Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 368

November 19, 2013: Times Like These: 1935

[In such bitterly partisan and divided times, it can be easy to feel as if things have never been this bad before. Without downplaying the genuine challenges presented by our own moment, however, it’s well worth AmericanStudying other similarly polarized eras. So this week I’ll highlight five such moments, and think a bit about what we can learn from them. Your thoughts, on these moments, our own, or any others, are very welcome as always!]

On how history sometimes repeats itself—and yet how it doesn’t.The debates lasted for months, occupying both houses of Congress and much media coverage despite the ongoing, national and global economic disaster. The debates were heated and divisive, with the Republicans castigating the administration and Democratic plan as far too expensive and as creeping (or overt) socialism, and the Democrats responding by calling the Republican position extreme, inaccurate, and destructive to the American people. The debates concluded with the Democrats pushing through—critics would say forcing through—their plan to extend a significant new government program to millions of Americans, a move that was perceived and narrated as simultaneously a victory for the first-team Democratic president and an over-reach that would come back to bite him and his party down the road.I don’t know if I entirely succeeded, but my goal in writing that paragraph was to make it impossible to know for sure (unless you cilicked on the hyperlinks!) whether I was describing the 2010 debates over President Obama’s Affordable Care Act or the 1935 debates over President Roosevelt’s Social Security Act. I’m not usually a big fan of the “Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it” frame—every historical moment is specific and distinct enough that the idea of such repetition doesn’t make a lot of sense—but the parallels between the 1935 and 2010 debates are sweeping and striking enough as to be, to my mind, inarguable. And if we grant those parallels, it becomes at least a bit harder to make the case for the ACA—which comprises a far less sweeping addition to our government and society than did Social Security—as the final nail in America’s coffin, or the moment when our national fall commenced, or whatever other apocalyptic narrative you want to trot out. Unless you want to make the same case for Social Security over these last 75 years—and precious few have been willing to go there—you’ll find your argument instantly challenged by that post-1935 history.So remembering 1935 reminds us that history can, occasionally, seem to repeat itself. But doing so also makes clear one very simple reason why it cannot: because each and every historical event, and thus certainly each hotly debated and significant new law, does indeed change our society and future. Even at the most basic level, the Social Security Act fundamentally altered the lives of all American seniors, then and since; its existence has also substantially changed the way all adult Americans plan for and move toward the end of their lives. While it’s impossible to argue that any single historical event impacted the future more than many others, it’s similarly impossible not to recognize how much our present moment has been created out of our past, and more exactly out of the most defining and lasting influences within that history. So if this moment feels like it’s the same as 1935, with some significant justification, it’s also worth remembering that nothing has been the same since 1935.Next divided era tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other divided moments you’d highlight?

November 18, 2013: Times Like These: 1963

[In such bitterly partisan and divided times, it can be easy to feel as if things have never been this bad before. Without downplaying the genuine challenges presented by our own moment, however, it’s well worth AmericanStudying other similarly polarized eras. So this week I’ll highlight five such moments, and think a bit about what we can learn from them. Your thoughts, on these moments, our own, or any others, are very welcome as always!]

