Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 304

December 8, 2015: Circles of Friends: Five of Hearts

[December 12thwill mark the 100th anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s birth, and since Sinatra was as well-known for his famous group of friends as for his individual achievements, I wanted to spend the week AmericanStudying such circles of friends. Leading up to a special weekend post on the Rat Pack!]Three books that together help illuminate an intimate and influential late 19th century circle of friends.1)      The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams & His Friends, 1880-1918 : Patricia O’Toole’s group biography of Adams, his wife Marian (known as “Clover”), John and Clara Hay, and Clarence King—the extremely close-knit group who called themselves the Five of Hearts—is without question the place to start in seeking this understand the individual and collective identities, and historical and social influences, of this Gilded Age quintet. And since Henry and John first met during the Civil War, when both worked as private secretaries in the Lincoln administration, this is truly a story that spans much of American society and life in the half-century between that war and the early 20th century.2)      Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life : I blogged at length in that hyperlinked post about my New England American Studies Association colleague and friend Natalie Dykstra’s wonderful investigative biography of Clover Adams. Since Henry Adams remained virtually silent about Clover after her 1885 suicide, an event that (as O’Toole’s subtitle indicates) took place relatively early in the history of this group of friends, Clover is without question the most mysterious of the five friends—making Dykstra’s work both a vital complement to O’Toole’s book and an important addition to our understanding of women’s lives and experiences in the Gilded Age.3)      Empire : The fourth book (in the series’ historical chronology; it was published fifth) of Gore Vidal’s American Chronicle is neither the most famous book in the series (that’d be Lincoln) nor the best (that’d be Burr). But among the many aspects of America at the turn of the 20th century that Vidal illuminates with his usual clarity, wit, and subtle emotion is the continuing role that Adams and Hay play in affairs of state in that moment—and thus the enduring importance of this group of friends in helping shape America’s identity and future throughout the Gilded Age. Indeed, as Secretary of State under both McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, Hay became one of the most pivotal figures in the transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era, from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. That pivotal role, and the friends who contributed to it, are nicely portrayed in Vidal’s book, adding one more layer to the picture of this intimate community painted by all three of these texts and authors.Next friend circle tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

December 7, 2015: Circles of Friends: Revolutionary Circles

[December 12thwill mark the 100th anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s birth, and since Sinatra was as well-known for his famous group of friends as for his individual achievements, I wanted to spend the week AmericanStudying such circles of friends. Leading up to a special weekend post on the Rat Pack!]Three tight-knit communities that helped create the Revolution—and the nation it produced.1)      The Junto: Ever precocious and forward-thinking, Ben Franklin was only 21 years old when he organized this “club of mutual improvement” in Philadelphia in 1727. This group of philosophically and civically minded men would go on not only to debate questions of morality, theology, and social responsibility, but also to help found the Library Company of Philadelphia (the nation’s first public library), among other communal efforts. Moreover, I would argue that it was precisely from the Junto’s model of shared philosophical and civic engagement among friends that Franklin developed his sense of the crucial role played by conversation, ideas, and collegiality in producing communal change—a role that he himself would embody throughout the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary period.2)      Hamilton and Friends: As dramatized in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton and a group of fellow young military officers became very close in the early years of the Revolution. The letters between Hamilton, French emigrant the Marquis de Lafayette, and South Carolinian and abolitionist John Laurens (among others in this cohort) offer an intimate glimpse into both the Revolution and the role played by homosocial male relationships in this late 18th century moment (so intimate, indeed, that one historian has argued that these relationships were gay love affairs). Given the crucial role that Lafayette played in the Revolution’s successful conclusion, and the role that American friends like Hamilton played in maintaining the connection with Lafayette, it’s fair to say that these letters did no less than help win independence.3)      Stockton’s Circles: Also helping win independence was one of the close-knit communities in which Annis Boudinot Stockton played a significant role: Stockton (wife of Declaration signer Richard Stockton) was the only woman elected to the secretive American Whig Society, and safeguarded the group’s documents at her New Jersey home (where she also hosted George Washington and many other leaders) throughout the Revolution. But if this community of Stockton’s helped argue for and win the Revolution, another, the Mid-Atlantic Writing Circle, helped create in literature and culture the new nation birthed by that event. Writing Circle members Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge would write some of the “Prospect Poems” that helped provide history, mythos, and imagined futures for the new nation. And female members Stockton, Susanna Wright, and Hannah Griffits (among others) made sure that women’s voices, perspectives, and rights would be part of that evolving national conversation as well.  Next friend circle tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

