Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 64

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?

October 3, 2023: LGBT Histories: Harvey Milk

[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 a key detailthat complicates the story of a gay rights leader’s tragic murder, and how theoverarching history holds in any case.

In November1977, HarveyMilk, running his third campaign for public office in San Francisco, waselected to a seat as City Supervisor, becoming the first openly gay electedofficial in California history (and oneof the first in American history as well). Milk’s rise paralleledin many ways the emergence of a vibrant and vocal gay and bisexualcommunity in San Francisco’s Castro Street district (an area that came to beknown as The Castro),and so as so often this individual leader’s story also helps us understandcollective and communal histories and experiences. Yet at the same time, wecan’t and shouldn’t discount the impressive individual ambition and courage ittook for Milk to run for elected office as an openly gay man in the 1970s. Thatcompelling individual story, along with a charismatic personality anda strong voice, are what made Milk such an iconic figure, and why culturaltexts such as Gus VanSant’s 2008 film Milk (starring Sean Penn) continue toengage with this unique and important American figure and story.

That story endedtragically only 10 months after Milk’s inauguration (30 years ago today) to theBoard of Supervisors, with his November1978 murder by former city supervisor Dan White. Given Milk’s iconic andground-breaking identity, it would be quite easy, if not inevitable, to imaginethat Milk was assassinated due to his identity as a gay man—and indeed, thathad always been my assumption about the murder and its motivations. But inlooking into Milk for this post, I learned that (at least as far as I can tell,and as always corrections or additions in comments are very welcome!) the murder was something quitedifferent: White had stepped aside from the Board in order to pursueopportunities in business, and when they failed and he attempted to return tothe Board, he was denied the ability to do so (on procedural grounds) by MayorGeorge Moscone; White then snuck a gun into City Hall and killed first Mosconeand then Milk, whom he apparently saw as having collaborated with Mosconeto keep him off the Board (and maintain a slim progressive majority in theprocess). Which is to say, the Moscone and Milk assassinations seem to be bestexplained by a combination of a disgruntled former coworker and politicalconflicts, none of which lessen the tragedy or horror but both of which aredistinct from Milk’s sexual identity and iconic status.

If that isindeed the case with Milk’s murder (and again, please offer any additional oralternative perspectives in comments, since I’m still learning about this topicas I always am here), then it’s important that we remember those details, so asnot to misrepresent what took place in this particular historical moment (norto shoehorn it falsely into a narrative about Milk’s groundbreaking work andlife). But at the same time, it’s also important that we not use this tragicend to Milk’s life to read back into or circumscribe that life and career morebroadly—that would be true even if he had been killed because of his sexuality,but it’s even more the case if the killing was unrelated to that part of hisidentity. That is, Milk’s charismatic and groundbreaking voice, his ambitionand courage, and the true significance of his electoral victory and year ofoffice-holding are the central elements of an iconic and important Americanlife and story, and remain key focal points on which our collective memories ofthe man and his moment should focus. Remembering with accuracy and nuance areimportant goals, but remembering our inspirational and ground-breaking figuresand histories are just as crucial, for the early gay rights movement as forevery part of American history.

Next historytomorrow,

Ben

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

October 2, 2023: LGBT Histories: The Society for Human Rights

[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!]

Three contextsfor the brief and frustrating yet important and inspiring history of America’s firstgay rights organization.

1)     Germany: The Society’s founder, Henry Gerber,immigrated to Chicago from Germany in 1913 at the age of 21; he enlisted in theUS army during WWI and ended up back in Germany, working as a printer for the AlliedArmy of Occupation between 1920 and 1923. While there he connected to thework of German physicianand sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and his Bundfür Menschenrechte (Association for Human Rights), a pioneeringorganization (linked to Hirschfeld’s work with a group known as the Scientific-HumanitarianCommittee) dedicated to both supporting gay communities and advocating forsexuality as a shared aspect of human identity. When Gerber returned to the USand became a postal worker in Chicago, he decided to create his own suchorganization, filing an application for a charter for a non-profit Societyfor Human Rights in December 1924. While the first world war is oftendescribed as a moment of new international (even global) conflict, and of theruptures that contributed to the rise of Modernism (among other effects),Gerber’s German influences (like his immigration story) illustrate the era’sand America’s concurrent possibilities for international connections andcollaborations.

