Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 262

April 19, 2017: Animating History: The Princess and the Frog and Representation

[On April 17th, 1937, Daffy Duck made his debut, in the Warner Brothers cartoon “Porky’s Duck Hunt.” In honor of that foul-tempered feathered friend, this week I’ll AmericanStudy five animated histories. Share your thoughts on them, on Daffy, or on animation or cartoons of any kind for a weekend post that’s sure to draw a crowd!]On race, representation, and seeing ourselves and our histories on screen.Since I went pretty hard after Disney on topics of ethnicity and race yesterday, it seems only fair to balance that with a post on 2009’s The Princess and the Frog , the animated film that introduced Tiana, Disney’s first African American princess. (I suppose I could also have balanced that Peter Pan post with one on Pocahontas [1995], but that’ll have to be a topic for another time—or feel free to share your takes on it in comments now! Can you see the colors of the wind?!) The film represented a shift or evolution for Disney not only in that particular protagonist and her identity, but also in its striking blend of a classic fairy tale (the Brother Grimm’s “Frog Prince”) with a very specific historical and cultural moment and setting (the African American community and its contexts and connections in 1920s New Orleans). It was a box office, critical, and awards-season success, and I think is hugely significant on at least two distinct but interconnected levels.For one thing, I think it’s difficult to overstate the importance of a community of American audience members (and particularly youthful audience members) seeing a protagonist whose appearance and identity mirror their own. In a long-ago post in this space I highlighted Philip Nel’s work on the controversy of young adult publishers “whitewashing” their covers and marketing efforts, changing or at least minimizing the ethnic and racial identities of the works’ protagonists in the images that represent those characters. Of course a novel’s reader can encounter the protagonist through his or her own lens in any case, but those visual images and representations have a strong influence on an audience’s perceptions, and again especially youthful audiences. And far more influential still would be the images of an animated protagonist, whose appearance and identity so fully guide our viewing of that work. So the presence of an African American Disney princess in such a film and for its audiences is to my mind far from simply a token or a gesture.But I would argue that at least as important is the film’s aforementioned historical and cultural setting. I’ve waxed poetic multiple times in this space about New Orleans as an exemplary American space, and The Princess and the Frog engages with multiple sides to that place and its histories, from the Creole community and voodoo customs and spiritualities to the city’s histories of masquerades and even the meanings of particularly significant local settings such as St. Louis Cathedral. I also think that the decision to set the film in the 1920s is an important and effective one, tapping into ongoing post-19th century histories, to segregation, and to concurrent contemporary trends such as the Harlem Renaissance, allowing its youthful audiences not only to connect with Tiana and her world, but also and crucially to recognize that world’s distinct yet still ongoing and resonant histories and stories. Pretty inspiring for a Disney film!Next animated history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other animation or cartoon thoughts you’d share?

