Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 61

November 10, 2023: 13 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: #ScholarSunday Threads in 2020

[This weekAmericanStudier celebrates its 13th anniversary! For this year’sanniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of key moments and piecesin my development as an online public scholar, leading up to a special weekendtribute to some key influences on that evolving career!]

I’vewritten a good deal in different places about my Twitter #ScholarSundaythreads, including in introducing thisGoogle Doc thread of threads and in this 2022year-end piece for the great Clio & the Contemporary site. But I haven’ttalked too much here on the blog about these weekly Twitter threads (yes, Istill call it Twitter and always will), which are now well past the 150 mark andmark (alongside yesterday’s subject, my Considering History columns) mylongest-running online public scholarly commitment outside of the blog. Andthat’s what I want to stress about them here, as part of this series on keymoments in my evolving online public scholarly career: that while I have longtried to support other public scholars (such as in my role as a Scholars Strategy Network BostonChapter co-leader), creating these threads and becoming closely associatedwith them (as I believe I now have been, and happily so) has represented asignificant step forward in my role not just as an individual online publicscholar, but as a force for spreading that work overall. I’ve always intendedthis blog to be that too (hence my eternal emphasis on GuestPosts and Crowd-sourcedPosts), but the blog will always also have a core individual component,while the threads are 1000% about the community and solidarity and collectivework. I love that that’s become such a part of this stage of my evolving onlinepublic scholarly career, and here’s to the next baker’s dozen!

Specialtribute post this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Online writing or work of yours I can highlight and share?

November 9, 2023: 13 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: Saturday Evening Post in 2018

[This weekAmericanStudier celebrates its 13th anniversary! For this year’sanniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of key moments and piecesin my development as an online public scholar, leading up to a special weekendtribute to some key influences on that evolving career!]

Idedicated aweeklong series at the start of this year to the 5th anniversaryof my first Considering History column for the Saturday Evening Post, and would mostly ask you to check out thatweek’s blog posts to get a sense of why and how this longest-running onlinewriting gig (almost at the six-year mark now, and I plan to keep writing themas long as they’ll have me) has been so meaningful for me. One additional reasonthat I didn’t overtly discuss in that series, however, was that this has beenmy first truly dedicated column space, not just me contributing writing to anonline site/community but a column (Considering History) that is 100% mine,started with my first column, has only ever been written by me, etc. One of mystrongest arguments for everyone getting into some form of blogging (if theyhave any interest in public scholarship, that is) is that it reminds us thatonline public scholarship can be and for many us most definitely is a gig, aconsistent and defined area of work, not just one-off op-eds or other more haphazardversions. My blog is one key part of that gig for me of course, but ConsideringHistory has been a second, and one shared as part of a much broader communityand publication (one that can betraced back to Ben Franklin, no less!). That has really helped me see theselast half-dozen years as a new stage in my online public scholarly career, onethat emerged out of this space but has gone to surprising and wonderful places.

Lastanniversary reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Online writing or work of yours I can highlight and share?

November 8, 2023: 13 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: Talking Points Memo in 2014

[This weekAmericanStudier celebrates its 13th anniversary! For this year’sanniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of key moments and piecesin my development as an online public scholar, leading up to a special weekendtribute to some key influences on that evolving career!]

I wrote atlength inthis prior post about my first truly viral piece of online writing, a November2014 column for Talking Points Memo that garnered well north of 100,000views, became one of their ten most-readcolumns of the year, and launched an 18-month gig writing columns everycouple weeks for TPM. I don’t want to repeat the things I said in that priorpost, in which I tried to trace many layers to what made that moment such aturning point for me and my online public scholarly writing career, so here I’llhighlight one additional layer: reading and engaging with the comments. Forwhatever reason, my blog posts have almost never gotten comments (feel free tobreak the trend below, though!), and I’d say that’s true for many publicscholarly sites. But TPM columns get a ton of comments, including the mosttroll-y and the most thoughtful and everywhere in between. And I always made ita point to read every one and to respond to as many as deserved any kind ofresponse (and, yes, even to troll back the trolls on occasion), a process Istarted with that November 2014 column and which I consistently found at leastsomewhat meaningful (if always somewhat infuriating as well). Publicscholarship is, after all, about public engagement and public conversations,and I’ve really tried to be part of them always, in all ways, throughout this evolvingcareer.

