Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 385

April 23, 2013: Reading Du Bois, Part Two

[I’ve written a good deal in this space on W.E.B. Du Bois, but I’ve got yet another reason to keep doing so—this fall I’ll be teaching a Major Author course on Du Bois! So this week I’ll be sharing a handful of the many amazing works that make Du Bois such an impressive American author and voice, leading up to a special guest post this weekend.]
On the entirely unknown and far from perfect novel that fills a significant American gap.Somehow, in the midst of all the other duties and successes of his incredibly busy and productive life, W.E.B. Du Bois found time to write a handful of novels. My guest poster is planning to address two of the more interesting and significant ones, Dark Princess (1928; generally considered his fictional masterpiece) and Worlds of Color (1961; the last book published in Du Bois’s lifetime), and I’ll leave them for her. Since both were written by a mature and prominent Du Bois—Dark was published when he was 60, Worlds when he was 93 (!)—they’ve received a substantial amount of attention, both in their own moment and in subsequent scholarship. Far less famous, however, is Du Bois’s first published novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911).Quest, which tells the story of multiple generations of African Americans in a turn of the century Southern community, has been neglected in part for understandable reasons: its style, while straightforward and engaging, lacks any of the technical skill that differentiates great from merely effective novels; it also had the misfortune of being a work of regional realism in the decade when authors such as Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein were introducing new, modernist forms for fiction. Yet much the same could be said for other, currently far more well-known African American novels of Reconstruction and its aftermath—such as Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood (1903)—and to my mind Du Bois’s novel certainly deserves a place among that group.Moreover, Du Bois’s sociological training and perspective differentiates Quest from any other novel of the period—and most other American novels period—in at least one crucial regard. Although many of the novel’s chapters focus on individual characters, it builds toward a far more overarching and analytical subject: the way in which the cotton industry links communities as seemingly disparate as elite Northern industrialists and provincial Southern white supremacists, cynical Washington politicians and young students at a local African American school. Such connections, of course, extended back in history into the antebellum world of slavery, yet were also evolving in complex and crucial ways in the postbellum period, particularly for free African Americans struggling to achieve their own quests for self-sufficiency and success; Du Bois’s novel likewise engages with these different historical and cultural sides to a shared and enduring American issue. In those ways, his novel can also be seen as embodying—perhaps solely, and certainly significantly—an African American naturalism.Next Du Bois readings tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

April 22, 2013: Reading Du Bois, Part One

[I’ve written a good deal in this space on W.E.B. Du Bois, but I’ve got yet another reason to keep doing so—this fall I’ll be teaching a Major Author course on Du Bois! So this week I’ll be sharing a handful of the many amazing works that make Du Bois such an impressive American author and voice, leading up to a special guest post this weekend.]
On the one Du Bois book that all Americans should read.I never quite got around to making my own nomination for the National Big Read, perhaps because I have so many books that I’d really love to ask all Americans to read: such as The Marrow of Tradition, Ceremony, and The Namesake, to name only three of the chief contenders. I’d gladly make the case for any and all of those novels, but it’s also possible to argue that for such a shared book it might make more sense to go with non-fiction: with a compelling personal narrative of significant American experiences, or a convincing sociological engagement with complex communal issues, or an inspiring philosophical call for national unity and progress. And it just so happens that W.E.B. Du Bois, at the youthful (I hope!) age of 35, published a book that was all those things and a great deal more: The Souls of Black Folk (1903).In two of the three posts cited in my intro blurb above I referenced “Of the Training of Black Men,” and certainly that individual chapter represents the whole of Souls, and its ability to move between those different genres and styles (along with other historical and cultural ones), very effectively. It also illustrates two of the other striking formal elements to Du Bois’s work in the book—his use of epigraphs and allusions from the full (available) range of world history, literature, philosophy, mythology, and religion, to put his voice and book in conversation with everyone and everything else (and demonstrate just why Shakespeare does not wince when Du Bois sits with him); and his inclusion of a bit of musical notation at the start of each chapter, notes and melodies drawn from the “sorrow songs” (the African American and slave spirituals) about which he writes eloquently in the book’s concluding chapter. These two intertextual elements exemplify the book’s unique combination of breadth and depth, its coupling of a world-wide reach with an incredibly nuanced depiction of its titular American community.In many ways, I’d say that it’s precisely that combination of depth and breadth that defines Du Bois’s greatness. On the one hand, he spent much of his near-century of life writing, thinking, and working unceasingly in response to one specific (if also sweeping and vital) issue: “the problem of the color-line,” as he put it at the outset of Souls. Yet on the other hand, to read Du Bois is to find serious and significant engagement with, it seems, every meaningful historical, cultural, and human question of his era, and many of ours as well. And Souls achieves that balance remarkably well: the book is sophisticated enough in its specific analyses to be considered one of the earliest works of American sociology; yet it’s sweeping enough in its philosophical, personal, literary, and artistic elements and achievements that I’d nominate it for a National Big Read text with no hesitation. What if the Great American Novel isn’t a novel at all, but a genre-busting book by one of our most inspiring icons?Next Du Bois readings tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