April 18, 2017: Animating History: Peter Pan and Racism

[On April 17th, 1937, Daffy Duck made his debut, in the Warner Brothers cartoon “Porky’s Duck Hunt.” In honor of that foul-tempered feathered friend, this week I’ll AmericanStudy five animated histories. Share your thoughts on them, on Daffy, or on animation or cartoons of any kind for a weekend post that’s sure to draw a crowd!]On datedness, racism, and teachable moments.In the midst of Disney’s Peter Pan (1953) can be found one of the most cringe-worthy, tone-deaf, racist sequences you’re likely to find in any mainstream Hollywood film of the post-World War II era. Centered on the song “What Makes the Red Man Red,” this sequence—which, if you haven’t seen, I can’t possibly do justice to here, so please watch the 3.5 minute clip hyperlinked there if you would and as long as you have the stomach for it—includes so many visual, linguistic, cultural, and historical stereotypes associated with Native Americans that it feels a bit like the perfect card in Racism Bingo (which would be about the worst party game ever). Given that the Native American chief’s daughter, Tiger Lily, is portrayed as a potential love interest for (and in any case loyal friend to) our hero Peter Pan, the sequence clearly wasn’t intended to be insulting to that character or her culture—but, well, the road to hell and all.It’d be easy to excuse or at least rationalize the sequence as simply dated, a reflection of a very different era in American culture and society (which is what many of the YouTube commenters on that linked video seem to have done). But while that might be partly true, it’s just as accurate to note that there had been prominent American critiques of such stereotypes (both from within the Native American community and from reformers and allies of that broad community) for more than a century prior to the film’s release. Moreover, while the 1950s were certainly far different from the 2010s in terms of racial images and issues overall, I can’t imagine a parallel 1953 sequence featuring African American or Asian American characters being created and included in a mainstream film (“What Makes the Yellow Man Yellow?” Doubtful). It seems indisputable that the sequence exists because of another, complementary set of racist narratives—the sense that Native Americans were not a meaningful contemporary American presence, not a potential audience bloc, not a community toward whose interests and responses Disney would need to be sensitive.So do we throw out the baby with the bathwater, dismissing the whole of this important animated film because of this one egregious and to my mind indefensible sequence? I don’t think we can or should—but neither do I think we should just minimize or ignore the sequence, or otherwise try to view the movie without it. Instead, I think it’s vital to focus overtly on how, in a movie that has nothing to do with such issues or images (that is, this isn’t Song of the South ), a sequence like this could be created and included, could become part of mainstream American culture in 1953. Which is to say, while I think we tend to overuse the concept of “teachable moments” these days, I absolutely believe that if and when I show my sons Peter Pan, it would be vital to highlight and use this sequence as precisely such a moment, a reflection of some of the worst (but also most telling, now as then) of our culture’s narratives and attitudes.Next animated history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other animation or cartoon thoughts you’d share?

April 17, 2017: Animating History: Dr. Seuss and Propaganda

[On April 17th, 1937, Daffy Duck made his debut, in the Warner Brothers cartoon “Porky’s Duck Hunt.” In honor of that foul-tempered feathered friend, this week I’ll AmericanStudy five animated histories. Share your thoughts on them, on Daffy, or on animation or cartoons of any kind for a weekend post that’s sure to draw a crowd!]On an animation icon’s surprising starting points.As I wrote in one of my earliest posts, it’s possible to read The Cat in the Hat (1957) as particularly radical in its portrayals of family and gender roles (especially in relationship to dominant 1950s images and narratives). But even if you don’t subscribe to that reading of Cat, it’d be very difficult to argue that its author, Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), didn’t have a substantial and generally very radical impact on the world of children’s books and animation—not just in his voice and style, his silliness and playfulness, his breaking of virtually every formal and generic rule, but also in his subtle but frequent inclusion of progressive themes and morals, including prominently the anti-Cold War (and anti-war period) ethics of The Butter Battle Book , among many other such messages.Which makes it that much harder to grapple with the fact that Geisel got his start crafting animated propaganda films for the military during and after World War II. But he did—first making army training films (featuring the cautionary tales of one Private Snafu) as part of Frank Capra’s Signal Corps (the organization that produced the most prominent U.S. WWII propaganda, the epic eight-part Why We Fight series), then branching out into even more overt anti-Axis propaganda works. Geisel even continued to make such films in the aftermath of the war, creating works to be distributed to soldiers in occupied post-war Germany. To call these films propaganda isn’t to critique them, necessarily—the term has come to be used pejoratively much of the time, but at its core it’s simply descriptive, a categorization of works that are overtly designed to further political purposes. Geisel’s World War II works were precisely that, and achieved their purposes clearly and convincingly.As the Capra reference indicates, Geisel was far from alone as an artist who enlisted in the war effort—in fact, he was more the norm than the exception. Moreover, it’s even possible to link his World War II works directly to (for example) his later anti-Cold War messages, since in both cases he could be seen as opposing the proliferation of violence and war (in the first case by the Axis powers, in the second by the Cold War superpowers). But for me, the problem is more one of style—whatever else we say about propaganda films, they are by design and necessity both straightforward and conservative, neither of which are terms that we would likely apply to most of Seuss’s subsequent children’s books and works. Of course we can simply say that Seuss evolved and changed, as does any artist (especially a talented one) over the length of a long career. But we also have to consider that each stage of Seuss’s career tells us something about the man and his work, and can’t dismiss or minimize the first stage just because it doesn’t line up with how we (or at least I) like to think of him.Next animated history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other animation or cartoon thoughts you’d share?