December 5-6, 2015: AmendmentStudying: On Not Taking the 13th Amendment for Granted

[December 6thmarks the 150thanniversary of the ratification of perhaps the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 13th. This week I’ve AmericanStudied some contexts for five other amendments, leading up to this special weekend post on the 13th!]Given how much all rational 21st century Americans agree that slavery was a dark stain on America’s identity, it might seem to have been inevitable that, with the Civil War concluded, slavery would be permanently abolished with a Constitutional Amendment. But here are three reasons why we should most definitely not see that amendment as a given:1)      How it happened: Steven Spielberg’s historical drama Lincoln(2012) is not without its flaws, but the film does an excellent job portraying the tense, difficult, extremely uncertain process by which Lincoln and his Congressional allies secured passage of the 13th Amendment. I don’t want to suggest for even a moment that the Civil War was not centrally about the issue of slavery—it was, full stop—but that didn’t mean that most Northerners, nor most political leaders, shared the same idea of what should happen with that issue as the war concluded. That what happened was a Constitutional amendment was thus anything but inevitable, and the process by which the amendment passed reflects both that uncertainty and the heroic lengths to which Lincoln and many others went to make it happen.2)      What happened next: The 13th Amendment was in many ways the most straightforward of the three so-called Reconstruction Amendments, and that fact, along with the many ways that the 14thand 15th Amendments have been extended, deepened, and (unfortunately) challenged in the 150 years since, might lead to it seeming the least significant of the three. But among the many ways (such as the rest of this post) that I would push back on that idea, I would note that neither the 14thnor the 15th Amendment would likely have been imaginable, much less possible, had the 13th not been passed. It’s not just that slavery might well have returned (on which see #3 in a moment), but that in any case there would have been no Constitutional or federal law defining African Americans as anything other than slaves. Without that first step, the rest of the path, fraught and incomplete as it has been, could not have existed.3)      What might have happened otherwise: I don’t actually believe that slavery could have returned in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War—but I absolutely believe it might have a couple decades later. I wrote at length in my first book, and have written in many places since, about the process by which American culture and society became by the 1880s (as Albion Tourgée succinctly put it) “distinctly Confederate in sympathy.” Indeed, as early as 1877 an editorial in the progressive magazine The Nation opined that with the end of Reconstruction, “the negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.” If (in the absence of a 13thAmendment) Southern states had wished to re-implement a slave system in the late 19th century, it’s very possible that neither law nor mainstream white society would have objected. And while segregation and its attendant histories have been called, with justice, the truth is that they were, at least, not slavery—and we have the 13th Amendment to thank for it.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

