Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 325

April 4-5, 2015: Crowd-sourced April Fools

[A few years ago, I had a lot of fun writing an April Fools series. Foolishly, I hadn’t done so since, but this year I decided I won’t get fooled again. So this week I’ve highlighted and AmericanStudied a series of funny figures and texts, leading up to this crowd-sourced post drawn from the funny responses and favorites shared by fellow AmericanFools (in the best sense, natch). I pity the fool who doesn’t add his or her own in comments!]First, I wanted to add one more topic to the week’s mix: Comedy Central announcement this week of their choice to replace Jon Stewart as host of the satirical Daily Show: comedian Trevor Noah. Noah has become a controversial choice, in large part because of some of his more edgy (if not offensive) past comic choices. But I would also argue that he is edgy on issues of race and culture/identity in ways that could take The Daily Show in new and interesting directions. In any case, a breaking American comedy story this week to be sure!Responding to Monday’s Stooges and Marxes post, self-proclaimed “huge Stooge fan” Rob Gosselin writes, “Curly's real name was Jerome Howard. He was part of Howard, Fine, and Howard during the Stooges vaudeville days. He was a raging alcoholic and he loved dogs. He was also a huge womanizer. A lot of the young women actors showed up in The Stooges shorts because Jerome wanted them there or promised them during a date that he would put them in a movie. He limped because when he was a child he shot himself in the foot with a rifle. He also spent his early twenties teaching ballroom dancing, and he was very light on his feet. He hated Lou Costello, claiming that he stole most of his material from him. Apparently, Lou would hang around off stage when the stooges performed in Vaudeville.  Moe Howard's parents dressed him like a girl for the first few years of his life. They even curled his hair to make it look like a young girl's hair. Apparently, they wanted a daughter. Shemp came into the act (movies) after Jerome had a stroke. Shemp originally struck out on his own to star in the ‘Joe Palooka’ series of short films. He was billed as ‘the ugliest man in Hollywood.’ He died of a heart attack after telling a joke while lighting a cigar in a taxi cab, on the way home from a boxing match.  During an appearance in Florida, Moe also had his life threatened after insisting on better treatment for the African American actors who occasionally showed up in their short films. Lucille Ball had her first screen appearance during a stooge short called ‘Three Little Pigskins.’ People also claim that Charlie Chaplin was the first actor to lampoon Hitler, when in fact Moe Howard appeared as the dictator Hailstone months before Chaplin's movie hit the screen. Worth noting that Curly wears a large metal star on his uniform throughout the short. I find this quite moving since all of the stooges were Jewish. I would recommend the book Moe Howard and the Three Stooges by Moe Howard. It's a fascinating look at the life of these men, and the world they lived in. It's much better than I expected. Oh and one more thing, the Howard brothers last name was originally Horowitz. They changed it for Hollywood.”Rob also follows up Thursday’s post on comedy that’s not funny any more, highlighting, “from the 1970s, Jake Tripper (John Ritter) on Three’s Companypretending to be gay so he could live with two straight women.”Jaime Lynn Longo responds to the same post, adding, “In the same vein, I would add Bosom Buddies. I loved that show as a kid, but I cringe every time I think of the premise now.”Responding to the series as a whole, Sam Southworth writes, “I would always want to highlight American humorists who can be overlooked by a less-than-hyper-literary culture such as ours, and point out the wealth of good writing and funny thoughts contained in Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, James Thurber and Walt Kelly. Humor is indeed evergreen, and always recombining ancient concepts with modern tropes, but sometimes I think ‘Why reinvent the wheel?’ Also, the humor contained in American folklore (as can be seen in any large collection, particularly the ones from the 1930s and '40s) remains shocking and funny, and as ‘edgy’ as any modern person could want, as exemplified in the Nantucket joke related to the sinking of the whaleship Essex and subsequent awkward dining plans while adrift (to include cannibalism) that results in the punchline ‘Know him? Hell, I et him!’ There is a certain gentility combined with lacerating rhetorical thrust that is as transgressive as Lenny Bruce, George Carlin or lesser wits who attempt to substitute vulgarity for actual comedy. We're a serious people, and a funny people, and at our best we are a seriously funny people, through war and privation and disaster.” And Sam adds, “Hunter Thompson—I persist in thinking Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail is a pretty remarkable achievement, as well as his other better known works. His Kentucky Derby and America's Cup coverage is fairly singular as well”; “I've also been frequently beguiled by WC Fields and the Marx Brothers--wonderful old stuff, right out of Vaudeville”; and “My personal strategy for when I think I'll sit down and write a comedic short piece is to just read a few Benchley articles, and my reluctance to go head-to-head with such a genius then reliably saves me from producing less-than-stellar Ha!-Ha! works. That cat was smooth and could write an amusing article about literarily nothing.”Tim McCaffrey highlights, “How about Carl Reiner? From Your Show of Shows and The Dick Van Dyke Show and the 2000 year old man bit with Mel Brooks. Plus I think he directed The Jerk (and had a small role in it). He has written some memoirs lately that are a bit rambling but have poignant scenes from WWII, the Red Scare, and growing up Jewish.” For more from both Sam and Tim, see this Facebook thread.Next series starts Monday,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other funny favorites you’d share?

