Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 260

May 12, 2017: The Scholars Strategy Network and Me: Boston March for Science

[Last week, I had the chance to attend a national meeting of the Scholars Strategy Network, a vital public scholarly organization of which I’ve been a Member for almost four years. So this week I wanted to share a few sides to my work with SSN, leading up to a weekend post on that national meeting and SSN’s expanding role in Trump’s America!]Thanks to SSN and their connection to Boston March for Science organizer Ashley Ciulla, I was able to record a video for the March’s participants, speak at an SSN event the night before, and attend the March itself on Saturday, April 22ndat Boston Common. Here are three takeaways from that inspiring and important protest:1)      Science and Activism: In the initial stages of conversation about the national (Washington) March for Science, of which the Boston March was an off-shoot, a number of scientists expressed concerns about being perceived or defined in any way as partisan activists. I understand those concerns, but as I argued in my recorded video, the truth is that American naturalists and scientists have pursued concurrent and interconnected public activisms throughout our history. Moreover, those activisms have never been, and I would argue are not now, partisan or political in any narrow sense; instead, these are public arguments for the roles that knowledge and investigation can play in support of the common good. While I don’t believe all scientists have to link their research to such collective arguments, I think each and every one has the right to do so, and that the more who do, the stronger our society will be. I felt that strength on April 22ndto be sure.2)      Scientific Community: I also felt there the perhaps underrated importance of science as a communal endeavor. That is, our narratives of science sometimes portray it—as I wrote in this post on our images of individual inventors—as the solitary pursuit of iconoclastic geniuses. Such individuals certainly have always played a role, but, as I argued in that post, any lasting and meaningful scientific invention or innovation takes a village to complete and sustain. The Boston March for Science featured a number of interesting speakers who shared a wide variety of perspectives and experiences, but a central thread across all of the speeches that I had the chance to hear was the importance of the scientific and social communities in which these individuals had pursued their work. And the March itself, of course, embodied another such inspirational scientific and social community, one only temporarily gathered in the same physical space but committed to a more enduring sense of solidarity among all the participants and their respective institutions and cohorts.3)      Supporting Science: That communal spirit certainly offers one important way in which we can all support scientists and their work. But equally vital, and a significant part of the motivation for holding a March for Science in 2017, is public, governmental support for the sciences. I don’t imagine I need to tell any readers of this blog about the deep, distressing cuts to scientific funding in President Trump’s first budget—most of them just proposed at this point, making it all the more important to highlight and challenge them. But it’s also important that we confront the gradually eroding public consensus on the value (and unfortunately even the most basic truths) of scientific inquiry and knowledge, a long-term trend that predates Donald Trump and can’t be addressed simply by resisting those proposed budget cuts. The March for Science participants were, of course, a self-selected group of those who do believe in and support the sciences; finding ways to broaden and deepen those attitudes as we move forward must be a vital goal for all of us.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on SSN, or other organizations or efforts you’d highlight?

