Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 41

August 5, 2024: Birthday Bests: 2010-2011

[On August15th, this AmericanStudier celebrates his 47th birthday.So as I do each year, here’s a series sharing some of my favorite posts fromeach year on the blog, leading up to a new post with 47 favorites from the lastyear. And as ever, you couldn’t give me a better present than to say hi andtell me a bit about what brings you to the blog, what you’ve found or enjoyedhere, your own AmericanStudies thoughts, or anything else!]

In honor of this AmericanStudier’s 34thbirthday in 2011, here (from oldest to most recent) were 34 of my favoriteposts from the blog’s first year:

1)      TheWilmington Massacre and The Marrow of Tradition: My firstfull post, but also my first stab at two of this blog’s central purposes:narrating largely forgotten histories; and recommending texts we should allread.

2)      PineRidge, the American Indian Movement, and Apted’s Films: Ditto tothose purposes, but also a post in which I interwove history, politics,identity, and different media in, I hope, a pretty exemplary American Studiesway.

3)      The ShawMemorial: I’ll freely admit that my first handful of posts were also justdedicated to texts and figures and moments and histories that I love—but theMemorial, like Chesnutt’s novel and Thunderheartin those first two links, is also a deeply inspiring work of American art.

4)      TheChinese Exclusion Act and the Most Amazing Baseball Game Ever: Probablymy favorite post to date, maybe because it tells my favorite American story.

5)      Ely Parker: The postin which I came up with my idea for Ben’s American Hall of Inspiration; I knowmany of my posts can be pretty depressing, but hopefully the Hall can be a wayfor me to keep coming back to Americans whose stories and legacies are anythingbut.

6)      MyColleague Ian Williams’ Work with Incarcerated Americans: Thefirst post where I made clear that we don’t need to look into our nationalhistory to find truly inspiring Americans and efforts.

7)      RushLimbaugh’s Thanksgiving Nonsense: My first request, and the first postto engage directly with the kinds of false American histories being advanced bythe contemporary right.

8)      The Pledgeof Allegiance: Another central purpose for this blog is to complicate, and attimes directly challenge and seek to change, some of our most accepted nationaland historical narratives. This is one of the most important such challenges.

9)      PublicEnemy, N.W.A., and Rap: If you’re going to be an AmericanStudier,you have to be willing to analyze even those media and genres on which you’refar from an expert, and hopefully find interesting and valuable things to sayin the process.

10)   Chinatownand the History of LA: At the same time, the best AmericanStudierslikewise have to be able to analyze their very favorite things (like this 1974film, for me), and find ways to link them to broader American narratives andhistories.

11)   The Statueof Liberty: Our national narratives about Lady Liberty are at least asingrained as those about the Pledge of Allegiance—and just about as inaccurate.

12)   TillieOlsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” and Parenting: Maybe the first post in which Ireally admitted my personal and intimate stakes in the topics I’m discussinghere, and another of those texts everybody should read to boot.

13)   DorotheaDix and Mental Health Reform: When it comes to a number of the people onwhom I’ve focused here, I didn’t know nearly enough myself at the start of myresearch—making the posts as valuable for me as I could hope them to be for anyother reader. This is one of those.

14)   BenFranklin and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments: As with many dominant narratives,those Americans who argue most loudy in favor of limiting immigration usuallydo so in large part through false, or at best greatly oversimplified andpartial, versions of our past. 

15)   Divorce inAmerican History: Some of our narratives about the past andpresent seem so obvious as to be beyond dispute: such as the idea that divorcehas become more common and more accepted in our contemporary society. Maybe,but as with every topic I’ve discussed here, the reality is a good bit morecomplicated.

16)   My Mom’sGuest Post on Margaret Wise Brown: The first of the many great guestposts I’ve been fortunate enough to feature here; I won’t link to the others,as you can and should find them by clicking the “Guest Posts” category on theright. And please—whether I’ve asked you specifically or not—feel free tocontribute your own guest post down the road!

17)   JFK,Tucson, and the Rhetoric and Reality of Political Violence: Thefirst post in which I deviated from my planned schedule to respond directly toa current event—something I’ve incorporated very fully into this blog in themonths since.

18)   TributePost to Professor Alan Heimert: I’d say the same about the tributeposts that I did for the guest posts—both that they exemplify how fortunateI’ve been (in this case in the many amazing people and influences I’ve known)and that you should read them all (at the “Tribute Posts” category on theright).

