Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 255

July 11, 2017: Thoreau’s Bicentennial: Cape Cod

[July 12thmarks Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday! So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five texts and contexts for Thoreau, leading up to a weekend post on three ways we can remember and celebrate this unique and influential American on his 200th.]On two complementary reasons to read Thoreau’s often-overlooked Cape Cod (1865).Between 1849 and 1857, Henry David Thoreau traveled four times to Cape Cod (no quick or easy journey for any Concord resident in those days, much less one who preferred walking to the train). He was as taken by the place as have been so many of its visitors, and eventually compiled his observations and reflections on those journeys into a single book manuscript, treating the four trips as one symbolic meta-visit to the Cape. Not yet published upon his untimely death in 1862, the book was released in 1865, but has I would argue been largely forgotten in the century and a half since; when the Thoreau canon is expanded beyond Walden and “Civil Disobedience” to include his travel writing, the choice is often A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). A Week, like all those works, deserves our attention to be sure (and will get it later this week!), but there’s a case to be made that Cape Codoffers two significant contributions of its own to our collective memories.For one thing, it gives us a far different Thoreau. As was known even to his contemporary Concordians and has become clearer and clearer ever since, the Thoreau of Walden and the like was a carefully constructed persona, an imagined version of the self created in order to model a perspective and identity for those neighbors he was hoping to wake up. Whereas I very much agree with scholar Henry Beston (in his Introduction to an edition of the book) that in Cape Cod we find “Thoreau as a human being,” and more exactly “what he was at the time, a Concord Yankee gone traveling.” He was also one of our keenest observers of and writers about nature, both scientific (particularly as a botanist) and human—and while he included those observations in all his works, the lack of an overt moral or social purpose to Cape Cod allows them to take center stage in a particularly compelling and successful way. Cape Codmay not be as immediate or authentic as Thoreau in his Journals, but it’s a far more concise work and one written with audience engagement in mind, and thus it complements his other published books with a more intimate glimpse into Thoreau than we otherwise get from them.Moreover, Cape Cod also offers an important glimpse into both the natural landscapes and human communities of the region prior to its full development as a tourist getaway. In Chapter IV, for example, Thoreau finds himself on a Wellfleet beach that would become part of the Cape Cod National Seashore: “In short, we were traversing a desert, with the view of an autumnal landscape of extraordinary brilliancy, a sort of Promised Land, on the one hand, and the ocean on the other. Yet, though the prospect was so extensive, and the country for the most part destitute of trees, a house was rarely visible--we never saw one from the beach--and the solitude was that of the ocean and the desert combined. A thousand men could not have seriously interrupted it, but would have been lost in the vastness of the scenery, as their footsteps in the sand.” And in the very next chapter, he ventures inland to converse with one of the most finely observed human subjects in all his writing, “The Wellfleet Oysterman.” Taken together, these two chapters give us a striking glimpse into Cape Cod in the mid-19thcentury, a world quite apart from Concord and the rest of Massachusetts, and one captured with the unique precision and power of which Thoreau was capable.Next Thoreau post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Thoreau responses you’d share?