On the bitter divisions that preceded, and perhaps even contributed to, a tragic day.On November 21, 1963, the day before John F. Kennedy was assassinated, numerous copies of a flyer featuring Kennedy’s picture (arranged like a mug shot) and titled “Wanted for Treason” were distributed in Dallas (most likely by members of the John Birch Society). Many of the seven (almost entirely inaccurate and ludicrously extreme) “treasonous activities against the United States” that the poster attributes to Kennedy feel, to be blunt, as if they could and perhaps have been written in the last year or two about Barack Obama with virtually no changes; but while those echoes have a great deal to tell us about our contemporary moment and its historical origins and connections, they’re not my main point here. Instead, I think the flyer helps us to contextualize Kennedy’s assassination, to realize that—whether or not Oswald had the slightest thing to do with the flyer or had even seen it or anything like it—Kennedy was governing in an era of increasingly unhinged and explicitly violent (if we remember the penalty for treason) right-wing rhetoric, published and circulated en masse, for purposes that can at best be called divisive.One problem with seemingly “lone wolf” assassinations (like Oswald’s of Kennedy, unless you go down the Oliver Stone route of course) is that the dominant narrative of such events can make it far too easy for us to elide the culture of extreme and violent oppositional rhetoric (as in the Kennedy flyer) in which the lone wolf committed his or her crime. Which is to say, it’s usually not, to my mind, either-or. There are those assassins who are obviously and centrally driven by specific historical and social contexts, such as John Wilkes Booth in his murder of Lincoln; and there are those who are pretty clearly just plain nuts, such as John Hinckley in his Jodie Foster-inspired attempt on Reagan. But in many—if not most—cases, a political assassination represents a complex combination of these two factors—an individual who is sufficiently detached from normal reality and society to plan and commit such an act, operating within a historical and social climate that fosters violent perspectives and responses and attacks on political figures. Which leads me to a few questions about one of the most violent moments in our recent political history. Was Gabrielle Giffords’ shooter influenced by the map on Sarah Palin’s website featuring key “targeted” Democratic Congressional districts (including Giffords’) with crosshairs over them? Did he know that Giffords’ Tea Party-endorsed opponent in the preceding election was an Iraq War veteran who featured a fundraising event where supporters could come out and shoot an M16 to “help” unseat Giffords? Did the shooter have any connection to the multiple times her office had been vandalized and she had received death threats after the passage of the health care reform bill, a bill for which she voted and to which Sharron Angle and others were in part referring when they spoke of “2ndAmendment remedies” if elections don’t do the job (and Giffords did indeed win re-election)? The overt answer to all of those questions might well be no, but I believe we cannot and should not attempt to understand his actions without at least some awareness of and engagement with these contexts.Next divided era tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other divided moments you’d highlight?

November 16-17, 2013: Crowd-Sourced Veterans

[In honor of Veteran’s Day, this week’s series has focused on cultural and historical engagements with this important American community. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the response and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers—please add your thoughts in comments!]
Ian Wilkins writes, “I agree that the best use of a time to remember and contemplate like that which Veteran's Day encourages us to do is to broaden out memory beyond the specifics of war itself, and to consider all of the far-reaching impacts into the lives of those who were involved in one way or another.
     My grandfather’s brother, Jack Wilkins, was an all-star multi-sport athlete from the Main South neighborhood of Worcester. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, he and my grandfather signed up and shipped off immediately—into the marines and the navy, respectively. While my grandfather rode aboard a Navy fuel tanker, thankfully avoiding torpedoes and coming home safely, Jack was piloting fighters in the marines. When WWII was over, my grandfather came home to his wife. Eschewing the reported major-league baseball tryouts which had been scheduled before the war, Jack stayed on in the marines, and went to Korea a short time later.
     Less than a month into Korea, Jack’s plane was shot down. For the entire duration of the war, nobody in the family knew what had happened to him. In fact, he had been captured and was a POW. The way they finally became aware of this is that, when the war was over, there were several prisoners released. My family was watching the prisoners walk off the planes on television, and there was Jack, alive! It has become a piece of family history that is not often talked about, but the city of Worcester held a parade for his return.
     Jack moved very quickly to a warmer climate (Florida), never to return to New England. He did not like to talk about his experience; the little I know of it I learned from my grandmother.
     As interesting and impactful as this story is, it is but one of many. Jack’s experience was something that followed him for the rest of his life. My absolute favorite movie which explores the horrible things that can follow vets home in this way is The Deer Hunter . Yes it is very long, and yes some of the stuff is absolutely crazy, but it always hits me in a very American way. Of course, there are so many great Vietnam movies which delve into the psychological toll, but the connections I feel to the America portrayed in The Deer Hunter—the small, industrial town and its inhabitants—makes it stand out for me.”Rob Gosselin writes, “In the early 1980's I served under a United States Marine Corps Master Gunnery Sergent. He did multiple combat tours in Vietnam. In his opinion, the only movie he ever saw that looked like what he experienced was Hamburger Hill (1987). It might be worth a look.”Irene Martyniuk responds to Thursday’s WWI post, writing, “I gave a paper a few years ago about the Irish who chose to serve in the British Army in WWI. Ireland was neutral, even though it was still officially part of the British Empire, and those who held an Irish passport were exempt from the British draft, but many (more than the Irish now want to admit) chose to serve—usually for the money. This is a topic Sebastian Barrybrilliantly explores in his fiction, about which I wrote in my paper. In doing research for that work, I was quite surprised to discover that in the Republic of Ireland, there are still no clear records as to how many Irish served in WWI (they still argue about ‘who is Irish’) and how many died, and the first official memorials honoring those who served and those who died were only erected in 2004 or so!”Responding to the same post, Stephen Railton writes, “I wonder when the monuments will reflect the black contribution to America's various wars? or the native American ones? etc?” And then he links these questions to the NAACP film Birth of a Race (1918), which in one section “shows a black man and a white man, working together in a field and then marching together in same uniform off to war. I don't think I've seen it all, just that clip, and it doesn't look very impressive as a piece of cinema -- god knows how little money they had to make it. I'm not sure it was ever shown in many (any?) theaters either. But like those un-erected monuments, it is part of the story you're helping us recover this week.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? What would you add?