April 20-21, 2013: Crowd-sourced Comic Books

[The week’s series has featured AmericanStudies takes on some of our most popular comic book characters. This super-powered weekend post is drawn from the responses and thoughts of fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours to the super-group, please!]
Throughout this week, Darren Reid has been sharing Tweets and thoughts on American superheroes, including this article on gender in early Superman comics. Thanks also to Steve Sarson for connecting me to Darren’s posts!Also check out this article in honor of Superman’s 75th birthday!Virginia Clemm Poe responds to Wednesday’s Wonder Woman post, writing, “TV folklore has it that before the Wonder Woman show with Linda Carter aired the show was originally written and (legend has it) that out there on the magic of youtube there's a pilot as a comedy of a young wonder woman living with her cantankerous mother in a retirement village in Florida. Think Golden Girls, but without the two other chicks, and Bea Arthur's way younger... and has superpowers... not to say that Bea Arthur doesn't have superpowers... I'm sure she did. Anyway, thanks for writing about the female superheroes. She taught us young girls a lot about life. Like if we want to be taken seriously, we should walk around in a strapless bathing suit. An American theme inspired strapless bathing suit!”Michelle Moravec shares this blog post on Wonder Woman and feminist art.I also saw a bunch of references (on Twitter and elsewhere) to this great PBS doc on Wonder Woman and superheroes.Irene Martyniuk shares these thoughts on Iron Man: “When I was working on a paper on Afghanistan at the movies, you suggested I look at Iron Man, and that has turned out to be a gift that has gone on giving. Iron Man, as you suggested, complicates the already complicated Tony Stark story. I was completely ignorant of the Tony Stark-Iron Man history and still am, for the most part, but placing him in Afghanistan and having him selling arms to the US, right at the beginning of the movie, immediately creates a weird situation (remember, he demonstrates The Jericho--an incredibly destructive mix of mortar and missile). Stark then becomes Iron Man after being kidnapped and finally discovers that his partner is selling their weapons to our enemy in Afghanistan. But wait--it's not the Taliban. It's the Ten Rings. A blond, happy reporter tells us in the film that ‘they are on a mission’ but what that mission is exactly is never explained and while Stark eventually wipes them out--he destroys a small part of Afghanistan in doing so and even lets the villagers become bloodthirsty vigilantes. Now skip ahead a year or two. I brought all of this up in my Afghanistan class and we watched Iron Man together. Then, as one of their mid-term questions, they had to imagine that Hamid Karzai was delayed in JFK and noticed at least three of the people or characters we had read and/or talked about that half semester and had asked his security team to bring the people over. My students had to imagine the conversations. Not surprisingly, nearly every student chose Tony Stark as one of their three for the exam. But what made me real proud were the nuances of their imagined conversations. In nearly every answer, Stark is his usual slick self, and he tries to charm Karzai. And Karzai is a little tempted by the firepower Stark represents as Iron Man. But Karzai then admonishes Stark, usually quite sharply, as an elder would in Afghanistan, over the destruction he has caused. Most of the students pointed out how the real Karzai frequently deplores the NATO/ISAF civilian death toll, without mentioning the damage and deaths caused by the Taliban, and they had him do the the same for Stark. By the end, Stark is flummoxed. All of his snappy comebacks have dried up, and Karzai moves on to the next character. My students also dealt with the issue of the Ten Rings and the Taliban. I had posited that the scriptwriters had not wanted to name the Taliban since, within the plot, Stark industries was selling arms to them, and this would clearly imply that American-made weapons were being used against American soldiers. Also, I explained, both in the paper and to the students, how films that use American military props--being bases, materiel, etc.--must be cleared by the military, and perhaps they objected. However, my students were much more knowledgeable about Tony Stark/Iron Man and explained that within the comic book series, Stark had been taken captive in Vietnam and held by a group called the Ten Rings. I don't think it totally destroyed my argument--they could have updated the name--but it does show the mythology of the comic book story (and the students looked it up during class to verify it). I miss that class.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