July 10, 2017: Thoreau’s Bicentennial: Civil Disobedience

[July 12thmarks Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday! So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five texts and contexts for Thoreau, leading up to a weekend post on three ways we can remember and celebrate this unique and influential American on his 200th.]Three lesser-known facts about Thoreau’s seminal essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849).1)      Origins in Oratory: Thoreau’s friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson tends to be more closely associated with lectures and oratory than the more iconoclastic and antisocial Henry. But Thoreau was of course part of the same Transcendental community and circles, and in February 1848 delivered a lecture at the Concord Lyceum entitled “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government.” As far as I can tell we don’t have a transcript or written version of that lecture, so it’s impossible to know how much Thoreau altered or added before publishing his essay the following year. But just as Emerson’s published lectures (such as “The American Scholar”) utilize a different structure and style than do his solely written texts (such as “Nature”), so too would we have to think in any case about how Thoreau’s oratorical origins for “Civil Disobedience” informed those kinds of formal elements, as well as the essay’s engagement with audience. To cite one small example of that latter aspect, Thoreau’s first-paragraph instruction to “Witness the present Mexican war” as an illustration of the abuse of government reads far differently if we think about him making such a controversial request of a live audience.2)      The Original Title: Even when Thoreau published the print version of the essay in 1849 (as part of the collected Aesthetic Papers ), it was distinct in a key way from the version that many future audiences have read. The essay’s 1849 title was “Resistance to Civil Government”; when it was reprinted in a posthumous 1866 collection, it was retitled “Civil Disobedience” (and in some subsequent reprintings has been called “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”). It’s my understanding that the text of the essay has remained unchanged in each case, but of course a title provides a significant first frame for any piece, and I would argue that both the distinction between “resistance” and “disobedience” and the different uses of “civil” (as modifying the government in the initial version and the disobedience in the latter ones) are titular changes that could guide readers in divergent ways as they begin Thoreau’s essay. (The resistance-disobedience distinction would be especially interesting to parse further in 2017, when resistance has become a focal concept of social and political protests.) And at the very least, I think we should refer to a text by the author’s intended title if and when we have a clear sense of that choice, as we certainly do with this text. So “Resistance to Civil Government” it is!3)      An International Inspiration: Much has been made, and rightly so, of the emphasis that both Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. placed on Thoreau’s essay and philosophy as inspirations for their own acts of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance. But prior to either of those responses, the Russian novelist and peace activist Leo Tolstoy highlighted Thoreau as one of his own chief inspirations. In a turn of the 20thcentury “Letter to the American People” that frames this anthology of Tolstoy’s writings on civil disobedience, the author notes that “thinking over at night, it came to me that, if I had to address the American people, I would like to thank them for writers who flourished about the [1850s].” Among other things, this less well-known international connection helps us recognize the role that Thoreau’s ideas have played in the anti-war and peace movements, somewhat different causes of course from the independence and civil rights struggles of Gandhi and King but certainly another longstanding legacy of Thoreau’s influential essay.Next Thoreau post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Thoreau responses you’d share?

July 8-9, 2017: Representing the Revolution: Hamilton

[For this year’s July 4th series, I’ve AmericanStudied cultural representations of the Revolution and its era, leading up to a special post on the most popular such representation ever!]I’ve already featured Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamiltonin two posts on this blog: my own thoughts here; and Emily Lauer’s Guest Post here. I would also recommend this great We’re History piece by Michael McLean, and you can’t go wrong with Joanne Freeman’s always important and incisive thoughts on the musical. So here I just wanted to share a couple follow-up thoughts, on one of the musical’s limits as history and one of its most important contributions to 21stcentury society:1)      Hamilton and Slavery: I expressed my main thoughts on this issue, which has become pretty dominant in my own perspective on the musical as it has evolved over the last year or so, in a comment on Michael McLean’s post. It’s understandable that the musical largely reduces the slavery issue to a North-South debate, although that is inaccurate both to the period’s overall histories (slavery was still legal in every colony as of the Revolution) and to the specifics of Hamilton’s life and story (including his first job as a clerk for the slave trade and his marriage into the slaveowning Schuyler family). Yet to my mind the problem is deeper still, on two levels: the musical’s opening song links Hamilton to slaves by association (note these two back-to-back lines: “And every day while slaves were being slaughtered and carted/Away across the waves, he struggled and kept his guard up”) a slippage that might lead audiences to think that Hamilton and his mother were themselves slaves; and by casting performers of color in the roles of Hamilton, the Schuyler sisters, Thomas Jefferson, and other slaveowners (to be clear, I love the musical’s casting choices overall, but this is an unfortunate side effect at the least), Miranda and his colleagues further that slippage and really suggest a far different (and at best historically inaccurate) relationship between these slaveowning figures and African American slaves.2)      Hamiltonand Kids: So, like pretty much every cultural representation of the Revolution and of history, Hamilton isn’t perfect (although that commonality doesn’t excuse or mitigate the musical’s specific historical problems). But what it is, among other positive qualities, is hugely popular and engaging, most especially (I have consistently found) with young people. That popularity has already become so widely known and accepted that we perhaps take it for granted; but if we take a step back and realize that one of the last few years’ biggest cultural crazes with teens and pre-teens is a Broadway musical about the American Revolution and national identity, we can recognize just how unlikely and significant this achievement has been and remains. Of course my hope, like that of all AmericanStudiers, would be that the musical’s audiences, young and otherwise, would extend their interests and researches well beyond this one text, and in the process learn more about issues such as slavery and the Revolution (among many many others). But that has to start somewhere, and whatever my reservations about particular aspects of the show, that it has started with Hamilton is a pretty exciting prospect.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other takes on Hamilton, or other Revolutionary representations you’d highlight?

