Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 275

November 11, 2016: Veterans Days: The Best Years of Our Lives

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

November 10, 2016: Veterans Days: Veterans’ Organizations

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

November 9, 2016: Veterans Days: The Harrisburg Veterans Parade

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

November 8, 2016: Veterans Days: Miyoko Hikiji

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

November 7, 2016: Veterans Days: The Bonus Army

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

November 5-6, 2016: ElectionStudying the Media

[Friday would have been Walter Cronkite’s 100th birthday. So to wrap up the ElectionStudying series, three thoughts on the worst and best of the media’s role in this election season.]On where in the 2016 campaign the mass media has failed and where it’s lived up to our ideals.First, I need to be clear that I have no illusions about a fabled time when “the media” (an amorphous and evolving concept in any case) stayed above or outside of the fray of partisan politics in America. Indeed, the first American periodicals rose quite directly alongside the Revolutionary era’s activisms and propagandas, and in the Early Republic period the first daily newspapers were often if not always attached to particular parties and factions within their cities. Yet as always in America, those most practical and perhaps cynical realities should be complemented with collective memories and narratives of more ideal histories; so, for example, there is this amazing Vietnam War moment recounted by longtime journalist David Halberstam, when as a very young reporter he literally and figuratively stood up to a powerful general to demand more accurate information about the U.S. war effort. To ask the media to live up to such ideals isn’t (to my mind) to long for a glorious past that never existed in any absolute or all-encompassing way, but rather to seek those voices and perspectives who follow Halberstam’s lead and epitomize the media’s best possibilities.For far too long in the 2016 presidential campaign, the mass media—and most especially television news, although certainly not limited to that sphere—not only did not live up to those ideals, but actively contributed to the rise, prominence and popularity, and eventual nomination of the worst major party presidential candidate in American history. Obviously Donald Trump needed news coverage, as does anyone running for president; but as far as I can tell he was the only candidate, among the couple dozen running in the primaries, whose every speech and rally and remark was covered and re-covered in full; both cable and the evening news recognized early the viewers and ratings that the Trump Show would bring, and acted in response to that crass motivation. Moreover, much of the time—at least until very recently, when the leads explicitly became Trump’s horrific statements and actions—the coverage simply provided Trump the time and air, without offering even partial rebuttals or critiques of his neverending series of lies. I’m sure his most ardent supporters would have viewed him positively in any case; but a much wider swath of Americans saw and (and at least some still see) this man as a serious presidential candidate thanks to these media abnegations and failures.But it’s important to be fair and balanced, of course (just threw up a little in my mouth after writing that phrase), and there have been standout media voices who have lived up to the ideals embodied by moments like Halberstam’s. Without the investigative journalism of Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald and the Washington Post’s David Farenthold , for example, many of the most shocking stories of Trump’s histories of cons, corruptions, and lies would have reached a far less wide audience; neither of their publications had exactly been a model of journalistic bravery over recent years, making their work that much more significant. The same could be said for Charles Blow of The New York Times, whose op eds have consistently offered some of the most thoughtful and devastating media critiques of Trump. And perhaps most tellingly of our 21st century moment, a number of cable comedy/satire programs have built on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report’s models and become truly vital voices in covering Trump with the accuracy and depth often missing from the news networks: I would single out John Oliver and Last Week Tonight in particular, but both Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal and Trevor Noah’s Daily Show have also done hilarious and impressive work as well. There are of course questions produced by blurring the lines between news and satire, and we should continue to ask them as we move forward; but without these comedic media voices, I shudder to think about how much might have remained absent from the coverage of and conversations about Donald Trump.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Any other ElectionStudying takes to share?

November 4, 2016: ElectionStudying: 1994

[For this last week before the most painful, frustrating, and potentially disastrous election season in my lifetime—and perhaps American history—concludes, I’ll AmericanStudy the histories, stories, and stakes of five prior exemplary elections. Would love to hear your ElectionStudying thoughts—or your recipes for staying sane for one more week—in comments!]On three ways—beyond the most obvious, the rise of Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America—that the “Republican Revolution” of the 1994 midterm elections foreshadowed 21stcentury American politics and society:1)      Oliver North: True, former Reagan aide and Iran Contra figure North lost his Virginia Senate bid (to incumbent Charles Robb). But it’s far from a coincidence that North has gone on to become a Fox News star—every aspect of his campaign, from his emphasis on his born-again Christianity to his unrelenting attack ads on Robb, has become integral to the 21stcentury right-wing media world of which he’s now a part.2)      Bill Frist: One of the most surprising 1994 victors was Frist, a heart surgeonwith no prior political experience who defeated three-term incumbent Tennessee Senator Jim Sasser. One of 1994’s most lasting influences (never more so than in this season of Trump) has been the value placed on “outsiders,” not just to Washington but to the political realm itself; and no candidate fit that mold better than Frist, who would go on to become the ultimate insider as Senate Majority Leader.3)      Rick Santorum: Among the many GOP triumphs in 1994, relatively little attention was paid to Pennsylvania Congressman Rick Santorum’s victory over incumbent Senator Harris Wofford (in part because Wofford had been appointed after John Heinz’s tragic 1991 death, so was far from an established incumbent). Yet Santorum’s victory was hugely significant, and not only because he has gone on to be a perennial presidential candidate. It marked the growing presence and power of Christian Conservatives, a trend that would culminate in the election and presidency of George W. Bush six years later.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this or any prior election?PPS. When I first published this post, back in November 2014, the great blog Lawyers, Guns & Money shared the post and engendered some excellent follow up analyses.