April 19, 2013: Comic Book Heroes: The Punisher

[A series on AmericanStudying some of our most popular comic book characters. Add your responses, and takes on other heroes and comics, for a super weekend post!]
On the character whose ambiguous heroism illustrates a fundamental American duality.Each of the comic book heroes I’ve written about this week is complex in one way or another, but I don’t think there’s any doubt that they’re all, at the end of the day, heroes (outside of those individual storylines where Superman goes bad or the like, which only reinforce the character’s general goodness in contrast). But the same cannot necessarily be said of Marvel’s The Punisher (Frank Castle); since his 1974 debut in The Amazing Spider-Man, as a man out to kill Spider-Man both because he believes him to be a criminal and because he seemingly enjoys killing, The Punisher has blurred the lines between hero and villain as much as any comic book character. On the one hand, Castle first became The Punisher after his wife and children were massacred and the killers escaped justice (until he delivered it to them); on the other hand, he has continued to kill ever since, a vigilante often skirting and breaking the law while at the same time claiming to honor and uphold it.There are salient late 20th century contexts for that kind of ambiguity, perhaps especially in the rise of vigilante characters such as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harryand Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey, men who take the law into their own hands in understandable yet brutal and extreme ways. Pushing that particular envelope even further are characters such as Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle (spoiler alert for that clip) or Michael Douglas’s Bill Foster, men whose motivations are even more murky and disturbed, although the objects of their violence seem often to deserve their fates just as much as did Clint’s and Bronson’s. It’s no doubt in part because of that sense of rightness in their actions, despite the obvious wrongness in much of their characters, that all four men became pop culture heroes in various ways; but such vigilante heroism is also an enduring American ideal. Even many of the Revolution’s heroes, from the Boston Tea Partiers to Paul Revere to Nathan Hale, operated outside of and in opposition to the law; and they’re far from alone in our popular iconography.Perhaps the most famous pop cultural embrace of vigilante-ism, however, is also a far more explicitly controversial one, and a reminder of the other side to these American histories. In the final sequence in D.W. Griffith’s technically pioneering and thematically disgusting The Birth of a Nation (1915), the Ku Klux Klan rides triumphantly to the rescue of the film’s protagonists, defying any and all official institutions (who are all in the film’s mythos in league with the villains) in the process; the scene’s celebration of the KKK’s lawlessness would be echoed two decades later by a distinctly similar scene in Gone with the Wind (both the novel and the film). These cultural texts remind us that the vigilante activities of the KKK, like those of lynch mobs, were for many decades in our national narratives treated just like those of The Punisher et al—as a disturbing and perhaps tragic but also understandable and even necessary response to societal ills. Makes Frank Castle that much more ambiguous, doesn’t it?Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So what do you think? Responses to any of the week’s heroes? Other comic characters you’d highlight?

