Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 244

November 16, 2017

November 16, 2017: AthleteStudying: The Williams Sisters



[November 12thmarked the 125th anniversary of the signing of America’s first professional football player, William “Pudge” Heffelfinger. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Pudge and other groundbreaking professional athletes, leading up to a weekend post on Trump and sports!]On two factors that have entirely changed my perspective on the tennis superstars.I have to start this post with full disclosure: for many years, indeed most of their long and hugely successful careers in professional tennis, the Williams Sisters would have been most likely to show up in this space as part of my annual post-Valentine’s non-favorites series. There were quite a few things that rubbed me the wrong way about Venus and Serena Williams, but I would highlight two in particular. One is not at all on them: their father Richard Williams, who had always seemed (and still I will admit largely seems) to me to embody the worst kind of overbearing and self-centered tennis/sports parent. And the other was much more fully about them, and especially Serena, who (I long felt) could never lose a tennis match and credit her opponent in any way; she always seemed to be blaming herself and her play, suggesting that if she just played the way she could, it would be impossible for any opponent to give her a challenge. Given Serena’s unrivaled career success, that might well be an accurate assessment, but it still felt at best petty and at worst downright disrespectful to so consistently (as I saw it) talk about her opponents and matches in that way. So even a couple years, I would have viewed the most recent Australian Open final between Venus and Serena as the worst thing that could happen in a women’s tennis tournament.My perspective has entirely changed in the last couple years, however, and while I know that doesn’t and shouldn’t matter at all to the Williams Sisters, I do think that the two most central influences in shifting my point of view are interesting ones to AmericanStudy and are both relevant to this series on women in sports. The single most powerful influence has been the sections of Claudia Rankine’s poem Citizen (2015) dedicated both to narrating one particular controversial moment in Serena’s career and to portraying and analyzing perceptions of Serena’s identity (that New York Times Magazine piece by Rankine echoes and extends many of Citizen’s topics, if in a different genre of course) and her responses to them overall. Of course I had long recognized, when I took a step back from my personal feelings on Serena and the sisters, the crucial roles that both race and gender (in an intersectional combination) have always played in shaping our narratives of the Williams’. But it’s one thing to recognize something analytically, and another to feel it empathetically; and I have to admit that it was reading Rankine’s book that truly made it possible for me to emphathize with Serena (and Venus) and how such narratives and frames have affected (if in no way limited) them at each stage and moment. Perhaps I should have been able to do so without the book, but of course works of art can and do greatly amplify our capacity for empathy, and Rankine’s portrayal of Serena offered a wonderful case in point for me.The other main factor in shifting my perspective is a bit more complicated to write about, and a lot more 21st century. To put it simply, many of the scholars and figures whom I follow on Twitter—many of them women of color, but also certainly folks in every conceivable ethnic and identity category—are huge fans of Serena and Venus, and would often during and around tournaments Tweet about what the Williams Sisters meant to them. I’ll be the first to admit that Twitter often fails to live up to this ideal, but at its heart one of the things it best represents is a chance to listen to other people, to hear and learn from their voices and perspectives with an immediacy and (in its own digital way) intimacy that’s not possible (or at least not the same) in any other medium with which I’m familiar. I can’t pretend that the first few times I saw such pro-Williams Tweets, I wasn’t more annoyed than anything else; but fortunately I continued to see them, and starting listening to and learning from them. I’m not looking for a pat on the back for that, as again I was doing both what Twitter should allow us to do and, for that matter, what any human being should do in conversation with others. Instead, I want to highlight this effect as both a model of what a site and space like Twitter can do and mean, and as a particularly good example of how these 21st century communities can, again at their best, help open us up to perspectives and voices that it might be otherwise harder for us to truly hear and be shaped by. Thanks to such perspectives, as well as to Rankine’s wonderful poem, I now am nothing but excited for the Williams Sisters to have one more (or another—who knows how many more there might be?) Grand Slam tournament battle.Next AthleteStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other athletes or related histories you’d highlight?
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Published on November 16, 2017 03:00

