Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 63

October 14-15, 2023: Vice President Studying: Kamala Harris

[50 yearsago this week, VicePresident Spiro Agnew resigned. That striking political moment was not onlypart of the deepeningWatergate scandal, but one of the few times when an American Vice Presidenthas made major news. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Agnew and othernoteworthy Veeps, leading up to this weekend post on our current VP!]

On acouple ways that the current Vice President represents real and meaningfulprogress.

First, oneof those openings where I ask you to read another piece of mine in lieu of afull paragraph here: in this case, an August2020 Saturday Evening PostConsidering History column inspired by Joe Biden’s selection of KamalaHarris as his running mate. Check it out and then come on back if you would!

Welcomeback! In the Conclusion of my book RedefiningAmerican Identity (2011) I made the case that Barack Obama might wellbe “the first American President” due to his multi-racial and cross-culturalheritage, a heritage that (myargument in that book went) is foundational to all of American history andidentity. While that is of course a symbolic and somewhat overstated (onpurpose) point, I’d stand by it, and would say much the same about the layersto Kamala Harris’s heritage and identity that I discussed in that 2020 column. Obviouslyshe is not defined by what happened to and with her paternal ancestors, evenless so than Obama is defined by his parents, so these are not really pointsabout the figures themselves, so much as about the American (and global)histories that are part of the figures’ heritages, and how important it is tofinally have leaders who overtly connect to those histories in ways we have notpreviously seen. Having such a leader in theVice Presidency isn’t entirely new (seriously, check out that story about aprior VP we should all better remember), but it’s a significant and inspiringstep nonetheless.

It’s notthe only such step that Harris represents, of course, and even a cross-culturalAmerica superfan like yours truly has to admit that there’s another layer toher representative status which is even more significant. Back in 2015, I madethe case in another column, this one for TalkingPoints Memo, that Walter Mondale’s choice of Geraldine Ferraro for his 1984 running matewas one of the most impressive and inspiring political moments in our history. Unfortunately(for so,so many reasons), Mondale and Ferraro did not win that election, and so wehad to wait nearly four decades more for our first woman Vice President. (Andare, even more frustratingly, still waiting for our first woman President, butthat’s another story for another post.) To anyone who might call that kind ofstep purely symbolic, I would respond (among other counter-arguments) that theVice Presidency has long been a symbolic position, whatever else it might have includedor meant, and it’s about damned time we have an occupant who symbolizes half ofthe country.

Next seriesstarts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Vice Presidents you’d highlight?

October 13, 2023: Vice President Studying: Dick Cheney’s Power

[50 yearsago this week, VicePresident Spiro Agnew resigned. That striking political moment was not onlypart of the deepeningWatergate scandal, but one of the few times when an American Vice Presidenthas made major news. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Agnew and other noteworthyVeeps, leading up a weekend post on our current VP!]

On a keyexplanation for a Vice President’s unprecedented power grabs.

By an interestingcoincidence, just before I began drafting this post, the prominent public historianKevin M.Kruse Tweeted (in response to a controversy about Mike Pence), “For two anda half centuries, the vice presidency has been widely regarded as a fairlyuseless office—even by the ones who’ve held it themselves.” I’m not a vicepresidential nor presidential historian (and neither is Kruse), so I’d alwaysdefer to those who have studied these figures, roles, and histories, with LindsayChervinsky’s The Cabinet (2020) agood starting point I’d say. But to my mind Kruse’s point is an accurate one—thatthe Vice Presidency, originally created in the Constitution/Framing as abizarre first-losersituation when it came to presidential elections, has over the centuries morphedinto a largely symbolic role, generally more relevant for elections (and whatVP nominees can bring tothe ticket) than for anything that the Vice President themselves will dowhile in office (other than those who have had to assume the presidencyunexpectedly, of course, which as Tuesday’s post on Andrew Johnson reflects canbe all too significant indeed).

There’sone recent and very notable exception to that trend, however: Richard “Dick”Cheney, who in his 8 years as George W.Bush’s Vice President wielded significantlymore power than any other VP (and by many accounts, including onefrom Bush’s own father and one presented in the recent dramatic film Vice (2019), more than the President himself). To gowith the general theme of the week’s posts, Cheney was also the subject of aparticularly bizarre Vice Presidential scandal, when heshot a man in the face during a February 2006 quail hunting trip and then prettymuch blamed the man (who seemed alltoo eager to take that blame) for the incident. But while that event isimpressively symbolic of narrativesof Cheney as a malevolent figure who consistently escaped any culpabilityfor his actions (narratives with which I would entirely agree, to be clear), it’simportant not to let it distract us from the far more significant story about Cheney:the way he grabbed far more power than any VP before or since, turning thatlargely symbolic office into a despotic one with destructive and tragic results(never more clearly than with theIraq War).