May 11, 2017: The Scholars Strategy Network and Me: No Jargon Podcast

[Last week, I had the chance to attend a national meeting of the Scholars Strategy Network, a vital public scholarly organization of which I’ve been a Member for almost four years. So this week I wanted to share a few sides to my work with SSN, leading up to a weekend post on that national meeting and SSN’s expanding role in Trump’s America!]On what I learned from contributing to SSN’s wonderful podcast, and why that multimedia effort is a vitally important one.In late 2015, I had the chance to record an episode for No Jargon, the Scholars Strategy Network podcast created by two rightly recurring figures in this week’s series, SSN Executive Director Avi Green and Director of Communications Shira Rascoe (the December 2016 date on the above hyperlink is about a year after my episode was released, just for accuracy). As you can hear for yourself if you listen to the episode (it’s about half an hour long, but Avi keeps it moving quickly and engagingly), Avi and my conversation focused on histories of immigration, immigration law, exclusionary and inclusionary attitudes, and refugee communities and responses to them, all as contexts for the then-ongoing presidential campaign, President Obama’s Executive Orders on immigration, and many other contemporary debates and issues. I’m as proud of that podcast episode as I am of any single moment or element of the public scholarly work I’ve done over the last few years, and would highlight both a personal and a broader takeaway from that very positive experience.On the personal level, I would say that recording my No Jargon episode reinforced but also greatly amplified my sense of the value of public scholarly conversation. That is, while of course most of the topics about which I talk in the episode are ones I had previously thought and written about at length and in depth (including frequently in this space, natch), my particular remarks and ideas in the podcast were nonetheless inspired directly and entirely by Avi’s questions and our evolving conversation in response to them. To parallel what I wrote earlier in the week about the evolution of my ideas on short-form online writing, I suppose I initially saw podcasting as a recorded/audio version of my writing; whereas in truth, if it’s done well (as No Jargon consistently does it), podcasting exemplifies precisely that genuinely conversational form, a medium where any individual’s voice and ideas are communicated through, and often (as were mine in this case) made stronger and more compelling by, dialogue. That doesn’t mean that I advanced different arguments or analyses in the podcast, but rather that I communicated both my perspective and the histories and concepts on which I focused in new, and I believe often clearer and more compelling, ways than I had in other settings. I can’t recommend taking part in a podcast strongly enough to any and all public scholars.That recommendation is an overarching one; but I also specifically and whole-heartedly recommend the No Jargon podcast to any and all interested listeners. Partly it’s because every episode that I’ve heard (and I’m quite sure every other one as well) offers and models precisely that conversational ideal about which I was just writing. Partly it’s because the entire endeavor embodies both the public scholarly and communal goals for which SSN is so consistently striving. But mostly it’s because all of us—and I mean all of us, as this has been just as true for me—can and will learn a great deal from every episode we listen to, about that particular topic and about the complex and crucial issues facing 21st century America and the world. Obviously I think we can and should learn from reading, of course; but just as podcasting presents public scholarly conversations in a different way from written work, so too does listening to a podcast allow us to learn in a distinct and equally important manner. Am I suggesting that No Jargon should be required listening for all my fellow Americans? I mean, not required required, no—just strongly recommended, as a communal and civic learning experience that’s as compelling and engaging as they come.Next SSN post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on SSN, or other organizations or efforts you’d highlight?

May 10, 2017: The Scholars Strategy Network and Me: Online Writing, Extended

[Last week, I had the chance to attend a national meeting of the Scholars Strategy Network, a vital public scholarly organization of which I’ve been a Member for almost four years. So this week I wanted to share a few sides to my work with SSN, leading up to a weekend post on that national meeting and SSN’s expanding role in Trump’s America!]On two SSN-inspired posts that extended beyond their online starting points.In October 2015, SSN Member Lawrence Jacobs and others at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairshosted two Washington, DC events to celebrate and discuss former Vice President Walter Mondale’s “life and legacy.” Jacobs and Avi Green asked me if I would write a tie-in piece on that theme for my biweekly Talking Points Memo column, and the result was “Why It’s Time to Reassess Walter Mondale’s Place in History.” Although the piece didn’t receive a ton of views, I was nonetheless proud of how it turned out, and prouder still of two unexpected follow-ups: Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, who was taking part in the DC events, Tweeted a link to the piece; and, most inspiringly of all, Jacobs wrote me that he had had the chance to share the piece with Mondale himself, who “appreciated the thoughtful analysis.” I share that latter detail not to brag (I mean, well, not only to brag), but to highlight instead how, thanks in no small measure to SSN’s connections and community, such online pieces can have significant offline stakes and meanings, can quite literally reach audiences we might never have expected. The following spring, Jacobs and his fellow political scientist Desmond King published a controversial and important book, Fed Power: How Finance Wins (Oxford University Press, 2016), an argument that the Federal Reserve has gone far beyond its Progressive Era origins to become a far-too independent and powerful part of our federal government and society. Thanks once again to my SSN connection to Jacobs, and specifically to a request from SSN Director of Communications Shira Rascoe for tie-in pieces to accompany the book’s April 2016 publication, I wrote a review of the book for my (at the time) new gig with the Huffington Post; I hope and believe that the review was even-handed, accurate, and fair despite those professional and personal connections. In any case, and in a reflection of how online writing has become just as much a part of our social and cultural conversations as more traditional print media, quotes from my review became part of the reviews section of the book’s Amazon page, alongside quotes from a newspaper (The Financial Times) and a magazine (The American Prospect). It’s easy to think of an online, blog post book review as fundamentally distinct from a print publication one—but as the Amazon use illustrates, they’re at least part of the same spectrum, if not indeed overtly parallel.That would be one main takeaway of mine from these two examples and experiences—that online writing, thanks in no small measure to its immediacy and accessibility, has the chance to extend to and connect with audiences and conversations well beyond its particular starting point or location (and often entirely outside of the plans or imagining of its author, which is mostly a good but occasionally a frustrating and even frightening thing; I’m referring in particular to the consistently vile and at times threatening comments on that post). But at the same time, both these specific examples and SSN’s work overall also illustrate the role that connections and community play in advancing and deepening such extensions of any individual’s writing and voice. I used to feel that “who you know” was a less than ideal side to this or any profession; but have to come to believe that there’s nothing wrong with, and a great deal that’s inspiring about, being part of communities that can help us share what we have to say with as many audiences and in as many settings as possible. Our words and works will be there in any case; we might as well be part of networks that can help get them viewed, engaged with, and responded to by as many readers as we can. Including, y’know, former Vice Presidents.Next SSN post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on SSN, or other organizations or efforts you’d highlight?

