Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 417

March 24-25, 2012: Race in Contemporary America

In which I hope to start a conversation about one of our most challenging and significant American Studies questions.

For a number of reasons, many of which I'll highlight as particular topics of posts in the coming week, I've decided to dedicate at least a week's worth of posts to the topic of race in contemporary American culture, identity, community, politics, society, art, and life. I have, you will be not at all surprised to learn, lots of thoughts of my own, both on specific events (which will again form the starting point for many of the particular posts) and on contexts and connections, back into our American past and to other American issues and questions. I have, that is, no shortage of things I hope to consider in this series from my own American Studier's perspective.

But while I obviously hope there's value to my sharing of those things from my own perspective—certainly it helps me to develop them in the ways I do in this space, but I mean value for you readers too—it remains the case, as I have said many times and in many ways here, that I see this blog and site, just as I see American Studies and public scholarship, as at their best and most meaningful a deeply collaborative and communal endeavor. That doesn't just mean getting responses to my own ideas, although I will always welcome those: in comments, by email (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu), in blog posts of your own, wherever and however you want to share them. But it also means hearing your own ideas and takes, fully and primarily.

So I'll note, as I have before and will again, the variety of ways in which you can share your perspectives and ideas, in this case on this complex and huge topic of race in contemporary America. You can create a new thread in the Forum. You can email me an analytical piece on any related topic or question, which I'll post in that section of the Resources page. Or you can suggest a topic for a blog post, one written either by me or (even better) by you in a Guest Post—I'll take such suggestions in any of those aforementioned ways: comments on posts here, emails, Forum posts, you name it. I'm also on Twitter (@AmericanStudier) and on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pages/American-Studier/340000226017686) if you want to check in that way.

Again, I have a week's series already more or less planned—but I'd love to make it a couple weeks because I have many takes of yours to help share as well. Let's make it happen!

First in the series on Monday,

Ben

PS. You know what to do!

3/24 Memory Day nominee: John Wesley Powell, the Civil War veteran, college professor, and Western explorer whose contributions to our national awareness of and respect for our natural treasures and resources was second only to his profound respect for Native Americans and what they meant to American identity and life, a perspective which led him to push for the creation of a federal Bureau of Ethology.

3/25 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace Prize winning scientist and humanitarian whose work in Mexico, India, and around the world changed the possibilities of modern agriculture, sustainability, and human existence; and Flannery O'Connor, one of the 20th century's most unique and talented authors of fiction, and a writer whose dark humor and cynicism were balanced by a deep and abiding humanity and faith.

March 23, 2012: The Safari Park

[This week, I'll be blogging about some of the many interesting sites and spaces of public memory and community in San Diego. This is the fifth and final entry in the series.]
A few of the many reasons why the San Diego Zoo's Safari Park is a lot more than just a great tourist attraction, and in fact serves as a site of public memory and community:

1) The Northern White Rhino: Without a doubt the most tragic inhabitants we met at the Safari Park were the two Northern White Rhinos—two of the four to six surviving such rhinos, all of whom are apparently too old to reproduce. I'm pretty good at finding the good within the tragic—I'm writing a book about it, y'know—but there's no way to see this impending loss as anything other than a tragedy. But thanks to the safari park, this tragedy won't go unremarked—all those visitors who, as we did, get to see these rhinos are made aware of the imminent loss of these impressive animals, and that's an important act of public memory in its own right.

2) The California Condor: At the other end of the spectrum is the genuinely amazing success story that is the California Condor. A couple decades ago these impressive birds of prey were down to Northern White Rhino numbers—but thanks to the efforts of the Safari Park and a couple other California organizations, the Condors have rebounded and rebounded with vigor, not only in sanctuaries like the Park but in increasing numbers in the wild as well. The Condor represents, among other things, the way in which a public site, and communal efforts and support, can change the course of history, and produce a more inspiring future as a result. Pretty good public memory lesson!