2)     Comstock: As you might expect, Gerber and theSociety met with immediate and innumerable challenges. One of the mostsignificant, and certainly the most ironic given Gerber’s day job as a postalservice worker, was the Comstock Act(1873), which crimilinalized sending materials deemed “obscene” or “immoral”through the mail. Given that all gay-oriented publications (even those with noovert erotic elements) were deemed obscene until the Supreme Court’s decisionin One, Inc.v. Olesen (1958), the Society was not able to communicate via mail atall without violating the law; for example, while Gerber founded and edited twoissues of a newsletter, Friendshipand Freedom, he likely did not mail it to any members, and no extantcopies of it are known to have survived. Such social and legal challengesproved insurmountable, as in 1925 Gerber and other founding members werearrested; Gerberwould be tried in court three times before the charges against him weredismissed, and in the process he lost all his personal papers, all remainingissues of Friendship and Freedom, andall of his personal savings as well. While the Society served as an influenceand inspiration for later gay rights organizations, its own history wastragically short-lived and circumscribed.

3)     JohnT. Graves: That frustratingly quick end in no way minimizes the Society’ssignificance, of course, nor the many layers to its community and histories.One of the most compelling to this AmericanStudier is that of John T. Graves,an African American preacher in Chicago who signed the Society’s inaugurationpapers (along with his partner, a railroadworker named Ralph Ellsworth Booher) and served as the Society’s first andonly President. That’s about all of the information that I’ve been able tolearn about Graves as of this writing, but even those few tidbits present somany complicated and compelling layers: the intersection of race and religionwith this early gay rights organization and movement. As I detailed in thispost, BayardRustin is often seen as one of the first figures to bring those differentAmerican communities and histories together; but four decades earlier, JohnGraves apparently did so as well. Just one more reason to better remember andengage with the frustrating but fascinating history of the Society for HumanRights.

Next historytomorrow,

Ben

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

September 30-October 1, 2023: September 2023 Recap

[A Recapof the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

September4: Fall Semester Previews: Ethnic American Literature: For this semester’spreviews series I focused on ongoing challenges, starting with teaching EthnicAmerican lit & history in 2023.

September5: Fall Semester Previews: English Studies Capstone: The series continueswith how to frame and teach a future-focused class in a moment when the futureis so fraught.

September6: Fall Semester Previews: First-Year Writing I: Teaching writing in theage of ChatGPT, as the series previews on.

September7: Fall Semester Previews: American Lit Online: A continued challenge ofonline-only teaching, and one for which I’d love ideas and perspectives!

September8: Fall Semester Previews: Departmental Program Review: The seriesconcludes with ongoing departmental work for the year and why it matters somuch.

September9-10: Update on My Current Book Project: And speaking of ongoing work, asemi-update on and request for connections with my new book project.

September11: AmericanStudying The Rising: “Into the Fire” and “The Rising”: ASeptember 11th series on Springsteen’s amazing cultural response tothat tragedy starts with two complementary but also contrasting ways to seefirefighters and their families.

September12: AmericanStudying The Rising: “Paradise” and “Worlds Apart”: The seriescontinues with two very different ways that TheRising pushes past stereotypes of Muslims.

September13: AmericanStudying The Rising: “You’re Missing” and “Mary’s Place”: Apair of couplets that reflect two sides of loss and griefs, as the series riseson.

September14: AmericanStudying The Rising: “The Fuse” and “Let’s Be Friends (Skin toSkin)”: In response to a frustrating current controversy, two Bruce songsthat remind us of the vital role of cultural works about sex in challengingtimes.

September15: AmericanStudying The Rising: “My City of Ruins” and “Superman (It’s NotEasy)”: The series concludes with two accidentally resonant songs thathighlight how art can radically change meaning alongside unfolding histories.

September18: AmericanStudying the Panic of 1873: Two Fires: For the 150thanniversary of its starting point, a series on the Panic of 1873 kicks off withtwo disasters that helped set the stage for that crash.

September19: AmericanStudying the Panic of 1873: The Coinage Act: The seriescontinues with a controversial 1873 law and the causes and contingencies ofhistory.

September20: AmericanStudying the Panic of 1873: Two Panics: What was quite similarand what importantly distinct about two 19th century Panics, as theseries rolls on.