April 15-16, 2017: Aviation Histories: The Wright Brothers

[April 16thmarks the 150th anniversary of aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright’s birth. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of key moments and figures in aviation history, leading up to this weekend post on the Wright Brothers themselves!]On Wilbur’s 150thbirthday, three lesser-known stories of the brothers who helped change transportation and the world.1)      A Printing Press: In 1888, fifteen years before their pioneering flight and when Orville was still just a junior in high school, the brothers developed their first technological innovation, a printing press that they built themselves. They used it not only to publish their own newspapers in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio (first a weekly [ West Side News ] and then briefly a daily [ The Evening Item ]), but also produced publications for other friends and locals. One of them was a high school classmate of Orville’s and a blossoming young writer and poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar; the brothers’ printed his newspaper the Dayton Tattler for a time. Such personal and historical details not only remind us that the Wright Brothers moved through many stages of invention and profession before their aviation pinnacles, but also help situate them in their settings, both of place and time.2)      A Bicycle Shop: Like many talented inventors, the Wright Brothers were never satisfied to stay in one stage or field for long; just four years after they opened their press, they had moved on, opening their bicycle repair and sales shop the Wright Cycle Exchange in 1892. As detailed at wonderful length in Kate Milford’s historical YA novel The Boneshaker (which features a Wright Brothers bicycle in a prominent role), bicycles had become something of a craze in this period, and the brothers quickly realized that they could turn their technological prowess to designing new and improved bikes. By 1896, the Wright Cycle Company was producing its own brand of bikes, machines which would of course also feature prominently in their later aeronautical efforts. But while this business and pursuit offer a direct throughline toward the machine that would propel the brothers into the air at Kitty Hawk, it also links them to a transportation trend and history that were far more widespread and influential throughout the 1890s and well into the early 1900s.3)      A Museum Feud: The interesting and complex histories didn’t stop with that 1903 flight in Kitty Hawk, of course. One of the most compelling was the brothers’ multi-decade feud with the Smithsonian Institution, thanks to a rivalry with the institution’s secretary Samuel Langley over whose manned flying machine should be considered the first successful model. The museum chose to display Langley’s Aerodrome (which he had never gotten off the ground) much more prominently than the Wright Brothers’ model, and the brothers (especially Orville, as Wilbur died far too young in 1912) retaliated by lending their invention to the London Science Museum in 1928. There it remained until Orville’s death in 1948, when a long-negotiated truce allowed the Smithsonian to purchase the flyer and return it to the United States for the first time in decades. Among the many salient lessons from this controversial history is a reminder that museums are living and evolving spaces, reflecting the conflicts and struggles of their societies as much as their ideals and innovations. It’s hard to imagine an American Air & Space Museum without the Wright Brothers—but for a long time, thanks to the tangled history of aviation, that was precisely the case.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other aviation histories you’d highlight?

