Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 316

July 20, 2015: Billboard #1s: “I’ll Never Smile Again”

[75 years ago this week, Billboard magazine released its first chart of American popular music hits. So this week, I’ll AmericanStudy five #1 hits and their cultural and social contexts. Share your thoughts on these and any other pop hits, classic or contemporary, for a chart-topping crowd-sourced post!]On how the originating #1 hit reflects a different era, and how it anticipated ours.The #1 song for 1940, the first year for which Billboardkept its nationwide tally, was “I’ll Never Smile Again”by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra. Dorsey and his bandleader brother Jimmy were all over the first Billboard chart, with Tommy also charting with “Imagination” and Jimmy “The Breeze and I,” and their ubiquitousness reflects the general dominance of big band music in the chart’s early years (Glenn Miller had three of the remaining seven top ten hits for 1940). Given how much we (or at least I) associate both Billboard and 20th century popular music with the rock and roll sounds that would emerge and come to dominate the chart in the subsequent two decades, it’s important to note how different mid-century American culture looked, as reflected on the first lists. The very first notes of “Smile” take us right back to that big band era, one that would persist for many more decades (the Lawrence Welk Show debuted in 1955, was broadcast through 1971, and continued in first-run syndication through 1982) but that was one of the most dominant cultural forces as of 1940.Yet if “I’ll Never Smile Again” in many ways reflects a bygone era in popular music, it also interestingly reminds us of our own moment. For one thing, Dorsey’s song was a collaboration, with the music provided by Dorsey and his band and the vocals by (a very young) Frank Sinatra; by their nature, many of the other big band chart-topping hits, including both “Imagination” (which also featured Sinatra) and “Breeze” (which featured big band favorite Bob Eberly), were likewise artistic collaborations. Such collaborative efforts have never gone away, but I would argue that they have returned to pop music very fully in the last decade: five of the last ten end-of-year #1 hits have been collaborations, and perhaps the most dominant trend in current pop music is for a song to be written and produced by a DJ (such as Calvin Harris, David Guetta, Zedd, or the like) and performed by a vocalist. Moreover, a significant percentage of the most successful recent hip hop songs have featured collaborations between a rapper (for the verses) and a singer (for the chorus). The sound of “Smile” might feel far removed from 2015, that is, but its long list of artistic credits feels very familiar.There’s another, even more universal way that “Smile” feels contemporary, though—and while this observation might seem obvious or pedestrian, I believe it’s an important one with which to begin a series on popular music. In its lyrics, from verses like “What good would it do?/For tears would fill my eyes/My heart would realize/That our romance is through” to the chorus, “Within my heart/I know I’ll never start/To smile again/Until I smile at you,” Dorsey and Sinatra’s song captures emotions of loss, longing, and love that have remained among the most consistent themes of popular music throughout its late 20thcentury evolutions (there’s a reason why the Greg Kihn Band recorded a song titled simply, “The Breakup Song”). Music, style, and genre of course play important roles in how a song affects us, and I’m not suggesting that we all have to (or could) like all types of music—but the truth is that popular music from 1940 has a great deal in common with works from 2015, including in the collaborative nature of its art and in the human themes on which it touches. A trip back through the Billboard charts highlights such connections, along with the many specific contexts on which I’ll focus this week.Next #1 hit tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other hits you’d highlight?