May 9, 2017: The Scholars Strategy Network and Me: Online Writing

[Last week, I had the chance to attend a national meeting of the Scholars Strategy Network, a vital public scholarly organization of which I’ve been a Member for almost four years. So this week I wanted to share a few sides to my work with SSN, leading up to a weekend post on that national meeting and SSN’s expanding role in Trump’s America!]On SSN and the moment that changed everything in my career.As of November 2010, the same month when I began this blog, I began trying to write op ed pieces for newspapers on histories that I believed were missing from contemporary debates over issues like immigration and diversity in America. Over the next four years I drafted and re-drafted a number of such pieces, waiting for moments when the particular issue would rise to the top of the news cycle once again and then sending the pieces out to various newspapers’ op ed pages. I apologize to any editors if I’m forgetting them, but as best I can remember I not only never got any of those op eds published (that I know for sure), but also never received a reply of any kind to any of those submissions (other than the automatic form-reply sent upon initial submission). While I didn’t entirely give up on the possibility (indeed, I kept revising and re-sending the pieces when suitable occasions arose), I have to admit that it started to feel like a minor and largely quixotic pursuit within the overall frame of my career, a way to pretend (I wouldn’t have used that particular word at the time, but I’m trying to reflect as honestly as I can) that I was aiming for public scholarly connections and audience beyond those that this blog or my books or other publications could reach. In November 2014, thanks to the Scholars Strategy Network, and specifically to its then-Media Director (now Executive Director) Avi Green, that all changed. President Obama was preparing to deliver a prominent, televised speech on his immigration (and Dream Act)-related Executive Order, and I was preparing a new version of my immigration histories op ed (now based in part on the many book talks I had given for The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us about America [2013]). But this time I shared the piece with Avi first, and—after ruthlessly and crucially forcing me to cut it down and make it more engaging—he encouraged me to place it with Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall’s website on all things American politics and society. With the help of Avi’s contacts there, my revised immigration op ed, “No, Your Ancestors Didn’t Come Here Legally,” was published on TPM Café; the piece would go on to receive more than 110,000 views, land at #4 on the list of TPM Café’s most viewed posts from 2014, and become the first of more than two dozen biweekly pieces of mine for TPM (and a model for the pieces I’ve written and continued to write for numerous other websites, including my most recent ongoing work as a blogger for the Huffington Post).There’s a lot that I could say about that moment and what it meant for me, but I think my main takeaway would have to be that it, and thus Avi and SSN, helped me realize for the first time the unique and vital role that short-form online writing can play in a 21st century public scholarly career. Despite my four years of blogging experience, I had mostly to that point been thinking about op eds as shorter versions of my other print publications, and thus had been sending them to print media like newspapers. For TPM, and with Avi’s help (as well as that of Nona Willis Aronowitz [especially] and David Kurtz, the TPM editors with whom I worked during my tenure there), I began to think about online public scholarly pieces as their own genre, one somewhat parallel to posts on this blog but with a voice, style, and emphasis on audience engagement all their own. Moreover, those evolutions in my voice and style became significant parts of my most recent book and, even more so, the book on exclusion and inclusion that I’m beginning now. To put it bluntly, I don’t know that any aspects of my public scholarly career over the last 2.5 years would have been possible without SSN and that TPM link—and I know that they would have been greatly impoverished at the very least.Next SSN post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on SSN, or other organizations or efforts you’d highlight?

