Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 249

September 19, 2017: Legends of the Fall: American Pastoral

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, for a crowd-sourced post sure to be as popular as pumpkin spice (if such a thing is possible)!]On a novel with over-the-top moments that practically scream “loss of innocence,” and the quieter scene that much more potently captures it.To follow up the main idea from yesterday’s post, I experienced a very different kind of teenage literary loss of innocence when I decided to read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) for pleasure in early high school (what can I say, I was a nerd and the son of an English professor to boot). I can still quite distinctly remember arriving at Chapter 2, “Whacking Off,” and encountering for the first time just exactly how far Roth is willing to go—how obscene, how graphic, how flagrantly over-the-top. For reasons not quite known to me, in my second semester at Fitchburg State I chose to put Portnoy on the syllabus of a junior-level seminar on “Major American Authors of the 20thCentury,” and got to see 25 undergrads—24 women, by chance—having their own such encounters with Roth, the novel, and that chapter in particular. Let’s just say it wasn’t just me.Roth’s late masterpiece American Pastoral (1997) is a far more realistic and restrained work than Portnoy, but nonetheless Roth includes a couple of distinctly Roth-ian over-the-top scenes, both symbolizing quite overtly his novel’s overall themes of the loss of innocence that accompanied the late 60s and early 70s in American culture and society. In the first, the novel’s now middle-aged protagonist, Swede Levov, meets with a seemingly innocent young women to try to learn the whereabouts of his missing daughter Merry; the woman turns out instead to be a brazen and cynical 60s radical, and she meets the Swede naked, graphically exposing and probing herself in front of him (while daring him to, in essence, rape her). In the second, the tour-de-force set piece with which Roth concludes the novel, a family dinner full of shocking revelations and betrayals is set against the backdrop of the televised Watergate hearings, and culminates with a crazy drunken woman stabbing an elderly man in the head with her fork.These scenes are as surprising and shocking as intended, and I suppose in that way they make Roth’s point. But if he intends the theme of the loss of innocence to be tragic as well as disturbing and comic (which those two scenes are, respectively), then I would point a far quieter and to my mind far more potent scene. In it, the Swede finally finds Merry and sees her again, for the only time between her teenage disappearance (after she bombs a local post office in political protest and kills an innocent bystander) and his own later death. He asks a few questions, but mostly what he does is listen (to her stories of all the horrors she has experienced in the years since the bombing) and observe (her literally fading life as a converted Jainist, one for whom any contact with the world is destructive and so self-deprivation and -starvation comprises the only meaningful future). As a parent, I can imagine nothing more shattering hearing and seeing such things from one of my children—and in the Swede’s quiet horror and sadness, Roth captures a far more powerful and chilling loss of innocence.Next fall tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

September 18, 2017: Legends of the Fall: Young Adult Lit

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, for a crowd-sourced post sure to be as popular as pumpkin spice (if such a thing is possible)!]On two iconic YA novels that fractured my innocence right alongside that of their characters.The early teenage years—those of late middle school into the beginning of high school—seem to resonate particularly well with the idea of a loss of innocence. I’m sure that kids who grow up in far more difficult situations than I did, or who have to deal with loss at a young age, or otherwise are confronted with the world’s darker realities experience the shift from innocence to experience, naivete to maturity, earlier. But even those of us who make it through childhood unscathed are going to come up against the harsher sides to life at some point, and ages 12-15 seems like a pretty common such milestone. I say that partly as a kid who was badly hazed by his cross country teammates during his freshman year of high school—but also partly the one who read John Knowles’ A Separate Peace (1959) and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974) and Beyond the Chocolate War (1985) in 8thgrade.I’d be lying if I said I remember much at all of the three books—that’s about 30 years, and a whole lot of books, under the bridge. But what I do remember are a couple of specific and very dark moments, of literal and symbolic falls: the seemingly accidental fall that Knowles’ protagonist Gene purposefully causes his friend Finny to take, a fall that eventually leads to Finny’s death (among other destructive effects); and a profoundly disturbing suicide scene in Cormier’s sequel, one that locates readers in the perspective of a young student leaping to his death after being ostracized and abused for his homosexuality by his peers and even a teacher. Obviously those weren’t the first literary deaths I had encountered—in 6th grade English I read Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None (1939), for crying out loud!—but they might have been the first in which kids my own age were killed, at least in such purposeful and brutal ways (ie, not the accidental drowning in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia [1977], traumatic as that was for this young reader).Perhaps it was that sense of proximity and (in a way) threat to myself that led these particular moments, and the novels in which they occur, to hit me as hard as they did. Perhaps it was that all three books are deeply concerned with what it means to be a teenage boy, in some of the better but (I would argue) mostly some of the worst senses. And perhaps it’s a tribute to their interesting and almost entirely implicit engagement with the wars during which they’re set—Knowles does have his characters engage with World War II toward the end of his novel; I don’t believe Cormier mentions Vietnam at all, certainly not at length, but his titular war certainly gestures in that direction. War, after all, has long been one of the most overt and catastrophic ways in which young men—and their societies—lose their innocence; in my reading of these young adult novels and their effects on me, I was led to feel such effects far more intimately than might otherwise have been the case.Next fall tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

