Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 418

March 6, 2012: Celebrating Zitkala-Sa

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

Celebrating a writer, educator, and activist who turned some of her culture's and our nation's lowest points into a pioneering and inspiring life and legacy.

In one of my earliest blog posts, I wrote about journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells (Barnett), calling her "A Voice from the Nadir." I wanted that title to sum up two seemingly distinct and eve opposed yet in fact interconnected and mutually dependent ideas, not only about Wells but about inspiring Americans more generally: that from the darkest moments in our histories (such as was the turn of the 20th century "nadir" for African Americans) often emerge the brightest and most inspiring lights. "Yet the shadows bear the promise/Of a brighter coming day," wrote Frances Ellen Watkins Harper during this same era; and as I argued in that Black History Month post on Harper, I believe—and am arguing in the book I'm hoping to finish this coming summer and fall—those lines means precisely that it is in the shadows that we must find the light, to the darkest histories that we must turn in search of hard-won hope.

While many historical periods could vie for the title of nadir when it comes to Native Americans, I think the 19th century's last few decades likewise have a very strong case: the "Indian Wars" were culminating with the final and complete defeat of all remaining independent nations; the removal and reservation systems were concurrently enveloping every nation more and more fully (with even the well-intentioned  Dawes Act playing into those trends); and, perhaps most egregiously, the system of "Indian boarding schools" was taking young Native Americans away from their communities and trying to force cultural assimilation and the loss of heritage on them. It was in direct response to and representation of those trends, and particularly the destructive boarding school experience, that Sioux author Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) emerged onto the national literary scene, with autobiographical pieces such as "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" and "School Days of an Indian Girl" (both published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900); since most of us American Studiers still encounter Sa through those works in anthologies (as I did), it's easy to define her through them, and thus to see her as a complex and talented chronicler of this nadir period for her community and culture.

Yet the individual perspective that comes through in those pieces, and even more in 1902's "Why I Am a Pagan" (also published in the Atlantic), is that of someone who will not be defined, and certainly not limited, by any single experience or category. And indeed Sa spent the next few decades extending her career and activism in a variety of compelling and significant ways: compiling, editing, and publishing Old Indian Legends (1901) , a collection of Native folktales and stories; working with composer William Hanson to write and stage The Sun Dance Opera (1913) , one of the most unique and pioneering works in American cultural history; and founding (in 1926) and serving as the first president of the National Council of American Indians, an influential political and social organization that lobbied on behalf of Native American rights and citizenship throughout the 20th century. In these and many other efforts, Sa illustrated just how fully she had transcended the depths of the nadir, and exemplified the potential for all cultures and communities—and, most importantly, for America itself—to similarly find hope for a stronger future: in our histories, in our cultures, and in our most inspiring identities.

Next inspiring American woman tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Any nominees for Women's History week?

3/6 Memory Day nominee: Ring Lardner, the pioneering American journalist, humorist, and novelist whose innovations in vernacular voice and a concise style predated and influenced modernists like Hemingway and late 20th century minimalists like Raymond Carver.[image error]

March 5, 2012: Celebrating Sophia Hayden

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

Celebrating the inspiring life and incredible artistic achievement of a woman forced from the public stage far too early.

Being stereotyped and through those stereotypes attacked has long been a potential danger for anyone who enters our national public and political spheres—just ask Thomas Jefferson, who during the 1800 presidential campaign was called by Johns Adams supporters "the son of a half-breed squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father"—but it seems to me that the chances of such attacks are often doubled when it comes to public women. From the viciously degrading images of suffragettes featured in this 1910 children's book to the protesters who carried signs asking presidential candidate Hilary Clinton to iron their shirts, the assaults on Eleanor Roosevelt's femininity to the assaults on Janet Reno's femininity, and most immediately to Rush Limbaugh's profoundly out of bounds attacks on a Georgetown law student who testified before Congress about the medical uses of birth control, women in our public conversations have far too frequently had to face personal and discriminatory narratives that go well beyond the normal terms of political or social debates.