May 8, 2017: The Scholars Strategy Network and Me: SSN Origins and Goals

[Last week, I had the chance to attend a national meeting of the Scholars Strategy Network, a vital public scholarly organization of which I’ve been a Member for almost four years. So this week I wanted to share a few sides to my work with SSN, leading up to a weekend post on that national meeting and SSN’s expanding role in Trump’s America!]Before getting into my personal experiences with SSN, a post on three important contexts for how and why the group was created: 1)      Theda Skocpol: The SSN was the brainchild of Dr. Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard; she remains SSN’s Director and has been a vital force in every aspect of its work to date. It’s fair to say that SSN embodies the publicly connected scholarly work Dr. Skocpol had been already producing for many decades, not only in her research and publications but in taking part in policy debates at and around the Clinton White House (among many other such efforts). But having had the chance to attend SSN events alongside Dr. Skocpol, I would stress that she sees herself first and foremost as a Member of the organization, a peer and colleague of all those scholars (781 to date, from 192 universities around the country) whose work constitutes SSN’s evolving body of contributions to American and global society and conversations.2)      Policy and Media: Like Skocpol (and, in a much much briefer and smaller way, like me), numerous scholars had already been producing publicly engaged work long before SSN’s founding. But it had been very difficult for most of them to bring that work outside of the academy and into two vital settings and conversations: government and its public policy debates; and the mass media and its connections to public audiences. SSN’s primary purpose was and remains to help individual scholars bridge those gaps, to offer and facilitate opportunities for us to speak directly with legislators and policy makers on the one hand and media outlets and pundits on the other. As the next couple posts in this series will illustrate, my personal connections have been more on the media side; but here in Massachusetts I’ve likewise seen multiple, tangible examples of policy debates to which SSN has connected its Members and which have been significantly affected by those links.3)      Community: SSN has never been solely about connecting individual scholars to those different aspects of their regional and national communities, however. Just as central has been a goal of creating scholarly communities, of helping publicly engaged scholars find like-minded folks and build collaborations and relationships with them. The most overt examples of such scholarly communities are the SSN Working Groups, in which scholars from around the country share resources and ideas related to a particular contemporary issue. But I have found that SSN’s communal connections can also develop in organic ways: to cite just one example, through one of the SSN Boston leaders Dr. Erin O’Brien I was connected to the WGBH Mass Politics Profs blog (for which O’Brien is one of the principal contributors), and had the chance to write a post on public education ahead of the state’s 2014 gubernatorial election. Now more than ever, it’s crucial that none of us feel that we’re going it alone, and SSN’s communal connections have helped me feel that sense of solidarity consistently and potently.Next SSN post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on SSN, or other organizations or efforts you’d highlight?