April 18, 2013: Comic Book Heroes: Black Panther

[A series on AmericanStudying some of our most popular comic book characters. Add your responses, and takes on other heroes and comics, for a super weekend post!]
On Black Powers, super- and political.In the July 1966 issue of Fantastic Four, legendary comics duo Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created their newest character, the Black Panther. Other black characters had appeared in various supporting roles in American comics, but the Panther—really a super-powered African prince named T’challa from the fictional nation of Wakanda—is generally considered the first mainstream black superhero. If so, Lee and Kirby, and their successors in writing and illustrating the character, have done that pioneering idea full credit, creating a character with as rich a backstory and mythos, home “world,” familial and romantic life, and powers and personality as any of his peers in the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and the Marvel Universe overall.From what I can tell it was coincidental that the Panther’s debut was followed three months later by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s October 1966 creation of the Black Panther Party(or at least there seem to be no explicit references to any connection between the two Panthers); both might have been responding to the well-known African American World War II tank battalion, among other potential origins for the name. But in any case the timing reflects the complexity of the American racial, social, cultural, and political world into which Lee and Kirby’s character arrived, both within the comic (as an African immigrant to the United States; or perhaps simply a visitor, as he often returns to his home country in the comics) and as a cultural presence. This was a character who was literally the most powerful individual within his African homeland, coming to a world in which the very concept of Black Power (also newly coined in 1966) was a revolutionary one.So when Stokely Carmichael led those SNCC marchers in the cry of “We want Black Power!,” would the release (just a month later) of the debut Black Panther story have satisfied them? Obviously a comic book superhero is not the equivalent of meaningful political or social change—but the Panther did represent a significant cultural shift, or at least an addition to the mainstream cultural landscape, and such cultural developments have their own value to be sure. Moreover, it’s possible to argue that such cultural shifts can produce social or political ones—as, for example, a generation of comic fans grows up rooting for a super-powered, socially responsible, Ku Klux Klan-fighting African prince, the concept of Black Power moves from an abstraction or a potential division to, ideally, a shared and obvious part of our world. Sounds pretty super-heroic to me.Last hero tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this character? Other comics you’d highlight?

April 17, 2013: Comic Book Heroes: Wonder Woman

[A series on AmericanStudying some of our most popular comic book characters. Add your responses, and takes on other heroes and comics, for a super weekend post!]
On the ambiguous creation, evolution, and cultural images of our first female superhero.Wonder Woman was created only a few years after Superman and Batman, debuting in the December 1941 issue of All Star Comics; but this superhero was hugely distinct from those and other contemporaries, and not just in the basic and obvious fact of her gender. For one thing, her creator, William Moulton Marston, was a Harvard-educated psychologist who was hired first as an educational consultant for comics companies before he developed the idea for this new character. And the circumstances behind that creation were particularly complex: in terms of the inspiration for the character, who was based partly on Marston’s impressive wife Elizabeth (who also, according to one article, suggested the character’s gender in the first place) and partly on a young student with whom the couple were supposedly having a polygamous relationship; and in terms of Marston’s stated goals, which included both giving young women a sense of their “force, strength, and power” but also molding them into adults as “tender, submissive, [and] peace-loving as good women are.”As Wonder Woman evolved over the next few decades, she similarly shifted between more and less progressive and traditional roles and characteristics. For example ,when she joined the Justice Society of America, the first comics super-group (created to help America fight Hitler and the Axis forces in World War II), she did so in large part to serve as the group’s secretary (I suppose a super-group needs a super-secretary); similarly, in a late 1960s storyline she retired the Wonder Woman identity in order to run a mod clothing store as Diana Prince (although she still fought crime on the side). Yet despite such connections to entirely or somewhat traditional women’s worlds, Wonder Woman’s mythology was similar to Superman’s—she came to our society from a distinct and superhuman race and world, in her case as an Amazonian princess, and so her human identity as Diana was the creation and mask—making her at her core a larger-than-life and particularly strong and powerful woman. And I would argue that the 1970s Lynda Carter TV showengaged with both sides of this coin: using skimpy costumes to capitalize on Carter’s physical appearance; yet consistently portraying her strength and toughness against any and all adversaries.So how do we analyze this character and her social and cultural images and meanings? A historicizing answer doesn’t seem sufficient, since in each era and stage Wonder Woman has had both progressive and traditional, boundary-pushing and stereotypical, sides. Given Marston’s own double-sided quote about what he hoped to convey to young female audiences, a reader-response analysis would also be problematic—that is, while we could argue that readers would emphasize one or another aspect of the character, depending on their own perspectives or goals, Marston seemed to be arguing that both ends of the spectrum were part of his explicit purposes. In both cases, and perhaps in any analysis, the baseline truth seems to be that Wonder Woman has been a multi-layered and contradictory character, one who can reinforce some of our culture’s attitudes and identities while at the same time taking them in distinctly new and radical directions. Not much that’s more AmericanStudies than that combination!Next hero tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this character? Other comics you’d highlight?