July 7, 2017: Representing the Revolution: TV Shows

[For this year’s July 4th series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural representations of the Revolution and its era. Leading up to a special post on Hamilton !]Paralleling yesterday’s post, three Revolutionary-focused TV shows that reflect the medium’s evolution.1)      The Swamp Fox (1959-60): I’m not gonna lie, I’m including this show partly because I wanted to share clips like that initial hyperlinked one, of a very young Leslie Nielsen as the titular hero (he even sang the show’s theme song!). But The Swamp Fox also reflects an interesting moment in TV history—produced by Disney, in a direct attempt to build on the success of its Davy Crockett miniseries (1954-1955), The Swamp Fox didn’t achieve that level of prominence but nonetheless represented (to my knowledge) the first TV show to focus on the American Revolution. It did so in part by translating many elements of the era’s hugely popular TV westerns (including Crockett, but also and especially late 1950s contemporaries like Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, and many more) into Revolutionary-era South Carolina. Yet at the same time, The Swamp Fox was set during a war, and as such its gun-toting heroes and villains (like the British officers played by John Sutton and Patrick Macnee) played very different roles than those on the westerns. Even without dashing young Leslie, this is a show well worth watching (and all eight episodes are currently available in full on YouTube).2)      George Washington (1984): It took a quarter-century for another TV miniseries focused on a Revolutionary historical figure to air, and when it did it was with the very different George Washington (as well as its 1986 sequel, George Washington II: The Forging of a Nation ). Starring Barry Bostwick as George, Patty Duke as Martha, and an all-star cast (including Hal Holbrook as John Adams and, in keeping with the Zucker Brothers comedies thread, Lloyd Bridges as Caleb Quinn), George Washington was a sweeping epic melodrama, set over more than 30 years (from the French and Indian War to the end of the Revolution) and featuring the same kinds of historicl and romantic intrigues featured in other 80s miniseries (perhaps most similarly, the following year’s Civil War epic North and South ). Although historical miniseries had been a popular TV genre since at least Roots (1977), I would argue that George Washington is at least as close to its contemporary primetime soaps like Dynasty and Dallas (both of which were dominating the airwaves in 1984) as to a historical drama like Roots. This was the American Revolution via 1980s bombast and excess—which, to be very clear, isn’t at all a critique, and makes for a fun eight hours of binge-watching pleasure. 3)      Turn: Washington’s Spies (2014-present): The 21st century has seen its share of historical miniseries, including the hugely successful HBO production John Adams (2008) and the more critically mixed History Channel show Sons of Liberty (2014-15). But I would argue that the recent (in fact, ongoing) show which better reflects our current TV moment is Turn, the AMC spy drama that premiered its fourth and final season just a few weeks back. Combining elements of contemporary historical spy dramas like The Americans , historical action melodramas like Vikings , historical resistance dramas like Underground , and stories of family and loyalty and crime like Sons of Anarchy, Turn reflects the breadth and depth of what longtime critics like Alan Sepinwall have taken to calling Peak TV (full disclosure: because of that quantity and quality, I’ve only seen a few moments of Turn as of this writing). Yet at the same time, the cancellation of Underground (which looked like it might get picked up by Oprah’s OWN, but unfortunately was not), which both garnered higher ratings and was more critically acclaimed than Turn, suggests that Peak TV is still influenced by complex issues of race and audience in frustrating ways. Which is to say, we might not be ready for the Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker miniseries that would be my ideal next cultural representation of the Revolution.Special Hamilton post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other Revolutionary representations you’d highlight?