3) The Baby Giraffe: This is a much more personal moment, yet still a deeply public one. Our visit to the Park happened to coincide with a special addition—the Park's youngest inhabitant, a three-week old baby giraffe (our younger son's favorite animal), was spending his first day out in the Park with his Mom, siblings, and extended giraffe community. Obviously a cute and powerful moment, and we could feel how much our various tour guides and park keepers shared in it. But it was also, for me, an inspiring reminder in miniature (well, miniature-ish) of the Park's most central purpose: to remind us of the larger world of which we're a part, a world that is as fragile as it is enduring, to which each of us, small as we are, is deeply and significantly linked.

It was a great trip! More this weekend,

Ben

PS. Any interesting or inspiring public sites you've visited (in any place)?

3/23 Memory Day nominee: Bette Nesmith Graham, the Texas high school dropout, single mother, and long-time bank secretary who invented Liquid Paper, became one of the 20th century's most successful inventors and entrepreneurs, and mothered one of the Monkees; if there's a more distinctly American story than that one, I've yet to hear it!

March 22, 2012: The U.S.S. Midway

[This week, I'll be blogging about some of the many interesting sites and spaces of public memory and community in San Diego. This is the fourth in the series.]

Trying to make sense of the two very different, and even opposed, public roles served by San Diego's most unique historic site.

Floating in San Diego's harbor, just a few hundred yards away from the city's downtown, is a hugely singular and compelling public space: the U.S.S. Midway, a formerly operational aircraft carrier that has (since 2004) served as a naval and aviation museum. The museum offers visitors at least three distinct visions into the lives of naval sailors and aviators: on the flight deck, a number of actual planes and helicopters, many of which the visitors can sit in; in the hangar beneath (alongside a few more planes), flight simulators and other re-creations of piloting and wartime experiences; and below-decks, an elaborately preserved and re-created vision of everyday life aboard the carrier for its officers, aviators, and sailors. My boys were particularly struck by the laundry room, with loads of fake clothes tumbling in the giant washers and dryers, and detailed depictions of the sailors whose job it was to carry the hundred-pound bags of laundry around the ship.

That laundry room illustrates what is to my mind the most significant and inspiring public role of the Midway museum: to help 21st century visitors understand the experiences and identities of those men and women who served aboard the carrier and its many sister ships, at all times but most especially during times of war. As I wrote in my first Veteran's Day post (in analysis of the post-World War II film The Best Years of Our Lives), when it comes to American Studiers and our connections to the American past, there are few acts of empathy more important than such understandings of what the experiences of war and military service have entailed; obviously such experiences are hugely varied, both in different periods/wars and for different individuals, but nonetheless a museum like the Midway offers a very striking and effective means to create those connections with past servicemen and women. I've visited a number of battlefields and other wartime historic sites, and would rank the Midway (and particularly its below-decks exhibits) among the most effective such connection-creators I've encountered.

There's another side to that connection, though, and it's one that is to my mind much less historical and more propagandistic. On the Midway I found it illustrated most succinctly by the placard in front of one of the flight deck planes; the placard was describing the plane's role during the Vietnam War, and noted that it was frequently used for "close-in bombing" in the war's later stages. Which is to say, although the placard was careful not to say this: these bombers almost certainly participated in President Nixon's often secret, likely illegal, and thoroughly despicable carpet-bombing campaigns of Cambodia and Laos; even if they didn't, they most likely dropped napalm and other weapons of mass deconstruction indiscriminately on North Vietnamese villages. Such bombings are quite possibly, as I wrote in my post on Dresden, an inevitable part of war; but that inevitability does not in any way elide their horrific brutality, and it most definitely did not make me view the plane being connected to such bombings with anything other than horror. But in the context of the Midway, with its stated motto of "Live the Adventure, Honor the Legend," Vietnam and its bombing raids are folded into that adventurous, honorable, legendary history—which is perhaps just as disturbing as the bombings themselves.

A multifaceted, complex, and vital American Studies, public historic site for sure! Last San Diego one tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

3/22 Memory Day nominee: Greta Kempton, the Austrian Jewish immigrant whose compelling portraits of Harry Truman and his family, among many other prominent and iconic Americans, led her to be known as "America's Court Painter," and contributed some of the more lasting images of American political and social life in the late 20th century.