April 14, 2017: Aviation Histories: Sully

[April 16thmarks the 150th anniversary of aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright’s birth. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key moments and figures in aviation history, leading up to a weekend post on the Wright Brothers themselves!]On the quiet lessons of an averted disaster, and the recent film that didn’t quite learn them.No disaster is a good disaster (I’ll be writing more about historical disasters in a few weeks as part of a series on the 80th anniversary of the Hindenburg fire and crash ), but there’s something particularly frightening and horrific about an airplane crash. Perhaps it’s because the very act of flying in a man-made machine still feels (at least to this AmericanStudier) somewhat artificial and even unbelievable, and thus that crashes (rare as they certainly are) feel always possible or close. Perhaps it’s because, compared to most natural disasters or other kinds of transporation accidents, a plane crash feels so assuredly fatal for all involved. Perhaps it’s due to all the continuing mysteries associated with plane crashes, even in an era when we believe we understand technology so well: the Bermuda Triangle, the disappearance of flights like the recent and still-missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, those infamous black boxes and the stories they do and don’t tell. In any case, plane crashes are uniquely unnerving (to say the least)—which is why, when the actions of a heroic pilot like Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger can help avert a potential crash and save the lives of all on board, they feel particularly impressive.The details of Sully’s rescue are pretty well known: he was piloting a US Airways flight out of New York’s LaGuardia Airport on January 15, 2009 when a flock of Canada geese collided with his plane, damaging both engines; Sully and air traffic controllers discussed returning to LaGuardia or trying for New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport, but decided both options were too risky and opted for an emergency water landing in the Hudson river; he pulled off that very tricky landing and saved the lives of all 155 passengers and crew. What’s perhaps less well known is that Sully wasn’t just a pilot with nearly 30 years of commercial flying experience; he was also a very experienced instructor and investigator, having provided aerial combat training for pilots during the Vietnam War, and then serving during his commercial flying career as a pilot instructor, an Air Line Pilots Association safety chairman and accident investigator, and an accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. All of which is to say, Sully’s decisions and actions in January 2009 weren’t simply the result of quick thinking or good instincts or bravery (although all those factors were in play); they were also the product of decades of instruction and training, of investigations and expertise in both aviation and crashes. None of that is to take away from what was required of Sully at that particular moment—but I would argue that a career of teaching and learning provided the impressive preparation and tools that Sully was then able to utilize in the most significant minutes of his career and life.I’ll admit to not having had the chance to see Clint Eastwood’s recent film Sully (2016), starring Tom Hanks as Sullenberger, but from everything I’ve seen and read about the film, it seems to have not taken that lesson of the “Miracle on the Hudson” to heart much at all. Perhaps believing that Sully’s crash landing was either too well known or too anti-climactic to provide sufficient dramatic tension for the film, Eastwood and his screenwriter Todd Komarnicki apparently (again, going on reviews and responses here—feel free to offer corrections in comments!) decided to turn National Transportation Safety Board crash investigators (ie, folks in the same role Sully had performed many times) into villains, out to second-guess Sully’s actions and to threaten and potentially destroy his reputation and career. Besides ramping up the dramatic tension, this choice aligns the film with Eastwood’s overarching perspective as a filmmaker (and, it seems, a person), which often pits heroic individual figures against frustrating and even vindictive institutions and bureaucracies. Clint’s of course entitled to feel however he pleases, and to tell the stories he wants as an artist—but to my mind, the story of Sully and his heroic rescue reveals precisely the opposite lesson: that institutions and communal efforts can help prepare us for the hardest moments, not in opposition to what we can and must do as individuals but as a vital complement to and training for those occasions for bravery and heroism. Now that I think about it, I think that’d make for a pretty good story too.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other aviation histories you’d highlight?