July 6, 2017: Representing the Revolution: YA Novels

[For this year’s July 4th series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural representations of the Revolution and its era. Leading up to a special post on Hamilton !]On three groundbreaking historical novels that reflect the evolution of young adult literature.1)      Johnny Tremain (1943): Esther Forbes’ Newbery Medal-winning novel follows its title character from his life in 1773 as a 14 year old silversmith’s apprentice (a career cut short when he suffers a debilitating hand injury early in the novel) through his gradual connection to the Sons of Liberty and participation in the Boston Tea Party (among other events), building to a climax set against the April 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord. Although Forbes creates Johnny’s 1770s Boston with depth and nuance, there’s never any doubt that the Sons are on the right side of history, a thread that likewise climaxes in the novel’s concluding section with a moving speech from James Otis(whom the other Sons had often dismissed as an insane old man) about the Revolutionary sacrifices that will be necessary and appropriate so “that a man can stand up.” Johnny Tremain is, let’s say, a Revolutionary historical novel for the Greatest Generation era.2)      My Brother Sam is Dead (1974): James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier’s Newbery Honor-winning (and National Book Award nominated!) novel offers a far more murky and (often) dark vision of the Revolution. The narrator, Tim Meeker, is torn between his loyalist father and Continental Army soldier brother in the early years of the Revolution; while we might expect transformations or reunions from a young adult novel, instead Tim’s father is abducted by pirates and dies of cholera on a prison ship, one of Tim’s friends is decapitated by the British, and Sam is eventually executed by the Continental Army (for stealing cattle, a crime for which he had been framed). This is a world where not only are loyalties divided and choices uncertain, but death and brutality seem to await regardless of what choices one makes; when Tim reveals in the conclusion that he has been writing the book from 1826, his survival seems to be the novel’s version of a happy ending. My Brother Sam is Dead is, let’s say, a Revolutionary historical novel for the Vietnam War and Watergate era.3)      The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party (2006): M.T. Anderson’s National Book Award-winning novel, the first in a two-volume series (the second, The Kingdom on the Waves , was published in 2009), is the story of a uniquely talented African American slave in Revolutionary Boston who finds himself and his mother used (and she killed) for social and medical experiments on race, escapes slavery and joins the Continental Army, and eventually (in the course of the series) joins the British forces in Virginia instead due to his opposition to American slavery. The novels wed Gothic tropes (Octavian’s Boston home is very much a Gothic haunted house, for example) to revisionist histories (his Massachusetts slaveowners are in league with Virginia planters to pursue their racist agenda, complicating our narratives of both American slavery and the Revolution), with the result a historical fantasy that imagines a far different nation and world than either of the prior novels had. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothingis, let’s say, a Revolutionary historical novel for the multicultural and Obama era. Next Revolutionary representation tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Revolutionary representations you’d highlight?