March 21, 2012: Balboa Park

[This week, I'll be blogging about some of the many interesting sites and spaces of public memory and community in San Diego. This is the third in the series.]

A historic site that does justice to its origins in unique and inspiring ways.

It's easy to forget just how significant the August 1914 opening of the Panama Canal really was—even when you're in the space created to celebrate that historic achievement. To honor that international feat of engineering, in the city that would be the first American port of all for ships coming west through the Canal, the United States and Panama jointly hosted the year-long 1915 Panama-California Exposition; San Diego's Balboa Park had been in existence for nearly half a century, but the Exposition represented the first unified use of the Park, and a number of new and striking features (such as Cabrillo Bridge, the tower on the California Quadrangle, and the El Prado plaza and buildings) were created as part of the Exposition grounds. Yet I would venture that as many 21st century visitors to Balboa Park know that origin point as there are 21st century Americans who think regularly about the Panama Canal.

That might seem to represent a kind of failure for a historic site; certainly if the goal of Balboa Park was or is to create and sustain public memory of the Panama Canal, it hasn't to my mind done so. Yet if we see the Park, and even the Exposition, as an effort instead to create a communal space as inspiring and powerful as the Canal's achievement, then our perspective becomes quite different. That's particularly true when it comes to the Prado area—the Bridge and Tower are certainly still striking, but the Prado is that and a good deal more: a collection of unique and compelling museums, set in and among buildings, plazas, and gardens of distinct and uniformly inspiring architectural and artistic achievement, offering visitors aesthetic, intellectual, and historic experiences that both highlight their San Diego setting and feel connected to the world beyond in ways that do justice to the best of what the Panama Canal could mean.

And then there's the Zoo. San Diego's justifiably world-famous zoo was directly inspired by the collection of foreign animals that were featured at the Exposition, and as it developed in the decade after the Exposition, it built quite precisely on the Exposition's ideal: featuring animals that were cast-off pets from naval and other vessels; finding animals for whom, in many cases, there was no longer space at other zoos around the world; and seeking to create in its own space authentic habitats that became models for all future zoos. Even before the creation of the even more unique and inspiring Safari Park (about which I'll have more to say in a couple days), the Zoo represented an extension of Balboa Park's ideals and influence on numerous levels—and whether or not visitors to the Zoo think at all about the Panama Canal or any of that history, they're helping to carry forward the Park's purposes and legacies in much more meaningful ways.

Next San Diego site tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

3/21 Memory Day nominee: Eddie James "Son" House, the Mississippi preacher and convict turned blues musician whose 1930s recordings are among the most influential American musical works, who directly inspired Robert Johnson (among many other subsequent greats), and who formed an integral part of Alan Lomax's 1941-2 Library of Congress recording sessions of the Delta Blues.

March 20, 2012: Cabrillo National Monument

[This week, I'll be blogging about some of the many interesting sites and spaces of public memory and community in San Diego. This is the second in the series.]

Three entirely distinct yet ultimately interconnected sides to a stunning public space.

Point Loma, the peninsula just north of San Diego where Spanish explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo became in 1542 the first known European arrival to the US West Coast, is home to 360 degrees of amazing views: of the San Diego skyline, of the Pacific Ocean, and of a good deal more of Southern California's coast and landscape. It's not hard to understand why the National Park Service chose the Point as the site of Cabrillo National Monument—and when you're standing beneath the Cabrillo statue, as I was with my boys late last week, it's fair to say that you're able to appreciate not only the current view, but also at least a bit of what Cabrillo and his expedition witnessed as they disembarked in this striking new world.

Just up the hill from the statue, the Park Service has created what would seem to be an entirely distinct historic site—a re-creation of and museum dedicated to the Old Point Loma lighthouse, a beacon that opened with the arrival of Anglo settlers in 1855 and lit the point for trading and passenger ships for the next three and a half decades. The lighthouse and museum do indeed do justice to the specific experiences and identities of light's keepers, especially the Israels, the husband and wife team who kept the light for its final twenty years of service. Yet the Israels are not so disconnected from Cabrillo after all—in part because Captain Robert Decatur Israel (a Mexican American War veteran) had married a daughter of Mexican Old Town, Maria Arcadio Machado de Alipas, providing yet another complex link between the two communities; and in part because for both of them, and the family they raised in the lighthouse, the point remained nearly as isolated, and just as stunning, as it had for those earliest arrivals. The statue and lighthouse thus highlight continuities as well as changes across the Point's first few post-contact centuries.