May 6-7, 2017: DisasterStudying: The Hindenburg

[May 6thmarks the 80thanniversary of the Hindenburg fire, a turning point in the use of video and newsreel footageto chronicle tragic disasters. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of historical disasters, leading up to this weekend post on that and other contexts for the Hindenburg.]On a justifiably famous context for the airship disaster, and a more ambiguous but equally compelling one.Eighty years ago, the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire while docking in Manchester Township, New Jersey, a horrific, tragic accident that produced thirty-six fatalities among passengers and crew. Much like the Titanic a couple decades earlier, the Hindenburg was a famous, groundbreaking vehicle that had left Europe to a great deal of fanfare, on the first of what were to be ten round-trip transatlantic flights that year; its scheduled return trip to Germany was already sold out. Yet while the Titanic’s disaster did not (as I understand it) lead to any immediate or significant change in the popularity of nautical travel, the Hindenburg crash marked the beginning of the end of the brief dominance of airships as a preferred option for passenger travel. Partly that striking effect was due to the particularly horrific idea of being caught on an airship in flight when it catches fire, of course; but I would argue that even more significant was the fact that for potential passengers all over the United States and the world, the Hindenburg fire was far more than just an idea: it was a series of infamous, viral images, videos, and radio broadcasts.A still image, photographer Sam Shere’s shot of an inflamed and crashing Hindenburg behind the mooring mast, became the defining depiction of the disaster. But it was through the newer video and audio technologies that the story of the crash truly went viral. Four different American and international organizations (Pathé News, Movietone News, Hearst News of the Day, and Paramount News) had representatives present for the landing and captured extensive newsreel footage, allowing viewers around the world to watch clips of an unfolding disaster for the first time in history (although, as those hyperlinks reflect, the clips were part of thoroughly produced and narrated pieces). But most striking of all was Herbert Morrison’s eyewitness radio report, recorded live and broadcast on Chicago’s WLS station the following day. Morrison was already a prominent figure in the industry (and would go on to become one in early television news as well), but his visceral reaction to witnessing the crash—epitomized by the phrase “Oh, the humanity!”—both propelled him to international fame and became inextricably linked with images and stories of the Hindenburg. If we’re now entirely accustomed to associating disasters with the media coverage of them, that link began with the Hindenburg.Far less famous than that media context, and far more ambiguous to be sure, were the connections between the Hindenburg crash and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime . The airship itself was entirely linked to Hitler, as its first public flight, alongside another airship the Graf Zeppelin in March 1936, served as propaganda for the regime; the two airships traveled around Germany broadcasting pro-Hitler messages and helped sway German public opinion in favor of reoccupying the Rhineland ahead of a referendum on the question. Most of the numerous, never proven theories of sabotage as the cause of the Hindenburgfire were based on various permutations of these Nazi ties: from A.A. Hoehling’s book Who Destroyed the Hindenburg? (1962), which named crew member Erich Spehl the saboteur in part because his girlfriend was a communist with anti-Nazi contacts; to more outlandish theories such as one that names Hitler himself as the culprit, in order to punish the German airship pioneer Hugo Eckenerfor his failure to support the regime. Historians and scientists have largely countered all of these theories; but even if the Hindenburgcrash was simply an accident, it seems important to me to remember that the airship had prominent swastikas on its tailfins. The Hindenburgmight have become a symbol of disasters for a new media age, that is, but it also embodied the relationship (at least as of 1937) between Nazi Germany and the United States.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other historical or contemporary disasters you’d highlight?

May 5, 2017: DisasterStudying: Representing Katrina

[May 6thmarks the 80thanniversary of the Hindenburg fire, a turning point in the use of video and newsreel footageto chronicle tragic disasters. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of historical disasters, leading up to a weekend post on that and other contexts for the Hindenburg.]On three exemplary stages of artistic depictions of the recent, controversial tragedy.1)      Documenting: Released less than a year after Katrina hit, Spike Lee’s gripping documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) is required viewing for anyone seeking to understand the hurricance and its many complex contexts and effects; but it’s only one of many impressive documentary films on those topics released in the years after the storm. Among them I would especially highlight Trouble the Water (2008), an immersive account of the storm filmed by a local family and featuring some of the most stunning and devastating on the ground footage of a hurricance ever captured. Taken together, Levees and Trouble offer crucial complementary lenses through which to document Katrina, and on a broader level exemplify what documentary storytelling can do in representing such histories and communicating them to audiences.2)      Rebuilding: There are likewise important documentaries about the multi-layered, ongoing efforts to rebuild New Orleans in the post-storm era. But I believe that the best artistic representation of that process is Treme , David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s four-season HBO show about music, food, race, culture, relationships, and the residents of that New Orleans neighborhood (and of the city overall) in the storm’s aftermath. Simon is a master television storyteller, and one of our culture’s most impressive depictors of urban communities and stories, but I would also argue that a TV show was the perfect artistic vehicle to chronicle the rebuilding process. Being able to follow the show’s numerous characters across multiple episodes and seasons provided a gradual, nuanced, contradictory, and always compelling perspective on whether and how the city could find its way again after the destructions and traumas of the storm.3)      Remembering: Both those documentaries and a show like Treme continue to have vital roles to play as New Orleans and the nation continue to document and rebuild, but nearly a dozen years after the storm, the complexities and meanings of remembering have also taken on a more prominent place in our collective narratives of Katrina. I don’t know of any artistic texts about Katrina that represent those complexities and meanings more successfully and powerfully than does Jesmyn Ward’sNational Book Award-winning novel Salvage the Bones (2011). Ward’s immersive, lyrical novel of a Mississippi family before, during, and after the storm is in many ways singular, but I would nonetheless argue that it also exemplifies what novels can do as representations of dark and potentially divisive histories. By focusing so fully and deeply on her central characters and family, Ward’s novel illustrates how fiction can produce empathy with the individual experiences and perspectives that are at the heart of any historical event—and thus can reshape our collective memories of those histories through such intimate, individual voices and stories.Special Hindenburg post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other historical or contemporary disasters you’d highlight?