The limiting public narratives faced by Sophia Hayden were not, apparently, as overt nor as vicious as in any of those examples, but they nonetheless had a profound cumulative effect. Hayden graduated from MIT in 1890 with a degree in architecture (making her the first female MIT architecture graduate and one of the first women to receive the degree from any American institution), but couldn't find work in the field due (again apparently) to her gender, and so took a job teaching high school drawing. Two years later she entered and won a contest to design the Women's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; her design and the building were praised and even honored, but were at the same time defined explicitly as "revealing the sex of its author" and otherwise embodying the limitations of women's artistic visions and designs, and such responses, coupled with the building's being torn down as soon as the Exposition concluded, led Hayden to retire from the profession shortly thereafter.

The goals of an event like Women's History Month certainly include remembering our darker histories and stories, and so it'd be important not to elide Hayden's choice and its apparently most significant (and certainly representative) causes. Yet it's even more important, it seems to me, that we not in any way replicate those causes by simply reinforcing (even sympathetically) negative, powerless, or purely tragic images of Hayden's life and work. For lots of reasons, but most of all this: this daughter of an Anglo father and a Chilean mother, this immigrant to the United States at a young age, this pioneering student and professional, this woman who at the age of 23 won a nationwide contest to design one of America's most important buildings, and who did so damn successfully and with a design that architecture students and scholars still analyze, is quite simply one of the most impressive, talented, and inspiring late 19th century Americans.

Next Women's History post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Any inspiring American women you'd highlight?

3/5 Memory Day nominee: Michael Sandel, one of the most influential 20th and 21st century American philosophers, and one whose course "Justice" (offered for the general public as well as for undergrads) has made philosophical issues applicable and relevant to everyday issues and conversations for decades.

March 3-4, 2012: Celebrating Shirley Sherrod

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

A tribute to a woman who is unfortunately best known for a malicious attack that entirely falsified her most inspiring work and qualities.

Conservative activist and propagandist Andrew Breitbart passed away this past week. Breitbart was only 43, and leaves behind a wife and four daughters, about whom I've tried to think a lot since I saw the news, so as to leaven some of my worst impulses in response to his death. Yet the complex truth is that we can recognize the tragedy of Breitbart's death for his family and loved ones while at the same time noting that two of his most enduring legacies are not only representative of his work more generally but also, quite simply, among the very worst things that have happened in American political life over the last decade: the destruction of ACORN, an organization that had been for four decades a vital resource for lower-income Americans; and the smearing and character assassination of Shirley Sherrod, a woman whose career and life exemplify some of the very best of what American can be.

The central problem with Breitbart's attack on Sherrod wasn't just that he pulled a quote entirely out of the context of the speech to the NAACP in which she spoke it, and used that out of context sound bite to smear her work on behalf of American farmers as driven in part by anti-white racism (leading to her losing that job with the USDA). All of that was bad enough, of course. But the central problem was that Sherrod's anecdote, as evidenced by the very next lines of her speech, served precisely the opposite purpose: it allowed her to identify some of her own past potential prejudices, and to argue for how important it had been for her to recognize and move past them, in order to do the best work she could on behalf of all those farmers (across racial and every other lines) who needed her and her organization's support. Sherrod's speech had thus exemplified both profoundly honest and inspiring self-reflection and the kind of cross-cultural community and transformation that, I have argued so many times in this space, is at the core of the most ideal American experiences and identities.

Moreover, the fuller details of Sherrod's biography and career only amplify those inspiring qualities. In 1964, when Sherrod (then Miller) was only 17 (and living in Georgia), her father was killed by a local white farmer, who was then acquitted of all charges by an all-white grand jury. While in college at Albany State in 1967, she and her future husband, Charles Sherrod, worked with SNCC, confronting some of the South's most enduring racisms and brutalities first-hand. And in 1969, the Sherrods' efforts on behalf of a local collective farming group, New Communities, were met with extreme and racist opposition from white farmers, suppliers, and the state's governor and political system, in the face of which the collective folded. Having experienced such personal, familial, regional, and professional discrimination, hatred, and violence (of all kinds), it would stand to reason that Sherrod would, at the very least, advocate first and foremost for the rights of African Americans. Certainly she did and has continued to do so—but at the same time she has consistently worked on behalf of all farmers, recognizing and embracing the interconnections and interdependences that have so long eluded white supremacists, critics of African American activism and of multiculturalism, and general purveyors of divisiveness like Breitbart.