November 3, 2016: ElectionStudying: 1948

[For this last week before the most painful, frustrating, and potentially disastrous election season in my lifetime—and perhaps American history—concludes, I’ll AmericanStudy the histories, stories, and stakes of five prior exemplary elections. Would love to hear your ElectionStudying thoughts—or your recipes for staying sane for one more week—in comments!]On a couple significant AmericanStudies stories beyond “Dewey Defeats Truman.”Don’t get me wrong—“Dewey Defeats Truman”was a unique historical moment, and the shot of a jubilant Truman holding a copy of that November 3rd Chicago Tribune is one of the more rightfully iconic 20th century photographs. The moment also reminds us of just how much American newspapers have always been affiliated with partisan politics: the Tribune was a solidily Republican-leaning paper with no love lost for the incumbent Democrat, and its choice to allow veteran political analyst Arthur Sears Henning’s electoral prediction to determine their next day’s front page (the paper went to press prior to the close of polls on the West coast) was no doubt due at least in part to editorial wishful thinking. It’s easy to decry the partisanship of contemporary newspapers and news media (on which more in the upcoming weekend post), but in truth that’s been part of their identity throughout American history.But even if the Tribune had gotten its prediction right, the 1948 presidential election would still be a hugely significant one. For one thing, there was South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and his third-party run as a Dixiecrat (or, officially, States’ Rights Democrat). Few American histories have been more influential than the long, gradual realignment of politics, race, and region, a story that starts as far back as Tuesday’s focal figures Lincoln and Johnson and extends right up to our present moment. Yet despite that century and a half long arc, the splintering of the Democratic Party at the 1948 national convention represents a striking and singular moment, a fulcrum on which those political and social realities permanently shifted. There were all sorts of complicating factors, not least Thurmond’s own secrets and hypocrises when it came to race—but at the broadest level, few election-year moments have echoed more dramatically than did the Dixiecrat revolt.For another thing, both Truman and Dewey used the mass media in an unprecedented way in the campaign’s closing weeks. The two campaigns created short newsreel films that were played in movie theaters across the country, reach an estimated 65 million filmgoers each week. The first televised 1960 debate between presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon is often described as the first national political moment of the media age—or even as a moment that “changed the world”—and certainly its live broadcast to a national audience represented something new in American electoral politics. But since so much of politics in the media age has not been live, has instead comprised constructed and produced media images and narratives, it’s fair to say that Truman’s and Dewey’s competing movies likewise foreshadowed a great deal of what was to come in the subsequent half-century and more of elections.Last exemplary election tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this or any prior election?