19)   MartinLuther King: How do we remember the real, hugely complicated, and to my mindeven more inspiring man, rather than the mythic ideal we’ve created of him? Apretty key AmericanStudies question, one worth asking of every truly inspiringAmerican.

20)   AngelIsland and Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free”:Immigration has been, I believe, my first frequent theme here, perhaps because,as this post illustrates, it can connect us so fully to so many of the darkest,richest, most powerful and significant national places and events, texts andhistories.

21)   Dresdenand Slaughterhouse Five: One of the events we Americans have workedmost hard to forget, and one of the novels that most beautifully and compellingargues for the need to remember and retell every story.

22)   Valentine’sDay Lessons: Maybe my least analytical post, and also one of my favorites. Itain’t all academic, y’know.

23)   Tori Amos,Lara Logan, and Stories of Rape: One of the greatest songs I’ve everheard helps me respond to one of the year’s most horrific stories.

24)   PeterGomes and Faith: A tribute to one of the most inspiring Americans I’ve ever met,and some thoughts on the particularly complicated and important American themehe embodies for me.

25)   The Treatyof Tripoli and the Founders on Church and State:Sometimes our historical narratives are a lot more complicated than we think.And sometimes they’re just a lot simpler. Sorry, David Barton and Glenn Beck,but there’s literally no doubt of what the Founders felt about the separationof church and state the idea of America as a “Christian nation.”

26)   NewtGingrich, Definitions of America, and Why We’re Here: Thefirst of many posts (such as all those included in the “Book Posts” category onthe right) in which I bring the ideas at the heart of my second book into myresponses to AmericanStudies narratives and myths.

27)   Du Bois,Affirmative Action, and Obama: Donald Trump quickly and thoroughly revealedhimself to be a racist jackass, but the core reasons for much of the oppositionto affirmative action are both more widespread and more worth responding tothan Trump’s buffoonery.

28)   IllegalImmigrants, Our Current Deportation Policies, and Empathy: Whatdoes deportation really mean and entail, who is affected, and at what humancost?

29)   Tribute toMy Grandfather Art Railton: The saddest Railton event of the year leadsme to reflect on the many inspiring qualities of my grandfather’s life,identity, and especially perspective.

30)   MyClearest Immigration Post: Cutting through some of the complexities andstating things as plainly as possible, in response to Sarah Palin’s historicalfalsehoods. Repeated and renamed with even more force here.

31)   PaulRevere, Longfellow, and Wikipedia: Another Sarah Palin-inspired post,this time on her revisions to the Paul Revere story and the question of what is“common knowledge” and what purposes it serves in our communal conversations.

32)   “Us vs.them” narratives, Muslim Americans, and Illegal Immigrants: Thefirst of a couple posts to consider these particularly frustrating and divisivenational narratives. The second, which also followed up my Norwegian terrorismresponse (linked below), is here.

33)   AbrahamCahan: The many impressive genres and writings of this turn of thecentury Jewish American, and why AmericanStudiers should work to push downboundaries between disciplines as much as possible.

34)  Terrorism,Norway, and Rhetoric: One of the latest and most importantiterations of my using a current event to drive some American analyses—andlikewise an illustration of just how fully interconnected international andAmerican events and histories are.

Nextbirthday best post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Youknow what to do!

August 3-4, 2024: A Proudly Tearful Tribute

[For thenext two weeks my blog will feature my annual Birthday Bests series, so by thetime I share my next regular post, we will have dropped my olderson Aidan off to start his first year of college. Do I need to say moreabout why I’m sharing a proudly tearful tribute post this weekend?!]

I’ve hadthe chance to pay tribute to mysons Aidan and Kyle quite a few times, both inthis space (where eachhas now also contributed a great Guest Post!) and in mySaturday Evening Post Considering History column.I’m not saying you’d necessarily be monsters if you didn’t check out thoseprior tributes to the two best dudes I know, but, well, why risk it? Check ‘emout and then come on back for more AmericanStudierDad tributes.