More inspiring American women this coming week,

Ben

PS. Any women you'd nominate? Ideas, and even guest posts, very welcome!

3/3 Memory Day nominee: Beatrice Wood, the artist, sculptor and craftsperson, and writer who came to be known as the "Mama of Dada" for her profound influences on modern art and 20th century culture.

3/4 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Rebecca Gratz, whose late 18th and 19th century cultural and philanthropic contributions to Philadelphia and American society rival Ben Franklin's; and Myrtilla Miner, the abolitionist and educator whose 1858 Washington, DC Colored Girls School represented a pioneering and powerfully influential American advance.

March 2, 2012: 1936

[To celebrate Leap Day, this week I'll be American Studying some particularly interesting leap years. This is the fourth and final entry in the series.]

In the depths of the Depression, a year full of complex, multi-layered American moments.

Not to get all metaphorical on you, but American Studies is really quite a bit like Pringles—once you pop the lip off of this interdisciplinary approach to our history and culture, it's pretty hard to stop peeling off those chips. A more traditional historical perspective on 1936 in America would, it seems to me, focus pretty fully on the Depression—its resurgence in and after this year, Roosevelt's continued efforts to combat it on a variety of fronts (aided by his sweeping reelection in November), and so on. Such an approach would certainly touch upon the year's completion of a number of significant public works projects, from Hoover Dam to New York's Triborough Bridge. Perhaps it would engage with Dorothea Lange's simple and eloquent 1936 photograph "Migrant Mother." And it might even note that it was in this year that James Agee and Walker Evans received the Fortune magazine assignment that would culminate, five years later, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) .

But an American Studies approach would take us well beyond such overt historical connections, considering many other aspects of the year to which we might connect the Depression in more subtle but no less meaningful ways. There's the release of Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece Modern Times, a film that examines and satirizes ideals of efficiency and productivity that (for example) could be seen as having contributed to a shift away from certain labor forces and communities of working Americans. Or there are the debuts of Life magazine and of Billboard's first pop music chart —both of which could be read either as celebrations of the resiliency of American communities and cultures or as escapes from the Depression's harsh realities (or, of course, as connected to entirely distinct histories or narratives). Or there are the dueling Southern and American historical novels, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!: the first largely embracing mythologies that could help Americans remember that "tomorrow is another day," and becoming one of America's best-selling works; the second attempting to force its audiences to confront some of our darkest realities, and selling hardly any copies at all.

Moreover, an American Studies perspective would help us remember that no single historical event or issue—not even one as sweeping as the Depression—ever monopolizes our national experience of a particular year. For example, two of 1936's most significant American events happened across the Atlantic, and were connected to very different political, social, and international histories and communities. At the year's Summer Olympics in Germany, Jesse Owens famously defied Hitler's racially supremacist predictions and captured four gold medals, becoming one of the nation's most unifying and inspiring athletes in the process. And no less inspiring in their own way were the thousands of Americans who formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the volunteer force who set sail for Spain to join with the forces resisting Franco and fascism in the Spanish Civil War. While the US's official military entry into World War II would not come until late in 1941, such events illustrate just how fully connected America was to Europe throughout the Depression years leading up to the war.

As with each of these years, lots more to think about and say—and thus for us American Studiers to do! More this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

3/2 Memory Day nominee: Theodore Seuss Geisel, the son and grandson of Springfield (Mass.) brewers whose The Cat in the Hat (1957) remains perhaps the single most influential children's book of all time, and whose long and complex American career began with World War II propaganda cartoons and culminated in a gently satirical work about aging in America.

March 1, 2012: 1912

[To celebrate Leap Day, this week I'll be American Studying some particularly interesting leap years. This is the third in the series.]

A year that witnessed a unique and hugely significant political contest—and two more subtle trends that foreshadowed some of the best and worst of the American century to follow.