July 5, 2017: Representing the Revolution: 1776 and Burr

[For this year’s July 4th series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural representations of the Revolution and its era. Leading up to a special post on Hamilton !]On two complementary but also contrasting efforts to humanize the Revolution’s Framers.I don’t think it’d be an even vaguely controversial position to argue that 1776 (1969, although that hyperlinked film adaptation was released in 1972) is no longer the most popular musical about the American Revolution. But we shouldn’t let the record-breaking, award-winning, and history-eclipsing smash that is Hamilton overshadow what was strikingly new and original about 1776 when it stormed onto Broadway (winning its own collection of awards in the process) half a century ago. That musical’s first scene immediately presented its most striking element, its commitment to humanizing the Continental Congress delegates, in two key ways: first using two competing songs (“Sit Down, John” and “Piddle, Twiddle, and Resolve”) to frame John Adams and other delegates as bickering, exhausted, emotional people (rather than simply Founding Fathers); and then moving into John’s imagination for an even more intimate and emotional song, as he and his distant wife Abigail (working the family farm in Braintree) squabble but then reiterate their commitment to each other in the moving love song “Till Then.” These are not, this first scene announces clearly, going to be the two-dimensional Framers we’ve come to know through Great Men of History kinds of narratives and images.Or are they? I don’t want to suggest that 1776 doesn’t succeed in adding human qualities, emotions, and relationships to its portrait of the Framers, as it certainly does (to my mind it was those human elements, along with the inarguably catchy songs, that made the musical the enduring hit it was). Yet while the musical does highlight various debates and differences of opinion among the delegates—particularly over the issue of slavery, which it largely reduces to a North-South debate in the all-too-common way that obscures the legal reality of slavery in all thirteen colonies as of the Revolution—it nonetheless frames all of the delegates, at the end of the day (or rather the end of the show), as the idealized heroes that the Founding Father narrative had helped create for a century and a half. Of course no 1960s Broadway musical was going to portray the Framers as villains or anything close to it, nor am I asking for (nor, indeed, would I agree with) such a portrayal. But it’s possible to humanize historical figures and yet still mostly mask their imperfections and failings (which could be included without rendering characters villains in any sense), and I believe that 1776 does steer almost entirely clear of that sort of “warts and all” portrayal of its subjects. A few years later, Gore Vidal published Burr (1973), the first in his American Chronicles (or Narratives of Empire, as they have come to be known in recent years) series of seven historical novels. Burrlikewise seeks to add human qualities and depth to the Framers and the Revolutionary period, but Vidal makes two narrative choices that significantly shift the tone of his portrayal of the past: using a fictional first-person narrator, Charlie Schuyler, a young New York lawyer who knows the elderly Aaron Burr and has no reverence of any kind for him, his generation, and the founders; and then having Charlie serve as Burr’s amanuensis, helping the elderly Burr write his memoirs, which allows Vidal to create a fictional version of Burr’s largely cynical and wicked perspective on his fellow founders and every aspect of the Revolution and Founding period. Vidal’s Burr hates Hamilton (obviously) and Jefferson (only slightly less obviously, since Jefferson brought him up on charges of treasonwhile Burr was serving as his Vice President); but even for those peers for whom his feelings are less negative, Burr is all too willing and happy to highlight their flaws and foibles (a lens, to be fair, which he likewise applies to himself throughout the novel). Vidal’s novel is perhaps too sarcastic and even satirical toward the Revolution’s figures and events, but it offers an important counter-point to 1776 (and to Hamilton, for that matter), and would be an important Revolutionary representation to keep in the conversation for that reason (among many others).Next Revolutionary representation tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Revolutionary representations you’d highlight?

July 4, 2017: Representing the Revolution: The Adams Letters

[For this year’s July 4th series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural representations of the Revolution and its era. Leading up to a special post on Hamilton !]On the myths, and the realities, revealed about the Revolution and its leaders in the Adams letters.Writing to his wife Abigail on July 3rd, 1776 (she was back at home in Braintree managing the family farm and raising their children), the day after the Continental Congress had drafted the Declaration of Independence, John Adams argued that “the Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epoch, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”On one level, the letter reveals just how much myth-making is inherent in any national celebration—we celebrate independence on July 4th because the Declaration was signed, dated, and sent out to the American public for the first time on that day; but Adams’ emphasis makes clear that the date was and is an arbitrary one, and of course that Revolutionary acts, like all historical moments, develop over time. On another level, however, Adams’ letter reveals quite impressively how aware the Congress was of the significance of what was happening: not only in his quite thorough prediction of the celebrations that would come to commemorate the event; but also in his recognition of all that would follow the Declaration. “You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not,” he wrote. “I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means.”Reading the Adams’ correspondence offers even more Revolutionary realities than those. For one thing, it deeply humanizes the second President (and by extension all the framers); I defy anyone to read John’s heartfelt July 20th, 1776 letter of concern for both his ailing family and his own separation from them and not feel differently about the man and moment. For another, the letters provide a visceral and compelling argument for the Revolutionary era’s hugely impressive community of American women—Abigail was not as publicly minded as peers such as Judith Sargent Murray and Annis Boudinot Stockton, but she makes a thoroughly convincing case for what Murray called the equality of the sexes: in her overt arguments for such equality, but just as much in her intelligence, her eloquence, and her strength in supporting both the family and its business and her husband and the nation’s. Many of my posts in this space have sought to complicate our idealizing national myths, but the Adams letters remind us that some of our realities have been just as ideal.Next Revolutionary representation tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Revolutionary representations you’d highlight?