Nextanniversary reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Online writing or work of yours I can highlight and share?

November 7, 2023: 13 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: The Historical Society in 2013

[This weekAmericanStudier celebrates its 13th anniversary! For this year’sanniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of key moments and piecesin my development as an online public scholar, leading up to a special weekendtribute to some key influences on that evolving career!]

In myfirst couple years of scholarly blogging, I had the chance toguest post on others’blogs on occasion, generally folks like RobVelella and WilliamKerrigan whose work I was fortunate enough to share in Guest Posts here aswell. I treasured each of those opportunities, but they didn’t feel distinctlydifferent from what I was already doing here. The first online writingopportunity that did feel more distinct came from The Historical Society, a collectivepublic scholarly website co-edited by Heather Cox Richardson. THS reached outto me in mid-2013 both to write a newpost on public scholarship and then to re-share a weeklongseries of mine on Newport, Rhode Island. Both of those opportunities—to writesomething new for a public scholarly online community, and to see my publicscholarly blogging appearing in such as space—significantly changed my sense ofmyself in these spaces and roles, and really helped me realize that I was becomingan online public scholar as well as helping to grow collective spaces for thatwork. I had the chance to do the same for a few other sites around the sametime, including Richardson’s next and even bigger venture, We’re History.But The Historical Society was really the first, and I can’t overstate howinfluential it was in helping me redefine myself and my work in these evolvingways.

Nextanniversary reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Online writing or work of yours I can highlight and share?

November 6, 2023: 13 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: 2010 Origins

[This weekAmericanStudier celebrates its 13th anniversary! For this year’sanniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of key moments and piecesin my development as an online public scholar, leading up to a special weekendtribute to some key influences on that evolving career!]

Fortechnological reasons that I quite frankly do not remember at all (13 years isa long time!), my introductory first blog post on W.E.B. Du Bois has sadly beenlost. But the first regular and full post, this onefrom exactly 13 years ago on the Wilmington Massacre and The Marrow of Tradition, is still there.A great deal has changed since that November 2010 origin point, both in myknowledge and analyses of that day’s specific subjects and in my voice andstyle as a public scholarly blogger (among many, many other things). But a lothas stayed remarkably similar, from a seemingly small but crucial thing likethe three-paragraph structure (not present in special posts like this week’sbut still my default for almost all posts) to my huge overarching goals ofadding to our collective memories in both nuanced and engaging ways. I honestlycan’t remember a time when this blog wasn’t a central part of my writing andwork and career, and given all that it has meant and opened up on all thoselevels—as the rest of the week’s posts will I hope illustrate—I also very muchdon’t want to. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this has been my mostdefining life’s work, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Nextanniversary reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Online writing or work of yours I can highlight and share?

November 3, 2023: Contested Elections: 2000

[75 yearsago this week, Dewey didn’t defeat Truman—but the 1948 election was close andcontested enough that onenewspaper famously reported he did. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that electionand a few other hotly contested ones (not including 2020, because itreally wasn’t), leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU alum andtalented young journalist who would never get it so wrong!]

On threefrustrating aftermaths of the most hotlycontested presidential election in our history.

1)     The climate crisis: It’s hard to remember exactlywhere our narratives stood in 2000, but I think it’s fair to say that Al Gore’s central rolein raising the alarm about climate change (or global warming, as it wasgenerally known then) was seen by many as at least slightly kooky, if notoutright silly, somewhat akin to the whole “AlGore invented the internet” conversations. As that hyperlinked articleargues, those latter critiques of Gore were pretty off-base—but not nearly asoff-base as any and all downplaying of his climate change activism. I don’tknow for sure what a Gore administration might have been able to do over thosefour or eight years to address the climate crisis, but I will always regret—andbelieve every one of us humans should regret—that we weren’t able to find out.