That powergrab was absolutely unprecedented (if not, as our most recent awful Oval Officeresident might say, unpresidented),but it didn’t come out of nowhere, and I would argue that a key origin pointfor Cheney’s embrace of unconstitutional powers links him closely to one ofyesterday’s subjects, the Nixon administration. There’s a famous photograph,included inthis article, of a very young Cheney shaking hands with President Nixon inthe Oval Office alongside Donald Rumsfeld (another powerful Bush administrationfigure and IraqWar instigator, natch). Nixon might not have been willing to grant his ownVP much power, but he was most definitely a believerin the Imperial Presidency, and indeed as that hyperlinked article argues ahugely influential step along the way toward presidential administrations withsecretive and dangerous levels of power. It was only a matter of time beforethe Imperial Presidency spawned (pun very much intended) an equally anddangerously Imperial Vice President like Dick Cheney.

Specialpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Vice Presidents you’d highlight?

October 12, 2023: Vice President Studying: John C. Calhoun and Spiro Agnew

[50 yearsago this week, VicePresident Spiro Agnew resigned. That striking political moment was not onlypart of the deepeningWatergate scandal, but one of the few times when an American Vice Presidenthas made major news. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Agnew and other noteworthyVeeps, leading up a weekend post on our current VP!]

On asignificant difference between the two VPs who resigned, and a linking thread.

When Agnewtendered his resignation, he became (and remains to this day) just the secondVice President ever to resign the office. The first, President Andrew Jackson’sfirst VicePresident John C. Calhoun (who had also served as President John QuincyAdams’ Vice President, making Calhoun the secondof two figures to date to serve as VP for two different Presidents),resigned in a significantly less consequential way: Jackson had already won asecond term in the 1832election with a new Vice Presidential nominee, Martin Van Buren; and soCalhoun was a lame-duck Vice President (not a phrase we often use, but anaccurate one in this case) when he resignedthe office in late 1832. He did so in order to replace outgoing SouthCarolina Senator RobertY. Hayne, who had resigned that position to become the state’s Governor; inthe resulting special election Calhoun was unanimously elected by the SouthCarolina legislature (as was the plan to which all these parties had apparentlyagreed) to fill Hayne’s Senate seat.

WhileCalhoun’s resignation itself was thus largely symbolic (and strategic vis-á-visthese other positions), the reasoning behind it was nonetheless quitesignificant, and represents a key distinction between Calhoun and Spiro Agnew. Toput it simply: Agnew resigned in large part because he was too closelyassociated with his President and akey scandal engulfing the administration (although the public explanationfor the resignation was a series of smallerdifferences between the two men, as well as Agnew’s ownprior bad behavior); while Calhoun resigned because of a scandal of his ownmaking that divided him from his President. That scandal was the South Carolinanullification debate that I wrote about in thisearly post and that was a hugely important step on the multi-decade movetoward secession (for which Calhounbecame a direct inspiration) and Civil War. With all due respect to Monday’ssubject and a close contender for this title, Aaron Burr, I’m pretty sure aVice President was never more overtly at odds with their President than Calhounwas with Jackson over nullification, and certainly Agnew and Nixon were neveranywhere close to so antagonistic.

Despitethose significant differences in their administration relationships andresignations, however, there’s at least one way in which I would link Calhounand Agnew (and through which both men foreshadowed certain key elements of thecontemporary American Right). Calhoun’s racist support for the system ofslavery (which he called “agood—a positive good”) led him to advance a mythic patriotic, blatantlywhite supremacist vision of American identity and history, one that as I arguein OfThee I Sing the Confederacy would later take up as a central foundingnarrative. In his critique of journalists who opposed the Vietnam War as “natteringnabobs of negativity” (among many other attacks, as that article traces), Agnewbecame one of the 20th century’s most overt proponents of a mythicpatriotic narrative, one in which critics of an administration and its policiesbecame nothing less than enemies of the state. A white supremacist vision ofthe nation and a narrative that critiques of America are treasonous are notidentical positions, but what they are, as I’ve arguedin many places for thelast few years, are two essential elements of mythic patriotism—a divisive anddestructive form that was embodied by both John C. Calhoun and Spiro Agnew.

LastVeepStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Vice Presidents you’d highlight?

October 11, 2023: Vice President Studying: Henry Wilson’s Book

[50 yearsago this week, VicePresident Spiro Agnew resigned. That striking political moment was not onlypart of the deepeningWatergate scandal, but one of the few times when an American Vice Presidenthas made major news. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Agnew and other noteworthyVeeps, leading up a weekend post on our current VP!]

How a vicepresidential publication helps us rethink an administration.

In a 2019New Year’s series on historical anniversaries, Idedicated a post to the thorny question of how we rememberUlysses S. Grant’s presidency, and more exactly how we acknowledge hisadministration’s significant failures while still highlighting some of itsgenuinely impressive and inspiring elements. Rather than repeat myself here,I’ll ask you to check out that post and then come on back here.

Welcomeback! Grant’s first Vice President, former Indiana Congressman and Speaker ofthe House Schuyler Colfax, declined to seek the office for a second time (atleast in part due to significantconflicts between him and Grant related to those ongoing scandals),and so Grant selected a new running mate for his 1872reelection campaign (and thus a new Vice President once Grant defeatedDemocratic nominee Horace Greeley and earned that second term): HenryWilson, a longtime Massachusetts Senator and leading member of the abolitionistRadical Republicans since before the Civil War. Wilson hadactively sought the Vice Presidential nomination in 1868, and so was poised tomake a real contribution to Grant’s second term and the period’s ongoingbattles over Reconstruction, among other issues. Unfortunately hesuffered a serious stroke in May 1873, just a few months after Grant’s secondinauguration, and although he stayed in office his health declined thereafteruntil he passed away after a second stroke in 1875.

Whilethose health issues likely led Wilson to be a less active contributor toGrant’s second term than he would have liked, another 1872 moment bothexemplifies his impressive voice and illustrates the stakes for thatadministration’s ongoing efforts. In the same year he won the Vice Presidency,Wilson published (with the prominent Boston publisher J.R. Osgood and Company) volumes1 and 2 of his magisterial The History of the Rise and Fall of the SlavePower in America, an important early scholarly effort to tracethe lead up to and events of the Civil War (volume 3 would be published afterhis death, in 1877). In an era when thepropagandistic efforts to reframe the Civil War (and related historiesof slavery and race) around whitesupremacist narratives were well underway, Wilson’s book offeredinstead an abolitionist account of slavery’s centrality to the war, theConfederacy, and (at least implicitly) Reconstruction’s ongoing debates andconflicts. That the soon-to-be Vice President of the U.S. wrote and publishedsuch a book reminds us that whatever its faults, Grant’s administration was fightingfor that abolitionist vision on a number of levels that we can and mustremember (and be inspired by) today.

NextVeepStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Vice Presidents you’d highlight?

October 10, 2023: Vice President Studying: Andrew Johnson’s Nomination

[50 yearsago this week, VicePresident Spiro Agnew resigned. That striking political moment was not onlypart of the deepeningWatergate scandal, but one of the few times when an American Vice Presidenthas made major news. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Agnew and other noteworthyVeeps, leading up a weekend post on our current VP!]

On one very goodand one very bad thing about the crucial wartime election.

I’ve bloggedbefore about the moment in which I’d argue (hyperbolically to be sure, butnot, I believe, without cause) that the Civil War and thus the fate of theAmerican future most clearly hung in the balance: the second day of the Battleof Gettysburg, and specifically Joshua Chamberlain and the20th Maine’s stand on Little Round Top. Even if I’m being tooextreme about that particular moment, it’s certainly fair to say that after Gettysburg theConfederacy stood very little chance of winning the war militarily. But onthe other hand, much remained uncertain and undetermined about the war’s finalstages, outcome, and aftermath, and no single moment more decisively impactedthose futures than the presidentialelection of 1864.