April 13, 2017: Aviation Histories: Howard Hughes

[April 16thmarks the 150th anniversary of aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright’s birth. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key moments and figures in aviation history, leading up to a weekend post on the Wright Brothers themselves!]On how two acclaimed films remember the iconoclastic aviator, and how to complement both narratives.Martin Scorcese’s The Aviator (2004), starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, seeks to portray Hughes’s roller-coaster life in the most blockbuster epic way possible. Despite the title, and despite a number of bravura aviation action sequences, Scorcese’s film is no more about Hughes’s pioneering aeronautic achievements than it is about his film productions, his numerous liaisons with Hollywood actresses and celebrities, his descent into eccentricity and mental illness, or any other individual stage in this multi-act drama. As he does so many of his heroes and protagonists, even those who don’t seem to deserve any response other than criticism or even condemnation, Scorcese clearly sees Hughes as an embodiment of the best and worst of the American Dream, of the grandest kinds of triumphs and successes and of the cost and pain that they often bring with them. DiCaprio is impressive in the part as he always is, capturing each stage of Hughes’s life from boyhood ambitions through the worst moments of his final years, but to this AmericanStudier the film feels like one of those sweeping biopics that includes almost everything and adds up to nearly nothing. I don’t imagine many viewers would come away learning anything specific or in-depth about Hughes as, y’know, an aviator.Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980), featuring Jason Robards as Hughes, couldn’t be more distinct in either overall tone or its portrayal of Hughes. Based on the true story (or at least true claims, although they have since received some validation) of a Nevada man who supposedly rescued Hughes after a desert car crash, befriended the aging and iconoclastic tycoon, and ended up receiving a controversial and still contested place in Hughes’s will, Demme’s film is a quiet and quirky character study, one focused much more on Paul Le Mat’s Melvin and his rocky life and relationships, with Robards’ Hughes as a sort of mysterious guardian angel and potential deux ex machina. As such, Robards’ Hughes is defined purposefully and entirely by his eccentric nature, as a man with virtually no remaining human connections sitting on a vast fortune that (due to precisely that eccentricity) might well end up with a schlub like Melvin Dummar. How Hughes got to that point and that fortune isn’t within the film’s purview, and so neither are his aviation achievements; Hughes the reclusive and mysterious billionaire is the character Demme’s film requires, and one that wouldn’t function as neatly if we heard about his high-flying exploits.Both films are of course free (well, free with the permission of the Hughes estate, I assume, but that’s neither my business nor my concern here) to use and portray Howard Hughes however they see fit. And it’s fair to say that both the sweeping epic story of Hughes’s life and the eccentric details of his final years would be of more interest to audiences than would individual moments of aviation advances. But on the other hand, some of those aviation advances are pretty impressive—most especially Hughes’s record-breaking July 1938 around-the-world flight, which beat the prior record for such a journey by nearly four days (Hughes achieved the featin 91 hours). Moreover, alongside such aeronautic accomplishments that rival (or at least approach) those of Charles Lindbergh and his peers, Hughes was also a highly successful aviation designer and engineer, with his work in advancing aviation technology deemed so significant as to win him (among many other awards) a 1939 Congressional Gold Medal “in recognition of the achievements of Howard Hughes in advancing the science of aviation and thus bringing great credit to his country throughout the world.” While I certainly wouldn’t entirely equate Hughes with the Wright Brothers, I would say that he’s further toward them on the spectrum of innovation and achievement than many other pioneering aviators. Which might not make for the most exciting epic or intimate character study, but is a history worth remembering as well.Next aviation history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other aviation histories you’d highlight?

April 12, 2017: Aviation Histories: Charles Lindbergh

[April 16thmarks the 150th anniversary of aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright’s birth. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key moments and figures in aviation history, leading up to a weekend post on the Wright Brothers themselves!]On how history can overshadow history, and why we should partly resist that trend.I think it’s fair to say that Charles Lindbergh, one of the true aviation pioneersin American history, is remembered in our collective narratives at least as well (if not, indeed, much more fully) for two stories that had nothing whatsoever to do with his flying abilities and achievements. First, there was the horrifying March 1932 abduction and murder of Lindbergh (and wife Anne Spencer Morrow)’s 20-month old son Charles Augustus, a true crime story that gripped the nation both for the 10 weeks that Charles was missing and again after the 1934 arrest and trial of Bruno Hauptmann (a prosecution that led to a new law deeming kidnapping across state lines a federal offense). And then, less than a decade later, there was Lindbergh’s 1938 acceptance of a German medal of honor from Nazi leader Hermann Goering, and his subsequent opposition to U.S. entrance into World War II through his leadership of the American First Committee, an openly isolationist, xenophobic, and anti-semitic organization. Although Lindbergh would go on to fly numerous missions once the U.S. had entered the war, after these dual 1930s histories he would always at the very least remain connected to such broader cultural, social, and political issues alongside his aviation advances and successes.That’s not particularly fair when it comes to the true crime story—not only because it tells us nothing about Lindbergh as a historical figure or a man, but also because placing that story too much at the center of our collective memories seems to replicate the grisly fascination with a missing and then dead child (one of far too many such true crime fascinations in our cultural history). But the America First history is a far different story. Lindbergh’s association with—really his leading, spokesperson status in—that movement reflects deeply his attitudes and beliefs, his close connection to the Nazi regime in Germany, his actions and activism on behalf of an exclusionary vision of American identity and community. While of course those beliefs of his may have evolved over time, and we can and should consider that question (and thus his World War II service, among other factors) as part of this conversation, the late 1930s and early 1940s were a pivotal moment in American and world history, and Lindbergh aligned himself very fully and vocally with some of the darkest and most destructive forces in that moment. We can’t possibly remember his life and public career without putting that alignment front and center, not only for the sake of an accurate assessment of the man’s role in and influence on America but also because “America First” has, like anti-semitism, returned with a vengeance in our present moment.Yet at the same time, there’s another way of looking at Lindbergh’s America First alignment in relationship to his aviation achievements. Lindbergh was far from the only isolationist and anti-semitic voice in early 1940s America; the St. Louis and its Jewish refugee passengers were turned away by forces far bigger and more widespread than Charles Lindbergh, after all. On the other hand, Lindbergh was quite literally the first person to make a solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean (on May 20-21, 1927, ironically in a plane named The Spirt of St. Louis ), a pioneering and courageous aviation achievement that distinguished him from all of his peers and contemporaries and changed the course of transportation history. History isn’t a competition or a zero-sum game; the courageous moment doesn’t cancel out the horrific one, and we can and should work to remember both as part of Lindbergh’s story. But it’s also important that we remember America First and its bigoted and exclusionary attitudes as a far too widespread phenomenon, one certainly exemplified by but by no means limited to Charles Lindbergh. Whereas when Lindbergh boarded that plane in May 1927 and set off across the Atlantic, he was both literally and figuratively alone, and that’s worth remembering as well.Next aviation history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other aviation histories you’d highlight?