April 3, 2015: April Fools: James Thurber

[A few years ago, I had a lot of fun writing an April Fools series. Foolishly, I haven’t done so since, but this year have decided I won’t get fooled again. So this week I’ll be highlighting and AmericanStudying a series of funny figures and texts. Share your own funny favorites in comments and I’ll add ‘em to the crowd-sourced weekend post—no foolin’!]On three unique ways the talented humorist captured the human condition.Any analysis of James Thurber’s legacy has to start with “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1939); not the almost entirely unrelated films with Danny Kaye(1947) and Ben Stiller(2013), but the pitch-perfect New Yorkershort story that started it all. “Mitty” is very funny and well done, capturing both the different genres and worlds of the fantasy sequences and the realities of Walter’s life and marriage with equal humor and success. But I know of few literary works that engage more thoughtfully or meaningfully with the question of the role that fantasy—and works of art that produce it—plays in our internal and external identities and lives, nor many that portray such questions ambiguously enough that it’s equally possible to make the case that they render our protagonist a fool or a hero, an escapist idiot or a man doing what he needs to do to navigate his day and life. Thurber’s story could certainly be fairer to Mrs. Mitty, but, as Thurber himself knew well, nobody’s perfect!Thurber produced many, many more stories, cartoons, and other works in the course of his long and prolific career (most of them also first published in The New Yorker), but I would highlight a couple specific categories of works through which he framed his central interests in identity and society in particularly unique ways. First, there are the nearly 100 short “fables” that he collected in Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940) and Further Fables for Our Time (1956). The idea of adopting the Aesop’s fables method and form for our modern society and culture seems perhaps obvious or even clichéd, but I don’t know of any other author who has produced a similar body of such modern fables, much less ones that are as successful (both at capturing the classic Aesop’s vibe and at reflecting elements of 20th century life) as Thurber’s. All of these elements are exemplified by the most famous fable, “The Unicorn in the Garden” (1939); although “Unicorn” employs human characters, whereas Thurber’s other fables (like Aesop’s) use anthropomorphic animals, it nonetheless offers a great starting point for exploring Thurber’s funny and pointed work in the genre.One of the few longer (and non-New Yorker-based) works in Thurber’s career was his 1939 stage play The Male Animal , co-written with Thurber’s college classmate Elliott Nugent; the play was a hit and was adapted as a 1942 film starring Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland. Set on a college campus, the comic but socially pointed play centers both on the rocky marriage of its protagonists (further threatened by the return of a former football star/love interest of the wife) and on the unexpected political controversy in which the husband (a professor) finds himself when his plan to read Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s sentencing statement to a class is discovered by the college’s conservative administration. The play (and film) navigate these different layers of identity—the personal and political, the romantic and professional—with all the wit and observational clarity we would expect from Thurber, but adapted very successfully to this new medium. For an author and artist of Thurber’s talents, every stage of his career and work reveals just another level of his comic, biting, and deeply human themes and effects.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,Ben
PS. So one more time, and I’m dead serious here: Funny favorites you’d share for that weekend post?