November 15, 2017

November 15, 2017: AthleteStudying: Curt Flood



[November 12thmarked the 125th anniversary of the signing of America’s first professional football player, William “Pudge” Heffelfinger. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Pudge and other groundbreaking professional athletes, leading up to a weekend post on Trump and sports!]On three documents that together help tell the story of the athlete whose stand for players’ rights changed professional sports forever.1)      Flood v. Kuhn (1972): At the end of the 1969 season, Flood’s 12th in his highly successful Major League baseball career, the St. Louis Cardinals traded him to the lowly Philadelphia Phillies. Angered by the total lack of control that professional athletes had over their own careers and destinies, and (he told the players’ union) emboldened and inspired by “the change in black consciousness in recent years,” Flood refused to go along with the trade, instead writing a letter to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn in December 1969 requesting that he be declared a free agent. Kuhn denied his request, Flood sued Kuhn and Major League baseball for violating federal antitrust laws, and the case eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court. In its June 1972 decision, the court ruled 5-3 in favor of Kuhn and MLB, citing as predecent 1922’s Federal Baseball Club v. National League . But the case and Flood had set irrevocable forces in motion, and they would lead to numerous changes in both baseball and professional sports, including the creation of precisely the free agent category for which Flood had argued.2)      The Way It Is (1971): Unfortunately, Flood himself was never able to benefit from those changes. Blacklisted from baseball following his lawsuit, he sat out the entire 1970 season (receiving what teammate Bob Gibson estimated were an average of “four or five death threats a day”during that time); the Cardinals then traded him to the Washington Senators, and he played 13 games for them in 1971 before retiring from the sport. Later that year, he published a groundbreaking memoir, The Way It Is, that linked his own story and life to impassioned arguments against the reserve clauseand other elements of baseball’s anti-player policies. Flood’s text is rarely highlighted on lists of either American autobiographies or baseball books; while it’s not particularly compellingly written, it certainly offers a new and important perspective on both professional sports and (among other categories) African American identity and life, and deserves to be more widely remembered and read today. 3)      The Curt Flood Act of 1998: Changes such as free agency took place and evolved over time, but it took twenty-five years before Flood’s legacies for professional sports and players’ rights were cemented at the most national and legal level. That happened with two Congressional laws, 1997’s Baseball Fans and Communities Protection Act (in the House) and 1998’s Curt Flood Act (in the Senate). Together, these laws established once and for all that major league baseball was subject to the same antitrust laws as all other American corporations, and that players were thus protected by those antitrust laws as well. Both laws were crafted in honor of, and the Senate’s law was named in overt tribute to, Flood, who had passed away from complications from throat cancer in January 1997 (just two days after his 59th birthday). While he thus tragically did not live to see the most sweeping results of his stand and activism, I hope and believe he knew how much he had changed professional sports, and the lives of professional athletes, through his courage and commitment.Next AthleteStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other athletes or related histories you’d highlight?
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Published on November 15, 2017 03:00