September 16-17, 2017: The Worst and Best of Allegiance

[September 8thmarked the 125th anniversary of the first publication of the Pledge of Allegiance, in the popular magazine The Youth’s Companion . So this week I’ve AmericanStudied this complex shared text, starting with a repeat of one of my oldest posts and then moving into four new ones. Leading up to this weekend post on the very salient question of the worst and best versions of allegiance!]On what allegiance too often means, and what it might instead.As I write this post in early September, a Cleveland police officers union has announced that its members will not hold a flag during the festivities before the first Cleveland Browns regular reason football game of the season. The union is angry that a number of Browns players have been kneeling during the national anthem before the team’s preseason games, and has pledged not to participate in the pregame ceremony as long as the players continue their silent protests. (It might be relevant to know that this is the same union that since May of this year has fought for the continued, consequence-free employment of the two police officers who shot and killed 12 year old Tamir Rice in November 2014.) While this action is more specifically linked to the argument that the kneeling players are “disrespecting” or even “attacking” law enforcement, is certainly also echoes other statements (many made in recent weeks by former NFL players and commentators, and of course many more made over the last year since Colin Kaepernick began his protests) that the protests are also “disrespectful” or even “unpatriotic” toward the flag or the United States.That’s what “allegiance” is often taken to mean, of course. A kind of loyalty that is dutiful and obedient, that follows the rules of what to do during an anthem, that indeed treats those social mores as nearly as sacrosanct as the rules about proper handling of the flag itself. Such obedient allegiance to a nation not only doesn’t require independent thinking or action from its citizens, it actively discourages them, at least when it comes to the shared spaces and occasions in which we demonstrate our allegiance. The Kaepernick situation has laid bare the truths at the heart of such narratives of allegiance as plainly as could be: this is a young man who has exercised his rights of free speech, peaceable assembly, and protest as calmly and respectfully as I can imagine, and yet he has been treated and responded to by a significant portion of his fellow Americans (and apparently the entirety of his league’s powers-that-be) as if he is some sort of domestic terrorist or the like. When it comes to obedient allegiance, to paraphrase Anakin Skywalker as he becomes Darth Vader, if you’re not with us, then you’re our enemy.Yet as I’ve tried to argue throughout this week’s posts, that’s not the only way to think about allegiance, nor the Pledge to it. My most recent book made the case for the concept of critical patriotism, and I would say that if we are to take such a concept seriously, it would have to entail spaces and ways in which we could exercise that form of patriotism communally. What precisely would that more critical form of allegiance entail? Perhaps something as simple as a moment of silence at the end of the Pledge or anthem, in which we’re asked to think about something we would like to improve or strengthen in our national society or community, and then to share our answer with a neighbor. That’s simply a symbolic gesture, of course, but that’s all that these pledges and anthems are, symbolic representations of the national community and identity to which we are dedicated. Isn’t it time we strove together to embody a more thoughtful and engaged version of both allegiance and America?Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other takes on these questions or the Pledge you’d share?