November 15, 2013: Veteran’s Week: Veterans Against the War(s)

[In honor of Veteran’s Day, a series on cultural and historical engagements with this important American community. Please add your thoughts and takes—on individual posts, on other aspects of veterans in American history, culture, and community, and on anything else that comes to mind—for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On the longstanding veterans communities that we hardly ever recognize—and my personal connection to them.Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) has been around for forty-six years, almost exactly as long as the National Organization for Women (NOW). But for one reason or another—perhaps the specificity of its name, perhaps the controversies and critiques that surrounded and still surround the organizaton—VVAW is not, to my mind, generally recognized as a contemporary American activist organization. Instead, VVAW tends to be treated as a part of history, a reflection of the growing 1960s divisions in American culture and society over the Vietnam War and related issues. Those historical questions certainly contributed to the organization’s founding—but just as NOW has existed long past the specific women’s movement issues and debates that prompted its 1966 founding, so too has VVAW extended its efforts and reach well beyond the end of the Vietnam War and its era.Recognizing VVAW’s ongoing presence and activism would be important on its own terms, but it would also help us to better engage with the similar organizations that have become increasingly prevalent in late 20thand early 21st century America. I’m thinking specifically of two very distinct but equally influential groups: Iraq Veterans Against the War, which focused its initial efforts on that particular recent conflict but has gradually broadened its scope, just as VVAW did; and Veterans for Peace, which was founded in 1985 and has opposed militarism and conflict more broadly from the outset. Among the many reasons why these organizations deserve our fuller recognition, I would argue that such awareness would significantly challenge one of our most persistent recent narratives: that each American must choose whether to “support the troops” or oppose war. These anti-war veterans’ organizations reveal that schism as a false dichotomy, one that masks the possibility—the increasingly prominent possibility—that troops themselves can oppose wars.While such anti-war veterans’ organizations seem to be a relatively recent American phenomenon, my own family history indicates that there is nothing new about wartime service producing anti-war sentiments. My paternal grandfather, Arthur Railton, was a World War II veteran and a committed pacifist, and he consistently credited his war experiences as the source of that subsequent and vociferous opposition to war. In the absence of organized anti-war veteran activism in prior generations, it might be easy to develop narratives that would (for example) contrast Greatest Generation vets with Vietnam-era ones—but such contrasts would, as my grandfather proves, be no more necessarily accurate than a purely historical understanding of VVAW. The truth is that anti-war veterans are not a product of any one moment or debate, but rather comprise a longstanding, ongoing, and significant American community.Crowd-sourced post tomorrow,BenPS. So what do you think? Last chance to share responses or other takes for that weekend post!