April 2, 2015: April Fools: Minstrel Shows

[A few years ago, I had a lot of fun writing an April Fools series. Foolishly, I haven’t done so since, but this year have decided I won’t get fooled again. So this week I’ll be highlighting and AmericanStudying a series of funny figures and texts. Share your own funny favorites in comments and I’ll add ‘em to the crowd-sourced weekend post—no foolin’!]On what we do with comic art that’s just not funny any more.Tastes vary, de gustibus non est disputandum and all that, and it’s likely that no two people will find precisely the same works or comedians funny. But I think it’s fair to say that even if we don’t all find the subjects of my prior posts this week equally hilarious (besides my professed lukewarm take on The Interview, I’ll also admit to being left mostly cold by the Three Stooges and their non-stop violence), we can all recognize the humorous qualities of their works, their successful uses of various comic styles, techniques, and appeals that have endured across the decades (and in Mark Twain’s case more than a century) since their initial release. While researching the Keaton and Chaplin post, for example, I found myself laughing at numerous moments—and recognizing the wit and inventiveness in many others that didn’t make me laugh. Many of the fundamental qualities of humor, that is, seem to me to be consistent, universal, and enduring.But not all of them, which brings me to one of the most popular and successful forms of American comic art throughout the 19thand well into the 20th centuries: the minstrel show. Minstrel shows certainly used many of the comic styles and techniques I’ve traced throughout the week’s posts: physical and screwball comedy, wordplay, satires of historical issues and popular current trends, and more. Yet they did so through one overarching and (to say the least) troubling element: the creation and deployment of exaggerated, ridiculous, bigoted and awful stereotypes of African American identities and communities. Most of the minstrel shows’ performers were white comedians and performers in “blackface,”taking the parody to another level still; but even with those few prominent African American performers, the central use and abuse of racial stereotypes for comic purposes remained the same. And again, despite our collective association of such shows with 19th century America, they continued and evolved well into the 20th century, such as in the hugely popular Amos ‘n’ Andy radio and television programs.So what do we do with such comic works, ones that depend for their humor on choices and elements we no longer (I hope and believe) find the slightest bit amusing? By “we” there, I’m thinking not about scholars (who can of course always study and analyze such past works) but about a more collective community, American audiences more broadly. For one thing, we can consider how some elements of these works might have come down to our own moment: I’ve seen arguments that both the Martin Lawrence Show and Tyler Perry's hugely popular character Madea (among other contemporary works and artists) have minstrel elements to them, for example; while I don’t know either of those well enough to opine on them, the question is always worth asking and engaging. And for another thing, it’s equally worth considering what stereotypes or bigotries remain more mainstream or acceptable in our own comic works: earlier this year I read a provocative piece that argues that Matthew Perry’s Chandler Bing from Friends was fundamentally homophobic (and, more exactly, depended on such homophobia for much of his humor); and whether we agree or disagree with that argument, it’d be important to think about which 21stcentury comic works might look as dated and un-funny to future audiences as do the minstrel shows to us.Last fools tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Funny favorites you’d share?