September 15, 2017: Pledge Posts: The 1950s Addition

[September 8thmarked the 125th anniversary of the first publication of the Pledge of Allegiance, in the popular magazine The Youth’s Companion . So this week I’ll AmericanStudy this complex shared text, starting with a repeat of one of my oldest posts and then moving into four new ones. Leading up to a weekend post on the very salient question of the worst and best versions of allegiance!]On three contexts for the 1954 federal law that added “under God” to the Pledge.As I wrote in Monday’s post, one of the clearest contexts for the early 1950s campaign to add the phrase “under God” to the Pledge was the unfolding Cold War conflict with the (famously “godless”) Soviet Union. As quoted in that first hyperlinked article, the Presbyterian Reverend George Docherty, President Eisenhower’s Washington, DC pastor and one of the most vocal advocates for adding the phrase, argued in a February 1954 sermon that he “could hear little Moscovites repeat a similar pledge to their hammer-and-sickle flag with equal solemnity.” These arguments missed entirely the fact that what differentiated the United States from the Soviet Union was not state religion but instead precisely the opposite: a nation where no thoughts or actions were prescribed by the state, and indeed where the Constitution’s only reference to religion (outside of its amendments) was a guarantee that there would be no religious litmus test for officeholding in the new nation. And they foreshadowed one of the Cold War’s most troubling and pervasive trends: attempts to link the US to Christianity and the Soviet Union to atheism, and thus to define American atheists as somehow outside of and even opposed to the national community (as illustrated most fully by Ronald Reagan’s 1983 “evil empire” speech).As historian Kevin Kruse argues compellingly in his magisterial book One Nation Under God: How Corporate American Invented Christian America (2015), however, that Cold War trend was also part of a longer 20th century history. Kruse clearly lays out the links between such disparate forces as corporate resistance to the New Deal and evangelical Christianity in that hyperlinked NPR interview, which like all of his public scholarship is lucid, salient, and well worth your time. Here I’ll just highlight another pair of 1950s trends with which Kruse likewise engages: the rise of television as a mainstream medium, and with it the popularity of the first televangelists, most especially Reverend Billy Graham. There had of course been other periods of national popular religious revival, such as the two Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries. But I would argue that those prior revivals, despite the nationwide presence, had maintained an emphasis on the local, on particular communities gathering (in churches, under tents, in fields) to practice and share in their spirituality. Whereas by definition televangelism was about connecting people around the country, linking each individual or family watching the television to their fellow “congregants” around their own televisions. Such links made the concept of a communal, national “Christian America” far more fully possible, I’d say.Yet despite the direct connection between those 1950s shifts and the addition of “under God” to the Pledge (as well as of “In God We Trust” to our currency just a couple years later, in 1956), I think that many if not most Americans believe the phrase has been part of the Pledge since its origins. Partly that’s due of course to a general lack of historical awareness, a problem that public scholars like Kruse and myself are committed to helping remedy. But partly it’s due to a very direct and ongoing intended purpose of adding the phrase: revising our collective memories, rewriting our understanding of American history and identity to make it into something (Christian, European American, homogeneous) that it quite simply was not. In that sense, it’s both ironic and pitch-perfect that the social group The Knights of Columbus were among the first to advocate for adding the phrase: arguing that the United States is one nation under a Christian God (or any God, for that matter) means, among many other things, writing Native Americans out of our history and community in a way quite parallel to Columbus’ many exclusions and genocides. There’s a direct throughline, that is, between revising the Pledge and pledging to “Make American Great Again”—both are mythologizing campaigns in service of an imagined American identity, and both thus demand our response and resistance. Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other takes on the Pledge you’d share?