November 14, 2013: Veteran’s Week: African Americans in World War I

[In honor of Veteran’s Day, a series on cultural and historical engagements with this important American community. Please add your thoughts and takes—on individual posts, on other aspects of veterans in American history, culture, and community, and on anything else that comes to mind—for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On two opposing yet crucially interconnected ways to remember a community of veterans.Thanks in large part to the film Glory (1989), we’ve started to develop a collective sense of the U.S. Colored Troops who fought in the Civil War; thanks to similar cultural texts such as the film Red Tails (2012), we’ve perhaps begun to do the same for the African Americans who served in World War II. But for whatever reason—perhaps it’s as simple as the absence, to date, of a historical film centered on them?—I don’t think we have much of a collective awareness at all of the equally significant community of African American soldiers who served in World War I. Coming half a century after abolition, in the same era as such defining histories as the Great Migration, the lynching epidemic, and the founding of the NAACP, this World War I service is certainly as significant as those other, more famous ones, and deserves far more remembrance in our 21stcentury culture.If we start to engage with the histories of this community, however, another reason for our general amnesia about them becomes clearer: compared to the pretty inspiring Civil War and World War II stories, the history of these 370,000 World War I soldiers—and of the vets when they returned home—is a strikingly dark and divisive one. Exemplifying those dark histories are the words of the U.S. chief military commander, General John Pershing, who while publicly recognizing African American soldiers privately composed a secret communiqué to white officers instructing them that “we must not eat with them, must not shake hands with them, seek to talk to them or to meet with them outside the requirements of military service. We must not commend too highly these troops, especially in front of white Americans.” And when they returned to the United States, these veterans found themselves right back in a society where President Wilson had recently segregated the federal government, where The Birth of a Nation (1915) was a towering cultural achievement, where whatever protections their uniforms had afforded them ended as abruptly as did the war.So we can’t better remember these World War I soldiers and veterans without remembering another in the long national series of hypocrisies and horrors directed at African Americans—which of course doesn’t mean we shouldn’t remember them (quite the opposite). But on the other hand, we can also work to push beyond those negatives to remember the deeply inspiring sides to this community’s service, and to consider how they brought those experiences back with them to the post-war nation. In his May 1919 “Returning Soldiers,”published as an editorial for his monthly NAACP magazine The Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois makes the case for thinking of the soldiers in precisely that way; throughout his stirring editorial Du Bois contrasts the cause for which these soldiers have risked their lives for the “fatherland” to which they will soon come home, concludes, “We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.” It’s quite possible to see this era, and this community of veterans, as a vital step toward the Civil Rights Movement—and in any case it’s well worth remembering this inspiring side of their experiences.Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other histories you’d share for the weekend post?

November 13, 2013: Veteran’s Week: The Red Convertible

[In honor of Veteran’s Day, a series on cultural and historical engagements with this important American community. Please add your thoughts and takes—on individual posts, on other aspects of veterans in American history, culture, and community, and on anything else that comes to mind—for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On the powerful story that embodies, but also challenges, one of the most widely understood aspects of veterans’ experiences.Some of the more challenging kinds of topics to AmericanStudy are those for which we already have a pretty good collective understanding—not ones where there are widely shared but inaccurate narratives, but rather ones where we seem, by and large, to get it right. In that case, after all, it would be fair to ask what a public scholar has to add to the conversation. One such collectively shared understanding, it seems to me, has to do with the widespread prevalence of PTSD and similar illnesses and conditions among veterans—we’ve been talking collectively about related questions and issues since at least World War I and “shell shock,” and have since Vietnam become increasingly aware of just how significant an issue this illness comprises for all of our men and women who return home from wartime military service.Just because we’re generally aware of an issue, though, doesn’t mean that we’re fully engaged with its histories and stories, with questions like how it impacts individuals and communities. There are lots of ways to increase that kind of engagement, but I know of few that are more effective than encountering works of art that can humanize these broader historical issues; and thus I can think of few more salient AmericanStudies efforts than highlighting such works of art. When it comes to PTSD and war veterans, I don’t know of any artistic work that more concisely and powerfully captures those histories than Louise Erdrich’s short story “The Red Convertible” (1984). Through her depiction of two brothers, one (Henry Lamartine Jr.) a Vietnam vet dealing with PTSD and the other (Lyman Lamartine) narrating both Henry’s story and its effects on his family and community, Erdrich brings veterans’ PTSD home in literal, metaphorical, tragic, and deeply affecting ways.If reading Erdrich’s story thus helps us embody this broader historical issue, it also definitely challenges, or at least complicates, our widely shared understanding of that issue. For one thing, the Lamartine brothers, like most of Erdrich’s characters and Erdrich herself, are part of the Ojibwe Chippewa (Native American) tribe and community, and her story thus forces us to grapple with the hugely disproportianate percentage of Native Americans who have served in our country’s wars (and thus been affected by issues such as PTSD). And as a result, Erdrich’s story also reminds us that PTSD, like any illness and especially any psychological illness, varies widely and crucially depending on a range of other factors, many connected directly to the particular community and environment surrounding the affected person. So a broad understanding of veterans and PTSD, while a good starting point, requires a good deal more engagement and analysis, and Erdrich’s story can help us carry that work forward on multiple levels.Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other texts or images you’d share for the weekend post?