April 16, 2013: Comic Book Heroes: Superman and Batman

[A series on AmericanStudying some of our most popular comic book characters. Add your responses, and takes on other heroes and comics, for a super weekend post!]
On two distinct AmericanStudies contrasts between our two most enduring superheroes.A great deal of ink—actual and electronic—has already been spilled about the identities, not only individual but also as a matched pair, of Superman and Batman, Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, the Man of Steel and the Dark Knight. Heck, there have even been multiple special comic book series dedicated to the pair’s crime-fighting adventures. Having been created at almost exactly the same time—Superman debuted in 1938 and Batman in 1939—and having evolved, through comics and TV shows and films and reboots, in eerily parallel ways, the two caped crusaders stand as the yin and yang at the top of the superhero pyramid (us Spiderman fans might protest, but, well, we’d be wrong). How much more can an AmericanStudier say about these two?For one thing, I think more could be made of the immigrant vs. insider dynamic at play in the two characters’ backstories—and, more exactly, how each seemingly flips that backstory on its head in his present, mythic status. Superman, the immigrant from a foreign land (well, planet) who has to change his name in order to assimilate to his adopted family and the United States, ends up becoming the classic all-American symbol and success story, beloved of his countrymen. Batman, the son of privileged and powerful parents, born on third base holding a silver spoon, ends up rejecting much of that identity in favor of the shadows and dark corners, feared far more than he’s admired by his fellow Gothamites. Damned if I know what to make of those shifts exactly, but at the very least they reflect, individually and even more as a tandem, that superheroic myth-making is just as partially related to original identities and communities as is the self-made man narrative.For another thing, I’d say that the two characters illustrate two very different models of American heroism, images that contradict each other yet have often seemed to coexist in particular moments and stories. In our narratives of the Union’s victory in the Civil War, for example, we tend to give similar credit to Abraham Lincoln, the larger-than-life superman giving the era its moral gravitas; and to Ulysses S. Grant, the down-and-dirty fighter willing to use whatever tactics seemed necessary to get the job done. The two are difficult to reconcile—at the same moment that Lincoln was delivering his unifying Second Inaugural, envisioning reunion between the regions, Grant was pursuing the final stages of his “total war” strategy, devastating the Confederacy on every front. Yet it’s also possible to see them as necessarily complementary—perhaps Superman’s idealism needs Batman’s realism to get the job done; and yet without the idealism the realism would perhaps seem too dirty or debased. The yin and yang of our superheroic myths.Next hero tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on these characters? Other comics you’d highlight?