November 14, 2017

November 14, 2017: AthleteStudying: Ruth and Gehrig



[November 12thmarked the 125th anniversary of the signing of America’s first professional football player, William “Pudge” Heffelfinger. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Pudge and other groundbreaking professional athletes, leading up to a weekend post on Trump and sports!]On the iconic teammates who embody two contrasting narratives of American identity.One of the most defining, originating American myths is that of the “Puritan [or sometimes Protestant] work ethic,” the concept of a community of quiet, stoic everymen and –women going about their often thankless but vital labors with determination and persistence. Yet at the same time, two of the first genuinely famous American individuals would have to be Miles Standish and John Smith, both boisterous, hard-living, larger-than-life, and self-aggrandizing soldiers and explorers who famously wooed the ladies and carved new territories with (seemingly) their forceful personalities alone. (Seriously, if you haven’t read Smith’s third-person personal narrative of his own heroism, you have to, if only for the passage where he fights off hundreds of Indian attackers and uses his guide as a personal human shield.) And these two narratives came together to form Revolutionary America’s defining icon, Ben Franklin, a self-made man composed (if you read hisautobiography) of equal parts persistent hard work and self-conscious myth-making.Like all enduring national narratives, these defining images have evolved over the centuries; yet they have likewise retained some core elements that remain visible in many different incarnations. For example, we can see strong respective elements of each in two of the 20th century’s most famous and iconic sports figures, a pair who happened to be teammates on the New York Yankees: Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Each was interesting and complicated in his own right, but there’s no question that their most iconic qualities fit these two enduring narratives quite closely: Gehrig was known first as “The Iron Horse” for his astounding and record-setting consecutive-games-played streak, and second for his stoic and inspiring battle with the tragic illness (ALS) now generally known by his name; Ruth was known as “The Sultan of Swat,” as much for his legendary parties and excesses as for his titanic homers, and like the aforementioned American icons went out of his way to embrace and extend his own myth on every occasion. (An interestingly similar dichotomy could be identified in two subsequent Yankees teammates, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle.)It’s easy to side with Gehrig and quiet hard work over Ruth and boisterous excess, and of course my own phrasings and frames here have undoubtedly done so. It’s certainly fair to add that, if we think of icons as role models (an idea that various sports figures have passionately critiqued), far more of us parents would likely direct our kids to emulate Gehrig than Ruth. But from an AmericanStudies perspective, it’s particularly interesting to consider the enduring co-existence of these two narratives, the sense that we have found ways, across the centuries and in many different social and cultural contexts, to valorize such seemingly contrasting and even directly opposed ideals. We are of course big, and contain multitudes; but narratives and images like these can help us push past that bigness to consider and analyze some of the communal emphases that have defined and continue to define us, and that reveal the multiple sides to our shared national identity and culture.Next AthleteStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other athletes or related histories you’d highlight?
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Published on November 14, 2017 03:00

November 13, 2017

November 13, 2017: AthleteStudying: Pudge Heffelfinger



[November 12thmarked the 125th anniversary of the signing of America’s first professional football player, William “Pudge” Heffelfinger. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Pudge and other groundbreaking professional athletes, leading up to a weekend post on Trump and sports!]On how a groundbreaking athlete reveals three sides to the development of football and professional sports in America.1)      College vs. pros: The two central realities of football in the late 19th century are roughly equally hard to believe in our 21st century moment: that college football was pretty much the only game in town; and that the center of the college football universe were Ivy League institutions like Harvard and Yale. But those were the pigskin realities, and the legendary Yale career of Pudge Heffelfinger exemplifies them quite nicely. Heffelfinger was a three-time All-American at defensive guard during his four years at Yale (the 1888 to 1891 seasons), and he (under legendary coach Walter Camp) led at least two of those teams (1888 and 1891) to undefeated seasons. The 1888 team, moreover, also gave up precisely no points on the season, outscoring its thirteen opponents 698 to 0 (for an average victory of 53.7 to 0). Few if any sports teams, from any era or at any level, have equaled the success of that Ivy League football squad, and Heffelfinger helps us remember that striking fact and moment.2)      Haphazard growth: Professional sports were beginning to emerge in that same late 19th century moment; but, especially when compared with the juggernauts that our major sports organizations now seem to be, they did so in piecemeal and haphazard fashion. Heffelfinger’s historic paycheck embodies that randomness quite precisely—in the 1960s, the Pro Football Hall of Fame, alerted by a rediscovered item from Pittsburgh newspapers, recovered a long-lost page from the account ledger of the Allegheny Athletic Association. The page revealed that Heffelfinger had been paid both a $25 salary and a $500 “game performance bonus” by Allegheny to play in a game on November 12th, 1892. It appears that he was the only player paid to appear in that game; over the next few years, six other players would be paid, some for individual games and some on salary for entire seasons. Such was the individualized and haphazard nature of “professional” sports in the 1890s, and the first step toward the sports and cultural behemoth that is the 21st century National Football League.3)      Organization and Publicity: By the mid-20thcentury, both football in general and professional football in particular had become far more organized and wide-ranging, and in his final role in football (after a few years of coaching at various universities) Pudge Heffelfinger likewise exemplified that new era. Between 1935 and 1950, he compiled and authored Heffelfinger’s Football Facts , an annual publication that featured statistics and schedules for both college and pro teams. This periodical, one of the first of the now-ubiquitous annuals published for every major sport, did more than just reflect football’s growth and popularity, though—it also helped contribute to those trends, using the name and identity of this iconic early star to publicize and sell the sport to familiar and new audiences alike. One more side to the profession and business of sports that Pudge Heffelfinger embodies and helps us remember.Next AthleteStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other athletes or related histories you’d highlight?
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Published on November 13, 2017 03:00