Welcomeback! I could dedicate a year’s worth of posts to paying tribute to my sons andnot come close to saying enough, so to keep things relatively focused (if nottear-free, obvi), I’ll just highlight one particular recent moment for each ofthem that exemplifies why they’re just the goddamn best:

--I won’tbore you with all the details, but my wedding day earlier this year turned outto be an exceptionally long and also impressively independent day for Aidan, ashe was running in a track meet that evening but wanted to be part of as much ofthe wedding as possible. So he ended up embarking on a truly multi-step odysseythat involved a variety of means of transportation and a late-night quest for away to charge his phone to get him the final few miles to his Airbnb (the firsttime he had ever spent a night entirely solo). When he did eventually get tothat resting spot, as he subsequently told us the story, he decided to take acool-down run to a nearby beach, where, and I quote, he “sat on a rockcontemplating life.” If you didn’t just gasp aloud at that line’s and moment’scombination of cuteness and sweetness, I don’t know if we can be friends.

--Aidan’sthe one heading off to college (sob), whereas Kyle just completed his junioryear of high school—AKA the hardest year in high school (at least in both oftheir experience), as well as one of the most exhausting any of us could everhave. Many of those challenges culminated with the three AP exams Kyle took,after which things calmed down a bit. Or at least they should have, but hestill had plenty to do even for those classes, including the very extensiveJunior Issues Research Paper (JIRP) about Aidan’s version of which I wrote abit inthis column. Kyle would have been well within his rights to mail that onein a bit, but my amazingly dedicated and inspiring younger son did the opposite—choosinga topic that’s deeply meaningful to him (climate and environmental activism,through the specific lens of Electric Vehicles) and putting in truly exemplarywork on it (including pulling one of his many junior-year all-nighters). I’vesaid it before and I’ll damn well say it again—no one and nothing inspires memore than my sons, in these specific moments and in every part of their identitiesand lives.

BirthdayBests start Monday,

Ben

August 2, 2024: Martin Sheen Studying: Grace and Frankie

[Thiscoming weekend, the greatMartin Sheen celebrates his 84th birthday. Sheen’s life has been asimpressiveand inspiring as his iconic career, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handfulof threads to both. Leading up to a special tribute to a pair of even moreinspiring Americans!]

[NB. Thispost originally appeared in 2015, but I would argue all of its points onlydeepened with all the G&F seasonssince that early point.]

On twoways the Netflix sitcom pushes our cultural boundaries, and one way it happilydoes not.

TheNetflix original sitcom Graceand Frankie (2015) features one of the more distinctive and yet appropriately2015 premises I’ve seen: two lifelong male friends and law partners come out totheir wives as gay, in love with each other, and leaving their wives for eachother and a planned gay marriage. The premise alone would make the show one ofthe more groundbreaking on our cultural landscape, but the fact that the twomen are played by two of our most prominent and respected actors, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston, makesthis nuanced, complex, warm, and so so thoroughly human portrayal of a same-sexrelationship even more striking. It seems to me that a greal deal more has beenwritten about Transparent and Jeffrey Tambor’s portrayal of thatshow’s transgender protagonist than about Sheen and Waterston in Grace and Frankie—and without takinganything away from Tambor’s equally nuanced and impressive performance [ED: althoughhe sure took a lot away from it himself with hisown actions], I would argue that seeing Sheen and Waterston in these rolesrepresents an equally significant step forward in our cultural representationsof the spectrums of sexuality, sexual preference, and identity in America.

What’sparticularly interesting about Grace andFrankie, moreover, is that Sheen and Waterston’s characters and storylinerepresents only half of the show’s primary focuses—and the other half, focusedon the responses and next steps and identities and perspectives of their formerwives Grace and Frankie, is in its own ways just as ground-breaking. Played tocomic, tragic, human perfection by legendary actresses Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, thesetwo characters represent to my mind two of the most in-depth and multi-layeredportrayals of older women in television history. That there has been somebehind the scenes controversy about the paychecks of Fonda and Tomlin incomparison to those of Sheen and Waterston, while of course frustrating andtied to broadercurrent issues and arguments, also seems to add one more pitch-perfectlayer to the ways in which the show asks us to think about the experiences,lives, and worlds of older women in a society that tends (as this scene highlights withparticular clarity) not to include them in our cultural landscape much at all.In a year when the single leading candidate for the presidency (I refuse toconsider Donald Trump for that title; [2024 Ben: man I wish I had been right])is herself a woman over 65, Grace andFrankie engages with our current moment in this important way as well.