July 18-19, 2015: Trinity Sites and Texts: Hiroshima Mon Amour

[On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site, New Mexico, an explosion with numerous aftereffects and meanings. This week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of such Trinity connections, leading up to this special weekend post on a foreign film that’s also profoundly American.]On two ways an overtly foreign film sheds light on American histories.The groundbreaking French New Wave film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) may be the most non-American text on which I’ve ever focused in this space. Directed by French filmmaker Alain Resnais, best known for his Holocaust epic Night and Fog (1955), with a screenplay by French novelist Marguerite Duras, and telling the story of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and its aftermath through the lenses of a French actress and a Japanese architect, including flashbacks to her wartime experiences in France and his during and after the bombing, the film is hugely historical, international, and thoughtful, relevant and meaningful to any viewer to be sure. But it nonetheless feels as if there are literally dozens of critical and theoretical lenses that could be applied to it before an AmericanStudies perspective would come to mind.Yet there are both specific and overarching connections we can make between this foreign film and American histories, without even having to engage (as I hope I have all week) with the atomic bomb’s manifold national resonances. On the specific level, the film’s flashbacks for its female protagonist (known only as She) highlight the ways in which her individual experiences of the war in France (and particularly her relationship with a German soldier and its destructive consequences) defy easy national categorizations and divisions. Those flashbacks, in turn, allow her to connect with the Hiroshima victims in a subtle but powerful way (that I won’t spoil here), adding one more international border-crossing to her identity and the film. I’ve written before about how fully war both depends on and constructs such national categories and divisions, and about the catastrophic results of such constructions (such as the Japanese internment, to name only one example). The more we can consider instead experiences like those of the Revolutionary era loyalists, who crossed their war’s boundaries just as the film’s heroine does, the more of a full and accurate sense of war we’ll have in our collective memories.On a more overarching level, Duras’s screenplay offers a sustained and nuanced engagement with the conjoined themes of history and memory, and more exactly with how much the past’s presence—individual and collective, which are in the film not two separate threads but one intertwined pattern—impacts and shapes every part of our present, even (if not especially) our most intimate relationships. That concept is of course obvious and inescapable in Hiroshima, where not only the bomb’s destructions but the half-life of its radiation means that the past will be literally present (if seemingly not, as that linked article notes, overtly damaging) for hundreds of years to come. But the film makes clear that the past’s echoes are just as strong for its French protagonist, and that indeed she is profoundly affected by both her own personal and national pasts and by those she has encountered in her new city. Anyone who has read this blog for even a few posts knows how much work I believe we Americans have to do when it comes not only to engaging with our histories (particularly our darkest ones), but also and just as importantly grappling with all their effects and meanings in our present identities and communities. I can think of few texts that portray these themes more evocatively and successfully than Hiroshima Mon Amour.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

July 17, 2015: Trinity Sites and Texts: On Faith and the Bomb

[On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site, New Mexico, an explosion with numerous aftereffects and meanings. This week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such Trinity connections, leading up to a special weekend post on a foreign film that’s also profoundly American.]How the name Trinity helps us think about a particularly vexed aspect of the site and history.In 1962, Los Alamos project member General Leslie Groves wrote to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the laboratory’s director, to inquire why he had chosen the name “Trinity” for the site where the first atomic bomb would be tes\ted. Groves wondered if it was just to keep the site’s specific location and purpose secret, as there were a number of geographic sites in the region with the same name. But Oppenheimer responded that it seemed to him, as he remembered his thoughts at the time, to have had more to do with John Donne, and quoted two Donne poems: “As West and East/In all flat Maps—and I am one—are one,/So death doth touch the Resurrection,” which Oppenheimer cited as a favorite poem of his and the principal connection to the site; but, recognizing that “That still does not make a Trinity,” he also referenced the better-known “Batter my heart, three person’d God.”Even without the Donne connection, of course, the word “Trinity” has a particular, long-standing connection to Christianity, and the Holy Trinity that forms such a central part of the Christian faith. However, in other recollections Oppenheimer would connect the Trinity test to the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita, quoting two different passages from the text in attempts to capture his thoughts as he witnessed the successful explosion: “If the radiance of a thousand sunswere to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one”; and, more famously, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” And while the Donne and Christian allusions seem to suggest that the bomb represented for Oppenheimer a logical opportunity to reflect on death and mortality, and the limits of humanity in the face of those eternal truths, the Hindu quotations suggest something quite different: that in the creation of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists had become gods in their own right, or at the very least had constructed something that could do the work of a god (or perhaps a devil) quite effectively.None of us can know with any certainty what Oppenheimer or any of his peers thought or felt at Trinity, of course; and undoubtedly, as Oppenheimer’s subsequent quotes reflect, their perspectives evolved, shifted, and perhaps changed entirely as the atomic age and Cold War unfolded. But if we take a step back from these perspectives, individual and collective, the questions of faith and its relationship to a moment and history like Trinity remain significant and complex ones. Albert Einstein, whose letter detailing and apologizing for his role in developing the bomb I referenced in Wednesday’s post, famously remarked that “God does not play dice with the universe.” The sentiment reflects, as Stephen Hawking argues in that linked talk, the role that Einstein’s spiritual determinism played in his scientific analyses of nature and life. Yet I can think of few metaphors more apt for the atomic age—in which, make no mistake, we are still living today, if without the overt reminders that the Cold War provided so frequently—than a universe of random chance, one in which the wrong roll of the dice can have immediate and catastrophic consequences. Can faith in a providential plan help us live in that world? Did Oppenheimer and his peers forever alter our sense of that world and its plans? I don’t have answers to those questions—but Trinity, in name and reality, forces us to engage with them in any case.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