December 4, 2015: AmendmentStudying: Prohibition Culture

[December 6thmarks the 150thanniversary of the ratification of perhaps the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 13th. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for five other amendments, leading up to a special weekend post on the 13th!]Three texts that help us understand the world that the 18thAmendment made (and the 21stunmade).1)      The Great Gatsby (1925): One of the most ambiguous elements in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is the nature (indeed, the existence) of Jay Gatsby’s criminal activities. His association with stereotyped Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim (one of Fitzgerald’s lowest points), among other factors, seems to suggest that he is indeed involved in organized crime. Yet at the same time, “organized crime” in the 1920s often meant the bootlegging of illegal alcohol, a crime that would become not a crime less than a decade later and that even in the era of Prohibition was widely practiced and accepted. However we read this element of the novel, Gatsby is deeply tied to and reflective of Prohibition.2)      The Untouchables: If Gatsby offers a vision into the permissive culture of alcohol that remained (if it was not indeed deepened) during Prohibition, Eliot Ness’s 1957 memoir and the 1959-63 TV show and 1987 Brian DePalma filmbased on it give us instead the law enforcement perspective on the era. Al Capone was of course involved in numerous criminal enterprises, but as this clip from the filmillustrates, The Untouchables in all its forms focuses explicitly on his bootlegging activities. Which is to say, if some Prohibition-created criminals were probably as ambiguous and in many ways harmless as Jay Gatsby, others were certainly as evil as Al Capone—and the story of both Prohibition and the justice system throughout this period must include the latter figures and histories as well.3)      Spirits of Defiance: National Prohibition and Jazz Age Literature (2006): As Fitzgerald’s novel illustrates, Prohibition didn’t just produce new versions of crime and law enforcement, of course—it also produced literature and culture, and a great deal of it. Indeed, I think the case could be made that jazz itself wouldn’t have emerged in the ways it did without the era’s clubs and speakeasies, and they wouldn’t have existed in the forms they took without Prohibition. All these and many other historical and cultural questions are engaged with in depth by Kathleen Drowne’s impressive book, a must-read for anyone interested in not only Jazz Age literature and culture, but the world the 18th Amendment made.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

December 3, 2015: AmendmentStudying: Washington DC and the 23rd Amendment

[December 6thmarks the 150thanniversary of the ratification of perhaps the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 13th. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for five other amendments, leading up to a special weekend post on the 13th!]On how the 1961 amendment echoes the city’s complex history, and how it helped shift it.From its earliest origins, the federal capital of Washington, DC has had a complex, contested identity, both within the American government and as a geographic entity. The capital was created out of both an informal political arrangement (the Compromise of 1790, in which Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson agreed that the federal government would pay all remaining state Revolutionary War debt in exchange for establishing a national capital in the South) and a couple of subsequent Congressional laws (the Residence Act, also of 1790, which formalized a 10-year plan to construct the capital; and later the , which officially designated the newly constructed city as part of the federal government and thus its citizens as part of neither Maryland nor Virginia). And the political and geographic evolution did not end there: in 1846, for example, the Virginia General Assembly (fearing that slavery would soon be abolished in the capital) voted to accept the area known as Alexandria (which had been incorporated into DC when the capital was officially organized) back into the state; Congress agreed, and with its July vote for this “retrocession” changed all those Alexandrians from citizens of DC (and thus without Congressional representation or electoral votes for president) to Virginians.The 23rdAmendment to the Constitution, which passed Congress in June 1960 and was ratified in March 1961, culminated more than 70 years of Congressional efforts to address some of the political inequities captured in my first paragraph’s final parenthesis. As early as 1890, a proposal was introduced to Congress to grant DC voting rights in presidential elections; the bill did not pass, but thanks to the efforts of Washington Evening Star journalist and editor Theodore Noyes and his Citizens’ Joint Committee on National Representation for the District of Columbia, activism of behalf of this political change for the capital continued throughout the 20th century. Yet while the 23rd Amendment did indeed grant electoral votes to the District, it did not provide Congressional representation for the city, an issue that remains contested to this day (as illustrated by DC’s tongue-in-cheek license plate slogan). Moreover, as of 1961 Washington, DC still did not have “home rule,” meaning that residents of the city could not elect their own mayor or city council. Although this had been the case throughout the city’s complex history, the rapidly increasing percentage of African American residents during the mid-20thcentury made the issue part of the Civil Rights Movement by the 1960s—a connection brought home vividly and painfully during the April 1968 riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.Five years after those riots and twelve years after the 23rd Amendment was ratified, Congress finally passed the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, giving DC residents the ability to elect both a mayor and a 13-member city council. In 1975, the city elected its first mayor, African American housing and civil rights leader Walter Washington; to date, seven of the city’s eight mayors have been African American, with the other, Adrian Fenty (who served from 2006 to 2010), having a mixed-race heritage. Each of these mayoral administrations deserves individual attention and analysis, of course; yet taken as a whole this history represents one of the most consistent and potent African American presences on the American political landscape. And I believe it’s fair to say that without the passage of the 23rd Amendment, and the national attention its ratification campaign brought to the issue of DC’s political representation and voice, the move toward Home Rule and the subsequent rise of the city’s African American political establishment might never have taken place (or at least have had far less visibility and effect). The 23rdAmendment is likely one of the least-remembered of the 27 current amendments, but its impact shouldn’t be underestimated. Next amendment tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