At thetime that it’s four main characters and their storylines are thus sogroundbreaking, however, I would argue (to parallel things I said about Longmire in thispost) that in its use of the conventionsand traditions of the sitcom form Graceand Frankie feels very comfortably familiar. That might be one reason why Transparent, which blends genres muchmore into something like adramedy, has received more critical attention and popular buzz (of coursethe parallelsto the Caitlyn Jenner story are another such reason). Yet just because Grace and Frankie stays more withinthose familiar sitcom lines (featuring everything from physical comedy andwacky misunderstandings to recurring catchphrases and jokes) doesn’t make itless stylistically successful—indeed, I might argue that using such familiarforms yet making them feel fresh and funny is itself a significant aestheticsuccess, and one that Grace and Frankie mostdefinitely achieved for this viewer. Moreover, there’s a reason why the sitcom is one of television’s oldestand most lasting forms—it taps into some of our most enduringaudience desires, our needs for laughter and comfort that not only continueinto our present moment, but have an even more necessary place alongside theantiheroes and dark worlds that constitute so much of the best ofcurrent television. Just one more reason why I’m thankful for Grace and Frankie.

Tributepost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

August 1, 2024: Martin Sheen Studying: The West Wing

[Thiscoming weekend, the greatMartin Sheen celebrates his 84th birthday. Sheen’s life has been asimpressiveand inspiring as his iconic career, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handfulof threads to both. Leading up to a special tribute to a pair of even moreinspiring Americans!]

On theiconic actor who was almost the fictional President Bartlett, and two ways toAmericanStudy the one who was.

As both aserious West Wing fan (especially in its particularly stellar first fewseasons) and someone possessing a wealth of useless pop culture knowledge, I’lladmit to being surprised that I didn’t know until researching this post thatthe role of President Josiah “Jed” Bartlett was initiallyoffered to Sidney Freakin’ Poitier.As that article notes, negotiations apparently didn’t get too far, but we canstill imagine not just this particular show with Poitier in that lead role, butalso and even more importantly a fictional Black President on television in1999. On that latter note, it was only two years later that 24 debuted,featuring presidential candidateDavid Palmer (the great Dennis Haysbert) who beginning in Season 2 (2002-2003)would in fact become the nation’s first Black President. Butimportant as Palmer was to 24, in season 1 and throughout his time onthe show, he was always a supporting character to Kiefer Sutherland’s iconicand badass protagonist Jack Bauer, and so it still would have been quite differentand far more significant for the President at the heart of The West Wingto be portrayed by a Black actor. What might have been!

When negotiationswith Poitier fell through, the show’s creator Aaron Sorkin and his fellowproducers decided to go with an actor with whom Sorkin had already worked on apresidential project from just a few years earlier: MartinSheen, who had played Presidential Chief of Staff A.J. MacInerneyin The American President (1995, and written by Sorkin). While it mayhave been simply the existing working relationship between the two men that ledto this choice, it’s really interesting to think about President Bartlett as aWest Wing promotion for Sheen from that earlier role, and I would say thatthere’s an ethnic American undercurrent to that trajectory (if not nearly as dramatic,or at least not as visible, of one as Poitier would have been). That is, as I’vetraced at length in this series, Martin Sheen’s birth and legal name of RamónEstévez, and the Hispanic heritage through his Spanish immigrant fatherreflected in that name (as well as the multi-ethnic heritage and familialhistory of cross-culturaltransformation contributed by his Irish immigrant mother and their marriage),make his President Bartlett very much an American first in his own right.

And yet (aphrase with which I’ve started many third paragraphs in this blog’s history, Ibelieve). It’s not just that Sheen, through the name change I wrote about inyesterday’s post among other elements, could be described as white-passing (orat least not overtly Hispanic in any identifying ways for folks who don’t knowhis biography). It’s that the character of Josiah Bartlett is explicitlydefined as part of a foundational and elite New Hampshire familythat dates back to at least the time of the American Revolution (which we knowbecause none other than Paul Revere designed their carving knife),and thus that both the family and the individual are almost certainly not intendedto be Hispanic. If Sheen’s heritage and multi-generational family are defininglyAmerican in some of the best ways, I’d say that a politician having to minimizeor even disguise ethnic heritage to be perceived as more of an “AmericanPresident” is definingly American in some of the worst. Would The West Winghave been as successful or long-running if its President were overtly Hispanic(or Black, or any identity other than white non-Hispanic)? I’m not at all sureit would, and that’s a frustrating thing to recognize.

LastSheenStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 31, 2024: Martin Sheen Studying: Estévez Legacies

[Thiscoming weekend, the greatMartin Sheen celebrates his 84th birthday. Sheen’s life has been asimpressiveand inspiring as his iconic career, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handfulof threads to both. Leading up to a special tribute to a pair of even moreinspiring Americans!]