July 16, 2015: Trinity Sites and Texts: The Enola Gay Controversy

[On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site, New Mexico, an explosion with numerous aftereffects and meanings. This week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such Trinity connections, leading up to a special weekend post on a foreign film that’s also profoundly American.]Three lesser-known, telling details from the controversy over the Smithsonian’s proposed Enola Gay exhibit (all drawn from this wonderful “History on Trial” website).1)      An origin point: According to the two main architects of the proposed exhibit, Smithsonian Secretary Robert McCormick Adams and Director of the National Air and Space Museum Martin Harwit, the initial idea of the exhibit as “The Crossroads” was inspired quite directly by their experiences of the Cold War and atomic age in the 1970s and 80s. This is a really complicated way to envision an exhibit about a specific historical moment: to frame it more (or at least as much) through the lens of what followed in the half-century after the moment, rather than (for example) what led up to it. I personally agree with that wider frame, but it’s important to note that it could be controversial for reasons not simply related to partisan political divisions or the like.2)      A very specific debate: As the website highlights at length, the nearly year-long debates over the proposed exhibit included numerous topics and questions, voices and controversies. Yet the culminating debate, and the one that apparently derailed the initial exhibit for good, was focused on a much more specific historical question: invasion casualties, the number of American lives that might have been lost in a hypothetical invasion of mainland Japan. In part because that historical question is and will always remain so hypothetical, and in part because like most historical questions it’s impossible to separate from different perspectives and opinions in the present, the answers were stunningly wide-ranging: from an estimate of one million casualties provided by supporters of the bombing to Martin Harwit’s quote of about 63,000 casualties in a January 9thresponse to the American Legion (the letter that led the Legion to call for cancelling the exhibit entirely). A good illustration of how fraught and significant such specific historical debates can be in our collective memories and conversations.3)      The past isn’t past: The whole controversy proves that point quite effectively, of course. But nearly a decade after the initial debates, another Enola Gay controversy sprung up that echoed and extended the first. The Air and Space Museum was opening its new museum space near Virginia’s Dulles Airport, and the Enola Gay was to be moved into that new, more expansive exhibit space. Apparently the initial plan was to label and exhibit the plane solely as a “magnificent technological achievement,” a framing that received pushback from the Committee for a National Discussion of Nuclear History and Current Policy as well as from the Japanese and Japanese American communities. As I wrote in this piece on San Diego’s U.S.S. Midwaymuseum, the question of how to exhibit instruments of war is always a complicated one—but I can think of few debates that offer more instructive and crucial examples of the ongoing presence and meaning of the past, and more exactly of the value in engaging with how we represent as well as remember those histories.Next Trinity connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