I don't think there's much doubt that the biggest American story of 1912 (unless we count the sinking of the Titanic as an American story) was the three-way presidential contest between incumbent Republican William Howard Taft, Democratic challenger Woodrow Wilson, and third-party candidate Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt was of course only four years removed from the end of his combative and popular two-term presidency, and his Progressive Party (popularly known as the Bull Moose Party after TR was shot, finished a campaign speech, and said he felt as healthy as that animal) became one of the most successful third parties in American presidential history, garnering more than ten times the electoral votes of the incumbent Taft. Given the many significant legacies of Wilson's two terms, from World War I and its aftermath to the federal embrace of the segregated Jim Crow South, it's hard to overstate the importance of this election to American and world history.

Yet despite those undeniable political legacies, it's possible to argue that two other, less prominent 1912 trends even more centrally signaled core aspects of the American century that was just beginning to unfold in this era. One defining quality of that century was America's near-constant international interventions and conflicts, many of which never reached the status of a war but which of course were no less meaningful without that designation, and 1912 saw two of the first such interventions:
While such military interventions would become increasingly controversial in the second half of the twentieth century, the second, more cultural international American influence that truly began in 1912 has continued and only grown over the last few decades. In July 1912, New York cinema owner and entrepreneur Adolph Zukor screened the first full-length film drama shown in America (Sarah Bernhardt's Queen Elizabeth); later that year he founded the Famous Players Film Company, which would shortly thereafter incorporate into Paramount Pictures. And in classic Hollywood fashion, it did so at nearly the same time as its first true competitor, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company (later Universal Pictures). American Studiers can debate and have frequently debated whether Hollywood's international dominance parallels the US military's, has complicated or even challenged that other national hegemony, or represents an entirely distinct part of the American Century—but in any case you can't tell those stories without Hollywood, and its dominance began in many ways in 1912.

Final leap year tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Any American histories or stories to which these events connect for you?

3/1 Memory Day nominee: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Irish American immigrant and sculptor whose democratic ideals and activisms were exemplified in one of America's most progressive, pioneering, and inspiring works of art, the Shaw Memorial. [image error]

February 29, 2012: February Recap

[Leap year posts resume tomorrow—but on this leap day, a recap of the month in American Studying.]

February 1: Tebow and Abdul-Rauf: The second post in my series on American sports studies analyzes religion, community, and identity through two very distinct individuals and stories.

February 2: The Three Acts of John Rocker: The third sports post analyzes the three complex and compellingly American stages of John Rocker's saga.

February 3: The Growth of an American Sports Studier: The fourth sports post charts three of my own stages through baseball books I have loved.

February 4-5: A Key Question about Muhammad Ali: The sports series concludes with a question—to which I'd still love your answers!—about Ali's reception and perception in the 1960s.

February 6: Remembering Lucille Clifton: My Black History Month series begins with one of our most multi-talented poets.

February 7: Remembering the Harlem Renaissance: The next Black History post adds three interesting writers and voices to our memories of the Harlem Renaissance.

February 8: Remembering Anna Julia Cooper: Black History post on one of the late 19th century's most inspiring identities and texts.

February 9: Remembering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Black History post on an American whose writings and influences touched virtually every 19th century issue.

February 10: Remembering David Walker: The final Black History post, on a very aggressive, angry, and necessary abolitionist voice and work.

February 11-12: Remembering Whitney Houston: A brief tribute to one of the late 20th century's most talented and troubled American popular artists.

February 13: Remembering Nat Love: A week of love-inspired posts starts with this account of the black cowboy, Pullman porter, and celebrated autobiographer.

February 14: Love in Color: On national narratives and images of interracial relationships.

February 15: Love, Puritan Style: On John Winthrop's Arbella sermon and Puritan ideals of love, charity, and community.

February 16: Remembering Yasuhiro Ishimoto: A tribute to a Japanese American photographer about whose story, generally and for this American Studier specifically, there's a lot to love.

February 17: Love Lessons: A Valentine's-inspired tribute to books, films, and people this American Studier loves!

February 18-19: Tim McCaffrey's Guest Post: My latest guest post, on Jackie Robinson's World War II service and activism.

February 20: Precedents Day: My suggestion on how to make this national holiday into a more meaningful remembrance of our leaders and histories.