On two importantways that Sheen’s birth and legal name have carried on.

As thegreat-grandchild of Jewish immigrants who came to the United States in thelate 19th century and almost certainly had their names changed (orat least significantly shortened) when they did so (although likely not onEllis Island, despite to the contrary), I’m very familiar with that longstanding andfraught tradition for American families and individuals whose names seem to putthem outside the white (and all-too-often racist) mainstream. When he wastrying to make it as a young actor, Ramón Estévez took part in that tradition(one that have often felt pressure to repeat), only professionallybut still apparently painfully for his father. As he put it in his 2003 Inside the Actor’sStudio interview (and has repeated in other interviewssince), “So I thought, I gotenough problems trying to get an acting job, so I invented Martin Sheen. It'sstill Estévez officially. I never changed it officially. I never will. It's onmy driver's license and passport and everything. I started using Sheen, Ithought I'd give it a try, and before I knew it, I started making a living withit and then it was too late. In fact, one of my great regrets is that I didn'tkeep my name as it was given to me. I knew it bothered my dad.”

Talking openlyabout that choice and change in his later years is of course one way that Sheenhas made sure to keep his birth (and again, legal) and father’s surname alive. Butthere are other important ways, and here I want to highlight two connected to hisfour children with his wife of more than 60 years, the actress JanetTempleton Sheen, all of whom are likewise artists and three of whom haveused Estévez professionally (about the fourth, CharlieSheen, the less said the better). By far the most well-known of those threeis Emilio Estévez, the very prominent and successful 1980s actor who hasgradually moved more fully into a directing career as well. Emilio’s career overallreflects adifferent emphasis on name and identity than his father’s, as the twodiscussed frankly and movingly in this interview.But I’d especially emphasize a film that Emilio wrote and produced as well asdirected, The Way(2010), which stars his father as a doctor who walks the Camino de Santiagopilgrimage route after the tragic death of his son. Given the relationshipbetween that project’s writer-director and star, and the relationship of bothof them to the Spanish immigrant Francisco Estévez, I’d say this filmbeautifully reflects and extends the family legacy on multiple levels (andEmilio hassaid the same).

The othersuch extension I want to highlight isn’t as specific nor as compelling as thatone, to be clear. But I really like that the production company behind thatfilm was Estévez Sheen Productions,a company created in 2002 by Sheen’s (who has thesame first and last names as his father, but a different middle name so he’snot a Jr.). And that company was behind another inspiringly multi-generational2010 production, a staging of Frank Gilroy’s Pulitzer-winning play TheSubject Was Roses (1964). Martin Sheen had co-starred in that play’s1964 debut as the young character Timmy, and then received a Best SupportingActor Golden Globe nomination for his performance in the 1968 film adaptation. Inthe 2010staging Martin Sheen played the father character, John, with his son and thisversion’s producer Ramón in attendance at the February debut. Both of thesechildren seem determined to keep both their father’s and their family’slegacies alive in purposeful and thoughtful ways, and I have to believe that’smore meaningful to their grandfather’s memory than a surname.

NextSheenStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 30, 2024: Martin Sheen Studying: Catholic Activism

[Thiscoming weekend, the greatMartin Sheen celebrates his 84th birthday. Sheen’s life has been asimpressiveand inspiring as his iconic career, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handfulof threads to both. Leading up to a special tribute to a pair of even moreinspiring Americans!]

On a greatexample of art imitating and amplifying life.

For aDecember 2019 piece for my Saturday Evening Post Considering Historycolumn, I highlighted the inspiring Catholic activism of Dorothy Day. Day eventuallyplayed an important role in Martin Sheen’s own activist life, so I’d ask you tocheck out that column if you would and then come on back for two layers toSheen’s relationship to Day and Catholic activism.

Welcome back! The Wikipedia page for Sheenclaims that he “met Catholic activist Dorothy Day” while pursuing his youthfulacting career with the Living Theatrecompany in New York City, but that seems to be an overstatement. As Sheenremembered it in this2015 interview with Chicago Catholic, “He may have met Dorothy Dayin 1959 or 1960 when he was a young man working for a pittance in anavant-garde theater in Greenwich Village and eating the free meal providedevery night by the Catholic Worker. ‘They had a breadline, and you didn’t haveto pay and you didn’t have to listen to a sermon, you just showed up fivenights a week and you got a free supper,’ he said. ‘Now, I could have metDorothy Day. I can’t say for sure because I went there for months and months,but I was only there for the food. Eventually, I came to a far betterunderstanding of the Catholic Worker and it became a very powerful force in mylife and a great source of inspiration and I’m still to this day verysupportive of the Catholic Workers all over the United States.’”