July 15, 2015: Trinity Sites and Texts: Scientific Spies

[On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site, New Mexico, an explosion with numerous aftereffects and meanings. This week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such Trinity connections, leading up to a special weekend post on a foreign film that’s also profoundly American.]On two of the many Soviet spies associated with Los Alamos, and a broader context for such espionage.As I wrote in this post on Cold War Communist spies, both the very nature of espionage and the understandably secretive way in which our government has responded to and documented such activities means that our historical knowledge of such spies remains and perhaps will always be partial and uncertain. Yet as I wrote there, the documents and information to which we now have access do seem to implicate Joseph Rosenberg quite clearly as a Soviet spy who sold atomic secrets; and while (as I understand it) the role of his wife Ethel remains far less certain, it’s also clear that one of Joseph’s main sources for those secrets was Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, a former Army machinist who went to work for Los Alamos in 1944 as a member of the Special Engineering Detachment. Working in tandem with his own wife Ruth, David sent information on the Manhattan Project back to Julius in New York; when he was discovered and arrested in 1950, David confessed to these and many other activities (a confession that as that link indicates became a key part of the Rosenberg trial), admitting, “I was young, stupid, and immature, but I was a good Communist.”Greenglass was apprehended due to testimony by another Soviet spy, Klaus Fuchs, a British physicist who had worked with the Soviets since 1941 and was assigned to the Theoretical (design) Division during his time at Los Alamos. Fuchs and Greenglass, like Julius Rosenberg, were identified and prosecuted as spies during their lifetimes; but many other Soviet spies were not, and have only been revealed decades later thanks to document declassifications and releases. One complicated example of that history is Theodore Hall, a physics prodigy who was only 19 when he went to work at Los Alamos in 1944 and who apparently passed along at least some classified information to Soviet contacts during his time on the project. His espionage is only “apparently” confirmed for multiple reasons: when he was apprehended by the FBI in the early 1950s he refused to confess, and the agency felt it was more important to keep their ongoing investigations secret than expose their knowledge by bringing Hall to trial; and even when the information became public record in the 1990s, Hall would only discuss his activities obliquely, noting, “To help prevent [a US atomic] monopoly I contemplated a brief encounter with a Soviet agent, just to inform them of the existence of the A-bomb project. I anticipated a very limited contact. With any luck it might easily have turned out that way, but it was not to be.”Each of these individuals and cases is complex, and it’d be a mistake either to reduce them to one overarching narrative or to assume I can do justice to them in this post. Moreover, I don’t want to pretend that such atomic espionage wasn’t criminal and even traitorous; whatever one’s feelings about the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb, these figures were not at liberty to share their classified efforts and knowledge with anyone else, much less the Soviet Union. Yet at the same time, I would argue that the number of scientists who seemingly took part in such activities highlights a fundamental contradiction of the Manhattan Project: that it required, indeed depended on, the efforts of some of the world’s brightest scientific minds; but that for many such scientists, working to produce a hugely destructive new weapon was at best a fraught and troubling goal. No single text better illustrates that contradiction than Albert Einstein’s famous statement on his “participation in the atom bomb project”; and I think it’s fair to say that Einstein spoke for many if not most of his fellow scientists. That might not excuse the many cases of espionage, but it certainly helps explain them.Next Trinity connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