September 14, 2017: Pledge Posts: 1890s America

[September 8thmarked the 125th anniversary of the first publication of the Pledge of Allegiance, in the popular magazine The Youth’s Companion . So this week I’ll AmericanStudy this complex shared text, starting with a repeat of one of my oldest posts and then moving into four new ones. Leading up to a weekend post on the very salient question of the worst and best versions of allegiance!]How three 1890s contexts help us think about the Pledge.Francis Bellamy’s Pledge was published in The Youth’s Companion as part of a September 8th, 1892 National School Celebration of Columbus Day. 1892 marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s initial arrival in the Caribbean, and that quadricentennial thus became a moment for significant national celebrations. But not necessarily national commemorations—that is, as I analyzed at length in the Conclusion to my first book, the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that exemplified this national occasion (although it did so in 1893, as it took longer to plan than expected) focused far more on celebrating America’s achievements and glories in the present than on remembering its histories or figures from the past. Although, as I argued in yesterday’s post, Francis Bellamy’s personal and familial contexts make it unlikely that he intended the Pledge to be solely or simplistically celebratory, there’s no doubt that it could and did serve such purposes. Take the word “indivisible,” for example—defining the United States as indivisible required, in 1892 in particular (although the point sadly holds true today as well), a thoroughgoing amnesia about both recent and ongoing histories.That celebratory side to the Exposition did not go unchallenged, however. One of the most compelling challenges was offered by the pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature (1893). Edited by the great Ida B. Wells, featuring contributions from Frederick Douglass, Wells’ future husband Ferdinand Lee Barnett, and Irvine Garland Penn, and distributed just outside the Exposition grounds, The Reason Why used this celebratory occasion to raise hard questions about race in American society and history, and to offer alternative visions of a national community than those presented at the Exposition. In so doing, it modeled a kind of critical utopianism that could be productively compared to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and to the utopian understanding of the Pledge of Allegiance for which I argued at the close of yesterday’s post. Like both Edward and Francis, the pamphlet’s authors understood all too clearly the realities of Gilded Age American society—but they all used their words and voices to argue as well for a more ideal version of the nation.Those harsh Gilded Age realities concerned class and work just as much as they did race and culture, of course—and in May 1894, just six months after the Columbian Exposition closed, another Chicago-area event illustrated and amplified those issues. That event was the Pullman Strike, which began with a May 11th wildcat strike at the company’s Illinois factory but subsequently spread to Pullman workers and lines around the country. The strike itself, and even more so the state and federal governments’ use of soldiers to brutally break it in a series of July 1894 events, provided another clear example of just how divided this supposedly “indivisible” republic of ours was. Yet at the same time, the strike could be paralleled to The Reason Why, as another example of an oppressed American community using their voices and activisms to highlight and challenge such realities and inequalities. The strikers and labor leaders were agitating for nothing less than “liberty and justice for all,” and I can’t help but think that the Christian Socialist Francis Bellamy was in full solidarity with that activist push to produce a United States closer to the Pledge’s ideal definition.Last Pledge post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other takes on the Pledge you’d share?