So Sheen’s personal connection to Day and the CatholicWorker movement was a long arc, although no less (and perhaps in some ways evenmore) meaningful for it. But he also has an interesting artistic connection tothe movement, through his performance as Peter Maurin in the 1996 independentfilm EntertainingAngels: The Dorothy Day Story (1996; Sheen’s West Wing co-star Moira Kelly plays Day). Maurin co-founded theCatholic Worker movement with Day, and was in his own right a hugely important figurenot just in that specific spiritual and activist tradition, but in the arc of20th century American social and laboractivism among other histories. As I know every reader of this blog knowswell, I believe that cultural representations of our figures and historiesoffer one of the most compelling and successful ways to add them to our collectivememories; few American figures need such adding more than Dorothy Day and PeterMaurin, and Martin Sheen offers us a cultural as well as biographical andactivist way to better remember that pair.

NextSheenStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 29, 2024: Martin Sheen Studying: Youthful Origin Points

[Thiscoming weekend, the great MartinSheen celebrates his 84th birthday. Sheen’s life has been as impressive and inspiringas his iconic career, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of threads toboth. Leading up to a special tribute to a pair of even more inspiring Americans!]

On threefoundational moments that helped make the man.

1)     Health Challenges: Sheen (whose birth andlegal name is , as I’ll write more about on Wednesday) was born in 1940, and in hischildhood dealt with the devastating effects of one of the period’s most persistenthealth crises: polio. I haven’t been able to find the exact age at which Sheenwas stricken with the potentially fatal illness, but apparently he was bedriddenfor a year before the experimental SisterKenny treatment helped him regain use of his legs. Combined with adifferent physical ailment caused by his difficult birth (his left arm waspartially crushed by forceps, leaving him with chronicErb’s palsy), these childhood afflictions no doubt affected young Sheen,and to my mind must have played a role in creating an individual with suchempathy and commitment to helping others.

2)     Family Crisis: Unfortunately, health issueswere not the only such crises—when Sheen was 11 his mother (Irishimmigrant Mary-Ann Phelan) died, and his factory worker father ()did not have either the income nor the time to take care of Sheen and his ninesiblings. They were faced with the very real possibility of being raised in orphanagesor the foster care system, but fortunately Holy Trinity CatholicChurch in Sheen’s hometown of Dayton offered sufficient support to keep thefamily together. As I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s post, Catholic activism would becomea lifelong and defining element of Sheen’s identity, and I imagine this foundationalexperience with the best of Catholic community contributed greatly to thatemphasis.

3)     Labor Activism: That activism began longbefore Sheen became an adult, in a surprising place: on the Oakwoodgolf course at Dayton Country Club, where he and his older brothers workedas caddies. Sheen had joined them when he was just 9, and by the age of 14 wasfed up with the combination of low pay, grueling responsibilities, and abusivetreatment from the club’s wealthy clientele. So Sheen ledthe caddies on a walk-out, risking the wrath of not just those elite membersbut also his boss, who Sheenremembers coming out and telling them, “Well your [butts] are in troublenow. You better change your mind.” Although the strike apparently did notsucceed, and Sheen was fired, clearly this final foundational moment only lit afire in a young man who would go on to live his life bythis mantra: “Acting is what I do for a living but activism is what I do tostay alive.”

NextSheenStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 27-28, 2024: July 2024 Recap

[A Recapof the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

July1: Models of Critical Patriotism: “What to the Slave is the 4th ofJuly?”: A July 4th series inspired by my book Of Thee I Singkicks off with a stunning speech that challenges us as much today as it did 172years ago.

July2: Models of Critical Patriotism: “Eulogy on King Philip”: The series continueswith a speech that offers two complementary models of critical patriotism.

July3: Models of Critical Patriotism: Suffrage Activists at the CentennialExposition: National divisions and critical patriotism at the nation’s 100thbirthday celebration, as the series rolls on.

July4: Models of Critical Patriotism: America is in the Heart: An author andbook that both introduce under-narrated histories and redefine American identity.