Then there are the really long-term continuities. At the base of the Point's cliffs are the tidepools, both the natural phenomenon and a National Park research center that monitors and learns from their many unique inhabitants. The existence of the tidepools predates Cabrillo, the Israels, and likely any other human arrivals to the Point; the visitor who encounters and explores them is thus, in a significant sense, connecting to the space and history in a fundamentally different way than at either of the historic sites. Yet on the other hand, the research center itself reflects a late 20th and early 21st century engagement with the place, a recognition that Point Loma has always been defined by its natural as well as social meanings, and ultimately is constituted, as is all of America, out of the relationships between communities and the lands and environments with which they have coexisted.

Next San Diego site tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

3/20 Memory Day nominees: A tie between B.F. Skinner, the scientist whose theories of behavioral psychology remain controversial but certainly advanced our conversations about human interactions and identities, and whose Walden Two (1948) does full philosophical and social justice to its titular predecessor; and Fred Rogers, the children's television host and educator whose long-running PBS show became the gentle and guiding soundtrack to multiple generations of American kids, and whose advocacy for early childhood education and for public television in its early stages were crucially important to shaping late 20th century America.

March 19, 2012: Old Town State Historic Park

[This week, I'll be blogging about some of the many interesting sites and spaces of public memory and community in San Diego. This is the first in the series.]

The historic re-creation that both reflects a divided history yet also captures and exemplifies a shared city.

In many ways, San Diego serves as an embodiment of the forgotten history of Mexican American homelands and dispossessions that I chronicled in this post. Founded in the mid-18th century by Father Junipero Serra as the site of California's first Mission, the city served as a center for the state's growing Hispanic American population for nearly a century; Father Serra's dual goals of conquest and conversion make clear that the history of Spanish arrival and settlement in the Americas, and particularly their relationship to the area's native peoples (as documented so thoroughly by Bartolomé de las Casas), is no less conflicted than that of the English in Massachusetts (for example). But it was in any case a long and rich history, and one found nowhere more fully than in the San Diego blocks, homes, and community surrounding that first mission.

Then came the Mexican American War, and more exactly the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended it; as I wrote in that prior post, despite the treaty's attempts to guarantee certain land ownership for Mexican Americans, it generally instead served as one factor among many that led to increasing dispossession of the Mexican American landowners in favor of Anglo arrivals, squatters, gold rushers, and settlers. The dates on virtually every historic house and site in San Diego's Old Town State Historic Park—a historic re-creation that spans six pedestrian-only blocks full of interesting and evocative spaces and details—tell the story: houses and establishments that belonged to Mexican American families and proprietors in the 1840s frequently had Anglo inhabitants and names by the 1850s. The Silvas-McCoy House is a particularly clear example: prior to 1851 the home belonged to Maria Eugenia Silvas, whose family had been in the region since the 1770s; by a decade later it was owned by James McCoy, an Irish immigrant who became the new town's sheriff and state senator.

Yet the truth is that the transition (like all historical shifts) was rarely as clear-cut or as absolute as that, and in fact the details of many of the Old Town houses and sites reveal Mexican American residents and establishments remaining present and active into at least the late 19th century, and thus an area and community that was significantly multi-cultural (and –lingual) for many decades. Or, to be more exact, an area that is, like San Diego itself, still significantly multi-cultural and –lingual, both in the people who live in and around Old Town, and in the Historic Park's own identity and public memory. Walking through there a week ago, I was deeply impressed by both the many different cultures and communities re-created (including not only Mexican and Anglo but also Chinese and Native American) and the consistent attempt to reflect their interconnections and interdependences. The history of San Diego cannot be told or understood without all those presences, individually but even more collectively, and Old Town State Historic Park fully illustrates that central fact.