May 4, 2017: DisasterStudying: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927

[May 6thmarks the 80thanniversary of the Hindenburg fire, a turning point in the use of video and newsreel footageto chronicle tragic disasters. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of historical disasters, leading up to a weekend post on that and other contexts for the Hindenburg.]Connecting America’s most destructive river flood to three prominent historical figures and issues.1)      Herbert Hoover: In 1927 Hoover was Secretary of Commerce under President Calvin Coolidge; yet while Coolidge generally maintained his administration’s laissez faire, small-government attitude in the flood’s aftermath, refusing almost all federal intervention in or aide to the stricken states and communities, Hoover took a different approach. His hands-on management of the flood relief camps in particular (despite the racial inequities on which my third focal figure here focused) received widespread national acclaim, and helped propel the previously unknown Hoover toward his successful 1928 nomination for and election to the presidency. It’s one of the great ironies of American history, though, that it was Great Depression migrant camps—which came to be called Hoovervilles—which contributed significantly to Hoover’s subsequent loss to Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. Disaster relief giveth and disaster relief taketh away.2)      Huey Long: Hoover wasn’t the only political candidate to benefit greatly from the 1927 flood’s effects and aftermath. Long had unsuccessfully run for Governor of Louisiana in 1924, and in the years since had continued his populist activism as a member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission. The 1927 flood allowed Long to leverage those longstanding populist attitudes and actions into more direct critiques of New Orleans elites, the state’s government bureaucracy, and their concurrent failures to look after the impoverished and working-class communities most affected by the flood. As this Slate article argues, the 1927 flood ushered in a new era of public calls for government intervention and aid; yet it’s equally important to tie those changing attitudes to populist movements like Long’s, which throughout the South almost always flirted with white supremacism and organizations like the Klan. Long himself was no friend of the Klan, to be clear; but as my next figure makes clear, populist responses to the 1927 flood were inseparable from the region’s systems of racial prejudice and segregation.3)      W.E.B. Du Bois: As I highlighted in this post, and as a river park in his hometown of Great Barrington (MA) commemorates, Du Bois had a lifelong, multi-layered attachment to rivers, and his strong interest in the flood and its aftermath was likely tied to that personal perspective. Yet as this wonderful exhibit at the National Museum of African American History & Culture makes clear, both the 1927 flood itself and the subsequent disparities in relief efforts disproportionately affected African Americans, giving even a less personally interested activist and journalist more than enough reason to cover the story at length (as Du Bois did in the NAACP magazine The Crisis, which he edited). Moreover, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Southern African Americans amplified the already-underway Great Migration, further shifting the nation’s racial and cultural demographics in profound and lasting ways. As usual, W.E.B. Du Bois has a great deal to tell us about those interconnected histories and effects of this singular yet telling disaster. Last DisasterStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other historical or contemporary disasters you’d highlight?

May 3, 2017: DisasterStudying: Boston’s Great Molasses Flood

[May 6thmarks the 80thanniversary of the Hindenburg fire, a turning point in the use of video and newsreel footageto chronicle tragic disasters. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of historical disasters, leading up to a weekend post on that and other contexts for the Hindenburg.]Three telling details about the unique 1919 North End disaster, which plays a small but significant role in Dennis Lehane’s historical novel The Given Day.1)      The Anarchists Did It—Or Not: When a tank containing more than 2 million gallons of molasses burst at the Purity Distilling Company on January 15, 1919, suspicion initially fell—as it did so frequently in this Red Scare era—on “anarchists.” Some of the alcohol produced by the factory was used to produce munitions, so the accusation wasn’t entirely without cause. But after nearly three years of investigations and hearings, the United States Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA) was held solely responsible for the disaster; one theory is that the company was trying to work faster in order to outrace Prohibition, as the 18th Amendment was ratified the day after the flood. In any case, the disaster serves as a telling reminder, in this pre-Depression moment, that corporations were at least as dangerous to American communities as Reds.2)      A New Class of Response: The reason for those three years of investigations was simple but very new as of 1919—local residents brought a class-action lawsuit against USIA. In our famously litigious 21st century moment, that response might seem like a given; but in 1919, the idea of a class-action suit was largely unfamiliar, as illustrated by this list of six game-changing such suits that dates back only to 1925. So when these North End residents brought their suit against USIA, when they pursued it to victory and received an unprecedented $600,000 in settlements from the company, they represented a potent, populist extension of the Progressive Era’s efforts to regulate and curb big corporations.3)      How We Remember: Adjacent to the site once occupied by the Purity tank, and now home to the city’s Langone Park and neighboring Puopolo Park, is a small plaque (placed by the Bostonian Society) that commemorates the flood. Yet I would venture that literally millions more Bostonians and tourists have encountered this history not through the plaque, nor through Lehane’s novel (bestseller that it was), but rather through one of the city’s ubiquitous Duck Boats (run by Boston Duck Tours). That dark brown boat, named Molly Molasses, comprises a pitch-perfect representation of the role that historic tourism plays in our collective memories, for good and for bad. But far be it from me to critique any attempt to better remember this unique, compelling, and exemplary historic disaster!Next DisasterStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other historical or contemporary disasters you’d highlight?