July5: Models of Critical Patriotism: MLK and Baldwin, Kaepernick and the 1619Project: The series concludes with a link to my Saturday Evening PostConsidering History column on the long legacy of African American criticalpatriotism.

July6-7: Critical Patriotism in 2024: And a special weekend follow-up onprotests that exemplify critical patriotism, protests that don’t quite, and whyit’s not as simple as that.

July8: Found Footage Stories: History of New York: For the 25thanniversary of the Blair Witch Project, a series on found footagestories kicks off with a humorous text that was way ahead of its time.

July9: Found Footage Stories: The “Introduction” to “Rip Van Winkle”: Theseries continues with a silly and a serious layer to Washington Irving’scontinued use of found footage frames.

July10: Found Footage Stories: House of Leaves: The limitations andpossibilities of scary stories, as the series discovers on.

July11: Found Footage Stories: Illuminae: Two ways to contextualize a bestsellingdystopian YA series that relies on found footage.

July12: Found Footage Stories: Horror Films: The series concludes with thelongstanding appeal and the limits of faux-realism.

July13-14: Found Footage Stories: The Blair Witch Project: For the film’s 25thanniversary, a special weekend post on three Blair Witch legacies.

July15: ElvisStudying: Elvis and Sinatra: In honor of an iconic date in his history,a series on Elvis Presley kicks off with the differences between influential andinteresting.

July16: ElvisStudying: Elvis Films: The series continues with takeaways fromthree stages in Presley’s iconic film career.

July17: ElvisStudying: Graceland: Mythic facades, the realities behind them,and a third way to look at Elvis’ historic home, as the series rocks on.

July18: ElvisStudying: The Presidential Medal of Freedom: The important nationalhonor as a unifying occasion or a partisan instrument.

July19: ElvisStudying: First and Last: For that iconic anniversary, on how wecan understand Elvis’ profound changes, and why they’re not the whole story.

July20-21: ElvisStudying: Representing the King: The series concludes withquick takeaways from a handful of the countless cultural depictions of Elvis.

July22: Revisiting the Canon: Ernest Hemingway: In honor of Hemingway’s 125thbirthday, a series on revisiting canonical authors kicks off with three phenomenalHem short stories.

July23: Revisiting the Canon: James Fenimore Cooper: The series continues withhistorical and literary reasons to revisit a challenging early bestseller.

July24: Revisiting the Canon: Nathaniel Hawthorne: How two of our mostover-taught texts can still be under-appreciated, as the series reads on.

July25: Revisiting the Canon: Mark Twain: Reading and thinking about along-past author as a contemporary commentator.

July26: Revisiting the Canon: William Faulkner: The series concludes with how aclassic author’s struggles can be as illuminating as his triumphs.

Nextseries begins Monday,

Ben

PS. Topicsyou’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

July 26, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: William Faulkner

[This pastweekend we celebrated ErnestHemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do mypart to diversifyour curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lotsof valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this weekI’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

On how aclassic author’s struggles can be as illuminating as their triumphs.

In thisblog post focused especially on August Wilson and his ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle,I briefly made the case for William Faulkner’s ambitious, messy, amazing book Absalom,Absalom! (1936) as “America’s most morally powerful novel.” I stand by thatcase, also a central subject of myfirst academic article way back in the day, and would ask you to check out thatpost (or that article if you’re feeling as ambitious as Faulkner was!), andthen come on back for some further thoughts on Faulkner’s successes andfailures.

Welcomeback! As I also argued in that article, one of the single most frustratingfacts in American literary history is that Faulkner’s immediate follow-up to Absalomwas TheUnvanquished (1938), a Civil War-set novel that pretty consistentlyendorses Lost Cause andwhite supremacist narratives of the war and race in Southern and Americanhistory. (Although this2015 article makes a more positive case for Unvanquished’s politics,so maybe I should give it another chance.) While Faulkner certainly didn’t writeabout those subjects across his career in ways that echo the worst of ThomasW. Dixon or Margaret Mitchell, it’s fair to say that his default wasn’tnearly as nuanced and powerful as Absalom either—I’d argue that a moreapt reflection of Faulkner’s limited ability to write or even truly think aboutAfrican American characters, for example, is his single-sentence description ofDilsey in the 1945Appendix to The Sound and the Fury: “They endured.” Not blatantlydiscriminatory and not inaccurate, but, compared to the huge swaths of new texthe creates about the other (white) Compson characters in that Appendix, anillustration of Faulkner’s relative lack of interest in the identity and lifeof a character like Dilsey—of whose family, not coincidentally, he also writesthere, “These others were not Compsons. They were black.”