April 15, 2013: Comic Book Heroes: Dick Tracy

[A series on AmericanStudying some of our most popular comic book characters. Add your responses, and takes on other heroes and comics, for a super weekend post!]
Comparing, contrasting, and contextualizing the comics’ most enduring detective.In 1931, Chester Goulddebuted his comic strip Dick Tracy ; Gould go on to write and illustrate Tracy’s hard-hitting adventures for forty-six years, until his retirement in 1977, and the series has continued with new authors and teams in the decades since, making it one of America’s longest-running comics. Tracy’s popularity can be attributed to a number of factors, from his outrageous adversaries to his decades-long courtship of Tess Trueheart; but I would argue that it is the character’s strikingly hard-boiled perspective and philosophy that particularly define his appeal. As the Library of American Comics site linked above notes, “I’m going to shoot first and investigate later” (apparently an actual line) sums up Tracy’s crime-fighting style quite concisely and effectively. In the era of Al Capone (the model for Big Boy, Tracy’s first opponent), such a perspective surely spoke to the American psyche.For further proof for that collective perspective, and for an important artistic context for Gould’s creation, I’d point to the first two novels published by seminal mystery writer Dashiell Hammett: Red Harvest (1929) and The Dain Curse (1929). Hammett’s narrator and protagonist in these debut novels (and in other later stories) is a detective so hard-boiled he doesn’t have a name; known only as The Continental Op(short for operative), this detective weathers (and contributes to) the titular bloody harvests and family curses without blinking an eye, seemingly unaffected and unchanged by even the worst of the world around him (a characteristic that is of course even more pronounced for a multi-decade character such as Tracy). While they had various influential ancestors (including Western lawmen and heroes such as the title character of Owen Wister’s The Virginian), it’s fair to say that between them Tracy and the Op really inaugurated the hard-boiled detective as a popular American character and type.Neither Tracy nor the Op changed much over time; but less than a year after publishing The Dain Curse, Hammett would release his third novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930), and interestingly revise the hard-boiled detective type in the process. Falcon’s protagonist, Sam Spade, is certainly just as hard-boiled as either the Op and Tracy; indeed, without spoiling the novel’s climax I’ll note that Spade takes an action there that’s perhaps a bit harder still than any taken by those men. Yet unlike the Op, Sam doesn’t narrate his novel, and Hammett’s third-person narrator is able to develop a more nuanced perspective on his detective as a result. The novel’s opening paragraph and initial description of Spade, for example, concludes with the sentence, “He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan,” a line that it’s impossible to imagine appearing in a Dick Tracy strip. Such details don’t necessarily make Spade any less of a hero, ultimately, than his counterparts—but they make clear that the Dick Tracy type was already, in its own moment of creation, being complicated as well as popularized.Next heroes tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on these characters? Other comics you’d highlight?