November 11, 2017

November 11-12, 2017: Crowd-sourced Veterans Days



[In honors of Veterans Day, this week’s series has AmericanStudied veteran figures, histores, and stories. Leading up to this crowd-sourced post on all things veterans and Veterans Day—please share your own stories and connections in comments!]On Twitter, Jennifer Dane writes, “This is one of my areas of interest, especially around oral histories of LGBT troops during DADT. I am one of those service members myself.” She adds, “A good, but tragic book is Coming Out Under Fire .”My friend, Guest Poster, and state university colleague Roopika Risam highlights “a great new DH project from my colleague Andrew Darien,” on Salem State University student veterans.Floyd Cheungnominates “anything by Karen Skolfield, like this.”On Facebook, Kelley Smolinskishares two perspectives. Her own: “Even with the influx of films shining light on the mental and emotional sacrifices made by veterans, there's a disconnect between people's response to those films and the way we observe Veterans Day. Every year, kids pile into the gym and zone out during Veterans Day assemblies and attendance at parades is limited. They deserve more than that.” And that of her fiancée, Zachary Ryan Davis, a veteran of the US army: “I'm very proud of my service and proud of those I served with. They deserve to be honored. I'm always disappointed by the turn out for Veterans Day festivities. And you can't even say it's because we don't like parades. Look at anytime a sport team wins. It's a very powerful statement on where we place our importance. It's a powerful statement on who we consider heroes.”Finally, an anonymous reader shares, “I want to share this story, because he never would. My step-dad, ‘Pop,’ was in the Marines in the 80s, and was sent all over the world as a paratrooper and sharpshooter. In the early 80s, he was stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. It has only recently been found that the water at Camp Lejeune was filled with contaminants at that time, including trichloroethylene, perchloroethylene, vinyl chloride, benzene, and other compounds. And only recently have links been found between the contaminated water and eight diseases, including Parkinson’s Disease. He was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s when I was in high school, but it was unknown that it was linked to Camp Lejeune until a few years ago. It was only last year that the Department of Veteran Affairs confirmed his case of Parkinson’s stems from his time in North Carolina and they have just assumed responsibility. Ever since he was diagnosed, he has never once complained. Even after learning he had the disease because of where he was stationed, he has never once placed blame, gotten angry, or felt regret. He does not like to discuss his illness, as he does not want sympathy from anyone. Despite the hardships he faces every day, he is still proud of serving his country and would not take back the time he spent as a Marine, even with knowing that it is the reason he has Parkinson’s. Personally, that is unfathomable to me. His every day life is a sacrifice. It has been a struggle for our family, but what helps is his positive attitude. This is why Veteran’s Day is special to me. Though he does not want the outward recognition (because to him, he merely feels he was doing his duty to his country), I still honor him on that day. He is the most respectable man I have ever met and I am so lucky to have had him as a ‘2nd dad’ ever since he married my mom when I was 6 or 7. I have never met someone who has such strength to make it through every day with a smile.One thing I’d like to add is how I wish people stopped judging or assuming things about each other. Pop has a hard time walking, and at my youngest brother’s soccer banquet a few years ago, he was called up to the podium and he stumbled on his way. There was one parent who said under his breath, ‘It’s disgusting that he’s drunk at a high school soccer banquet…’ Now, he can’t even drink due to his medication. Also, last summer, he and my mom were at the beach on Cape Cod and were walking up to the car. He was walking a little ahead of my mom, staggering and stumbling, and a man on a bicycle came up behind my mom, looked at her, pointed at my step-dad, and said, ‘Wow, guess all the weirdos are out today… stay away from that one.’ My mom was the bigger person on both of these occasions and said nothing, though her emotions were out of control. She said nothing, because he would never have wanted her to. He does not want sympathy. He does not want recognition. He knows he served his country and that’s all that matters to him. To me, it’s frustrating to know that people jump to such horrible conclusions. He is a veteran. He served our country. Personally, I wish the two men who made these comments knew the truth. Maybe they would think twice before judging the next person. Maybe they would learn to respect others more. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just still angry about these two incidents. Regardless, Pop proves to be stronger and stronger every day, even as the disease makes him weaker.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think, or what would you add?
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Published on November 11, 2017 03:00