April 11, 2017: Aviation Histories: The Tuskegee Airmen

[April 16thmarks the 150th anniversary of aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright’s birth. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key moments and figures in aviation history, leading up to a weekend post on the Wright Brothers themselves!]Why we need to continue working to remember a particularly impressive group of American aviators.I don’t see many movies in theaters these days (something about the two blockbuster action films of mine that take up most of my free time, and with whom I do tend to see any theatrical releases I get to), and so I’m not usually very invested in which ones do well and which don’t. Moreover, my general fan boy frustration with George Lucas over his increasingly mercenary endeavors with the Star Wars franchise, one of this AmericanStudier’s foundational childhood texts, during the final years of his ownership of that film property before the sale to Disney made me even less likely to root very hard for a Lucas film to succeed. Yet despite those factors, I’ll freely admit that I was hoping for much bigger box office performance and buzz for Lucas’s most recent movie, 2012’s Red Tails, a historical action film based on the lives and World War II experiences of the Tuskegee Airmen.It’s important to note, as that hyperlinked Tuskegee Airmen website does in its opening description, that African American soldiers have been a part of every U.S. military effort; since Harry Truman desegregated the army after World War II, in 1948, it’s fair to say that the Tuskegee Airmen were thus in one sense not pioneering but rather culminating, the final impressive African American service in the face of a segregated and circumscribed military role. But in other important ways the Airmen did represent a significant step forward: created as a result of extended pressure and work by African American civil rights and media organizations and allies, the squadron performed prominently and heroically, contributing directly to the changed climate that made Truman’s actions possible at all. In many crucial senses, then, the Airmen’s legacy is overt and indisputable, whether our national narratives or histories do full justice to their efforts and impacts or not.Yet as anyone who has read this blog for more than a couple minutes knows, I think more full and accurate national narratives and histories are pretty important too. Partly that’s just because the Airmen deserve to be better remembered, to have their contributions recognized for the amazingly meaningful American histories and stories they were and are. Partly it’s because our national narratives about African Americans stilltend to break down into either victims (of slavery, of Jim Crow, of racism in general, and so on) or threats (too many contemporary narratives to cite, but here’s one good example), and the Airmen provide a welcome alternative to either role. And partly it’s because they offer all of us a rare and crucial combination: the opportunity to remember with more accuracy and complexity some of our more painful American histories, and at the same time to be inspired by the best of what America has been and can be. Lucas may have stated that second point most clearly when he said that young black kids “have a right to have their history … made corny and wonderful just like anybody else does.” Word, George.Unfortunately Red Tails didn’t do as well as it should have (yet—it can and hopefully will have an extended post-theatrical afterlife), so that important American work continues. Next aviation history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other aviation histories you’d highlight?