February 21: The Big Easy and Friends: A Mardi Gras-inspired tribute to cities and the American Studies lessons I have learned from them.

February 22: Chinatown and Los Angeles: The city series continues, with a post on Polanski's film and the complex histories and stories of LA.

February 23: Images of Charleston: The city series heads east, to analyze three distinct but interconnected images of this South Carolina port.

February 24: Detroit Connections: The series moves to the Motor City, to analyze three distinct historical and cultural connections for a 1960s revolutionary movement.

February 25-26: Cities of Hope?: Philadelphia, Sayles, Springsteen, and narratives of decline and renewal in late 20th and early 21st century American cities.

February 27: 1848: The leap year series begins with three revolutionary 1848 moments and the histories to which they connect.

February 28: 1884: The next leap year post examines new cultural and social presences in 1884.

Hope you've enjoyed February here as much as I have! Next leap year post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any topics or areas you'd like to see in the blog in the months ahead?

2/29 Memory Day nominee: Dee Brown, whose best-selling, tragic, and completely compelling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970) exemplifies the very best that revisionist history, narrative history, and quite simply American history writing, scholarship, and study can be.[image error]

February 28, 2012: 1884

[To celebrate Leap Day, this week I'll be American Studying some particularly interesting leap years. This is the second in the series.]

A year that welcomed a number of hugely important new presences on the American cultural and social landscape.

Even if you don't agree with Mr. Hemingway that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn, … all American writing comes from that. There was nothing before," there's no question that Huck's opening sentence to us readers, which begins "You don't know about me without you have a read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," signaled a striking new voice in our literary tradition. Yet I believe that Huck has some competition for the most famous 1884 American novel: Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona might occupy less space in our national consciousness, but few other literary works (from any year or era) have created an entire region's tourist industry; and while the annual Ramona pageant might not reflect Jackson's activist political vision, her novel is every bit as socially complex and (at their best) progressive as Twain's.

In New York, two very different but equally significant American cultural icons debuted (in their own ways) in 1884. On August 5th, the cornerstone of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty was laid; a portion of the statue had (as my site's introductory picture reflects) been debuted at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, and the full statue would be dedicated in 1886, but the cornerstone marked the most important step along the way. Less than two months earlier and just a few miles away, the world's first gravity roller coaster had opened at Coney Island; Sunday School teacher and reformer LaMarcus Adna Thompson's coaster cost a nickel, traveled at 6 miles an hour across its 600 feet of track, and wed technological advancements to amusement in a genuinely new way. It's pretty difficult to imagine 21st century America without either Lady Liberty or roller coasters—the question of which cultural presence has influenced more American identities I've leave to the historians and pop culture studiers to duke out!

Perhaps the two most lasting and radical 1884 changes, however, had to do with time. At its May 1st national convention, the American Federation of Labor officially declared the eight-hour workday to be the standard for all working men and women; it would take many more decades of activism and protest for the eight-hour day to become the norm, but the May Day proclamation represented a hugely significant public step toward that shift. And at October's International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, convened by that most unlikely of presidents Chester Arthur, geographers and scientists from around the world adopted the Greenwich Prime Meridian, standardizing the world's measurement of time in a staggering new manner.

February recap tomorrow, next leap year on Thursday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Any suggestions for interesting years (leap or otherwise)?

2/28 Memory Day nominee: Frank Gehry, the award-winning and hugely influential Canadian American architect who radically redefined the concept of home and whose Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is perhaps the late 20th century's single most famous architectural achievement.[image error]

February 27, 2012: 1848

[To celebrate Leap Day, this week I'll be American Studying some particularly interesting leap years. This is the first in the series.]

Three revolutionary moments and the mid-19th century trends they can help us recognize and analyze.

1848 is internationally famous for its numerous European revolutions, which helped transform multiple nations and the arc of world history in general. Yet across the Atlantic, America witnessed its own revolutionary 1848 moments, events that would transform our own national histories and futures. The first happened in January at a California saw-mill belonging to one John Sutter; Sutter discovered gold on his property, launching the gold rush that would bring hundreds of thousands of new settlers into the state and region over the next decade. Less than a month later, on February 2nd, the US and Mexico finalized the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and Western land became that much more available and attractive for such migrations.

