimate spirit of Ray’s (Kevin Costner) father, with whom Ray had had a 1960s-related falling out that had not been mended at the time of his father’s death. David James Duncan’s epic novel The Brothers K (1992) covers far more ground than Field of Dreams, including its titular homage to Dostoevsky, extended sections set in Canada, India, and Vietnam, and numerous other allusions and histories, but if I were to try to boil it down I would similarly focus on the book’s 1960s-produced divisions between the four Chance brothers and their parents (with dad Hugh a former star pitcher, and baseball thus figuring prominently into all the family members’ stories and relationships).
The film and novel don’t just link the 60s to baseball, however—they make the case, quite overtly and passionately, that baseball can (and, if allowed, will) heal such familial and national divisions. James Earl Jones’ character in Field is particularly obvious in that regard—he begins the film as a formerly idealistic 60s-era writer who has since turned cynical and misanthropic, but who finds his youthful enthusiasm once more through Costner’s baseball field, leading to his famous speech about baseball’s enduring and ongoing unifying American presence and role. Duncan’s novel is more subtle, but in (for example) its framing device—two almost perfectly parallel and quite poignant scenes of fathers, sons, and baseball with which the novel opens and closes—it makes a very similar point to Jones’ speech. So are they right? Can baseball unite us all? Given that our 21stcentury divisions can tend to make those of the 1960s seem nonexistent by comparison, the question feels more pertinent than ever—and I’ll open it up to you, dear readers. What do you think?
Next baseball story tomorrow,Ben
PS. So again, what do you think? Other baseball stories you’d highlight?

March 27, 2018: Baseball Stories: The Given Day

[For this year’s Opening Day series, I’ll be highlighting individual baseball stories and AmericanStudying their contexts and meanings. Play ball!]
On Babe Ruth, symbolism, and race in America.
There’s no doubt that sports can bring out the worst as well as the best in us, and that sports fandom does so with particular force. But even those of us who have experienced hateful sports rivalries are likely to be shocked when we read about the death threats (among other horrific attacks) that Hank Aaron faced as he approached and then passed Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record. This wasn’t Jackie Robinson, breaking baseball’s color barrier and changing a still-segregated society nearly thirty years earlier; this was simply a very talented baseball player finishing a very succesful baseball career, one that had landed him at the top of the record books. And yet something about the combination of his race and identity with those of the iconic legend he was eclipsing led to some of the ugliest expressions of which we Americans and humans are capable.
The moment and those expressions tell us a great deal about racism in America, and it would likely be a mistake to focus our analyses on any other side to those histories. But at the same time, I do believe that if Aaron had been approaching a Lou Gehrig record, or a Joe DiMaggio record, or a Ty Cobb record, or any other legendary player, the responses might not have been quite so vitriolic. There’s just something about the Babe in the collective consciousness of a number of American sports fans, or rather a few related somethings: his literally and figuratively larger than life status, the way in which he was already a myth of sorts before he became one after his career was done; his concurrent representation of an earlier era in baseball and sports and America, one that likely couldn’t help but feel to many fans contrasted with the world of professional sports in Aaron’s 1970s; and, yes, the way in which each of those histories was made possible in large part because Ruth played in a segregated league, competing with only a portion of his era’s best ballplayers.
It’s with all of those different sides to Ruth, his era, and history in play that Dennis Lehane creates a series of bravura sequences interspersed with the main narratives througout his early 20th century historical novel The Given Day (2008). One of Lehane’s two co-protagonists is an African American ballplayer named Luther Laurence, and Lehane opens his novel with a set-piece in which Ruth and some of his fellow professional players (en route from one 1918 World Series site to the other) encounter Luther and other African American players, leading to a pickup game that is at once color-blind and yet ultimately as segregated as the rest of society. Ruth reappears in a few additional set-pieces later in the novel, always bringing with him the same uneasy combination of baseball and society, mythic ideals and gritty realities. Some reviewers critiqued the Ruth sections as tangential to the book’s main narratives, which is true enough—but they make great use of the Ruth mythos, illustrating one more time how much this larger than life figure can say and do in our national conversations and stories.
Next baseball story tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other baseball stories you’d highlight?

March 26, 2018: Baseball Stories: Play for a Kingdom

[For this year’s Opening Day series, I’ll be highlighting individual baseball stories and AmericanStudying their contexts and meanings. Play ball!]
On baseball, America, and the Civil War.
Far more knowledgeable baseball historians than I have long debated the sport’s origins, and specifically the role that famous “inventor” Abner Doubleday did or did not play in creating our national pasttime (or even whether said national pasttime was in fact invented in a different nation, one from which we had recently declared independence no less!). It’s an interesting debate, one that touches on not only 19th century history, the development of mythological narratives in communities and nations, and how culture moves and changes across international borders, but also on the ongoing role that sports plays in our collective consciousness and imaginations. But to my mind, it’s also deeply meaningful that the invention of baseball has long been tied to Doubleday, a man otherwise most famous as a decorated Union officer during the Civil War.
Doubleday’s supposed and contested invention of the sport took place well before the war, in Cooperstown (NY) in 1839. But I would argue that many of our collective narratives of baseball’s earliest days are closely tied to the Civil War, to images of soldiers playing sandlot games during the downtime between battles and campaigns. In part remembering the war in that way offers a peaceful alternative to the war’s most dominant images, a way to imagine and contemplate Civil War soldiers that doesn’t focus solely on the conflict and violence and loss that so defined the war years. But on the other hand, the images of Civil War baseball games could be read as a direct (if of course bloodless) complement to the war’s battles—in which, similarly, “teams” that might well have been friendly or even related off of the diamond became bitter adversaries once they stepped onto that field, one from which only one side could emerge victorious (there are no ties in baseball, as the saying famously goes).
Both sides to baseball and the Civil War are captured in the best historical novel about that subject (and one of the best baseball novels period), Thomas Dyja’s Play for a Kingdom (1998). Dyja’s novel imagines a chance 1864 encounter between Union and Confederate soldiers engaged in the bloody battle of Spotsylvania, an encounter that turns into a series of baseball games contested alongside (and, gradually, intertwined with) the battle itself. Dyja nicely illustrates how the games serve not only as a distraction from the battle, but also and just as crucially as a parallel to it, one in which shifting relationships and allegiances, as well as the soldier’s individual personalities and perspectives, cannot ultimately lessen the harder and more absolute truths of war. Whatever its other starting points, baseball—like America—was created anew during the Civil War, and Dyja’s novel helps us contemplate those complex and vital points of origin.
Next baseball story tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other baseball stories you’d highlight?