April 10, 2017: Aviation Histories: Earhart and Roosevelt

[April 16thmarks the 150th anniversary of aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright’s birth. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key moments and figures in aviation history, leading up to a weekend post on the Wright Brothers themselves!]On one of the most famous American flights, and one that should be.
Our national fascination with Amelia Earhart (1897-1937)—I think you could make a case that she’s the most famous 20th century American woman—is entirely understandable. Even before she flew off into the unknown just a few weeks shy of her fortieth birthday, she was a hugely unique and compelling figure who also happened to live at precisely the right time: that era of the first prominent pilots, of the Red Baron and Charles Lindbergh (one of Earhart’s nicknames was “Lady Lindy”) and Howard Hughes, of those terrifyingly fragile-looking planes making their way across the continent and the oceans. And beyond the mythologies, of Earhart’s individual mystery and of those high-flying national figures in general, she was also a genuinely complex and interesting American, one whose identity can help us AmericanStudiers think about technology and progress, the aftermath of World War I and the lead up to World War II, gender and identity, and many other topics besides.
Yet I’d still make the case that Earhart’s final journey has some serious competition for the most significant flight featuring an American woman, and at the very least that her competitor’s flight, like her competitor herself, deserves a lot more attention in our national narratives and memories. In March 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), whose husband Franklin was just beginning his third term as President under the very dark cloud of the ongoing Second World War, visited the Tuskegee Air Corps Advanced Flying School in Tuskegee, Alabama. Self-taught pilot Charles Anderson had founded the school for African American civilian pilot training two years earlier, and was facing in his attempts to support and extend its efforts all of the discrimination and lack of funding and the like that we might expect in the depths of the Jim Crow South and in an era when the military itself (like so many organizations) was fully segregated. And so when the nation’s First Lady not only visited the school, but despite the protests of her Secret Service agents requested a private flight with Anderson and spent over an hour in the sky with him, the event took on a literal and a symbolic significance that is difficult to overstate. Nor was this a one-off for Roosevelt, as she facilitated a White House visit for Anderson and others later that year where they successfully lobbied for more military support and collaboration for Tuskegee.
The thousands of pilots who would graduate from Tuskegee over the next few years and become part of the Tuskegee Airmen, and what that community meant for both America’s war efforts and toward President Truman’s 1948 desegregation of the armed forces, is a rich and powerful AmericanStudies topic in its own right, and one about which I’ll write in tomorrow’s post. But Roosevelt’s March 1941 flight likewise serves as a particularly salient single linchpin for her candidacy for my Hall of American Inspiration. While I don’t doubt that Roosevelt’s name is familiar to most Americans, I nonetheless believe that, as has been the case for all of my nominees, our narratives greatly underrate the striking breadth and depth of her contributions to American and world identity and history: from the nearly 100 columns she wrote for national magazines during her years in the White House to her service as one of America’s first Delegates to the UN General Assembly, her pioneering work as the inaugural chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights (work that culminated in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” a document that Roosevelt called “the international Magna Carta of all mankind”) to her chairing (the year before she died) of President Kennedy’s groundbreaking President’s Commission on the Status of Women, and in many other arenas and ways alongside these efforts (including her work throughout the 1920s on behalf of the Women’s Trade Union League), Roosevelt was for more than three decades one of America’s brightest lights and most powerful voices.Amelia Earhart is largely an a-political figure, one whose appeal has (or at least can have) nothing to do with politics or with narratives that can divide as well as unite Americans; I know that it is and might always be impossible to say the same of Eleanor Roosevelt, or of any First Lady. Yet a moment like that 1941 flight with Anderson has nothing whatsoever to do with politics, and the more we can remember and highlight such moments, and the inspiring Americans who made them happen, the more our national community can likewise take flight. Next aviation history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other aviation histories you’d highlight?