Next San Diego site tomorrow,

Ben

3/19 Memory Day nominee: William Jennings Bryan, who came down on the wrong side of the law and of history in the Scopes "Monkey" trial, but whose most significant legacy is a long career of speeches, political campaigns, public service, and advocacy on behalf of the American people (hence his nickname "The Great Commoner").

March 10-18. 2012: Spring Break Question

This American Studier will be on a spring break vacation for the next week. For the relevant Memory Day nominees, please check out the Memory Day Calendar, where each nominee will have the usual brief introduction. New blog posts will resume on Monday March 19th.

But while you're here, I have a question: if you had the chance to share one American thing—a text, a film, a song, a work of art, a building, a person, an event, an issue, an idea, an object, a symbol, an image, you name it (literally)—with other interested American Studiers, what would you share? And why?

Please feel very free and encouraged to share your answers here in comments. I'll most definitely learn from them, and will also try to work them into future blog subjects, posts, series, and so on.

Have at it! And see you in a week,

Ben

PS. You know what to do!

3/10 to 3/18 Memory Day nominees: Are available at the Calendar!

March 9, 2012: One Short Video, Two Impressive Women

[All this week, in honor of Women's History Month, I'll be highlighting some exemplary American women. This is the sixth and final post in the series.]

One of our most talented and inspiring contemporary actresses, Alfre Woodard, reads a speech by one of the 19th century's most interesting and inspiring orators and activists, Sojourner Truth:

http://front.moveon.org/the-most-powerful-performance-of-history-youll-see-this-month/?rc=fb.rp.6

Happy Women's History Month!

More tomorrow, a question for your consideration as American Studier takes its spring break,

Ben

PS. Last chance to nominate exemplary American women as part of this week's series!

3/9 Memory Day nominee: David Davis, the Illinois legislator and judge who had a strong influence on a trio of crucial American moments: as Abraham Lincoln's 1860 campaign manager; as the Supreme Court justice who authored one of the strongest defenses of civil liberties, the post-Civil War Ex Parte Milligan (1866) decision; and as a complex political player in the contested and controversial 1876 presidential election.

March 8, 2012: Celebrating Sui Sin Far

[All this week, in honor of Women's History Month, I'll be highlighting some exemplary American women. This is the fifth in the series.]

On this International Women's Day, celebrating the cross-cultural life and writings of one of the most transnational American women.

Much has been written, including by me in this space on multiple occasions, about the transnational turn in, the globalization of, American Studies. There's no question that the field of American Studies has over the past few decades increasingly recognized international connections for and influences on American culture and identity; moreover, there is of course equally little debate that our 21st century moment and world are particularly defined by global interconnections and links. Yet those contemporary trends can at times mask a deeper and, to my mind, more defining American reality: that many of the most striking and salient American identities and stories have been profoundly transnational since the first moments of contact. From Pocahontas to Olaudah Equiano, Judah Monis to Tom Paine, the first two full centuries of American life were full of such transnational lives, and the trend only deepened into the 19th and early 20th centuries.

There are many benefits to such a transnational vision of American identity—beyond the most beneficial feature, which is that it's accurate!—and high among them is that it can help us identify inspiring international Americans who might otherwise fall outside our national self-definitions. That definitely goes for the first documented Chinese American immigrant, Yung Wing, and for all those young men who would in the 1870s attend his Chinese Educational Mission school. But it's perhaps even more salient when it comes to Yung's semi-countrywoman Sui Sin Far (also known as Edith Maude Eaton): Far was born in England in 1865, to an English merchant father and Chinese immigrant mother; when she was still young they moved to Canada and settled in Montreal (where she began her journalistic and writing career); in the 1890s she moved to Jamaica for a short time; and only at the turn of the 20th century did she make the United States her permanent home, living in Seattle, San Francisco, and finally Boston (where she died at the far too young age of 49). Such a biography might seem to describe a citizen of the world, a woman and writer whose American connections were no stronger than were her English, Canadian, or Chinese ones.