May 2, 2017: DisasterStudying: The Triangle Fire

[May 6thmarks the 80thanniversary of the Hindenburg fire, a turning point in the use of video and newsreel footageto chronicle tragic disasters. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of historical disasters, leading up to a weekend post on that and other contexts for the Hindenburg.]On two well-established legacies of and one evolving question about a horrific industrial disaster.The March 25th, 1911 fire at New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory led to the deaths of 146 garment workers, some as young as fourteen years old, making it one of the most deadly and tragic industrial disasters in American history. A number of factors came together to make the fire as destructive as it was: the factory was on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the Greenwich Village Asch Building, and inadequate methods of communication meant that for at least those workers on the 9th floor news of the fire literally arrived at the same time that the fire itself did; the factory’s owners kept many of the doors to stairwells and exits locked in order to prevent both theft and unauthorized breaks, leading many workers to jump to their deaths from windows rather than wait to be killed in the fire; the building’s one exterior fire escape was in terrible shape and perhaps already broken, and collapsed during the fire, sending at least twenty workers to their deaths; and so on. Yet while the particular combination of such contexts and events produced the fire’s strikingly high number of fatalities, it’s entirely accurate to say that each of those individual factors was representative of trends across the nation’s industrial sector in the period (and for many decades prior), the recognition of which in the fire’s aftermath led to a number of important legacies and changes.Those legacies can be roughly divided into two main categories: workplace safety regulations and labor activism. The safety issues were investigated first by a New York State Committee on Public Safety (headed by Frances Perkins, the sociologist and activist who would go on to serve as FDR’s Secretary of Labor and the first woman appointed to a presidential cabinet) and then by the newly created Factory Investigating Commission (chaired by State and future U.S. Senator Robert Wagner and future NY Governor and presidential candidate Al Smith). These two efforts produced nearly forty influential state laws and numerous other workplace safety recommendations and changes. At the same time, the labor movement responded to the fire with vigor and sustained activism; on April 2nd, just a week after the fire, socialist and feminist union leader Rose Schneiderman gave a speech at the city’s Metropolitan Opera House to members of the Women’s Trade Union League, arguing that “the only way [working people] can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.” In the subsequent months and years, it was the relatively new but rapidly expanding International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) that most directly took up that charge, fighting for factory and sweatshop workers around the country. Indeed, it’d be impossible to separate the legislative and legal advances from the presence and role of these labor activists, and it’s most accurate to say that the two forms of response to the fire went hand-in-hand.Those safety and labor responses and changes represent the most clear and enduring legacy of the Triangle fire. But as a public AmericanStudies scholar interested in our national collective memories, I would argue that the question of how to remember the fire is another important, and certainly still evolving, one. Many of those conversations were centered on, as were the initial efforts of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition(formed in 2008), the 2011 Centennial, a hugely prominent event that featured contributions and speechesfrom then-Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis among many other luminaries. Yet as important as such an individual moment for memory is, it’s vital to think about longer-term and more lasting ways to add histories like the Triangle fire into our national memories and narratives. The Coalition is working to build a permanent public art Triangle Fire Memorial in Lower Manhattan; those efforts remain in their early stages and I’m sure could benefit from any and all ideas and contributions, fellow AmericanStudiers. But as big of a fan as I am of public art memorials, I would also stress that 21st century collective memories are created at least as much in digital, multimedia, and educational spaces and communities. How to better include a horrific disaster like the Triangle fire in those kinds of collective conversations remains, both specifically and generally, an open and evolving question, I’d say.Next DisasterStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other historical or contemporary disasters you’d highlight?