While nosingle author can or should write about everyone or everything, Faulkner’sfailures when it comes to African American characters and stories, communitiesand histories, do to my mind mean that we can’t consider him one of ourgreatest novelists. But he was hugely talented and an important literary andcultural voice, and if we can include his struggles and failures along with hisstrengths and successes as complementary and interconnected parts of ourreading and response, I’d argue that only makes an even more compelling casefor teaching him and his works. To round off the whole of this week-longseries, part of the problem with the canon as it developed was precisely thatit treated authors and works as “classics” to be praised, rather than complexand multi-layered subjects worthy of our critiques along with every other formof engagement and analysis. We can’t read or teach everything, much as I wishwe could; and when we’re making choices about what to engage, it’s not just (orto my mind even mostly) about what’s great, but also and especially about what’smost illuminating. I’d say that’s the case for every one of the authors Ihighlighted this week, and it’s most definitely the case for William Faulkner.

July Recapthis weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 25, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: Mark Twain

[This pastweekend we celebrated ErnestHemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do mypart to diversifyour curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lotsof valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this weekI’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

[NB. Thispost is obviously a repeat from the end of my Fall 2017 Twain course, but Ithink it also makes the case for continuing to engage this most-canonizedAmerican author as well as any could!]

On reading andthinking about a long-past author as a contemporary commentator.

I’m pretty sureI hadn’t thought at all yet about the syllabus or specifics for my MajorAuthor: Mark Twain senior seminar when I gave last March’s talk at the Twain House on the topic of “Twainas Public Intellectual.” (Perhaps that’s a bit more inside baseball thanyou’d like if you’re a non-higher ed reader, but it’s a general truth, if notindeed a fact universally acknowledged, that as of March 3rd wedon’t often have any real sense of our Fall classes, beyond their basicexistence.) I’d even go further, and say that when I put in my idea to focusthis third iteration of mine for the course (after ones on HenryJames and W.E.B.Du Bois) on Twain, I did so much more because of the breadth and diversityof his career and works than because of any particular thought aboutcontemporary connections he might offer. I knew that toward the end of hiscareer Twain wrote anumber of pieces that engaged very fully with his contemporarysociety (in ways that would alsoresonate with our own), but generally saw that as one of many stages inthat long and multi-faceted career.

Well, I waswrong—or at least severely understating the case—on two distinct but interconnectedlevels. For one thing, I discovered in one of those late-career texts, 1905’s “AsRegards Patriotism” (that’s not the whole piece, which also includes someengagement with the U.S. occupation of the Philippines that had pushedTwain so fully into the political realm, but it gives you a good sense ofit at least), perhaps the most relevant historical source for our contemporarydebates over the NFLanthem protests that I’ve yet encountered. And for another, even moreunexpected thing, I likewise discovered a very early-career piece of Twain’s,1866’s “What Have thePolice Been Doing?,” that resonates quite closely and stunningly with thecurrent debates over police brutality that are so intimately linked to thoseanthem protests and manyother contemporary conversations. Which is to say, across the whole arc ofhis long career Twain not only engaged with aspects of his contemporarysociety, but did so in ways that also offer specific and important contexts andlessons for ongoing issues and debates in 21st century America.

That last clauseis a tricky one, though. The latest of these Twain pieces were written wellmore than 100 years ago, and the police piece more than 150. Obviously thewhole of my public scholarly career is dedicated to the idea that learningabout the past can and should affect us in the present in a variety of ways,but is it really possible—or desirable—to see particular pieces from 100 to 150years ago as direct and relevant commentaries on our contemporary moment andsociety? Shouldn’t we instead take both them and their historical and socialcontexts on their own terms, complex as they already were? I would agree thatthat’s a primary move, and hope and believe that we began and dwelled in thatspecific analytical space for many of our class conversations. But it’s noteither-or, and we also consistently (in our shared work and in individualstudent responses and papers) linked both specific pieces like the ones aboveand overarching aspects of Twain’s writing and genres, career and perspective,society and contexts, to debates, issues, cultural works, and ideas in 2017. Speakingfor myself, I learned a great deal about both Twain and us through thosecontemporary links, and wish that many more Americans had the chance to readthese pieces and consider what Twain can tell and offer us.

LastCanonStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?