April 1, 2015: April Fools: Keaton and Chaplin

[A few years ago, I had a lot of fun writing an April Fools series. Foolishly, I haven’t done so since, but this year have decided I won’t get fooled again. So this week I’ll be highlighting and AmericanStudying a series of funny figures and texts. Share your own funny favorites in comments and I’ll add ‘em to the crowd-sourced weekend post—no foolin’!]On mining the past or the present for laughs, and why we need both.Buster Keaton’s 1927 silent film The General, which retells the true story of a Civil War locomotive and its engineer, is more than just the comedian and director’s masterpiece, or one of the great American films (although it’s both); it’s also exemplary of Keaton’s consistent use of the past (both historical and artistic) as a primary source for his comedy. That was true of the films that helped launch his career:  the short The Frozen North (1922), a parody of frontier culture and Westerns; and Three Ages (1923), Keaton’s first feature film and a parody of Biblical melodramas such as D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance(1916). And it was just as true of the group of classic features he made over the next half-decade, a list that included not only The General but also the Hatfield-McCoy parody Our Hospitality (1923), the detective comedy Sherlock Jr. (1924), and Seven Chances (1925), which was based on a 1916 play. In all these different ways, Keaton relied on the past for his stories, his genres, and his audience’s sense of the traditions he was employing and parodying.Charlie Chapin’s 1936 silent film Modern Times, in which Chaplin’s iconic hero the Little Tramp is forced to confront various elements of the industrialized, urban world during the Great Depression, is more than just the comedian and director’s masterpiece, or one of the great American films (although I would argue it’s both); it’s also exemplary of Chaplin’s consistent engagement with the present (both its issues and its images) in his comedy. That was true of Chaplin’s earliest directorial efforts, such as The Kid (1921), in which the Tramp and an adopted son struggle to survive in the modern world, and A Woman of Paris (1923), which stars Edna Purviance as the titular new woman who refuses to adhere to traditional roles or expectations. And it was even more true of the masterpieces that Chaplin would direct and star in over the next two decades, a list that included not only Modern Timesbut also the urban comedy City Lights (1931), the Hitler parody The Great Director (1940), and the black comedy of adultery and murder Monsieur Verdoux (1947). In all these different ways, Chaplin’s films reflected, critiqued, and contributed to the evolving modern culture and society around them.Obviously this is an overly simplified vision of both of these comic and artistic geniuses and their full and rich careers; but I feel that there are these interestingly contrasting threads running through each man’s works. Moreover, I believe those threads could be productively linked to other American comic artists: Mark Twain, for example, like Keaton tended to focus his comic texts on the past (whether English, as in The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; American, as in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson; or world, as in Innocents Abroad and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc); whereas Nathanael West, for another example, like Chaplin usually focused his satirical lens on elements of the modern American society around him (Hollywood in The Day of the Locust, urban living and relationships in Miss Lonelyhearts, the failure of the American Dream in the Depression era in A Cool Million). And at the end of the day, I think it’s vital to include both kinds of comedy and art in our conversations: laughing at the past helps us understand and engage with those histories; and laughing at the present helps us recognize and analyze ourselves. And those are both seriously important skills.Next fools tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Funny favorites you’d share?