November 12, 2013: Veteran’s Week: Band of Brothers

[In honor of Veteran’s Day, a series on cultural and historical engagements with this important American community. Please add your thoughts and takes—on individual posts, on other aspects of veterans in American history, culture, and community, and on anything else that comes to mind—for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On nostalgia and nuance in one of our best recent representations of war.I’ve written before, in this post on images and representations of World War II, about historian Michael Kammen’s categories of remembrance and commemoration: the former an attempt to capture the past with more accuracy and complexity; the latter a more simplified and celebratory representation of history. Particularly interesting, I’d say, are the cultural texts that seem to include both types, and it’s in that category that I’d put Steven Speilberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998)—the film opens with the famous extended D-Day sequence that is absolutely gripping in its realistic depictions of the battle in all its chaos and horror, a section that exemplifies genuine remembrance of such a historic event; but then the film segues into a larger narrative that, while still featuring realistic battle sequences, feels far more driven by various war-film cliches and commemorative ideals.Spielberg’s follow up World War II work, produced along with his film’s star Tom Hanks, was the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2001). From its title and famous promotional image on, the miniseries certainly reflects a deeply commemorative perspective on the men of Easy Company and, through them, on World War II soldiers and the Greatest Generation to which they belonged. Like Ryan, the series is unsparing in its depictions of the violence and horrors of war; but outside of one peripheral character, the company’s over-the-top and ultimately unfit-for-battle training officer (played to crazy perfection by David Schwimmer), its portrayals of the soldiers are overtly and consistently celebratory. And one of the series’ most unique and effective touches—the choice to begin each episode with interviews with the surviving Easy Company veterans whose characters are represented onscreen—would seem to add one more compelling layer to those celebratory depictions.But in fact I would argue the opposite: that the veterans’ interviews tend to comprise the series’ most nuanced remembrances of the war and its histories. The men talk openly and frequently, for example, about fear and exhaustion and apathy and other less-than-ideal emotions, reminding us that these were not Hollywood heroes but simply average young men thrust into an often horrifying and always uncertain world. And particularly striking are the group of interviews in which the veterans talk about Nazi soldiers, recognizing that they were similarly young and scared and human, and reflecting on what was asked of each group (to try to kill each other, to put it bluntly). Like the similarly striking choice to include in the series’ final episode a speech delivered to his men by a surrendering German general, these veterans’ perspectives complicate the kind of good vs. evil narratives that are necessary for pure commemoration, and remind us that remembrance of the war—any war—includes the histories and stories of all the involved nations and communities.Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other stories or images you’d share for the weekend post?

November 11, 2013: Veteran’s Week: A Veteran Performance

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

November 9-10, 2013: AmericanStudies Wants You!

Thanks to a couple of inspiring factors—generous cross-postings and links from The Historical Society’s blogand the new online magazine Ethos; audiences at my many recent book talks—my blog has been getting a lot of new visitors lately. It’s also, coincidentally but happily, almost exactly the three-year anniversary of AmericanStudies! So for both of those reasons, I wanted to take this weekend post first to welcome any and all such new readers (as well as returning ones, of course!), and to highlight the introductory post that’s also now permanently linked at the top of the blog’s right-hand column. And second, I wanted to mention three distinct but equally valuable ways you can add your voice and perspective to the ongoing conversations here:
1)      Guest Posts: Among my very favorite entries from these three years and nearly 1000 posts would have to be the Guest Posts. They’ve been written by familyand friends, by colleagues, by people I’ve only (so far) met online and even someone I’ve never met at all. The only problem is that I haven’t had nearly enough of them! So if you would like to contribute a guest post, on any topic or subject (and with no set structure or style), please feel free and very encouraged to email me and let me know!2)      Crowd-Sourced Posts: For the last year and a half or so, I’ve tried for many of my weekly series to end with a weekend Crowd-Sourced Post—a chance to share the responses and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers on any of the week’s posts, on the series’ topics and questions overall, and on anything else they want to add. All of the crowd-sourced posts could still benefit from your takes in their comments, so please check ‘em out and see what you have to say! And keep an eye out for future such posts, including one next weekend to follow up the week’s Veteran’s Day-inspired series.3)      Comments: At least once a year (and probably more often than that) I’ve mentioned how much I welcome and love any and all blog comments. That’s true for specific reasons—that is, I see each post as part of a conversation, and so would always appreciate continuing conversation in response. But it’s also true for a more general reason—that it’s incredibly important for me to have the best sense I can of who’s reading this blog, of who you all are and what brings you here and what you would like to see and have to say. The more I learn those things, the better I can connect what I’m doing here to you all, which is my most fundamental goal. So, for example, please feel free to introduce yourself in a comment on this post, and to let me know a bit about what brings you here and what you’d like to see as this conversation evolves. Thanks!That Veteran’s Day series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