For a number ofreasons, President Lincoln’s ultimately decisive victory over Democraticchallenger (and former terrible Union general) GeorgeMcClellan was a very positive result. For one thing, despite the eventualsize of that victory (212 to 21 electoral votes, and a popular vote margin ofmore than 400,000), it was hardly a foregone conclusion: for much of 1864 thewar was going poorly enough that Lincoln’s chances, particularly when coupledwith JohnC. Frémont’s initial presence in the race as a third-partycandidate, seemed gloomy at best. And for another, related thing, hadMcClellan triumphed he almost certainly would have negotiateda peace with the Confederacy (that was his stated platform and plan) thatwould have made such outcomes as the1865 passage of the 13th-15th Amendments far moredifficult, if not indeed impossible.

So it’s a verygood thing that Lincoln won reelection. But in order to strengthen his chancesof doing so, Lincoln and the Republican Party did a very bad thing: nominating Andrew Johnson,Tennessee’s Military Governor and a lifelong Southern Democrat, as Lincoln’ssecond Vice President (replacing his first, former Maine Governor and longtimeRepublican HannibalHamlin). Perhaps Johnson helped assure that victory, although by electionday, with Frémont and his third party out of the race and the war going muchbetter, it’s doubtful that his contribution was required. Far more certain isthat, after Lincoln’s tragic assassination, the presidency of Andrew Johnsonwas one of the worst and most destructive in our nation’s history, culminatingboth in hisnear-impeachment (the first in American history) and, much worse, in a verydifferent vision of Reconstruction than whatLincoln had begun. It can be easy to overlook VP nominations, but Johnson’sproves just how significant that element of an election can become.

NextVeepStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Vice Presidents you’d highlight?

October 9, 2023: Vice President Studying: Aaron Burr’s Trial

[50 yearsago this week, VicePresident Spiro Agnew resigned. That striking political moment was not onlypart of the deepeningWatergate scandal, but one of the few times when an American Vice Presidenthas made major news. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Agnew and other noteworthyVeeps, leading up a weekend post on our current VP!]

On twodark sides to expansion that a Vice President’s trial helps us better remember.

In the summer of1807, former Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr was tried fortreason and high misdemeanor in a Virginia federal court, one presidedover by none other than Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. WhileBurr has become much better known over the last few years due to his centralrole in the life and (especially) death ofAlexander Hamilton, and while he lived a long and influentialAmerican life that included prominent roles in the Revolutionand Founding, this trial focused on by far the most striking and controversialpart of Burr’s story, what came to be known as the BurrConspiracy: his 1805-06 efforts (begun while he was still VP, natch) toraise an independent military force in the Western United States and either useit to establish a separate nation with himself as the leader or to invadeMexico (possibly to enact the same purpose of carving out a distinct territorythat he could rule). The uncertainties revealed by even that brief summary,however, along with other factors like the lack of reliable witnesses (otherthan one shady co-conspirator,James Wilkinson), led to an acquittal on both charges (despite President ThomasJefferson’s ardent and possibly unconstitutional attemptsto influence the outcome).

Thehistories around Burr’s conspiracy and trial, like all those in his incrediblycomplicated and compelling life, deserve their own specific attention andanalysis. But this unique moment nonetheless also reflects a couple broader andquite dark realities of expansion, both in that early 19th centuryperiod and throughout our history. For one thing, we often frame expansion (atleast in how it is presented in our educational texts and conversations)through the official mechanisms by which territory was added, whether treatieslike the one that began this week’s posts or financial transactions like the 1803Louisiana Purchase through which theJefferson Administration (with Burr as VP) acquired these Westernterritories from France. Yet while such measures did formally add new lands tothe expanding nation, the actual expansion of Americans (individually andcollectively) into those territories was far, far more messy and bloody. I’velong argued that the OklahomaLand Run of 1889, in which US settlers invaded that futurestate while it was still all Indian Territory, was a striking and illegalhistorical moment—yet one could just as easily see it as emblematic of thechaotic and brutal way that US expansion always took place on the ground.