Across the continent, the year's most revolutionary East Coast event was more planned and much less chaotic, but certainly just as striking of a turning point. In July, a handful of dedicated women's rights activists, among them Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, for what became the first official Women's Rights Convention in American history. The attendees not only expressed and furthered their communal commitment to the cause, but drafted a document, the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, that echoed yet significant revised the Declaration of Independence in order to advance their arguments in favor of women's equality. In November, Samuel Gregory would open the New England Female Medical College in Boston, exemplifying the era's practical and social advancements for women as a result of these revolutionary efforts.

Perhaps the year's most subtle revolutionary moment likewise occurred in November, on two fronts. That year's presidential election, in which the Whig Zachary Taylor defeated the Democrat Lewis Cass, was the first in which all 30 states voted on the same day; moreover, the election results were shared and carried by a group of five major newspapers who had constituted themselves into a new organization, the Harbor News Association—or, colloquially but soon officially, the Associated Press. American politics, journalism, and society were being increasingly linked into an interconnected national entity—and, as the year's foundings of the Boston Public Library (the nation's first free municipal library) and the state public universities of Mississippi and Wisconsin-Madison indicated, that nation's literate and engaged population was concurrently increasing.

Next leap year tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any particularly rich or interesting years you'd highlight?

2/27 Memory Day nominees: A tie between John Steinbeck, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, regionalist, realist, and travel writer whose best novel remains one of the most significant works in American literary history; and N. Scott Momaday, the Kiowa American novelist, poet, and scholar whose Pulitzer-winning debut novel helped usher in a powerful new era in Native American literature.[image error]

February 25-26, 2012: Cities of Hope?

[This week's posts, following the lead of Tuesday's Mardi Gras-inspired celebration of New Orleans and friends, will take American Studies approaches to a few complex and interesting American cities. This is the fourth and final entry in the series.]

Case studies and cultural representations of the balance of decline and renewal, decay and revitalization, despair and hope, at the heart of late 20th and early 21st century American cities.

When I moved to Philadelphia in the fall of 2000 (to start my graduate studies), the city was poised on the razor's edge between decline and renewal. The city's new mayor, John Street, had campaigned and won the office on a platform of aggressively pushing back against what he termed "blight," the ongoing decay and destruction of many of the city's neighborhoods and communities. Over the next decade his Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI), coupled with downtown and historic district renovation projects and with ongoing gentrification of certain university neighborhoods, would indeed revitalize portions of the city. But in many others, such as the North Philly area within a couple blocks of my grad program at Temple University, the situation in 2012 seems little improved, if not indeed worse, than it did at the turn of the new millennium.

If Philadelphia's future remains uncertain, a formerly thriving city in neighboring New Jersey seems to exemplify what can happen if the process of urban decay is not arrested. Much has been written about the decline and fall of Newark, from historical accounts to great American novels; but perhaps the best representation of the city's experiences is in the fictionalized New Jersey city at the heart of John Sayles' amazing film City of Hope (1991) . I wrote at length about City, alongside my favorite Sayles (and American) film Lone Star (1995), in this early post ; here I would add that the film's climactic events for its two protagonists, Vincent Spano's construction worker Nick and Joe Morton's city councilor Wynn, highlight both the realities of the blight and the possibilities of renewal. Without getting into too many spoilers, I'll note that Nick is in worse shape and is hiding in an abandoned building (while the film's chorus, David Strathairn's homeless street person Asteroid, echoes "Help! We need help! In the building!"—cries that are not yet answered but do leave open the possibility of aid), while Wynn is leading a march of African American citizens to make their case to the mayor (who is holding an elite fundraiser) for attention and support.