April 8-9, 2017: My Five Years on the NeMLA Board

[The recent NeMLA Convention also marked my final one as a member of the Executive Board(I was Past President for this convention). So I wanted to take this moment to reflect a bit more broadly on my years as a governing member of this amazing organization.]On five takeaways from my five wonderful years with NeMLA.1)      The People: I could write many, many posts about the amazing folks with whom I’ve worked on the NeMLA Executive Board over these years. From Elizabeth Abele, who helped bring me on board and single-handedly kept NeMLA going for many years; to Carine Mardorossian and Brandi So, who have taken up Elizabeth’s mantle and brought NeMLA into a new phase; to Ellen Dolgin, Daniela Antonucci, Hilda Chacón, and Maria DiFrancesco, without all of whom the last few conventions would have been shadows of the successes they became; to all of the other Board memberswho have been models of collegiality and collaboration. That last note is really the point I want to drive home: in the words of a phrase from the past year that we should all better remember than we currently seem to be, NeMLA’s leadership has truly been “stronger together,” and I’ve been blessed to work with each and all of these folks.2)      The Process: Throughout that work, and most especially in the couple years of planning for my 2016 presidential convention in Hartford, I got to experience in the most intimate and extended way imaginable all that goes into making a convention and an organization like NeMLA as successful as they so consistently are. The cliché is that you never want to see how the sausage is made (and as a sausage fan I take that point); but when it comes to NeMLA, seeing all the stages and steps of this multi-year process has helped me enjoy and engage with academic conferences, and indeed many other kinds of events, at a far deeper level than had previously been the case. I don’t know that I’ll ever quite match the feeling of introducing Jelani Cobb’s keynote address in Hartford, a moment that culminated so many years and so many small moments of planning and preparation; but I know that that feeling can and does help me imagine and appreciate similar moments at many other conferences and events as well.3)      The Problem: “Problem” isn’t really the word for what I’m highlighting here (I just couldn’t resist the alliteration); I mean instead the limitations, the things that even a great organization like NeMLA can’t necessarily do or affect. Throughout my time with NeMLA, I’ve worked to figure out how the organization can intervene in and possibly impact the frustrating and untenable situations facing adjunct and contingent faculty across the world of higher education. As those posts reflect, we’ve talked about this issue a great deal, both at our conventions and before and after them; but I can’t say with any certainty that we’ve been able to do anything other than talk, or that our conversations have made a tangible difference for adjunct and contingent faculty or higher education. There’s only so much an organization can do, of course, but I still have felt and continue to feel this limitation quite acutely when it comes to these vital and troubling issues.4)      The Public Schools: You could say the same thing about the issues facing America’s public schools, of course; what can any organization, much less an academic and scholarly one, do in response to such issues? But here I would say the opposite: that even though only a few of our 2016 convention attendees and speakers visited Hartford public schools, I believe that those visits were potent on both practical and symbolic levels: practically because the students, teachers, and communities there had the chance to learn from interesting and inspiring scholars and writers (and vice versa); and symbolically because the visits reflected the inescapable fact that we are all connected, that the work of public schools and universities, of teachers and professors, of professional and student writers, of all these communities on so many levels, depend on one another far more than they diverge. May we continue to work to find and nurture such connections in the conventions and years to come.5)      The Pleasures: Last, but far from least, are the pleasures I have found in these five years of conventions and conversations and collaboration and community. My life has turned upside-down and sideways multiple times over that span (usually by my own doing, to be clear), and NeMLA has been one of the most consistent and consistently positive parts of it. From wonderful roundtables and panels and creative readings and addresses, to dinners and meetings (yes, meetings!) with my colleagues, to unexpected encounters with the cities and settings for each convention, to opportunities for scholarly work I’ve found through the conventions, and in many other ways too, NeMLA has made my life better, richer, and more meaningful. While my time on the Executive Board may be ending, you can be sure I’ll find ways to keep that connection going—and I encourage you all to do the same, with NeMLA specifically or with whatever organizations and communities can offer such pleasures for you.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Any NeMLA memories or connections you’d share?