December 2, 2015: AmendmentStudying: The 19th Amendment and the ERA

[December 6thmarks the 150thanniversary of the ratification of perhaps the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 13th. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for five other amendments, leading up to a special weekend post on the 13th!]On how the long, hard road to women’s suffrage might parallel a current political journey.A bill proposing a Constitutional amendment that read “The right of citizens to vote shall not be abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex” was first introduced into the Senate (by California Senator Arlen Sargent, a friend and ally of suffrage activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony) in January 1878. The bill met with lukewarm reception at best from Sargent’s fellow Senators, however, and never made it out of hearings in the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections. It would be reintroduced by one like-minded Senator or another every year for the next 41 years before finally being successfully proposed (as a Joint Resolution of Congress) in May 1919, but the long road continued even after that point. Indeed, it was not until August 18th, 1920 that the proposed amendment received its 36thstate ratification (Tennessee, thanks in significant measure to the private plea of the elderly mother of one state legislator), the two-thirds majority needed to be ratified and become the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.It’s not just that the suffrage amendment had such a long and uphill journey to passage and ratification, though. After all, I would bet most thoughtful 21stcentury Americans could imagine how such a sweeping political change (some 10 million new voterswere immediately enfranchised when the 19th Amendment was ratified) might be controversial, even if nearly all of us (ahem) would of course now support it wholeheartedly. But what is likely far more difficult to imagine—and thus to remember, although as I argue in this Talking Points Memo piece we certainly must remember it, for its own sake and as part of a long, dark American history—is just how consistently virulent and violent was the opposition to women’s suffrage (and specifically to those activists advocating it). As late as March 1913, a suffrage march organized alongside Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration was attacked by an angry mob who cursed, spit upon, and physically assaulted many of the (overwhelmingly female) marchers, while DC police looked on. Suffrage activists were far from victims, I hasten to add—it was precisely their efforts that finally secured the vote—but these histories of violence do add one more striking layer to our understanding of how long and hard this half-century journey was.In 1923, three years after the 19th Amendment’s ratification, activist Alice Paul drafted a new amendmentguaranteeing full equality of rights under the law regardless of sex. This Equal Rights Amendment (or ERA) was introduced into Congress every year between 1923 and 1972, when it finally passed and was sent to the states for ratification. When the time limit for ratification expired in 1982, however, only 35 of the 38 required states had ratified the ERA; the amendment has been re-introduced into every Congress since but has not yet been passed again. For those of us who support the ERA, this history of stagnation, slow and partial and ultimately incomplete progress, and repeated effort without resolution could easily feel deeply frustrating, could turn us off to the possibilities of political movement on such an amendment and issue. Yet without minimizing those frustrations and realities, I would note that the history of women’s suffrage and the road to the 19th Amendment reveal the need and value of continuing to fight for equality and justice, even—indeed, especially—when that journey is a long and difficult one. Those fighting to secure passage and ratification of the ERA are doing precisely that, and they have history on their side.Next amendment tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