November 2, 2016: ElectionStudying: 1876

[For this last week before the most painful, frustrating, and potentially disastrous election season in my lifetime—and perhaps American history—concludes, I’ll AmericanStudy the histories, stories, and stakes of five prior exemplary elections. Would love to hear your ElectionStudying thoughts—or your recipes for staying sane for one more week—in comments!]How an American Studies approach can help us better understand and analyze our most contested presidential election.The 1876 presidential election was not only the most contested in American history—with the electors for four states remaining up for grabs for months after election day, leaving the nation with no newly elected president until January of 1877—but also, and for related reasons, one of our most overt and destructive historical turning points. Historians have in recent years worked to complicate and challenge narratives of the Compromise of 1877—or the “crooked bargain,” as it had long been called—by which Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the electors of key Southern states and thus elected president over Samuel Tilden. But whatever the precise nature of the election’s conclusion, the fact remains that one of Hayes’s first official acts as president was to withdraw federal troops from the South, thus explicitly and dramatically ending Federal Reconstruction and fundamentally altering the course of American history as a result.An interdisciplinary, AmericanStudies analysis of the 1876 election wouldn’t entail eliding the political and historical complexities of the election itself, its aftermath, and the trajectory and conclusion of Federal Reconstruction. But it would, I believe, contextualize those details with other social and cultural histories, narratives and moments from earlier in the year that exemplify how much the election compromise reflected and solidified existing national trends. I opened my first book by highlighting one such cultural history, the striking 1876 shifts in advertisements for the Howard company’s touring Tom Show (a stage production based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin): where February 1876 newspaper ads highlighted the show’s “vivid picture of life among the lowly” and “great moral drama,” only three months later May 1876 ads described instead a “new version, in commemoration of the centennial,” one “adapted to the sentiment of the times” and featuring “old-time plantation melodies of pleasant memory.” The Centennial Exposition itself (which opened in May in Philadelphia) further illustrated such shifting cultural sentiments, both in its invitation to Confederate veteran and poet Sidney Lanierto write the opening ceremony’s “Centennial Cantata” and in its on-site “Southern Restaurant,” a culinary concession where “a band of old-time plantation ‘darkies’ [sung] their quaint melodies and strum[med] the banjo before the visitors from every clime.” And an AmericanStudies analysis of these narratives could connect them to prominent 1876 literary works: from Mississippi lawyer James Lynch’s epic poem “Robert E. Lee, or Heroes of the South” which casts Lee as a staunch defender of the antebellum South and its slave society; to Lanier and his brother Clifford’s short tale and folk poem “Uncle Jim’s Baptist Revival Hymn,” in which “a certain Georgia cotton-planter” laments the grass’s “defiance of his lazy freedmen’s hoes and ploughs.” Such cultural and literary trends don’t mean that the election’s results or effects were inevitable, nor that there weren’t competing, very distinct narratives about region, race, and history in the year and era. But engaging with them helps illuminate the moment and contexts in which the election took place, and helps us analyze how and why it unfolded as it did. Next exemplary election tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this or any prior election?PPS. I also blogged about the election of 1876 in direct relationship to this year’s election here.

November 1, 2016: ElectionStudying: 1864

[For this last week before the most painful, frustrating, and potentially disastrous election season in my lifetime—and perhaps American history—concludes, I’ll AmericanStudy the histories, stories, and stakes of five prior exemplary elections. Would love to hear your ElectionStudying thoughts—or your recipes for staying sane for one more week—in comments!]On one very good and one very bad thing about the crucial wartime election.I’ve blogged before about the moment in which I’d argue (hyperbolically to be sure, but not, I believe, without cause) that the Civil War and thus the fate of the American experiment and future most clearly hung in the balance: the second day of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, and specifically Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine’s stand and charge on Little Round Top. Even if I’m being too extreme about that particular moment and figure (and if so I blame Michael Shaara and Jeff Daniels!), it’s certainly fair to say that after Gettysburg the Confederacy stood very little chance of winning the war militarily. But on the other hand, much remained uncertain and undetermined about the war’s final stages, outcome, and aftermath, and no single moment more decisively impacted those futures than the presidential election of 1864.For a number of reasons, President Lincoln’s ultimately decisive victory over Democratic challenger (and former terrible Union general) George McClellan was a very positive result. For one thing, despite the eventual, historically large margins of that victory (212 to 21 electoral votes, and a popular vote margin of more than 400,000), it was hardly a foregone conclusion: for much of 1864 the war, now into its fourth year and bloodier and more destructive than ever, was going poorly enough that Lincoln’s chances, particularly when coupled with John C. Frémont’s initial presence in the race as a third-party candidate, seemed gloomy at best. And for another, related thing, had McClellan triumphed he almost certainly would have negotiated a peace with the Confederacy (that was his stated platform and plan) that would have made such outcomes as the 1865 passage of the 13th-15th Amendments far more difficult, if not indeed impossible. So it’s a very good thing that Lincoln won reelection. But in order to strengthen his chances of doing so, Lincoln and the Republican Party did a very bad thing: nominating Andrew Johnson, Tennessee’s Military Governor and a lifelong Southern Democrat, to be Lincoln’s second Vice President (replacing his first, former Maine Governor and longtime Republican Hannibal Hamlin). Perhaps Johnson helped assure that victory, although by election day, with Frémont and his third party out of the race and the war going much better, it’s doubtful that his contribution was required in any case. Far more certain is that, after Lincoln’s tragic assassination, the presidency of Andrew Johnsonwas one of the worst and most destructive in our nation’s history, culminating both in his near-impeachment (the first in American history) and, much worse, in a very different vision of Reconstruction than what Lincoln had begun. It can be easy to overlook VP nominations, but Johnson’s proves just how significant that element of an election can become.Next exemplary election tomorrow,Ben                                 PS. What do you think? Thoughts on this or any prior election?