November 10, 2017

November 10, 2017: Veterans Days: The Best Years of Our Lives



[In honors of Veterans Day, a series AmericanStudying veteran figures, histores, and stories. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post on all things veterans and Veterans Day—share your own stories and connections, please!]On the film and performance that capture the spectrum and significance of veterans’ experiences.
There are no shortage of memorable World War II stories in our national narratives—of course there are the overarching narratives like The Greatest Generation and Rosie the Riveter; then there are the explicitly and centrally celebratory texts, such as in films like Midway or Saving Private Ryan; the more complex mixtures of celebration and realism, such as in films like From Here to Eternity or Flags of Our Fathers ; and the very explicitly critical and satirical accounts, as in the novels Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five . One could even argue, with some accuracy, that if there is any single event or era that doesn’t need reinforcing in our national consciousness, it is this one; similarly, one could argue that if there’s any group of American films that can’t be considered generally under-exposed or –remembered, even if some have waned in popularity or awareness over time, it’d be those that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Well, I guess I like a challenge, because I’m here to argue that a World War II-centered film that in 1947 won not only Best Picture but also Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Screenplay, Editing, and Music has become a much too forgotten and underappreciated American text. That film was The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler’s adaptation of MacKinlay Kantor’s novel about three returning World War II veterans and their experiences attempting to re-adapt to civilian life on the home front. It’s a far from perfect film, and features some schmaltzy sections that, perhaps, feel especially dated at nearly seventy years’ remove and have likely contributed to its waning appeal. But it also includes some complex and powerful moments, and a significant number of them can be attributed directly to Wyler’s most famous and important casting choice: his decision to cast former paratrooper Harold Russell, an amateur actor who had lost both of his hands in a training accident, in the role of Homer Parrish, a similarly disabled vet with hooks replacing his hands. Homer’s relationship with the extremely supportive Wilma (played by Cathy O’Donnell) offers its share of the schmaltz, but in other ways his character and performance are much more dark and complicated, affecting the emotions through their realism and sensitivity rather than just overt heartstring-tugging.
That’s especially true of the scene that stood out to me most when I watched the film (as a college student in the late 1990s) and that has stuck with me ever since. Homer, once a star high school quarterback who was used to being watched and admired by younger boys in that earlier role, is attempting to work on a project in his garage but struggling greatly with his prostheses; he knows that a group of neighborhood boys are spying on him in fascination and horror but tries to ignore their presence. He can’t do so, however, and in a burst of anger releases much of what he has been dealing with since his injuries and return, breaking the garage windows with his hooks and daring the kids to fully engage with who and what he has become. The moment, big and emotional as it is, feels as unaffected as it gets, and manages to do what few of those more well-known World War II stories can: celebrating and critiquing in equal measure, recognizing the sacrifice and heroism of a Homer while mourning what war does and takes and destroys. Ultimately the scene, like the film, provides no definite answers, no straightforward adulation of its veterans nor darkly comic takedown of war myths, but instead simply asks us to think about what life (in and out of war) has meant and continues to mean for someone like Harold Russell, and all his veteran peers.Indeed, Best Years is ultimately about precisely that—the experiences and identities of the soldiers themselves, at their best, at their worst, and everywhere in between. On Veteran’s Day, and on every other day as well, I think it’d be ideal to focus not on wars at all, horrific and cold and impersonal and, yes, hellish as they always are, but on remembering those Americans whose lives were and continue to be so impacted by these experiences—not least, I have to add, because I think we’d be a lot less cavalier about starting wars if we did so. Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Stories or histories you’d share for the weekend post?
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Published on November 10, 2017 03:00