July 14, 2015: Trinity Sites and Texts: Historical Novels

[On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site, New Mexico, an explosion with numerous aftereffects and meanings. This week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such Trinity connections, leading up to a special weekend post on a foreign film that’s also profoundly American.]What two very different historical novels help us see about the Trinity project.In yesterday’s post, I highlighted the complicated, crucial role that the Trinity site plays in the closing pages of Leslie Marmon Silko’s postmodern, Native American, unique and amazing historical novel Ceremony (1977). Silko does more with her Trinity section than highlight the stolen tribal holy lands on which the test site was located, however (vital of a task as that undoubtedly is). At the climax of her description of the Trinity site and what it helps her protagonist Tayo see and understand for the first time, Silko writes with eloquence and anger about the ironic but unquestionable way that the atomic bomb had brought the world closer together and back to a more primal truth: “From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers had planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.”In this passage, as in so many moments and elements in Ceremony, Silko makes plain that her novel is anything but limited to Native American themes or histories (central to it as they certainly are). Like Tayo here, Silko recognizes the fundamental, crucial connections between seemingly distant and divided people and places, stories and communities, identities and histories. In ushering in the atomic age and the Cold War, Trinity exemplified some of the most threatening and destructive such connections, the ways in which we humans can bring the destroyers’ planned fate (whether with bombs, cultural and economic exploitations, or in so many other ways) to other cultures near and far (as well, of course, as to our own communities and the planet on which we all live). Yet at the same time, Tayo and Silko acknowledge through the repetition of “united” here, moments and histories like Trinity allow us to consider what we all share, to see the possibilities for communal human experience that are not limited to particular cultural or national borders and boundaries (since the bomb, like the rocks out of which its uranium came, knows and cares nothing about such divisions).Acknowledging and engaging with such connections isn’t easy, however, nor is it necessarily entertaining (a word that has likely never been applied to Silko’s dense and demanding first novel). In order to create a much more entertaining genre fiction in his own first novel, the historical mystery/thriller Los Alamos (1997), author Joseph Kanon elides many of those social, cultural, and human questions in service of a compelling but ultimately slight plot. Kanon’s novel is set in the months leading up to the Trinity test, and even includes a description of that event; but as Lawrence Thornton writes in his New York Times reviewof the book, Kanon “has carefully subordinated his more serious intentions, as well as the inherent complexity of his material, to the demands of nonstop action.” As I hope has been made amply clear in this space, I have nothing whatsoever against genre or popular fiction; but in writing more of a period novel than a truly historical one, Kanon both misses that chance for greater complexity and offers a far more neatly resolved engagement with the dark and disturbing histories comprised by Los Alamos and Trinity.Next Trinity connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

July 13, 2015: Trinity Sites and Texts: Los Alamos

[On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site, New Mexico, an explosion with numerous aftereffects and meanings. This week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such Trinity connections, leading up to a special weekend post on a foreign film that’s also profoundly American.]Three ways to AmericanStudy one of the world’s most important and controversial laboratories.The central laboratory in the Manhattan Project, the World War II program through which the United States developed the first atomic bombs, was located in Los Alamos, New Mexico for a very specific reason: J. Robert Oppenheimer loved the area. Oppenheimer, the physicist who would become the laboratory’s first director and the so-called “father of the atomic bomb,” had traveled to New Mexico at the age of 18 to recover from a devastating illness and had, like yesterday’s artists and so many other visitors (including a certain 13 year old AmericanStudier during his family’s national park vacation) fallen in love with the place. By 1942, when he was selected to head the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer owned a horse ranch near Los Alamos, and his familiarity with the area, coupled no doubt with his sense of how conducive it would be to privacy and secrecy, led him to recommend it as the laboratory’s site. So on one key level, Los Alamos reflects the complex and often contradictory personality of its first and most famous director.The selection of Los Alamos and New Mexico for that site also engendered at least one more deeply ironic contradiction. Oppenheimer’s love for the area was due in no small measure to its spectacular landscapes; the Southwest is like nothing else in America, and, as Willa Cather captures so perfectly in her historical novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), its mesas and canyons can capture for life the heart and soul of any visitor. Yet it was precisely that wild and open landscape that made the area ideal for not only the Los Alamos laboratory but also its culminating moment: the Trinity test, the July 16th, 1945 first explosion of an atomic bomb. Perhaps the test site near Alamagordo, in the Jornada del Muerto Valley, was indeed uninhabited and available for such an explosion—but even if that were the case, the denotation without question destroyed thousands of square miles of Southwestern landscape, flora, and fauna, and permanently affected and altered whatever was left behind. I don’t believe the cliché that we always hurt the ones we love, but in Oppenheimer’s case, his choice certainly damaged the place he loved.Moreover, I’m not entirely convinced that the Trinity site was as uninhabited as the Manhattan Project’s planners believed. In the climactic section of her novel Ceremony (1977), just a few pages from the amazing conclusion about which I have blogged before, Leslie Marmon Silko locates her protagonist Tayo close enough to the Trinity site (in not only geography but also, as a World War II veteran, chronology and experience) that he can reflect on its status as yet another theft and destruction of sacred tribal lands by the U.S. government. To be clear, the Jornada del Muerto Valley had not belonged to Tayo’s Laguna Pueblo people, nor any other Native American tribe, for some time, making that theft and destruction more metaphorical and overarching than immediate or legal. But as many of my posts this week will highlight, the simple fact is that Southwestern land has been contested and cohabitated for centuries, and certainly remained that way into the era of the Trinity test. Los Alamos, that is, is as Mexican American as its name suggests and as Native American as all of New Mexico, making the Manhattan Project likewise emblematic of the American project at its worst and best.Next Trinity connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