March 31, 2015: April Fools: The Interview

[A few years ago, I had a lot of fun writing an April Fools series. Foolishly, I haven’t done so since, but this year have decided I won’t get fooled again. So this week I’ll be highlighting and AmericanStudying a series of funny figures and texts. Share your own funny favorites in comments and I’ll add ‘em to the crowd-sourced weekend post—no foolin’!]On what’s problematic, and what’s important, about the controversial comedy.In the last post in that 2012 April Fools series, I highlighted five great, enduring works of American satire. Having had the chance to see the satirical film The Interview (2014) earlier this year, I have to admit that I don’t see it ever landing on such a list. Directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, based on a story by Rogen, Goldberg, and Dan Sterling, and starring Rogen and James Franco as the producer and star of a celebrity interview show who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the screwball comedy throws a ton of jokes and over-the-top sequences against the wall, many of them vulgar, graphically violent, or some combination of both. There are certainly funny moments, both of the silly and the pointed variety; but for the most part the film feels like it’s working way too hard for much too little payoff. And much of the problem lies in that attempt to combine the silly and screwball with the satirical—satire, it seems to me, requires us to use our brain; and too much of the time, The Interview is trying to hit us far lower than that.The film became far better known for its controversy than its comedy, of course, and on that level too I would argue that it’s problematic. I don’t have any problem with a work of fiction satirizing (and even, SPOILER and graphic violence alert, brutally killing) a world leader like Kim, and certainly I don’t support the North Korean government’s attempts to suppress the film’s release. But as I wrote in this January piece for my Talking Points Memo column, I don’t believe we Americans have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to critiquing such blind, uncritical worship of our beloved leaders. Since many of the responses to my piece suggested I was equating the two nations overall, let me be clear: America is not North Korea, in any sense. But I would stand by my point that far too many Americans expressed, in response to Natalie Maines’ far less incendiary depiction of George W. Bush, a level of outrage and anger commensurate to the North Korean response to a film portraying their leader in far, far worse light (as well as, y’know, brutally killing him). Which is to say, if we want to make the case that North Korea should be able to handle satire and criticism more calmly, we’re going to have to turn that mirror on ourselves and our own histories as well.I don’t think it entirely succeeded in doing so, but it is important to note that The Interview does, in fact, attempt to true that satirical and critical lens on America as well as North Korea. It does so partly through the easy targets of the media and our culture of celebrity, both embodied by James Franco’s thoroughly annoying and stupid character (although he is eventually supposed to be a hero, so I’m not sure how much the zingers ultimately connect). But it does so more subtly through the film’s true heroine, Sook, the North Korean officer who hopes to overthrow Kim and establish a democratic government in his place. When Sook reveals her true intentions, Franco and Rogen exclaim that Kim must be assassinated; she replies, “How many times is America going to make the same mistake?,” and Franco responds, “As many times as it takes, sister!” Again, such moments of thoughtful satire of American foreign policy and perspectives are both few and far between and often overshadowed by the silliness and vulgarities and so on; but they’re there, and perhaps they even registered with the millions of viewers who sought out the film after the controversy. For a silly, mediocre screwball comedy, that’d be a surprising and meaningful effect.Next fools tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Funny favorites you’d share?

March 30, 2015: April Fools: Stooges and Marxes

[A few years ago, I had a lot of fun writing an April Fools series. Foolishly, I haven’t done so since, but this year have decided I won’t get fooled again. So this week I’ll be highlighting and AmericanStudying a series of funny figures and texts. Share your own funny favorites in comments and I’ll add ‘em to the crowd-sourced weekend post—no foolin’!]On the two groups of siblings at the heart of mid-20th century American comedy and popular culture.From the Booths to the Barrymores, the Douglas’s to the Bridges, on down to Will and Jada Pinkett Smith and their increasingly visible young ‘uns, multi-generational families have long been a staple in American popular culture. Whether you read the trend as one of many signs that American society is not nearly as class-less as we like to believe, as a symbol of our hankering for an equivalent to the British royal family, or as simply a reflection that it’s easier to get ahead if you know the right people, there’s no doubt that our cultural icons have often come as part of family units. Yet I’m not sure that any other cultural medium or any other historical moment have been dominated by competing families of entertainers as were the 1930s and 40s by the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges.The two families (which is a slightly inaccurate word for the Stooges, since Moe, Shemp, and Curly were brothers but Larry was unrelated to them) have interestingly parallel biographies: each group of brothers was born to Jewish American immigrant families in late 19th century New York; members of each began to perform in Vaudeville-type acts for the first time in 1912, and achieved their first real breakthrough successes about a decade later; and the similarly-titled films that truly launched each group both appeared within a year of each other, the Marx’s The Cocoanuts (1929) and the Stooges’ Soup to Nuts (1930). The families even feature individual brothers who helped originate the act but left the group at a relatively early point, Zeppo Marx and Shemp Howard. Yet despite these parallels, in my experience it’s very rare to find passionate fans of both the Marx Brothers and the Stooges—they seem today, as perhaps they did in their own era, to have found pretty distinct fan bases.It’d be easy to attribute that divide to the highbrow/lowbrow dichotomy, and certainly there’s no doubt that the two groups tended to employ very different kinds of comedy: the Marx’s using their scripts and wordplay first and foremost, the Stooges their physical comedy and violence (although certainly Harpo Marx was entirely a physical comic, and in other ways too this division would break down upon close examination). Yet I would say that the two groups also exemplify two very distinct directions for American comedy and popular culture after Vaudeville, both employing developing technologies but in quite different ways: Cocoanuts was one of the first sound films, and throughout their career the Marx Brothers used this new medium of sound film to great effect; whereas most of the Stooges’ classic works were shorts, and while such pieces were often featured before or with other films they were also tailor-made for the new medium of television as it developed in the decades to come. Both films and television remain central media for American comedy, of course, but they work and connect to audiences in fundamentally different ways, and the Marx’s and Stooges can help us analyze those trends at their earlier moments.Next fools tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Funny favorites you’d share?