April 13-14, 2013: Taxes in America: The Cost

[As you finalize your taxes—not you, I know you’re done already, I mean everybody else—this week’s series has focused on some American moments and issues related to this controversial national theme. This special post does too, but in a very different way. Would love your thoughts!]
On the lesson one of our greatest TV shows has to offer when it comes to taxes.Earlier this year, after literally years of prodding from friends and family members, I finally got around to watching all five seasons of The Wire . To say that I enjoyed the show would be to understate the case quite significantly; I’d say it’s one of the most impressive works of art (in any genre) I’ve ever encountered, and that no other show has ever engaged my brain, heart, and soul in equal measure. There are lots of reasons why, but very high on the list is that the show offered literally countless AmericanStudies stories, histories, themes, and moments; of the shows I’ve watched, only The West Wing comes close to being so thoroughly AmericanStudies, and I’d argue that David Simon’s breadth far exceeds that of Aaron Sorkin’s politically focused masterwork.Despite bringing the political realm into the show in seasons 3 through 5 (primarily through the lens of city councilman and later mayoral candidate [among other developments that I won’t spoil here] Tommy Carcetti), Simon never engaged in any central way with the question of taxes; The Wire was profoundly focused on the city of Baltimore, and of course taxation is far more a state- and federal-level issue than a local one. Yet I would argue that one of the central political issues facing that city and its politicians throughout those seasons, the city government’s nearly bankrupt status, relates to taxes on two key levels: the flight from Baltimore to the suburbs of much of the city’s tax base, leaving behind communities in desperate need of government support but with no ability to contribute meaningfully toward that government’s revenues; and the concurrent failure, both because of equally shrinking revenues and because of unwillingness and often antagonism, of the state government to support its cities adequately.Those are problems, and systemic ones, but they’re also largely abstract. Yet where The Wire truly stands out is in its ability to connect systemic issues to amazingly realized, fully human characters and communities, and that’s certainly true when it comes to this revenue question. Time and again in seasons 4 and 5, viewers see that both the city’s public schools (where season 4’s four main characters are in middle school) and its police forces (where many of the show’s most prominent characters work) are drastically under-funded, leading to countless problems, failures, bad choices, and some of the show’s darkest outcomes. This, Simon’s show intimates and I would state as clearly as possible, is the cost of historically low taxes (among many other policies of course): what should be among our most significant national priorities, such as education and the justice system, become instead wastelands; and those who depend on them for their employment, their futures, their survival—which is, y’know, all of us—are left with no support at all. I have no idea what to do about that problem—but watching and engaging with The Wire would be a good start.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

April 12, 2013: Taxes in America: The Big Question

[As you finalize your taxes—not you, I know you’re done already, I mean everybody else—this week’s series will focus on some American moments and issues related to this controversial national theme. Leading up to a special weekend post that will frame that theme very differently!]
On three different AmericanStudies ways to start answering the million-dollar question about taxes in 21st century America.As I noted in this post on the Eisenhower Administration, during that period the marginal income tax rate for the highest bracket earners stood at 91%. No, that’s not a typo. There were certainly attempts by Congressional Republicans to lower that rate, and I’m sure it was not universally beloved; but neither were there widespread protests in the street, nor the rise of an entire movement dedicated to the idea that Americans are T(axed) E(enough) A(lready). That movement, instead, has come into existence in an era when tax rates are at historic lows, and when the possibility of raising the highest marginal rate from 36% to 39.5% (ie, to still more than 50 points less than that 1950s rate) is portrayed in many quarters as unbearably onerous.So the big question is: why and how have our national narratives and debates over taxes shifted so completely? I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer, but here, briefly, are three different approaches an AmericanStudier might take to start developing one:1)      Political: The most obvious starting point, but not a bad one. We could look for example to Ronald Reagan’s 1981 first inaugural address, and specifically his assertion that “government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” Reagan was speaking of “the current crisis,” but it’s fair to say that the idea also formed a part of his coalition and governing philosophy overall. Such a political perspective would, it seems to me, necessarily lead to arguments for government revenues being as low as possible, among many other outcomes.2)      Cultural: The “Southern strategy”theory comprises only one part of why Reagan ended up on that stage in 1981, but I believe it most definitely played a role. And along those lines, one significant national change from the 1950s to the 1970s would be an increased emphasis on cultural “others” (from an Anglo-American perspective) receiving government support—as evidenced by Reagan’s own “welfare queen” story and by the Boston busing protests, among many other moments. For some late 20thcentury Americans, then, tax revenues might be seen as going toward far less desirable expenses than they had in earlier decades.3)      The Media: Some of the more striking poll results of the last few years have had to do with taxes, and more exactly with the percentage of Americans who believe that their taxes have gone or are going up when in fact they have gone down. It seems clear to me that a principal culprit for such erroneous beliefs is the so-called (and accurately named) “right-wing echo chamber,” the alternative-reality narratives created by Fox News, talk radio, the blogosphere, and other media sources. Ironically, it’s in this era of strikingly low taxes that many Americans are being led to believe, by such sources as these, that their taxes are higher than ever—as clear an indictment of our current media climate as any I can think of.So those are starting points for how I might analyze this national shift. One more, special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?