July 11-12, 2015: Samuel Southworth's Guest Post: In Honor of the 150th Anniversary of the US Secret Service

[Samuel A. Southworth is a military and espionage historian, the author of four books, as well as a former Lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught Rhetoric and Writing. He is also a former Wilderness-EMT, and was a medical volunteer at Ground Zero in New York in September of 2001. Southworth has also been a professional musician for 32 years, writing songs as well as singing and playing guitar, banjo and penny whistle. His 2014 album Mountain Time is available free on SoundCloud.]



The threat of political assassination has always been with us, hovering just offstage unsettlingly. This year we celebrate the 150thanniversary of the US Secret Service, which also provides us with a chance to both expand our knowledge and refine our thinking. One of the cardinal sins in considering governmental entities is to see them as monolithic creatures, beings in their own right, when the reality is that they are composed of people like you and me, prone to all the admirable qualities as well as personal shortcomings that are the legacy of humanity. To airily wave your hand and critique the FBI or CIA is to see the topic from such a remove that it becomes lost in the landscape, like a monster in a Goya etching glimpsed over the top of intervening hills. This unfair simplification is especially true of security and police forces, who quietly patrol and do their work, alert for threats on the darkest nights and in the foulest weather, but only hit the newspapers when something goes wrong—as has happened, alas, for the Secret Service rather more often than not in the past few years. This should in no way blind us to the professionalism and day-to-day efforts made by these brave men and women for a century and a half.
At least since Julius Caesar learned to rue the Ides of March in 44 BC, the removal and replacement of leaders by violent means has appealed to a constant demographic of the fanatical and impatient. Kings (and Queens) of England have been plotted against and attacked, Czars have been shot at and blown up by “infernal devices,” an explosive end to Napoleon's career was attempted, and a group of disaffected French army officers took several runs at Charles de Gaul in the early 1960s, angered by his liberation of Algeria from its colonial yoke (inspiring the first thriller by Frederick Forsyth: The Day of the Jackal). And the death of one man (to be fair, an archduke) could propel Europe into a world war, as the events in Sarajevo in 1914 taught us. There is no debate as to the importance of leaders, as well as the need to protect them from the radical forces who would replace ballots with bullets in their zeal to shift the political landscape.
All the more surprising, then, to learn that the Secret Service in the United States was started as an anti-counterfeiting unit, at a time (1865) when it was estimated that up to 60% of all currency in circulation was phoney—not to mention a certain rebellious portion of the country who saw fit to print their own money. But with the death by shooting of presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley, not to mention attacks on both Roosevelts as well as Harry Truman, the focus and best-known of the Secret Service's specialties would be honed in a cauldron of fire, right in the public sphere, where the look of a successful operation was the fact that nothing happened; likewise, when it went sideways, such as in the amphitheater of death that is Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, the results could resonate and reverberate for decades afterwards.