November 9, 2017

November 9, 2017: Veterans Days: Veterans’ Organizations



[In honors of Veterans Day, a series AmericanStudying veteran figures, histores, and stories. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post on all things veterans and Veterans Day—share your own stories and connections, please!]On the distinct and even contrasting reasons why veterans’ organizations are formed.As Alfred F. Young’s wonderful book The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (1999) demonstrates, American veterans have been gathering to remember and celebrate their service for as long as there’s been a United States of America. The 50th anniversary Revolutionary commemorations traced in Young’s book were not organized under the banner of a single veterans’ organization per se, but they certainly represented a collective effort to memorialize not only the Revolution’s principal events (such as the titular Boston Tea Party, among many others), but also those individuals and communities that contributed to them. And those dual and complementary purposes—gathering with fellow veterans to memorialize and celebrate the events and service they share—represent obvious but certainly central elements to any and all veterans’ organizations.Young also convincingly argues that there was a present and political purpose to those commemorations, however—an effort to influence contemporary debates and issues through remembering the Revolutionary events and service in particular ways. That purpose to veteran organizing became even more pronounced later in the 19thcentury, when competing Civil War veterans’ organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) and the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) fought both to establish their own vision of the war’s histories and meanings and to advocate for concurrent contemporary political and social goals. Partly in an effort to distinguish themselves from these Civil War organizations, but partly to advocate for their own memorializations and goals, veterans of the Spanish American War formed yet another such organization, the Veterans of Foreign Wars. And after World War I, even though the VFW could have certainly covered all that war’s veterans, the era’s own political conflicts and controversies led Congress to charter instead a more overtly patriotic new organization, the American Legion.There’s no reason why these distinct organizational purposes—community and commemoration on the one hand, political and social advocacy and activism on the other—have to be mutually exclusive, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that the more overtly political late 19th and early 20th century organizations weren’t also genuinely communal and commemorative. But I think it’s also important to note that the present and political purposes would also have a limiting effect—that is, that veterans who might otherwise fit the organization’s definition but who did not share its political orientation (for example, African American World War I veterans not inclined toward the kinds of jingoistic patriotism expressed by the American Legion) would find themselves excluded, unable to take part in the organization’s communal and commemorative activites and functions. Given the challenges and struggles that all veterans face, the kinds captured so eloquently in the text I’ll focus on in tomorrow’s post (The Best Years of Our Lives), it seems to me that the most successsful veterans’ organizations would be those that welcome and support all veterans.Last post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Stories or histories you’d share for the weekend post?
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Published on November 09, 2017 03:00