July 3, 2017: Representing the Revolution: The Patriot

[For this year’s July 4th series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural representations of the Revolution and its era. Leading up to a special post on Hamilton !]On the monstrous issue at the heart of a Revolutionary blockbuster.There are lots of reasons why this AmericanStudier should be a big fan of Roland Emmerich’s historical blockbuster film The Patriot (2000; serious spoilers in that hyperlinked video). It features a protagonist who seems to be at least loosely based on one of my childhood favorite American historical figures: Frances Marion, the Swamp Fox on the Revolution. It includes multiple, compelling scenes set in the South Carolina State Legislature (seriously). And it’s a got a heaping helping of Chris Cooper, which is more than just about any other summer blockbuster outside of the unquestionably great The Bourne Identity . What’s not to like?The very, very very, unlikeable villain, that’s what. As embodied by Jason Isaacs, The Patriot’s villainous British colonel is a thoroughgoing monster, the kind of man who will shoot a young child just for the heck of it, with a smile on his face. There are of course generic reasons for this choice—the film is what we might call a historical revenge saga, one inspired quite directly by Mel Gibson’s previous Braveheart as well as similar films like Gladiator; those films featured equally monstrous villains played by Patrick McGoohan and Joaquin Phoenix(respectively), characters designed in each case to insure that audiences would root for nothing more than to see the protagonist achieve his vengeful goal. Maybe if I were a British or Roman historian, those villains would bother me more than they do—but as an AmericanStudier, it’s Isaac’s over-the-top bad guy in The Patriot who really gripes my cookies.The problem isn’t just that making Isaacs such a monster reduces the film’s narrative of the American Revolution to a story of primal revenge (although that sure doesn’t work on any historical level, unless you want to argue that everybody really took that Crispus Attucks thing personally). Nor is it just that it makes the British look really bad, although they had some justifiable issues with that effect of the film. To my mind, the biggest problem with The Patriot’s monstrous villain is that he makes the film’s Revolutionary protagonist into an equally one-dimensional saint, turning our hugely complex, politically and socially layered originating moment into a simplistic saga of good vs. evil. I’m sure there were monstrous men in the British army, and in the Continental one as well—war tends to bring out such types. But they didn’t define the Revolution’s causes or stories; and so whatever its charms, this Revolutionary representation gets a failing grade in history.Next Revolutionary representation tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Revolutionary representations you’d highlight?

July 1-2, 2017: June 2017 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]June 5: The Pulitzers at 100: The Good Earth: A centennial series starts with the limits of an influential novel, and one way to move past them.June 6: The Pulitzers at 100: All the King’s Men: The series continues with two of the things that make one of our most underrated novels so great.June 7: The Pulitzers at 100: Angle of Repose: Two literary contexts for Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece, as the series rolls on.June 8: The Pulitzers at 100: The Color Purple: What the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel didn’t include, and why it’s still a worthy complement to the book.: How last year’s winner complements but also complicates a prior winner.June 10-11: The Pulitzers at 100: The Underground Railroad: The series concludes with anachronisms, genre blurring, and the most recent Pulitzer winner.June 12: American Beaches: Revere Beach: A summer series begins with three stages in the history of an exemplary American beach.June 13: American Beaches: The Inkwell: The series continues with three layers to one of our most historic beaches.June 14: American Beaches: Gidget and the Beach Boys: 1960s pop culture images of the beach and what to make of them, as the series rolls on.June 15: American Beaches: On the Beach: The intense and tragic film that couldn’t compete with historic fears.June 16: American Beaches: Baywatch: The series concludes with why those beach bodies are also a body of evidence.June 17-18: American Beaches: Jamie Hirami’s Guest Post on Venice Beach: A talented young AmericanStudier on one of our most unique and telling beaches.June 19: Mysterious Beach Reads: Ross MacDonald: My annual Beach Reads series kicks off with the series sure to send summer chills down your spine.June 20: Mysterious Beach Reads: Tony Hillerman: The series continues with the books that capture the mysteries and allure of the Southwest.June 21: Mysterious Beach Reads: Jonathan Lethem and Tim O’Brien: Two ground-breaking novels that explore the mysteries of memory, as the series rolls on.June 22: Mysterious Beach Reads: Attica Locke: The wonderful first two novels by a new favorite American author.June 23: Mysterious Beach Reads: Tana French: The series concludes with two ways to AmericanStudy the talented Irish novelist.June 24-25: Crowd-sourced Beach Reads: One of my favorite crowd-sourced posts of the year didn’t disappoint—add your nominations in comments!June 26: The US and World War I: Entering the War: A WW1 centennial series starts with two reasons why US troops entered the war in 1917.June 27: The US and World War I: The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF): The series continues with three contexts for the US soldiers who fought in the Great War.June 28: The US and World War I: African American Soldiers: Two opposing yet connected ways to remember a community of veterans, as the series rolls on.June 29: The US and World War I: Representing the War: Lessons from two compelling cultural representations of the war.June 30: The US and World War I: The Palmer Raids: The series concludes with the governmental overreach that extended the worst of the war into its aftermath.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