December 1, 2015: AmendmentStudying: Santa Clara County and the 14th Amendment

[December 6thmarks the 150thanniversary of the ratification of perhaps the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 13th. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for five other amendments, leading up to a special weekend post on the 13th!]On the seemingly offhand sentences through which the Supreme Court radically revised American law, history, and community.In the spring 1886, the Supreme Court heard a trio of cases related to California’s taxation of railroad corporations and properties, cases collectively entitled Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). The cases’ specifics hinged on small and (to this AmericanStudier) relatively uninteresting questions of (for example) whether fences adjoining railroad tracks were considered part of those tracks for purposes of land categorization and taxation, and the Court’s decision, written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, similarly focused on those small (if, of course, significant to the affected parties) questions. But it was in a “headnote” to that decision, transcribed by a court reporter and attributed to Chief Justice Morrison Waite, that the Court went far beyond those specific questions and helped change the course of American law and society.In that headnote, Waite stated, “The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.” The note was not part of the Court’s official decision, but the reporter (J.C. Bancroft Davis, a former railroad company president) included it immediately preceding the decision in his transcription for the official Court record. He did so, it’s worth adding, only after writing to Waite to inquire whether it did indeed represent the Court’s collective perspective; Waite responded that it did, and the sentences became part of the decision’s text and permanent identity from then on. Such a headnote would have no legal standing or precedent—yet nonetheless, by all accounts and all available evidence this informal opinion, that corporations were the equivalent of people under the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause, became far more impactful than anything in the decision’s formal text.Santa Clara thus represented a watershed moment in the evolving narrative of “corporate personhood,” one that saw its latest statement during the 2012 presidential primaries, in Mitt Romney’s oft-quoted remark at the Iowa State Fair that “corporations are people, my friend.” Yet I would also argue that Waite’s headnote illustrates another of the Court’s striking powers, one perhaps not part of its original Constitutional mandate but certainly part of how the Court’s role has evolved over the centuries since: the power to revise, to change our national understanding of key issues and questions. It did so here not only in the 14th Amendment’s language (which focused entirely on “persons” and “citizens”) but also, if far more subtly, on its contexts. The Amendment, after all, was drafted first and foremost to ensure full citizenship and equal protection for freed and former slaves—for persons, that is, who had suffered at the hands of one of America’s most sweeping capitalist and, dare I say it, corporate entities, the slave system. To read that Amendment’s effects to include protection for corporations was thus, to my mind, a stunning revision.Next amendment tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

November 30, 2015: AmendmentStudying: Summertime Blues and the 26th Amendment

[December 6thmarks the 150thanniversary of the ratification of perhaps the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 13th. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for five other amendments, leading up to a special weekend post on the 13th!]On how a classic summer song connects to a generation-shifting amendment.I listened to a lot of early rock and roll growing up (something about having a couple baby boomers for parents during the era that first defined the concept of “classic rock” and produced countless “Best of the 1950s” type collections), and few songs stood out to me more than Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” (1958). I don’t know that any single song better expresses the clash of youthful dreams and adult realities on which so much of rock and roll and popular music more generally have been built, and I definitely believe that Cochran and his co-writer (and manager) Jerry Capehearthit upon the perfect way to literally give voice to those dueling perspectives: in the repeated device through which the speaker’s teenage desires are responded to and shot down by the deep voices of authority figures, from his boss to his father to his senator.Coincidentally, Cochran himself died very young, at the age of 21, in an April 1960 car accident while on tour in England. Cochran’s death came just over a year after the tragic plane crash that took the lives of three other prominent young rock and rollers, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. There’s obviously no direct relationship between these two accidents, nor would I argue that these artists’ youthful deaths were the cause of their popularity (all four were already popular prior to the accidents). But on the other hand, I think there’s something iconic, mythic even, about rock and rollers dying young—or about, more exactly, our narratives and images of such figures—and I believe it’d be difficult to separate those myths from the idealistic and anti-authoritarian attitudes captured in Cochran’s biggest hit. That is, it feels throughout “Summertime Blues” as if the speaker’s youthful enthusiasm is consistently being destroyed by those cold adult responses—and melodramatic as it might sound, the loss of childhood dreams can certainly be allegorized through the deaths of the kinds of pop icons who so often symbolize youth.Yet of course most young people continue to live in, and thus impact, the world far after their youthful dreams have ended (“Life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone,” to quote another youthful anthem), and in a subtle, unexpected way Cochran’s song  reflects that human and historical reality as well. When Cochran’s speaker tries to take his problem to more official authorities, he is rejected by his senator for a political reason: “I’d like to help you, son, but you’re too young to vote” is the reply. In 1958, when “Summertime Blues” was released, the national legal voting age was 21, and so the 20 year old Cochran could not vote; but over the next decade a potent social and legal movement to lower the voting age would emerge, in conjunction with the decade’s many other youth and activist movements, and in 1971 Congress passed and the states ratified the 26th Amendment, which did indeed lower the eligible age for voting to 18. Being able to vote certainly doesn’t eliminate all the other problems of teenage life and its conflicts with adult authority—but it does remind us that neither the gap nor the border between youth and adulthood are quite as fixed or as absolute as our myths might suggest.Next amendment tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