September 13, 2017: Pledge Posts: The Bellamy Boys

[September 8thmarked the 125th anniversary of the first publication of the Pledge of Allegiance, in the popular magazine The Youth’s Companion . So this week I’ll AmericanStudy this complex shared text, starting with a repeat of one of my oldest posts and then moving into four new ones. Leading up to a weekend post on the very salient question of the worst and best versions of allegiance!]On the biographical and familial contexts that challenge and change our perspective on the Pledge.As I highlighted in Monday’s post, even the most basic biographical knowledge about Pledge author Francis Bellamy significantly shifts our sense of this American text and tradition. Bellamy was an ordained Baptist minister who identified as a Christian Socialist, meaning that he wedded his personal and professional spirituality to a radical vision of social and human equality. In 1891, just a year before he wrote the Pledge, he was forced out of his Boston ministry for “preaching against the evils of capitalism”; when he and his family subsequently moved to Florida, he ended up leaving his church there because it practiced racial discrimination against local residents of color. Interestingly and importantly, as I also wrote on Monday, Bellamy’s Pledge did not include the phrase “under God” or any references to religion (and when that phrase was added in the 1950s his granddaughter protested, claiming he would have been horrified). Yet there’s no doubt that its concluding phrase “with liberty and justice for all” was deeply intertwined with Bellamy’s Christian Socialism.While the Pledge certainly took off quickly after that 1892 publication, Francis Bellamy was far from the most famous late 19th century member of his extended family. Bellamy’s cousin was the novelist Edward Bellamy, among whose five books and many other published works was the 19thcentury’s third-highest-selling novel, Looking Backward, from 2000 to 1887 (1888). Looking Backward is a utopian science fiction story, in which its 19thcentury protagonist finds himself transported to the year 2000, where he discovers that a series of socialist reforms have turned the United States into a paradise quite unlike the Gilded Age moment of the book’s publication. I can’t entirely recommend Looking Backwardas an engrossing read (it often feels more like a political pamphlet or dry sociological study than a novel), and I definitely won’t ever teach the whole thing again (as I did in my first course on the Gilded Age, a 2007 English Senior Seminar). But it’s a pretty fascinating window into late 19thcentury America, and its striking sales numbers indicate that many of Bellamy’s fellow Gilded Age Americans found something of interest in this utopian alternative.Edward and Francis are their own people, and I don’t know for sure that Francis had any direct engagement with Edward’s novel (although I’m willing to bet he did, given the two men’s shared socialist philosophies). But nonetheless, I think it’d be really interesting and important to consider the Pledge of Allegiance alongside Looking Backward—to consider, that is, whether we might see the Pledge as a utopian vision of the United States in its own right. I’m thinking in particular about the central phrase “to the Republic for which it stands,” the moment when the Pledge shifts overtly from a tribute to a flag to a testimony to a national community. After all, I can’t imagine that Francis Bellamy, or any engaged and thinking person, could truly look at the United States in 1892 and see a nation currently dedicated to “liberty and justice for all.” But what if Bellamy saw the Pledge as a utopian text akin to his cousin’s, as imagining a potential future nation and community that could live up to and embody those ideals? What if we saw it that way today? Among other effects, that would require the Pledge to be a call to action, to the activism that can help move us closer to that more perfect union. Now that’d be worth dedicating ourselves to.Next Pledge post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other takes on the Pledge you’d share?

September 12, 2017: Pledge Posts: Protesting the Pledge

[September 8thmarked the 125th anniversary of the first publication of the Pledge of Allegiance, in the popular magazine The Youth’s Companion . So this week I’ll AmericanStudy this complex shared text, starting with a repeat of one of my oldest posts and then moving into four new ones. Leading up to a weekend post on the very salient question of the worst and best versions of allegiance!]On two contexts for my older son’s inspiring act of civil disobedience.First, here’s the relevant paragraph from my “Inspiring Children” post from earlier this year: “Throughout his time in 5thgrade this past year, my older son took a knee during his class’s recital of the Pledge; the idea, entirely his own, was to honor and extend Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protest. [ED: Which is even more frustratingly salient now that the NFL season has begun and Kaepernick remains unemployed, due at least as much to his protests as to concerns over his quarterbacking. But he has inspired a number of other parallel protests from fellow NFL players during this year’s preseason, so the story continues to evolve.] Thanks in part to Bruce’s amazing “American Skin (41 Shots),” a shared favorite song of ours, I’ve talked to the boys about police shootings and race in America for many years now; but there’s talking and then there’s listening, understanding, and developing one’s own perspective and voice. My son’s Pledge protest reflects just how fully he’s done all of the latter, and become his own amazing young man as a result (among many other influences of course).”Kaepernick, his fellow NFL protesters, and the history of sports protests thus offer one clear context for my son’s Pledge protests. But I wanted here to add a second such context, one directly linked to the turn of the 20th century era in which the Pledge originated: public schools and patriotism. While public education had been part of the United States since long before the Revolution, it was in the late 19thcentury that states began passing so-called “compulsory laws,” making school attendance mandatory for all young Americans. By 1900, 34 states had passed such laws, with the effect that by 1910 over 70% of American children attended school for at least some time; by 1918, every state required at least the completion of elementary school. There were of course many factors and arguments that led to this shaerd emphasis on mandatory education for all American children, but prominent among them was the sense that it was through such a shared educational experience that all young Americans—whether they were born here or had immigrated—could become “Americanized.” This was the goal of such parallel efforts in the era as the settlement house movement, and it was a clear facet of the push for mandatory education as well.That doesn’t mean by any stretch that our modern public education system was designed to brainwash the nation’s young people—it had far too much of a John Dewey influence for that. But at the same time, a certain patriotic reverence for the United States seems to have been a prominent part of American public education in the early 20th century; one need only read Mary Antin’s memoir The Promised Land(1912) to see the effects of that educational emphasis on a young immigrant girl (Antin frames those effects as entirely positive, to be clear). Given the centrality of the Pledge of Allegiance to a typical public school day in 2017, that linkage between public education and patriotic sentiment is still quite visible a century after Antin published her celebratory book. And given my own work, in my most recent book and overall in my career, on the concept of critical patriotism, it will come as no surprise that I see my son’s Pledge protest as not only appropriate for a space so tied to ideas of patriotism, but a vital example of applying such sentiments and concepts to one’s own life and choices. Fortunately, his school seems to feel the same, and allowed him to perform his patriotic protest throughout the year.Next Pledge post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other takes on the Pledge you’d share?