2)     The Supreme Court: No electoral aftereffectscould ever be as important as those, certainly not on a global scale. Butcloser to home, I would argue that the 2000 election, and more exactly thehugely and rightfully controversial Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision thatultimately decided said election, played a crucial role in shaping one of themost significant stories in 21st century American politics andsociety: the ever-more-overtly politicized presence of our highest court. As Iargued in this 2016 HuffPost piece, the Supreme Courthas always been political, and those origins and histories are important tokeep in mind. But nonetheless, the Court’s blatant and (to this AmericanStudier,among many others) unconstitutional intervention in a presidential electionmarked a decidedly more political role still, and at the very leastforeshadowed one of the single worst and most destructive court decisions inour history, CitizensUnited (2010).

3)     January 6th: Obviously—and Ido mean obviously—the November 2000 “BrooksBrothers riot” in Florida that sought to end the electoral recount there(and that most definitely did influence the Supreme Court’s ruling) was farfrom the first such expression of mass outrage and potential violence seekingto affect the outcome of an American election. But I nonetheless agree withthis excellent ChrisLehmann piece for The Nation thatthe 2000 riot was a direct predecessor to the January 6th, 2021insurrection, most especially in the ways that it demonstrated that far-rightrage and violence could dictate our national politics. Not sure any single factormore directly contributed to the rise and age of Trump, and I know that nosingle event better encapsulated those trends than did January 6th.One more reason to (as sarcastically as possible) thank the 2000 election.

SpecialGuest Post this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

November 2, 2023: Contested Elections: 1960

[75 yearsago this week, Dewey didn’t defeat Truman—but the 1948 election was close andcontested enough that onenewspaper famously reported he did. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that electionand a few other hotly contested ones (not including 2020, because itreally wasn’t), leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU alum andtalented young journalist who would never get it so wrong!]

On two clearand important factors in one of our closest elections ever, and onesignificantly more ambiguous but perhaps even more meaningful one.

1)     TV: I ended yesterday’s post on the 1948election with a comparison to the role of TV specifically and mass media moregenerally in1960, which is often seen as the first trulymodern election as a result of thatinfluence. As those three hyperlinked articles (and the many others I couldhave included) reflect, this is a factor that has been very thoroughlyexplored, and for good reason: it’s difficult to overstate how much TV and massmedia have shifted our politics, and continue to do so even in the age of theinternet (which is of course its own form of mass media). I don’t have a greatdeal to add to all those voices, but will say that I wrote a good bit in myrecent bookOf Thee I Sing about the “Camelot”mythos around the Kennedy administration as an exemplification ofcelebratory patriotism, and that whole narrative was deeply intertwined withKennedy’s boyish good looks and media-friendly charm.

2)     Johnson: Kennedy’s TV appearances (in bothsenses of the word) unquestionably influenced such narratives, and likelybrought folks out to vote as a result. But in American presidential electionsvoting matters more in a state-by-state way than an individual voter way, and tomy mind the single biggest influence on state voting patterns in the 1960election was Kennedy’s choicefor a running mate: Texas Senator and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B.Johnson. It’s not just that Johnson was a masterful party leader and politicalnegotiator, although those roles were never more crucial than in such a tightlycontested election. It’s also that the Dixiecrat revolt about which I wrote inyesterday’s post had only continued and deepened, and without a VP who couldtruly bring in Southern Democrats there’s no way Kennedy would have won the electoralvotes of the majority of the Southern states. Like Lincoln’sVP choice Andrew Johnson, similarly chosen for strategic reasons, this onealso became president himself due to a tragic assassination—but that’s a storyfor another post.

3)     Religion: The combination of Kennedy on TV andJohnson on the political landscape probably played the largest role in decidingthis very close election (and it seemspretty clear that fraud did not, despite the contemporaryand persistent arguments to the contrary). But throughout the campaign,there was a consistent debate which overshadowed either of those and any otherfactors: the questions surrounding Kennedy’s Catholicism. I wrote for my TalkingPoints Memo column back in 2015 about those debates, and won’t rehash thesame points here (although they’re worth remembering in an era when the majorityof our Supreme Court are devout Catholics, a clear reflection that thesenarratives have changed). Instead I’ll just note that whatever the effects ofthese religion debates on the election—and that’s a very complicated question,since Kennedy’s religion may at the same time have pushed some voters away andbrought in other new ones—they, and Kennedy’s significance as thefirst Roman Catholic President (and only one until ourcurrent administration), remind us that no election exists in a vacuum, andthat historic significance often goes far beyond the winners and losers in agiven year.