March 28-29, 2015: March 2015 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]March 2: Forgotten Wars: The Second Barbary War: A series on under-remembered American wars starts with the anniversary of an Early Republic conflict.March 3: Forgotten Wars: The First Barbary War: The series continues with three longstanding legacies of the late 18th century conflict.March 4: Forgotten Wars: The Aroostook War: National history, local history, and lumberjacks, as the series rolls on.March 5: Forgotten Wars: The Occupations of Nicaragua: Two 20thcentury conflicts that are all too representative, and how to remember them specifically nonetheless.March 6: Forgotten Wars: Remembering the Sand Creek Massacre: The series concludes with three sites that can help us remember a complex Civil War massacre.March 7-8: James Fallows on Forgotten 21st Century Wars: But wait, a special weekend post follows up a fellow AmericanStudier’s take on our current, ironically forgotten wars.March 9: Jazzy Connections: Scott Joplin: A JazzStudying series starts with the musical and cultural legacies of the hugely influential composer.March 10: Jazzy Connections: Jazz Literature: The series continues with three engaging and important examples of jazz’s influence on American literature.March 11: Jazzy Connections: Whites and the Harlem Renaissance: White America’s troubling and exploitative yet important relationship to black culture, as the series rolls on.March 12: Jazzy Connections: Charlie Parker’s Death: On the anniversary of the tragic event, reflections on what is lost and what endures when an artist dies young.March 13: Jazzy Connections: Jazz in the 21st Century: The series concludes with three ways to argue for the genre’s contemporary relevance.March 14-15: All That Crowd-sourced Jazz: Additions of mine and the thoughts of fellow AmericanStudiers round off the series—add yours in comments, please!March 16: AmericanThaws: Eliot and Williams: A Spring series starts with two very different images of the season in two great Modernist poems.March 17: AmericanThaws: The US and the UK: The series continues with when and how America’s oldest antagonism warmed up.March 18: AmericanThaws: William Mahone: Late-life evolutions that don’t impress me much, and those that do, as the series rolls on.March 19: AmericanThaws: Humanity in War: An amazing moment of humanity amidst the horrors of war.March 20: AmericanThaws: Nixon Goes to China: The series concludes with two ways to contextualize an undeniable historical turning point.March 21-22: AmericanThaws: Cuba: A special weekend post on two pieces of mine that can help us understand one of our most recent warmings.March 23: American Epidemics: Influenza and Ebola: A series on past and present epidemics starts by comparing and contrasting two of the most potent.March 24: American Epidemics: The Measles: The series continues with three stages in the history of a frustratingly persistent disease.March 25: American Epidemics: Yellow Fever: The Early Republic outbreak that nearly changed everything, and why it didn’t, as the series rolls on.March 26: American Epidemics: Smallpox and Mather: Two prior posts of mine that highlight the worst and best of American perspectives through Cotton Mather and smallpox.March 27: American Epidemics: Typhoid Mary: The series concludes with how an anniversary can help us remember a complex and important figure.Next series starts Monday,Ben
PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to write? Lemme know!