Moreover,the seeming dichotomy between (yet clear interconnections of) Founding Fatherand Vice President Burr and treasonous conspirator Burr is also emblematic ofthe unsavory (or at the very least far from idealized) roles performed bycountless prominent Americans in the expansion process. Davy Crockett is aparticularly good example, a folk hero who had his own Walt Disney TV show yet onewho made hisname in wars against Native Americans and then a pre-Civil War rebellionin defense of slavery (all of which were also in service ofeventual US expansions, whether into the Southeast or Texas). But anotherexample is none other than George Washington, whose firstmilitary service (which led directly to all his futuremilitary and political roles) was in the French and Indian War, a conflictprecipitated by (if not at alllimited to) the expansion of English settlements into new territories. Hell,many of the Civil War US Colored Troops (one of my favorite Americancommunities) went on to serve with the post-war BuffaloSoldiers, regiments of all-Black cavalry that fought Native Americansthroughout the late 19th century “Indian Wars.” When it comes toexpansion, to quote my favorite line from my favorite depiction of that USCTcommunity, “ain’tnobody clean.”

NextVeepStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Vice Presidents you’d highlight?

October 7-8, 2023: LGBT Rights in 2023

[As we beginanother LGBT History Month,this week’s series has highlighted some important moments across Americanhistory in the fight for gay rights and equality. Leading up to this weekendpost on the current state of that ongoing battle!]

On one definitesign of progress, one frustrating regression, and a key battleground.

1)     Cultural Representations: In thisweekend post almost exactly five years ago, I highlighted a trio ofgroundbreaking late 1990s cultural representations of LGBT lives. Theycertainly reflected a changing zeitgeist, but unfortunately it was not changingthat fast nor that much—in a recent rewatch of Law & Order: Criminal Intent (what can I say, I’m a sucker for Vincent D’Onofrio’sBobby Goren, the 2nd bestTV detective of all time), I came upon a 2004 episode where thesolution (semi-SPOILERS) hinged upon two characters being gay and hiding thatfact from their employer (which would, one of the characters made clear, firethem if their sexuality were revealed). Which makes it quite striking that lessthan two decades later, I routinely see LGBT couples featured (withoutcommentary, as it should be) in TV commercials and other everyday media, asjust part of the fabric of culture and society. My teenage sons can’t reallyimagine a pop culture landscape where that wasn’t the case, and that’s a verygood thing.

2)     Educational Repressions: No area of progress canever be taken for granted, however, and if certain prominent forces have theirway future generations of teenagers will not be nearly as collectively aware ofthe presence of LGBT lives in their society. I’m thinking, of course, ofpolitical movements and laws like Florida’s“Don’t Say Gay,” a bill which requires educators to pretend that LGBT peoplequite simply do not exist (and which overtlybans books that feature gay lives in any form). As a public school studentin Virginia in the 1980s and early 1990s, that was largely my experience—I can’tremember a single reading nor lesson that featured LGBT lives, identities,stories, histories, etc. in any way (certainly not overtly, and probably noteven implicitly). Not at all coincidentally, there was not a single out LGBT studentat my high school during my time there, nor was I aware of meeting someone witha sexual orientation other than straight until I attended college. That’s therepressive and abusive world to which these bigots want to return us, andunfortunately they’re making progress.

3)     Legal Protections: Pop culture and education arethus two significant spaces in which to fight for continued and expandedrepresentation of LGBT Americans. But above and beyond them, and indeeddirectly informing those fights as well as many others, is the basic butcrucial fact that LGBT rights are protected under the Constitution, keyelements like the 14th Amendment, and related laws like the CivilRights Act. It’s those protections which advocates of so-called“religious liberty” seek to deny, which are at risk in the aftermathof the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision,which are absolutely being targeted by the anti-LGBT forces in our currentmoment (most blatantly in anti-translaws, but that’s without doubt just the tip of the iceberg). The ongoingfight for LGBT rights is of course a human rights battle, but it is also, andmost importantly for this blog and its author, a foundationally American one.

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

October 6, 2023: LGBT Histories: 1970s Advances

[As we beginanother LGBT History Month,a series highlighting some important moments across American history in thefight for gay rights and equality. Leading up to a weekend post on the currentstate of that ongoing battle!]

On three 1973moments that helped advance the movement in distinct but interconnected ways.

1)     Lambda Legal’s lawsuit: In 1971, NewYork City lawyer William Thom attempted to incorporate a nonprofit known asLambdaLegal, an organization that would be dedicated to addressing the legal,political, and social needs of LGBTQ Americans and their allies. His applicationwas denied on the grounds that the organization’s goals were “neitherbenevolent nor charitable,” but fortunately Thom and his allies did not backdown. They appealed the decision, and in 1973 the New York Court of Appealsruled in Lambda’s favor and the organization was officially incorporated as anonprofit, beginningoperations in October. Over the next four decades Lambda has provided vitallegal and social services to LGBTQ Americans around the country, and has playeda significant role in such landmark legal decisions as 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court ruling (which invalidated allremaining anti-sodomy laws in the US). All of which stems from this crucial1973 decision.