Lastcontested election tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

November 1, 2023: Contested Elections: 1948

[75 yearsago this week, Dewey didn’t defeat Truman—but the 1948 election was close andcontested enough that onenewspaper famously reported he did. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that electionand a few other hotly contested ones (not including 2020, because itreally wasn’t), leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU alum andtalented young journalist who would never get it so wrong!]

On a couple significantAmericanStudies stories beyond “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Don’t get mewrong, “Dewey Defeats Truman”was a unique historical moment, and the shot of a jubilant Truman holding acopy of that November 3rd ChicagoTribune is one of the more rightfully iconic 20th centuryphotographs. The moment also reminds us of just how much American newspapershave always been affiliated with partisan politics—the Tribune was a solidilyRepublican-leaning paper with no love lost for the incumbent Democrat, andits choice to allow veteran political analyst ArthurSears Henning’s electoral prediction to determine their next day’s frontpage (the paper went to press prior to the close of polls on the West coast)was no doubt due at least in part to editorial wishful thinking. It’s easy todecry the partisanship of contemporary newspapers and news media, but in truththat’s been part of their identity throughout American history.

But even if the Tribune had gotten its prediction right,the 1948 presidential election would still be a hugely significant one. For onething, there was South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and histhird-party run as a Dixiecrat (or, officially, States’ Rights Democrat). FewAmerican histories have been more influential than the long, gradualrealignment of politics, race, and region, a story that starts as far back asTuesday’s focal figures Lincoln and Johnson and extends rightup to our present moment. Yet despite that century and a half long arc, thesplintering of the Democratic Party at the1948 national convention represents a striking and singular moment, afulcrum on which those political and social realities permanently shifted. Therewere all sorts of complicating factors, not least Thurmond’sown secrets and hypocrises when it came to race—but at the broadest level,few election-year moments have echoed more dramatically than did the Dixiecratrevolt.

For anotherthing, both Truman and Dewey used the mass media in an unprecedented way in thecampaign’s closing weeks. The twocampaigns created short newsreel films that were played in movie theatersacross the country, reach an estimated 65 million filmgoers each week. Thefirst televised1960 debate between presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and RichardNixon is often described as the first nationalpolitical moment of the media age—or even as amoment that “changed the world”—and certainly its live broadcast to anational audience represented something new in American electoral politics. Butsince so much of politics in the media age has not been live, has insteadcomprised constructed and produced media images and narratives, it’s fair tosay that Truman’s and Dewey’s competing movies likewise foreshadowed a greatdeal of what was to come in the subsequent half-century and more of elections.

Nextcontested election tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

October 31, 2023: Contested Elections: 1824

[75 yearsago this week, Dewey didn’t defeat Truman—but the 1948 election was close andcontested enough that onenewspaper famously reported he did. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that electionand a few other hotly contested ones (not including 2020, because itreally wasn’t), leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU alum andtalented young journalist who would never get it so wrong!]

In yesterday’spost on the pivotal presidential election of 1800, I made the case for how thatprofoundly contested and controversial election very easily could have markedthe end of the nascent American experiment—and how it fortunately andimportantly did not. As I usually do when I start a post with references to anotherpost of mine, I’ll end this first paragraph here and ask you to check out thatpost (if you didn’t read it yesterday, of course) and then come on back.

Welcomeback! While that election of 1800 ended up reinforcing fundamental Americanideas like the peaceful and orderly transfer of political power, it’s certainlyfair to say that it also reveals just how fraught and fragile the electoralsystem was in that Early Republic period. A quarter-century later, another andeven more contested and controversial election, the presidentialelection of 1824, drove home that point and then some. Thatexcellent educational resource highlights the main elements to this scandalouselection: due to a variety of factors, the election came down to a group ofcandidates from the same political party, the Democratic-Republicans; one ofthem, Andrew Jackson, received a plurality (but not a majority) of both thepopular and electoral votes; but when the election was thus thrown to the Houseof Representatives (per theConstitution), another candidate, John Quincy Adams, was elected to the presidency,possibly due (in the “CorruptBargain” narrative advanced by Jackson and his supporters, atleast) to Adams’close relationship with Speaker of the House Henry Clay. Whateverprecisely took place in the House, that narrative became a defining one overthe next four years, contributing directly to Jackson’s successfulpresidential challenge in 1828.