September 11, 2017: Pledge Posts: Myths and Realities

[September 8thmarked the 125th anniversary of the first publication of the Pledge of Allegiance, in the popular magazine The Youth’s Companion . So this week I’ll AmericanStudy this complex shared text, starting with a repeat of one of my oldest posts and then moving into four new ones. Leading up to a weekend post on the very salient question of the worst and best versions of allegiance!]On the widespread fundamental inaccuracies about an emblematic American text.
A few years back [ED: now too many years back for me to want to think about!], my younger son’s preschool class—made up of kids between 3 and 4 years old, not surprisingly—learned to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day. I didn’t have a particular problem with that, for a couple of reasons: it was a pretty diverse group of kids, and I liked that they could all learn from a very young age that America ideally means all of them, equally, no questions asked; and it was just so darn cute to hear him recite his version of it. So the practice, again, not an issue. But having heard the main classroom teacher articulate the theory while telling a fellow parent about her reasoning behind having them recite it—she said, and this is a paraphrase but it’s close, “It’s just one of those founding American things, you know? So I feel like they should know it as soon as possible”—helped confirm for me something that I’ve long suspected, which is that our communal knowledge of the Pledge is pretty significantly inaccurate on two key fronts.
For one thing, the Pledge’s historical origin is both more recent and much more radical than we probably know. It was created not in the Founding era, but more than a century later, in 1892; the still fresh sectional division of the Civil War, and its resulting destructions and continuing bitterness, meant that the word “indivisible” was not at all a given, and instead very much a point of emphasis for the Pledge’s creator. And moreover that creator, Francis Bellamy, was thinking not only of those divisions, but also and even more strikingly of the Christian Socialism to which both he and his cousin Edward Bellamy (author of the socialist utopian novel Looking Backward) subscribed: Frances Bellamy later admitted that he originally planned to include “equality” along with “liberty and justice for all,” or even to use instead the French Revolutionary slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity,” but recognized that in the late 19th century such beliefs were still unfortunately “too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization.” Yet even the emphasis on “liberty and justice for all,” in the same decade in which the Supreme Court confirmed the legality of Jim Crow segregation and the same year in which the number of lynchings of African Americans reached an all-time high, was like “indivisible” far from a given; and Bellamy’s reaffirmation of those core ideals, particularly as located in the Pledge’s culminating phrase, was and remains a significant and inspiring statement.
As valuable and influential as it would be for those origins to be part of our public consciousness of the Pledge, however, it would be even more significant for us to recognize its most overt evolution, and the contexts behind it. For the first sixty-two years of its existence, the Pledge included no reference to religion; it was only in 1954, after a campaign by the Catholic organization the Knights of Columbus, that Congress added the words “under god.” It should, I believe, be impossible not to recognize the very specific contexts for that addition, in an era of still strong McCarthyism (with its tendency to conflate atheism with anti-Americanism) and likewise a period in which opposition to the “godless Communism” of the Soviet Union was becoming entrenched in every aspect of American government and society. Less absolute but still worth our awareness is the reaction of the Bellamy family to this addition—Frances had been dead for over twenty years, but his granddaughter argued vehemently that he would have been opposed to the change, noting that he had been forced out of his church in 1891 due to his socialist perspective and had toward the end of his life voluntarily left a church in Florida because of its endorsement of racial discrimination. While we can never know for sure what Bellamy would have thought, we can certainly acknowledge the very contemporary and politicized motivations behind this addition; doing so, to my mind, would—especially if coupled with an understanding of Bellamy and the Pledge’s origins—make it much more difficult to see critiques of “under god,” or of the Pledge itself, as un- or anti-American.
I am not, to be clear, arguing that we should discard the Pledge, or even necessarily alter its current version. Instead, as I hope is always the case in this space, I am arguing first that we can’t ever assume that our versions of core national texts and stories are necessarily accurate or complete, and that we have to try to tell the fuller, more complex, perhaps more dark but usually also more rich and meaningful, stories and histories behind them. Second, and even more significantly, I’d argue that when we do, it opens our history and identity up, truly democratizes them, makes clear how much they have evolved and how much they continue to do so, and thus how much of a role we have to play in shaping and carrying them forward. Next Pledge post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other takes on the Pledge you’d share?