Tucked inside the Treasury Department, and supposedly not part of the IC (intelligence community) that encompasses some 16 or 17 agencies and departments (depending on who is counting), the Secret Service continues to chase after funny money, most memorably in the 1990s when Xerox came out with the very latest and best color copier—which was quickly used to crank out bogus and almost perfect $20 bills by some enterprising students at Columbia (but it's hard to get the paper just right). Indeed one of the few crossovers into “Spook World” by the Secret Service occurred in the 1950s when the Russian spy Col. Rudolph Abel of the KGB rejiggered American coins so that they would come apart in two halves, allowing for the concealment of microdots within. And when you take into consideration the ease and technological sophistication of modern currency forgery, we are led to believe that the service is as busy as ever with its original mission.
But one of the great things about American Studies is the fact that it is also about us and what we think as much as it is about Dead White Men and the Doing of Mighty Deeds. This humanizing of history seems to offer one of the best ways to keep the discipline alive and encourage future generations of students and thinkers to delve into what is often dismissed as a boring subject. History is many things, but its truest students (and best professors) know that it is not boring.
What image leaps to mind when we conjure up the Secret Service? It is a man with a crew cut and dark glasses, well dressed with a tie, surrounding a political figure, and with a wire emerging from his shirt collar and going up into one ear. While the political figure is often all smiles, the security is stone-faced by default, always watching the crowd, scanning the buildings, and receiving unknown directives from the Deus ex Machina voice out of Central Control. He may speak into his sleeve now and again, in a sort of a Maxwell Smart touch, murmuring reassurances to his team and his handlers. As Professor Railton has mentioned, we see this template in Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, Nicholas Cage, and a host of other cinematic depictions.
This entirely leaves to one side the plainclothes officers in the crowd, the women agents, the nuclear and biological threat units, the Counter Sniper Teams, the command and control elements, and the advance squads who go over the route several days before and do things like weld all the manhole covers to the pavement, and check that there is no extra wiring on traffic signals. Thankfully there is an entire phalanx of security workers who draw no attention to their professional efforts, and whom we cannot see or thank properly—which is just the way they would like it to be. There is also a uniformed branch of the Secret Service, such as the Private Leslie Coffelt who died protecting President Truman at Blair House in 1950 when a radical group sought to force their way in and kill him. Instead of a soft target, they ran into a professional who was willing to engage them in a gun battle—as are all the operational members of the Secret Service. Despite being shot three times and fatally wounded, Pvt. Coffelt returned fire and killed one of the attackers, while badly wounding the other, who spent 29 years in prison after he recovered.
Starting in 1984, the vast majority of the Secret Service's duties have been in the field of credit card fraud and the suppression of criminal online malfeasance, making their protective units just one part of their mission, and by no means the largest. A recent job listing required perfect Russian language skills and extensive knowledge of hackers and computer security, and could get you $180,000 a year if you can pass the stringent requirements and background check—seems pretty clear what the job entails.
While the tragedy in Dallas casts a long shadow, it is this idea that we should take forward on the anniversary of their founding: that more often than not, and against mighty odds, the Secret Service has stood quite literally in the line of fire (keep in mind Special Agent Tim McCarthy, who took a bullet meant for Ronald Reagan), and is prepared on a daily and minute-by-minute basis to oppose an attack on our elected leaders (as well as candidates), with deadly force if need be, and to neutralize the threat as quickly as possible. Recent scandals and historical failures notwithstanding, the stress and complexity of this job is difficult to overemphasize.
[Next series starts Monday!