And then there's Bruce (you didn't think I could write about New Jersey and not include Bruce, did you?). The last song on The Rising (2002), "My City of Ruins," became, for obvious reasons including Bruce's moving performance of it at a tribute event, indelibly associated with 9/11 and Ground Zero; but Springsteen wrote the song in 2000, inspired not by such a singular destruction but by the ongoing decline of his hometown, Asbury Park. Most of the song's lyrics capture different elements and images of that decline, from the metaphorical (the "blood red circle/on the cold dark ground") to the literal (the "young men on the corner/like scattered leaves"), the communal ("the boarded up windows/the empty streets") to the personal ("my soul is lost, my friend/Tell me how do I begin again?"). But in the song's closing verses, first its prayer for strength and then, particularly, the repeated "Come on, rise up" with which the song concludes, Bruce turns the eulogy for what has been lost into a call for renewal and revitalization, turns his city of ruins into, potentially but powerfully, a city of hope indeed.

A hope, and a call, I believe all Americans should share. More next week,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Any histories or texts about American cities you'd add to the mix?

2/25 Memory Day nominee: Chauncey Allen Goodrich, Professor of Rhetoric and Theology at Yale, benefactor and supporter of the university and of liberal education in America more generally, author of influential works on language and grammar, and, most significantly, Noah Webster's son-in-law and the editor of Webster's dictionary who helped extend and deepen that hugely important work.

2/26 Memory Day nominee: Johnny Cash, whose hugely productive and influential half-century musical and artistic career is deeply intertwined with numerous significant American moments, issues, and histories—and, of course, full of pitch-perfect classics and wonderful surprises.[image error]

February 24, 2012: Detroit Connections

[This week's posts, following the lead of Tuesday's Mardi Gras-inspired celebration of New Orleans and friends, will take American Studies approaches to a few complex and interesting American cities. This is the third in the series.]

How a unique 1960s activist organization connects to complex, longstanding American Studies narratives in the Motor City.

In early May 1968, a walkout and strike began at Dodge's Hamtramck assembly plant in Detroit. The efforts were the results of activism by a new labor organization in the city, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM); DRUM was created and constituted by African American activists and auto workers, and its equally Marxist- and Black Power-inspired worldview and manifestos critiqued management and the predominantly white United Auto Workers (UAW) in equal measure. Yet in its use of tactics such as wildcat strikes, picket lines, and elections for union executive boards, DRUM firmly located itself in the long histories of labor organizing in America and Detroit labor activism; moreover, one of DRUM's central leaders, Gordon Baker, was centrally connected to the UAW as well. Any analysis of DRUM's efforts and identity must begin with such multi-layered ties to organized labor.

At the same time, DRUM's 1968 origins cannot be separated from other late 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power histories in Detroit. From similarly new and revolutionary organizations such as the Afro-American Student Movement (founded in 1965) and the city's chapter of the Black Panther Party (1966), to the July 1967 riots that took over the city's streets and much of the nation's attention, Detroit was a flashpoint for much of the era's African American activism. Moreover, those 1960s organizations are likewise deeply interconnected with one of the city's and America's most longstanding revolutionary African American communities: the Nation of Islam. Founded in the 1930s by two residents of Detroit, Wallace Fard (who had emigrated to the US from Saudi Arabia) and Elijah Muhammad (who had been born Elijah Poole in Georgia and had come north during the Great Migration), the Nation was by the 1960s a powerful nationwide organization; yet no history of African American activism in Detroit can ignore this central presence in the city's racial and revolutionary communities.

For an American Studier, however, such historical, political, and social histories must be complemented by cultural ones—and it so happens that Detroit in the 1960s was also home to one of American popular culture's most significant new communities: Motown. Founded in 1959 by Barry Gordy, himself a former auto worker, Motown Records represented a truly singular presence on the American musical and cultural landscape—an organization that built on the many 1950s developments in American music and the concurrent boom in Detroit artists during those years, but that put such developments and successes in the hands of African Americans in a profoundly new way. Motown's goals were, of course, to achieve national popularity and sales, which could be seen as quite distinct from, and even opposed to, the more revolutionary purposes and efforts of DRUM and its peers; yet it's more accurate, to my mind, to call each of these organizations part of an interconnected web of African American activism and power in the city and nation over these tumultuous years.

Last city post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

2/24 Memory Day nominee: Winslow Homer, whose pioneering artistic career began during the Civil War, ended in the early 20th century, and along the way exemplified new, realistic, and deeply human engagements with social and natural places, worlds, and experiences.[image error]