June 30, 2017: The US and World War I: The Palmer Raids

[On June 26th, 1917, the first 14,000 U.S. soldiers arrived in France to join the Allied effort in The Great War. To commemorate that centennial, this week I’ll be AmericanStudying the U.S. and WWI—share your thoughts and contexts in comments, please!]On the governmental overreach that extended the worst of war into its aftermath.
As I detailed in Monday’s post, few presidents, or national leaders of any kind, have had as vexed a relationship to war as did Woodrow Wilson. With World War I raging across Western Europe, Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war”; the phrase was in its moment entirely accurate and yet in hindsight cannot help but be reflected in a funhouse mirror by the fact that Wilson would lead the US into that war only two months after his second inauguration. And yet, having reversed course so dramatically (and for complex and perhaps entirely justifiable reasons, as I wrote Monday), Wilson would end his presidency and political career fighting ceaselessly for the creation of the League of Nations, an international peacekeeping organization that could make real his pledge that World War I would be “the war to end all wars.” That the League failed, and that another world war would commence not two decades later, provides yet another tragically (and possibly unfairly) distorted reflection of Wilson’s aims and efforts.
Given all of those contradictory or at least conflicting elements of Wilson’s wartime foreign policy, it might become slightly easier to wrap our heads around a particular—and particularly contradictory—member of Wilson’s administration: A. Mitchell Palmer (1872-1936). Palmer was a Quaker who in 1912 turned down a chance to serve as Wilson’s Secretary of War, arguing that to be “a Quaker war secretary” would be to become “a living illustration of a horrible incongruity.” Yet when the US entered the war, Palmer took on, and performed with a diligence that is both impressive and disturbing, two of the most warlike roles within Wilson’s second administration: first from 1917 to 1919 as the Alien Property Custodian, an agency responsible for seizing and reallocating property belong to domestic “enemies”; and then, most famously and controversially, from 1919 to 1921 as Attorney General, a role in which Palmer (under the auspices of the Sedition Act) engaged in an increasingly overt and extraordinary war against “radicals,” conducting the so-called Palmer Raids on numerous political organizations and rounding up thousands of members for arrest and possible deportation (many of whom were not deported only due to the efforts of an under-secretary of labor, Louis Freeland Post, who opposed the raids).
World War I ended with the Armistice in November 1919, but the Palmer Raids continued well beyond that month, exemplifying just how fully Palmer carried over these wartime activities into other domestic efforts as Attorney General. These included extremely hostile responses to labor protests and strikes and a series of doomsday warnings about radical uprisings (to overthrow the federal government) on May Day (May 1st) of 1920 (warnings that would help commence the decade’s hysterical and repressive Red Scare). Palmer would also run for the Democratic nomination for President in that year, and his campaign rhetoric was as extreme as his actions had become: he noted in one speech that “I am myself an American and I love to preach my doctrine before undiluted one hundred percent Americans, because my platform is, in a word, undiluted Americanism and undying loyalty to the republic.” Many historians, including Christopher Capozzola in his excellent Uncle Sam Wants You: World War One and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (2008), have traced the rise of our modern military-industrial, surveillance, Patriot Act-creating state to developments around World War I, and in that view there can be few Americans more responsible for helping originate those trends than Palmer.
June Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other WWI stories or contexts you’d highlight?