March 27, 2015: American Epidemics: Typhoid Mary

[Inspired both by the recent events I’ll include in Monday’s and Tuesday’s posts and the historical anniversary on which I’ll focus in Friday’s, a series AmericanStudying epidemics, past and present.] On how an anniversary helps us remember an iconic and complex figure.One hundred years ago today, on March 27th, 1915, Mary Mallon (1869-1938)—better known as “Typhoid Mary”—was quarantined by public health officials for the second and final time. The Irish immigrant and cook had previously infected numerous New York-area employers, families, and communities with the highly contagious and dangerous typhoid fever; the incidents began around 1900, but it was not until a 1906 outbreak in Oyster Bay that Mary’s role in them was discovered, and she was quarantined from 1907 to 1910 in a clinic on North Brother Island. Upon her release she agreed to change professions, but instead changed her name and began working as a cook once more. Arrested in 1915 after starting yet another typhoid outbreak, this one at New York’s Sloane Hospital for Women, Mary was taken once again to North Brother Island, where she would remain in quarantine for the final twenty-three years of her life.Typhoid Mary’s striking story can be contexualized in a number of AmericanStudies ways. The public fascination with her (she was interviewed numerous times during those final decades of quarantine) reflects our longstanding interest in “true crime” narratives and figures, in seeking to understand and perhaps even empathize with those who do horrific or sociopathic things to their fellow citizens. At the same time, but on the other end of the emotive spectrum, the fearful and paranoid responses to Mary (and it is possible to see those responses as extreme at the same time that we recognize her culpability in her arc) were undoubtedly connected to equally longstanding narratives of dirty and diseased immigrants and the threats they pose to our communities and culture: narratives that had long been associated specifically with Irish immigrants; and that in response to the late 19th and early 20th century waves of arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America were newly energized in this period. In both these ways, the Mary of North Brother Island—quarantined away from the rest of America and yet forever available for interviews and pictures—could be said to represent a twisted American ideal.Comparing Mary’s life and history to a more genuinely idealized American story offers another lens through which to analyze her, however. As part of a September 2013 series on Newport’s The Breakers, I wrote a post on Rudy Stanish, the son of Eastern Europe immigrants who would rise to become the “Omelet King,” one of the most famous chefs in American history. Stanish’s Newport experiences began in 1929, while Mary was still alive and quarantined; in that, and even more in their shared profession, social status (as servants of wealthy families), and immigrant background, the two offer a compelling and complex comparison. Each life and identity is individual and shouldn’t be reduced to types or mythic narratives, but it’s hard for me to resist noting that Rudy and Mary represent two sides to the same coin, the American Dream and American Nightmare respectively. Their versions are extremes, of course—few Americans end up in either lifelong quarantine or as a chef to the stars—but that doesn’t mean they can’t be connected to more typical communal experiences. And it’s fair—if more pessimistic than I like to be—to say that more Americans experience the nightmare than the dream; and thus to note that we might understand how such a nightmare might lead to the life and choices of a woman like Typhoid Mary.March Recap this weekend,Ben
PS. What do you think?

March 26, 2015: American Epidemics: Smallpox and Mather

[Inspired both by the recent events I’ll include in Monday’s and Tuesday’s posts and the historical anniversary on which I’ll focus in Friday’s, a series AmericanStudying epidemics, past and present.] On the inspiring, redemptive response of a Puritan leader to an 18th century epidemic.A few years back, I had the chance to contribute some pieces to Maggi Smith-Dalton’s wonderful “Salem History Time” column for Boston.com. For my second and third pieces, I focused on two sides to the story and history of one of Salem’s most prominent citizens, Cotton Mather: his moral and social failures during the Witch Trials; and his subsequent, far more admirable responses to the city’s smallpox epidemics. Mostly I wanted to use today’s post to highlight those prior pieces, but I would say one more thing about these two American histories: that they reflect a longstanding conflict between fear and rationality, superstition and enlightenment, the worst of what we believe and how it can divide us and the best of what we can learn and how it can save us. In Mather’s own life, he moved from the former to the latter, from the Witch Trials hysteria to his influential innoculations—may we all find ways to make the same move, individually and collectively.Last epidemic tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think?