November 28-29, 2015: November 2015 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]November 2: Dead Presidents: Warren G. Harding: A series inspired by Harding’s birthday kicks off with what do and don’t know about the mysterious life and death of a president.November 3: Dead Presidents: William Henry Harrison: The series continues with what may have been lost, and what definitely was, in the most striking presidential death.November 4: Dead Presidents: James Garfield: How the second-shortest presidential term was still an impressive and influential one, as the series rolls on.November 5: Dead Presidents: William McKinley: Two reasons why I can’t mourn the loss of the McKinley presidency, despite his tragic assassination.November 6: Dead Presidents: FDR: The series concludes with public perceptions, private realities, and the influential health of a president.November 7-8: Five Years!: In honor of my five year blogiversary, I highlight five blogs and bloggers that have been inspiring and important to my own work.November 9: American Inventors: Franklin and Jefferson: A series inspired by Robert Fulton’s birthday kicks off with a telling invention linked to each of the two founders, and what separates them.November 10: American Inventors: Eli Whitney’s Effects: The series continues with the famous inventor’s more and less well-known effects, and what they have in common.November 11: American Inventors: Bell and Edison: Heroes, villains, and another way to see the historical picture, as the series rolls on.November 12: American Inventors: Boykin and Graham: Two largely forgotten, inspiring and influential inventors, and what links them.November 13: American Inventors: Steamboat Culture: The series concludes with five cultural texts that make good use of the birthday boy’s inventive innovation.November 14-15: Crowd-sourced Inventors and Inventions: A busy travel schedule meant I didn’t get to solicit many contributions to this post—so be sure to add yours in comments, please!November 16: SHA Follow Ups: Our Panel on the KKK: A series following up the Southern Historical Association conference in Little Rock starts with a few takeaways from the panel on which I presented.November 17: SHA Follow Ups: Special Sessions: The series continues with highlights from the conference’s provocative and complementary special sessions.November 18: SHA Follow Ups: Panels: Takeaways from a few of the many great SHA panels I attended, as the series rolls on.November 19: SHA Follow Ups: Books: Five new releases from UNC Press that illustrate the wealth of great scholarship featured at the SHA book exhibit.November 20: SHA Follow Ups: Little Rock and Race: The series concludes with three layers to how the city remembers race, and the fragile significance of the third.November 21-22: The Upcoming NeMLA Conference: Speaking of conferences, here’s a sneak peak of my forthcoming President’s Letter about the March 2016 NeMLA Conference in Hartford!November 23: Cultural Thanks-givings: Longmire: A series on current cultural texts for which I’m thankful kicks off with the TV show that’s both traditional and groundbreaking.November 24: Cultural Thanks-givings: Grace and Frankie: The series continues with two ways the Netflix sitcom pushes our cultural boundaries, and one way it happily does not.November 25: Cultural Thanks-givings: Americanah: Two of the many reasons why I’d call Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel one of the 21st century’s best, as the series rolls on.November 26: Cultural Thanks-givings: Macklemore: Two complementary songs that illustrate why I’m thankful for Macklemore’s engagements with American identity.November 27: Cultural Thanks-givings: Allegiance and Hamilton: The series concludes with what links and what differentiates two important new musicals.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to write? Lemme know!