September 9-10, 2017: Fall 2017 Previews: Conferences and Communities

[As the Fall semester of my 13th year at Fitchburg State commences, a series previewing some of my courses and other plans for the fall. I’d love to hear about your fall classes and plans in comments!]Two unfolding communal events I’m looking forward to—and room for one more!1)      NeMLA 2018: The 2018 Northeast MLA (NeMLA) Convention will be held in mid-April in Pittsburgh, with current President Maria DiFrancesco and continuing (and amazing) Executive Director Carine Mardorossian presiding. As always, it promises to be a wonderful event, with new initiatives like “NeMLA Reads Together” coupled with all that has made NeMLA a favorite community of mine for many years now. Your best chance to join us in Pittsburgh will be by submitting an abstract to one of the many compelling sessions, panels, and roundtables that’ll be featured there—so take a look at the CFP, submit an abstract or two (you can be on both a panel and a roundtable), and I’ll hope to see you in the Steel City in April!2)      SSN Boston: Other than the early August legislative event (which unfortunately didn’t end up taking place), everything I highlighted in that hyperlinked post on upcoming opportunities and connections through the Scholars Strategy Network’s Boston chapter remains true and well worth your time. Not a day goes by that I’m not reminded of both the need for publicly engaged scholars and teachers, and the benefit of being surrounded by a community of peers and colleagues as we do that vital work. SSN offers all of that, but it could be much wider and deeper of a community still, and that depends both on your own engagement with it and your recruiting of other folks. So once again I’ll ask you to consider joining SSN in one way or another, and to spread the word to anyone and everyone who might be interested as well. And feel free to email me with any questions or thoughts!3)      This Space for Rent: I bet you’ve got organizational and communal events and opportunities you’d like to highlight and share—and I’d love to learn about them and help spread the word here. So please feel free to highlight them in comments, or again email me and I’ll do so. Let’s make it as communal and successful a fall as possible!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. You know what to do! And any other fall courses or plans you’d highlight?

September 8, 2017: Fall 2017 Previews: Contemporary Short Stories for ALFA—Your Input Needed!

[As the Fall semester of my 13th year at Fitchburg State commences, a series previewing some of my courses and other plans for the fall. I’d love to hear about your fall classes and plans in comments!]I’m gonna keep this post brief and focused: for my next Adult Learning in the Fitchburg Area (ALFA) class, we’ll be reading and discussing 9-10 short stories (two per week for the final four weeks, and either one or two the first week depending on length as we’ll be reading them together) from the Best American Short Stories 2016 anthology. That hyperlink includes the table of contents, and so I’m asking for your help: there are twenty authors and stories in the anthology, at least twice as many as we’ll have room for in this class. Of course I have some first thoughts of my own, but I would be even more interested to hear thoughts of yours. Do you know any of these particular stories? Do you have strong takes on any of their authors? Please feel free to add your ideas in comments, or email them to me if you prefer. Help make this ALFA course as compelling and meaningful as possible! And look for a recap in this space in December, as ever!Last previews tomorrow,BenPS. Nominations for this class? Other fall courses or plans you’d highlight?