November 8, 2017

November 8, 2017: Veterans Days: The Harrisburg Veterans Parade



[In honors of Veterans Day, a series AmericanStudying veteran figures, histores, and stories. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post on all things veterans and Veterans Day—share your own stories and connections, please!]
On one of the terrible, and then one of the great, American moments.
As part of my 2013 Veterans Days series, I wrote about the frustrating contradiction embodied by African American World War I soldiers—the way in which their impressive collective service gave way to continued discrimination and mistreatment once they were back stateside. Those negative responses were made possible, or at least greatly enabled, by the nation’s ability to forget the soldiers’ service, to write this hugely inspiring history right out of our communal memories (despite the best efforts of writers and leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois). And it’s important to note that such post-war communal forgetting and elision had happened before, and in an even more overtly ironic way: the forgetting and elision of the histories and stories of the more than 180,000 African Americans who served as U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War.
Given all the challenges faced by those African American Civil War soldiers, given Abraham Lincoln’s clear crediting of them with helping turn the tide of the war, and given the freakin’ overarching cause of the war itself, our immediate and widespread forgetting and elision of this community of veterans was and remains a national disgrace and shame. And while those processes unfolded over many years, they also can be localized in one specific and very telling moment: the May 23-24, 1865 Grand Review of the Armies in Washington, D.C., in which over two hundred thousand Union veterans marched from the Capitol to the White House—and for which not a single USCT soldier was invited or allowed to participate. It’s impossible to know whether Abraham Lincoln, had he lived, would have permitted the Grand Review to develop in that way; but it’s certainly fair to link the moment and exclusion directly to the immediate post-war changes in Reconstruction plans and goals enacted by the Andrew Johnson administration and much of the rest of the federal government.If the Grand Review was thus a low moment in American history, it also led, six months later, to one of our high points: Harrisburg’s Grand Review of Black Troops. On November 14, 1865, Harrisburg’s own —Civil War journalist, recruiter, and leader; son of an escaped slave who would go on to study law and become an educational leader and much more; one of America’s most inspiring figures by any measure—served as grand marshal for a parade of U.S. Colored Troops, who marched through the city to the home of former secretary of war Simon Cameron (who reviewed and thanked the troops). Speeches by Octavius Catto, William Howard Day, and other luminaries helped frame the moment’s true historical, social, and national significance. And significant it was and remains: while it’s vital to remember, and rage against, the way in which the African American soldiers and veterans were forgotten and elided in our collective memories, then and (to at least too great of an extent) now, it’s just as important to remember the kinds of inspiring alternative histories and communities represented by great moments like Harrisburg’s Grand Review.Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Stories or histories you’d share for the weekend post?
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Published on November 08, 2017 03:00

November 7, 2017

November 7, 2017: Veterans Days: Miyoko Hikiji



[In honors of Veterans Day, a series AmericanStudying veteran figures, histores, and stories. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post on all things veterans and Veterans Day—share your own stories and connections, please!]On the book and author that can help bring our conversations about veterans into the 21stcentury.There’s no doubt that our narratives about and images of veterans have evolved a lot in the last half-century (the post-Vietnam era, we could call it). Thanks to a number of topics about which I’ve written in this space—controversial activist efforts like Vietnam Veterans Against the War, greater awareness of issues like PTSD, the stories and voices of prominent social and cultural figures like Tim O’Brien and Pat Tillman—the collective concept of a veteran now includes many more elements and angles than, I would argue, at any prior point in our history. But on the other hand, it seems likely to me that there’s a certain identity that is still most strongly associated with the concept—the identity of a white male, to put it bluntly—and that quite simply doesn’t align with either the historical or the contemporary realities of our veterans.As the long history of African American veterans or William Apess’s and Filipino Americans War of 1812 service remind us, that stereotypical image of veterans has never been sufficient. On a more recent note, better remembering the service and tragic death of Danny Chen would help us broaden our naratives of 21stcentury veterans (Chen’s death during training means he did not serve in a war, but his story demands inclusion in those narratives nevertheless). But alongside those important issues of race and ethnicity, shifting our collective images of contemporary veterans to include gender and sexuality more fully would be equally meaningful, and especially salient in this 21stcentury moment that includes a move toward women in combat roles, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and other such evolutions. And I don’t know of a better voice and book through which to better include and engage with those aspects of identity in our images of veterans than Miyoko Hikiji and her autobiographical and activist book All I Could Be: My Story as a Woman Warrior in Iraq (2013).Hikiji’s story, as an Asian American young woman from Iowa whose army service took her to the heart of the Iraq War, represents 21st century American life in a number of distinct but interconnected ways, and she tells that story—along with many stories of both her fellow soldiers and the Iraqis they encountered—with grit, humor, and power. But to my mind, even more telling and significant have been her activisms and advocacies on the home front—on a number of important issues, but especially her work to raise awareness of, and demand responses to, the widespread presence of Military Sexual Trauma (MST) among our armed forces and veterans. I’ve written a good deal in this space about histories and stories that unite veterans, and of course MST is the opposite, an issue and history that not only reveal conflicts within our military, but also have the potential to divide both our veterans’ communities and our national perspectives on them. But as I argue in my most recent book, ignoring such dark histories is neither possible nor effective—we must instead engage with them if we hope to move forward, and Hikiji’s voice and work can most definitely help us do just that.Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Stories or histories you’d share for the weekend post?
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Published on November 07, 2017 03:00