March 25, 2015: American Epidemics: Yellow Fever

[Inspired both by the recent events I’ll include in Monday’s and Tuesday’s posts and the historical anniversary on which I’ll focus in Friday’s, a series AmericanStudying epidemics, past and present.] On the Early Republic outbreak that very nearly changed everything, and why it didn’t.Yellow fever has been a recurring threatto American communities and populations (along with many places, in the Western Hemisphere and around the world), and one that has most frequently targeted the South and the Gulf Coast. From the numerous 19th and early 20th century outbreaks in New Orleansand the Mississippi River Valley; to an 1858 outbreak that killed more than 300 members of a single Charleston, South Carolina, church; to the 1878 Memphis outbreak that forced a steamship, the John D. Porter, to travel up and down the Mississippi for two months, a floating quarantine unable to unload its passengers for fear of infection; much of the region’s history has been shaped by the disease’s presence and effects. Yet Northern cities such as New York and Philadelphia experienced their share of yellow fever outbreaks as well—and it was a late 18th century Philly epidemic that came close to forever altering American history.Few Americans remember that it was Philadelphia which served as the nation’s capital for most of its first post-Revolutionary years, including the majority of George Washington’s time as president. Washington was inaugurated in New York City but served most of his first term (1789-1793) and all of his second (1793-1797) in Philadelphia; John Adams (president from 1797 to 1801) would likewise lead from Philadelphia, as Jefferson’s 1801 inauguration was the first in the newly completed Washington, DC. And so Washington, his administration, Congress, the Supreme Court, and the whole of the young federal government were located in Philadelphia during the 1793 yellow fever outbreak, the worst in the city and one of the most devastating in American history. The summertime epidemic claimed the lives of more than 5000 Philadelphians, with more than 100 dying each day at its height; Washington and the rest of the government managed to flee the city safely, but given the potency and rapidity with which infection spread (local merchant Samuel Breck noted that many of those affected were “in health one day and buried the next”), it’s very easy to imagine Washington stricken by the illness. What that might have meant for the nascent republic is an interesting and provocative question to say the least.We don’t and can’t know what that alternate history might have comprised, but we can say with far more certainty how and why the city beat back the epidemic. That story would have to start with Dr. Benjamin Rush, the physician and founding father (he signed the Declaration of Independence and participated in the Constitutional ratification debates, among other contributions) who refused to leave the city and spearheaded its efforts to contain and combat the outbreak (Rush did contract the disease in October but fortunately survived; his methods for fighting the disease were and remain controversial, but became the norm for many decades thereafter). But equally important to the city’s efforts was its substantial free African American population—Rush believed that the African American community were immune to the epidemic, and asked its members to serve as nurses and in other medical and support roles; while he was almost certainly wrong in his assumptions, many nonetheless answered his call and performed vital duties that the fellow citizens were unable or unwilling to execute. In a subsequent memoir, community leaders Richard Allen and Absalom Jones wrote that they felt, in response to Rush’s call, “a freedom to go forth, confiding in Him who can preserve in the midst of a burning fiery furnace, sensible that it was our duty to do all the good we could to our suffering fellow mortals.” Alternate histories can be compelling, but none holds a candle to this actual, inspiring American history.Next epidemic tomorrow,Ben
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PPS. After I wrote this post, Jonathan Bryant published a great one of his own on Yellow Fever for We're History: http://werehistory.org/before-ebola/