It’s thatfinal note that I would say offers a potential and problematic warning forpolitics and elections in our own contemporary moment. I want to say this asclearly as I possibly can: the election of 1824 was unquestionablycontroversial, and even if it was on the up-and-up relied on a highly unusualand quite strange Constitutional quirk to decide the victor; the election of2020, on the other hand, was ultimately quite straightforward, with onecandidate receiving a clear majority of both the popular and electoral votes. Yetin the three years since that election, the losing candidate—one who I wouldargue bears a striking resemblanceto Andrew Jackson in some clear and disturbing ways (althoughthere are those historianswho disagree)—and his supporters have been just as consistent in advancingtheir own narrative of corruption and cheating and a fraudulent election andpresident that need challenging. Whatever did or didn’t happen in 1824, afterall, it was the next four years’ worth of “Corrupt Bargain” narratives thatreally influenced the 1828 election—making clear just how fully we have to pushback on our 2023 version of that narrative.

Nextcontested election tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

October 30, 2023: Contested Elections: 1800

[75 yearsago this week, Dewey didn’t defeat Truman—but the 1948 election was close andcontested enough that onenewspaper famously reported he did. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that electionand a few other hotly contested ones (not including 2020, because itreally wasn’t), leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU alum andtalented young journalist who would never get it so wrong!]

On the momentthat definitely changed things in post-Revolutionary America—but also,inspiringly, didn’t.

It’d be anoverstatement to say that the first decade of post-Constitution America wasdevoid of national or partisan divisions—this was the era of the Alien and Sedition Acts and their responses, after all; also of that little rebellion up in Pennsylvania—but I don’t think it’s inaccurate to see the first threepresidential terms (Washington’s two and John Adams’s one) as among the mostunified and non-controversial in our history. That’s true even though Adams’s Vice President was his chief rival in the 1796election, Thomas Jefferson; Jefferson hadgained the second-most electoral votes, which in the first constitutional modelmeant that he would serve as vice president (an idea that itself relfects astriking lack of expected controversy!). There were certainly two distinctparties as of that second administration (Adams’s Federalists and Jefferson’sRepublicans), and they had distinct perspectives on evolving nationalissues to be sure; but there doesn’t seemto be much evidence of significant partisan divisions between them in thatperiod.

To say thatthings changed with the presidential election of 1800 would be to drastically understate the case. Once againAdams and Jefferson were the chief contenders, now linked by the past fouryears of joint service but at the same time more overtly rivals because of thatprior election and its results; moreover, this time Jefferson’s running mate, Aaron Burr, was a far moreprominent and popular candidate in his own right. And this combination ofcomplex factors led to an outcome that was divisive and controversial onmultiple levels: Jefferson’s ticket handily defeated that of his boss, greatlyamplifying the partisan rancor between the men and parties; but at the sametime Burr received the same number of electoral votes as Jefferson, an unprecedented (then or since) tie between two Republicans that sent the election into thehands of the Federalist-controlled Congress. Although most Federalists opposedJefferson (for obvious reasons), through a murky and secretive process (onelikely influenced by Alexander Hamilton) Jefferson was ultimately chosen on the 36th ballot as the nation’s third president.

Four years later Burr shot Hamilton dead in the nation’s most famous duel, and it’s entirely fair to say that, inthe aftermath of this heated and controversial election, the nation could havesimilarly descended into conflict. But instead, Burr and Hamilton’s eventualfates notwithstanding, the better angels of our collective nature rose to theoccasion—Adams peacefully handed over the executive to Jefferson, all those who had supported Burr recognized the newadministration, and the parties continued to move forward as political but not social or destructive rivals. Ifand when the partisan divisions seem too deep and too wide, and frankly toomuch for me to contemplate, I try to remember the election of 1800; not becauseit went smoothly or was perfect (far from it), nor because the leaders in thatgeneration were any nobler or purer (ditto), but rather precisely because itwent horribly and was deeply messed-up and the leaders were as selfish andhuman as they always are, and yet somehow—as untested and raw as we were—wecame out on the other side. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll find a way to do the same.

Nextcontested election tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?