November 8, 2013: Berkshire Stories: Remembering Du Bois

[Last month, I had the chance to visit the beautiful Berkshires of Western Massachusetts for the first time. The area’s as full of American history as it is of gorgeous fall foliage, and so in this week’s series I’ll highlight five such Berkshire stories, leading up to a special weekend post!]
On how an icon’s hometown doesn’t remember him, how it does, and how it could.W.E.B. Du Bois, perhaps my single favorite American and one about whom I’ve written a great deal in this space, spent the first seventeen years of his life in the small Berkshires town of Great Barrington. As he writes at length in the opening chapters of his most autobiographical book, Dusk of Dawn (1940), the town was deeply significant to both his multi-racial and –cultural heritage and to his own evolving late 19th century identity and perspective. But for any visitor to Great Barrington who doesn’t already know of and is not actively seeking out such connections, it would be easy to come away with no sense of Du Bois in the place. Indeed, even the Du Bois Homesite—not the home in town where he was born, but the one just outside of town where he lived for much of his childhood—is at the moment simply a walk through the woods with a couple placards; the house itself has long since been destroyed, and while UMass Amherst scholars and students have performed some interesting archaeological researches on the site, their findings are housed at the university, many miles away. (There is a long-term plan to create a historic site at the homesite, I should note.)If the homesite is thus disappointly devoid of inspiring Du Bois details, however, Great Barrington does include, for those who either seek it out or are fortunate enough to stumble upon it, one much more compelling site of collective memory of the man. The town’s picturesque River Walkwinds for a couple miles along the Housatonic; as I wrote in yesterday’s post, Du Bois’s lifelong passion for rivers was inspired by this particular one, and the riverwalk does a wonderful job highlighting that connection on two compelling and interconnected levels. It presents some of the relevant histories in a series of placards, including two that complement each other perfectly: one on the writings and work in which Du Bois reflected the Housatonic’s meanings for him; and one on the tragic and overtly racist aftermath of the 1927 Great Mississippi flood, a national shame that Du Bois catalogued at length in The Crisis. And the River Walk also includes an example of how these inspirations can be carried forward into the present: with the Du Bois River Garden Park, a publicly created and dedicated space adjacent to the river that connects the local with broader global issues in a way that Du Bois would greatly appreciate.On those multiple levels, the River Walk certainly illustrates one potent way to better remember Du Bois in his hometown: connecting local settings and issues, and present-day visitors, to this prominent historical figure’s life, work, and perspective. If the town’s signage more overtly guided visitors to the walk, it would go a long way toward making Du Bois more a part of every Great Barrington experience; the homesite could similarly connect to the River Walk and engage in its own fuller ways with Du Bois’s identity and legacy. But on the other hand, Du Bois wrote in the opening of Dusk of Dawn that “My life had its significance and its only deep significance because it was part of a Problem,” and so I’m not sure he would want extensive commemorations of his individual life. Instead, it seems to me that he could also be remembered in Great Barrington through some kind of civic activism and action, through (for example) a center dedicated to addressing social and cultural issues in the area, in New England, in the nation or beyond. It was to dedicate his life to such efforts that Du Bois left Great Barrington—and just as he brought the town and its influences with him, so, perhaps, could the town bring his life and influences back into its 21stcentury future.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?