2)     PFLAG’s origins: On March 26th, 1973, Parentsand Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG)held its first official meeting, at Greenwich Village’s Metropolitan-Duane Methodist Church.PFLAG’s founder, JeanneManford, had over the prior year become the most prominent such parent, asthe beating of her gay activist son Morty had prompted her to join him in hisefforts and participate in the city’s 1972 Gay Pride march (holdinga sign that famously read “Parents of Gays Unite in Support for OurChildren”). From those personal and familial origin points sprang anorganization that was initially similarly intimate—that March meeting had about20 attendees, and for the next few years other such small groups began toemerge around the country—but that by 1982 had become substantive enough to be incorporated in California as anon-profit. PFLAG represented a significant advance in a number of ways,but I would especially emphasize the importance of an organization dedicatednot to LGBTQ Americans themselves, but rather to their loved ones and socialnetworks. This was another key step in recognizing the full social presence andparticipation of this American community.

3)     APA Small Steps: As this week’s posts haveconsistently highlighted, however, civil rights advances can’t and shouldn’t beseparated from concurrent questions of discrimination, prejudice, andoppression. I wrote on Wednesday about the American Psychiatric Association’sdiscriminatory 1953 definition ofhomosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance,” a prominent,frustratingly “scientific” example of such anti-gay prejudice. Two decadeslater, the APA finally removed that classification in 1973; in 1975 the AmericanPsychological Association agreed, publicly announcing that “homosexualityper se implies no impairment in judgment, reliability or general social andvocational capabilities, and mental health professionals should take the leadin removing the stigma of mental illness long associated with homosexualorientation.” These were small steps along the path toward inclusion, but theywere steps nonetheless, and ones that complement the advances illustrated andgained by groups like Lambda and PFLAG.

Special postthis weekend,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

October 5, 2023: LGBT Histories: Stonewall

[As we beginanother LGBT History Month,a series highlighting some important moments across American history in thefight for gay rights and equality. Leading up to a weekend post on the currentstate of that ongoing battle!]

On the significanceof violence for civil rights movements, and also of remembering beyond it.

I don’t want tooversimplify the many layers and threads to AvaDuVernay’s wonderful and important historicaldrama Selma (2014), but if I hadto identify one turning point scene in the film, it would be the stunning and painfulsequence when a young John Lewis and his fellow Civil Rights marchers arebrutally attacked and beaten by Alabama state troopers on the EdmundPettus Bridge. As the film presents this moment, it was the violencedirected against the nonviolent marchers—and more exactly the nationalawareness of that violence, as it was covered extensively ontelevision news as well as in many other media venues—that led tosignificant shifts in both public consciousness and President Lyndon Johnson’sown policies, among other effects. And moreover, the film presents thoseeffects are entirely purposeful and intended, as illustrated by an earlier scene whenMartin Luther King Jr. and his fellow Civil Rights leaders argue that suchviolent responses to nonviolent resistance are precisely what they’re hoping todraw out of Selma’s Sheriff Jim Clark and his racist ilk. The violence, DavidOyelowo’s King argues, is a painful but necessary and crucial step towardachieving the movement’s goals.

I don’t thinkthere’s any way to argue that either the June 28, 1969 violent policeraids on New York City’s Stonewall Inn or the subsequent nights of riotsin protest of those raids were purposeful or intended by the gay rightsmovement or their allies. Although the LGBT community in New York had facedovert and official discrimination for years, and although there had been asimilar police raid and riot at SanFrancisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria a few years earlier (in August 1966), theviolent police crackdown on the GreenwichVillage establishment Stonewall—the city’s most prominent gay bar and nightclub at the time—was nonetheless as unexpected as it was brutal. But from whatI can tell, the raid and riots—both the night of the raid and for a new nightsafter, LGBTNew Yorkers and their allies gathered at the scene to angrily protest thepolice brutality—achieved similar effects to the events on the Edmund PettusBridge: garnering significantnational attention and sympathy for the gays right movement and its causesand goals, and in the process fundamentallyshifting the conversations over this American civil rights issue andmovement. In their different yet parallel ways, then, both Selma and Stonewallillustrate the tragic but important role that violence can play in helping civilrights movement advance their causes.