PS. What do you think?]

July 10, 2015: Secret Service Stories: 21st Century Scandals

[In honor of the 150th anniversary of the Secret Service’s founding, this week I’ll highlight a series of histories and stories related to that unique department within our federal government. Leading up to a new Guest Post on the organization this weekend!]On what’s not new about the recent spate of scandals, and what is.Over the last few years, as this Washington Post timelineexhaustively details, the Secret Service has had more than its share of embarrassments and scandals. None of these incidents have painted the agency in a flattering light, and the worst have revealed a widespread culture of party and corruption that seems quite antithetical to the rigor and professionalism required for this unique, challenging job. Yet as I wrote in Monday’s post, responding in particular to Susan Cheever’s Vanity Fair article on alcohol and the Secret Service agents who were working during the JFK assassination, an engagement with the agency’s history seems to reveal that its culture has always been (or at least has always included an element that is) a far cry from our mythologized images of stoic, superheroic agents dedicated solely to presidential protection.So perhaps the scandals involving alcohol (and drunk driving), parties (with Colombian prostitutes), and the like are simply more lurid, or even just more covered in our media-saturated world, than were their counterparts of yesteryear. Far more troubling, however, are the many incidents on that Post timeline that detail security breaches, moments when the Secret Service was not aware of the identities of those in close proximity to President Obama. And those incidents are particularly troubling because of an element that does appear to be new to, or at least greatly amplified in, our 21stcentury moment: the ever-increasing number of threats directed at our president. Given that the staggering numbers in that linked piece reflect only the threats discussed by the Secret Service, and for that matter that many possible threats are likely not discovered by the agency at all, it seems impossible to argue that Secret Service protection of President Obama is not a vital necessity; and equally impossible not to be shaken by the apparent ease, per the incidents in that timeline at least, with which folks who should not necessarily be near the president have been able to achieve that access.I suppose I hope that the number of such threats will decrease once President Obama is out of office. That is, I don’t hope so because of what it would confirm about the hateful and violent responses to Obama (although I’m quite certain of the reality of those responses in any case); but I do hope so because of course I don’t want to live for the rest of my life in a society where more than 30 daily threats are made against our elected leader. Yet whatever the precise origins of these increased threats, the sad truth, revealed yet again (the week in which I’m writing this post) in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, is that 21st century American society is awash in guns and gun violence, in hateful and divisive rhetoric, in media and online echo chambers that facilitate and amplify such rhetoric, in right-wing extremism and terrorism, and in many other factors that make it difficult for me to imagine that future leaders won’t face similar dangers. And while we can no more eliminate all threats than we can “win” a “war on terror,” we certainly need an effective Secret Service to help protect our elected officials to the best of their abilities.Guest Post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other Secret Service connections you’d highlight?

July 9, 2015: Secret Service Stories: Guarding Tess

[In honor of the 150th anniversary of the Secret Service’s founding, this week I’ll highlight a series of histories and stories related to that unique department within our federal government. Leading up to a new Guest Post on the organization this weekend!]On the silly and serious sides to a lifelong Secret Service detail.I imagine everybody is aware of the Secret Service’s primary responsibility, protecting the president and his or her administration; and thanks to the increased media attention received by presidential families and children, both in reality and in pop culture texts like the Katie Holmes film First Daughter (2004), we likely all also recognize the inevitable presence of Secret Service agents in the lives of these individuals. What we perhaps don’t always remember, however, is that many such Secret Service details don’t expire with a term of office—that for former presidents and their immediate family members (particularly their spouses, but also for children through the age of 16), the Secret Service will often be a lifelong part of their worlds, indeed one of the most constant such presences across all the stages of the presidency and its aftermath.This lifelong Secret Service presence was the subject of a comic film released only a year after Clint Eastwood’s In the Line of Fire: Guarding Tess (1994), which starred Shirley MacLaine as a president’s headstrong widow and Nicolas Cage as the eternally frustrated Secret Service agent in charge of her detail. Although the film culminates [SPOILER ALERT once more!] in an unexpected and very serious crisis, the kidnapping of MacLaine’s Tess, it plays as a whole (as reflected in MacLaine’s Golded Globe winfor Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical) as a light-hearted, comic examination of the challenges that come with such lifelong Secret Service protection. Cage wasn’t quite in the prime of his mega-acting heyday yet, although it was only a couple years away; but the film’s central motif in any case was a series of explosive, funny confrontations between these two powerhouse performers and their equally stubborn characters (a motif that continues even after the kidnapping crisis and into the film’s concluding scene).Yet if Guarding Tess mostly represents the silly side of the reality and effects of a lifelong Secret Service detail, it also helps us consider that issue in more serious ways as well. I know it’s not easy to work up much sympathy for those who have had the opportunity to serve in one of the most powerful positions in the world, and/or for those in their families who got to go along for that ride. And as both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton have amply demonstrated, there are great opportunities for former presidents to continue to make their mark in the world. But at the same time, those opportunities, like Shirley MacLaine’s frustrations in Tess, reflect the fundamental reality that a former president and his or her spouse will never be anything close to private citizens, that these figures will live lives that require permanent Secret Service details. For a president and spouse as young as Barack and Michelle Obama (he will turn 54 this August and she recently turned 51), that means the likelihood of three or more decades accompanied by the Secret Service, a prospect that, as Shirley and Nicolas can help us understand, isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs.Last story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Secret Service connections you’d highlight?