Yet I would argue the opposite, and not only because Far spent her final two decades in the United States and published her best-known and most enduring works (such as the 1912 collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance) during that time. What truly makes Far a transnational, cross-cultural American writer is the sheer number of her works that powerfully and profoundly portray, critique, celebrate, and embody American histories, identities, communities, and stories: that goes for every story in Spring (and most especially the complex, funny, and striking title story); for her autobiographical piece "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian" (1890); and, to my mind most perfectly and compellingly, for her short story "In the Land of the Free" (unfortunately not available in full online, although a good bit of it is in the Google books version of Spring linked above). That story does at least three very significant American Studies things: portrays the effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act on Chinese Americans; measures (to paraphrase what Bruce Springsteen has recently said about his own work and goals) the distance between the American Dream and many American experiences and realities; and, least overtly but just as crucially, represents the lives and worlds of a young Chinese American immigrant couple in San Francisco's Chinatown at the turn of the 20th century.

Doesn't get more international, more transnational, nor more American than that. Last exemplary American woman (for this week's series at least) tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

3/8 Memory Day nominee: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, the Civil War veteran and eloquent legal philosopher and writer who became one of the most articulate and influential Supreme Court Justices, advocating (often in dissent) for significant early 20th century causes such as workers' rights.

March 7, 2012: Celebrating Margaret Fuller

[All this week, in honor of Women's History Month, I'll be highlighting some exemplary American women. This is the fourth in the series.]

Remembering one of America's most talented and brilliant writers and philosophers, and her mercurial and tragically short life.

If Margaret Fuller had written only Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) , that book alone would be entirely sufficient to ensure her status as a unique and inspiring American. Building upon her essay "The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman Versus Women" (1843), which appeared in the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, Fuller's book is perhaps without peer in American literary and political history: an argumentative, activist work that is also profoundly philosophical and erudite; a work in which scholarly allusions to Shakespeare, European philosophers, and classical authors mingle with legal arguments, autobiographical reflections, and sophisticated social analyses. Fuller's book not only makes compelling arguments for women's equality, it embodies those arguments, exemplifying why Emerson considered Fuller the smartest Transcendentalist.

If Fuller had written only her travel writing and journalism, those publications would certainly signal her unique and crucial national and international literary vision and communal perspective. Summer     on the Lakes (1844) , her memoir and philosophical reflection on a trip to the frontier (at that time) and the Great Lakes, stands with contemporary works like Caroline Kirkland's A New Home; Who'll Follow? (1839) as constituting a new western American literature, one linked to the east and America's past and yet carrying those legacies into an evolving regional and national future.     And when she traveled to Europe a few years later, she did so as the foreign correspondent for the New York Tribute and so first and foremost as a writer and journalist, documenting her journeys and, eventually, her powerful connections to the Italian revolutions in pieces that are just as self-reflective and philosophical and yet still stand among the best American travel writing.

If Fuller had written only her literary criticism, that work would on its own terms establish her as a significant voice and influence in the rise of a distinct and valued narrative of American literary and cultural identity. In particular, her Papers on Literature and Art (1846), and specifically her essay "American Literature: Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future," take American literary production more seriously than virtually any other prominent writer (outside perhaps of Poe) had done; as illustrated by her earlier piece "A Short Essay on Critics" (1840), Fuller envisioned a similarly more meaningful and significant social and cultural role for literary critics, and her Papers, like all of the works I have highlighted here, exemplified and embodied those ideals and helped frame American literature (here and across the Atlantic) as a community of writers and voices with something meaningful to contribute to cultural and artistic conversations.

Yet Fuller wrote in all of those genres, and did so all before she was 40—the age at which, returning to America with her Italian revolutionary husband and their young son, her boat ran aground near New York and all three were drowned. A tragic loss, but one that could not destroy this immensely influential and inspiring American voice and life. Next inspiring woman tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Any nominees?

3/7 Memory Day nominee: Henry Draper, the 19th-century physician and socialite who followed in his father's footsteps to become a pioneering amateur astronomer and astronomical photographer, receiving a Congressional medal for directing the 1874 expedition to photograph the transit of Venus and obtaining (in 1880) the first recorded photograph of a nebula.