Yet as much ofmy writing in this space (and in my online spaces overall) argues, collectivememories are always about emphasis, about what we particularly focus on andmake central to our shared narratives and conversations. And so we canrecognize and engage with the role of violence in a history like that of the StonewallUprising, but still focus our collective memories on different, under-remembered,and to my mind even more influential elements of that history. For example, thesix months after Stonewall saw the founding of a number of new and significantgay rights organizations and initiatives in New York: the GayLiberation Front (GLF), founded just days after Stonewall and the firstcivil rights organization to use “gay” in its name; threenewspapers, Gay, Come Out!, and Gay Power; and the Gay ActivistsAlliance, which complementedbut also diverged from the GLF and made clear that the gay rights movementin the city (and beyond) had multiple voices and communities. For anotherexample, on the one-year anniversary of the raid, June28, 1970, Gay Pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles, andChicago; these are considered the first such marches in America, and wouldbecome one of Stonewall’smost prominent and enduring legacies. The more we can remember andemphasize these effects to Stonewall, the more we can focus on how the gayrights movement truly advanced its causes and perspectives, in response to butalso far beyond the oppressive violence of the raid.

Last historytomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

October 4, 2023: LGBT Histories: 1950s Discriminations

[As we beginanother LGBT History Month,a series highlighting some important moments across American history in thefight for gay rights and equality. Leading up to a weekend post on the currentstate of that ongoing battle!]

On two horrific1950s decisions, and whether we can find light in such dark moments.

The longstandingand widely-accepted narrative of the 1950s as a particularly conservativeperiod in American society and culture has been challengedsomewhat by historians and commentators in recent years, and for goodreason: decades don’t tend to break down quite so cleanly into singularidentities. While of course such narratives are generally based on particularstarting points—such as American society’s return to a post-war status quo inthe ‘50s, especially when contrasted with the radical cultural, social, andpolitical changes that would come in the following decade—they also depend oneliding or minimizing all of the layersand contradictions that are present and significant in any moment. So whileit would be easy to see the 1950s as entirely opposed to any acceptance (or eventolerance) of homosexuality in American society, the truth, as historianshave long worked to remind us, is that many identitiesand communities flourished in the decade, despite various prominent formsof cultural conservatism or oppression.

Yet at the sametime, we can’t swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, minimizingthose oppressions and their striking and horrific effects. And the early 1950ssaw too particularly ugly official decisions that not only oppressed but quiteliterally attacked gay Americans. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Associationpublished the first edition of its seminal Diagnosticand Statistical Manual (DSM-I), and in it classified homosexuality as a“sociopathic personality disturbance”; that deeply offensive classificationwould be partlyrevised in 1973 but only fully removed in the 1980s, meaning that itspainful and destructive effects for gay Americans lasted for nearly three decades.And in April 1953, shortly after taking office for his first term as president,Dwight D. Eisenhower signed ExecutiveOrder 10450, which not only banned gay and lesbian federal employees butencouraged both private contractors and allied nations to fire their own suchgay employees; this horrific federal action led directly to the so-called LavenderScare, during which countless Americans were fired and persecuted duesolely to their perceived sexuality. Taken together, these two officialdecisions reflect an early 1950s institutional culture extremely andaggressively hostile toward gay Americans.

Rememberingthese horrific decisions and oppressions is important, not because they embodythe entirety of the decade but because they certainly illustrate a pervasiveset of attitudes (in the supposedly scientific community just as much as thebureaucratic one) toward gay Americans and their fitness as members of society.Moreover, such darker memories shouldn’t and don’t make it impossible to focusas well on the kinds of individual and communal progress on which thehistorians to whom I hyperlined in the first paragraph above (among many otherpioneering gay/queer studies scholars) have written. Indeed, recognizing someof the darkest sides to 1950s America for gay Americans makes the commitmentand courage of those Americans that much more apparent and admirable still. Inmy book on Historyand Hope in American Literature, I focused one chapter on the 1980sAIDS epidemic, and images of both those dark histories and of hard-won hope forgay Americans (and all Americans) through them. But the same could certainly besaid of these 1950s oppressions, and of the ways that gay Americans and theirallies fought for their rights and identities in the face of such horrificdecisions and hostilities.

Next historytomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?