November 6, 2017

November 6, 2017: Veterans Days: The Bonus Army



[In honors of Veterans Day, a series AmericanStudying veteran figures, histores, and stories. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post on all things veterans and Veterans Day—share your own stories and connections, please!]On the radical veterans movement that ended in both tragedy and success.
Americans have a long tradition of marching on Washington in protest. And I’m not trying to seem young and talk about the 1960s like they require getting into the way back machine—I’m talking about a long tradition, one that actually predates the Constitution and even led to a particular clause being included in it. In 1781, with the Revolutionary War still ongoing but entering into a significantly less heavy phase, much of the Continental Army was demobilized without pay, and in 1783 a large number of veterans marched on Philadelphia (which was the nation’s capital at the time, so this counts), surrounded the State House, and demanded that money; Congress fled to New Jersey, forces in the regular army expelled the protesters, and four years later the Constitution was framed to include a section noting that the Posse Comitatus Act (which forbids the use of the army in civilian police work) did not apply within the borders of Washington, DC. But despite this founding presence of marches on Washington, I would argue that the 1932 Bonus Army, in its own moment and most especially in the years afterward, signaled the true arrival of this form of social and political activism.
The Bonus Army, which was the popular shorthand by which the self-titled Bonus Expeditionary Force came to be known, was a gathering of over forty thousand World War I veterans, family members, and interested parties that descended on Washington in the spring of 1932. The vets, who had not in many cases been what we would consider adequately compensated during the war, had been awarded Service Certificates by a 1924 law; but those certificates did not mature and could not legally be paid until 1945, and with the Depression in full swing and veterans hit particularly hard by unemployment and its attendant ills (as they always seem to be), the Bonus Army decided to push for immediate payments. To say that their march on and then multi-month occupation of Washington ended badly is to understate the case—in late July the Hoover administration ordered the army (led in prominent roles, interestingly enough, by Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Patton) to remove the marchers, and in the course of that removal the marches (who again included women and children in significant numbers) were driven out with bayonets and poison gas, and their makeshift camp was burned to the ground. Hoover wasn’t likely win the 1932 presidential election in the best-case scenario, but these events, coming about three months before that election, likely cemented Roosevelt’s victory.
And it’s precisely the aftermath of the Bonus March, the way in which such a literal and tragic defeat became a multi-part public relations and then very real victory, that made it a potent model for future protesters. Among the Roosevelt administration’s earliest actions was an effort to reach out to the marchers, with Eleanor Roosevelt in particular working to get many of them enrolled in the Works Progress Administration. When Roosevelt balked at actually changing the law to pay out the Service Certificates early, Congress stepped in, overriding a presidential veto, and paid the Certificates in full in 1936, nearly a decade before they would legally come due. And many contemporary observers and subsequent historians have credited the publicity surrounding the Bonus Army with contributing heavily to the creation of the GI Bill of Rights in 1944, an act that made immeasurably better the reentry into civilian life for veterans of World War II. For all these reasons, organizers and leaders of the 1963 Civil Rights-connected March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom cited the Bonus Army very specifically as a key influence and inspiration, and of course many later groups have likewise taken up similar strategies of social and political protest and activism on the most national and public stage. Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Stories or histories you’d share for the weekend post?
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Published on November 06, 2017 03:00

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