November 27, 2015: Cultural Thanks-givings: Allegiance and Hamilton

[One of the best parts of being an AmericanStudier in 2015 is the abundance of impressive cultural works with which we’re surrounded. So for this year’s Thanksgiving series, I wanted to give thanks for five great works and artists about which I haven’t had the chance to write in this space. Share your own cultural thanks in comments, please!]On what links and what differentiates two important new musicals.I haven’t written a lot about American musicals and musical theater in this space, but when I have they’ve been socially progressive and significant ones: Zitkala-Sa and William Hanson’s Sun Dance Opera(1913); DuBose Heyward and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935); and Jonathan Larsen’s Rent (1996). Each of those works is complex and in need of more extended analysis, but all three, it’s fair to say, broke from their genres’ conventions and traditions to portray American identities and communities in groundbreaking and important ways. And what that would mean, to make the complementary point overtly, is that the conventions and traditions of American musical theater tend to be socially conservative (perhaps more so than many of our cultural forms), to feature on the stage identities and communities in ways that flatter our mainstream ideals rather than challenge, complicate, or broaden those narratives. Which is to say, what the Tom Shows did with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, turning a divisive and clearly activist work into a safe and stereotyping mainstream popular entertainment, could be read as a symptom of a much larger trend in American musical theater.Whether or not that’s really been the case overall (and I welcome comments on other ways to read our musical theater histories!), the last few months have witnessed a couple very prominent steps in the more progressive direction. Jay Kuo and Lorenzo Thione’s Japanese Internment musical Allegiance, which debuted in San Diego in 2012, opened on Broadway in October, featuring George Takei (on whose experiences in an internment camp the musical is partly based) among its acclaimed cast. And in August, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Revolutionary War and Founding era musical Hamilton moved from its award-winning Off-Broadway run to Broadway, where it has continued and extended its popular and critical successes. Along with their shared attempts to bring American history to the stage, these two musicals also utilize casting to advance their progressive goals: Allegiancefeatures a richly diverse group of Asian American actors (including the three leads from the San Diego debut) amidst its impressively multi-ethnic cast; while Hamiltonhas famously gone even further in the direction of diversity, casting all Hispanic and African American actors as its European American characters (including Miranda himself in the title role) and reserving the role of King George for its only white actor, Brian D’Arcy James. In who as well as what’s on the stage, both these new musicals are unquestionably changing the genre.Yet in another way, the two musicals offer two quite distinct illustrations of the nature and politics of the musical as a cultural form. (To be clear, I haven’t had a chance to see either live yet, but have heard many of their songs and am also responding to numerous reviews of each. Again, I welcome further comments below!) The songs and musical numbers in Allegiance are consistently upbeat, and seem (both to this listener and to many reviewers) jarring alongside the much darker moments and settings through which the musical moves its characters. The rap and hip hop songs and numbers in Hamilton, on the other hand, align (counter-intuitively yet pitch-perfectly) with both the musical’s innovative casting and its portrayals of the Revolutionary and Founding figures and histories. That is, the music in Allegiance feels tied more to the musical genre’s conservative conventions, and thus at odds with the play’s progressive goals in ways that create a sense of dissonance; while Hamilton’s more radical musical choices parallel its progressiveness and create a sense of artistic as well as political coherence. I’m thankful that both these musicals are on the stage in 2015, but am especially thankful for the thoroughly innovative brilliance that is Hamilton.November Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Cultural thanks-givings you’d share?