September21: AmericanStudying the Panic of 1873: The Railroad Strike: How a hugelyimportant national labor action was influenced by the Panic, and vice versa.

September22: AmericanStudying the Panic of 1873: Anti-Chinese Prejudice: The seriesconcludes with the Panic’s key role in three stages of the evolvinganti-Chinese movement.

September23-24: AmericanStudying the Panic of 1873: 2023 Connections: A specialweekend post on one overt and two more subtle (but perhaps even more important)echoes of the 1870s.

September25: Cultural Falls: Young Adult Lit: An autumn series on cultural images offalls kicks off with two young adult novels that fractured my innocencealongside that of their protagonists.

September26: Cultural Falls: American Pastoral: The series continues with PhilipRoth’s masterful historical novel which embodies both the extreme and thepoignant 60s losses of innocence.  

September27: Cultural Falls: The Body and Stand By Me: A novella and film adaptationthat, in their divergent portrayals of the loss of innocence, also reflect thecomplexities of adaptation, as the series falls on.

September28: Cultural Falls: Presumed Innocent: The legal thriller and filmadaptation that exemplify the multiple layers of revelations about innocenceand guilt in the best mystery fiction.

September29: Cultural Falls: “American Pie”: The series and month conclude with thestraightforward and subtler sides to the famous ballad about individual andcultural losses of innocence.

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

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

September 29, 2023: Cultural Falls: “American Pie”

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American cultural representationsof the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn!]

On the straightforward and subtler sides to a beloved ballad aboutindividual and cultural losses of innocence.

Like I imagine many teenage boys in the four decades since its release, Imemorized the lyrics to Don McLean’s “American Pie” (1971) during myhigh school years. Partly that had to do with one very particular moment in thesong, and just how much every teenage boy can associate with watching thatcertain someone dance with a certain someone else in the gym and knowing thatthe object of our affection is instead “in love with him”—and how much we thusall felt at times like “a lonely teenage bronckin’ buck.” But partly it seemsto me that McLean’s song captures and allegorizes a more general part ofteenage life, the life and death significance that we place on music,relationships, friendships, social status, all those potentially fleetingthings we care about and worry about and love and hate with such force.

As this piece on McLean’s official website indicates, McLean intended the song as a tribute both tohis own turbulent teenage years and to the even more turbulent American momentwith which they coincided—a moment that began (for McLean and in the song) withthe February 1959 death of Buddy Holly (among otherpopular artists) in a plane crash and wouldconclude a decade or so later with American society and culture in one of ourmost fractured states. His song thus became an anthem for two seeminglyunrelated but often conjoined narratives: “The Day the Music Died,” the story of one of the most tragic days in American cultural history; andthe decade-long loss of innocence that is often associated with the 1960s and all the decade’s tragedies andfissions. These aspects of McLean’s song are contained in every section: theFebruary 1959-set introduction, the increasingly allegorical verses, and thefar more straightforward chorus.

But there’s another, and to my mind far more ambiguous, side to that chorusand to McLean’s song. The question, to boil it down, is this: why do the chorusand song focus so fully on Buddy Holly, rather than (for example) on his fallenpeer Ritchie Valens? Holly is generally cited as far more influential in rock and roll history, but at the time of the crash he had only been prominent for a year and ahalf (since his first single, “That’ll be the Day” [1957]); Valens, whilefive years younger, was on a very similar trajectory, having recorded his first few hits in the year before thecrash. Moreover, while Holly’s sound paralleled that of contemporaries such as Bill Haley, Valens’ Latino American additions distinguished him from his rock and roll peers. So it’s difficult not tothink that an Anglo-centric vision of America has something to do with McLean’sassociation of “Miss American Pie” and “good old boys” with Holly rather thanValens—an association that, aided no doubt by McLean’s song (if complicated abit by the hit film La Bamba [1987]), American narratives too often continue to make.

September Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. Images of fall, or The Fall, that you’d highlight?

September 28, 2023: Cultural Falls: Presumed Innocent

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American cultural representationsof the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn!]

On the multiple layers of revelations built into the best mystery fiction(major SPOILER ALERT for those who haven’t read Scott Turow’s novel or seen theHarrison Ford film).

I’ve blogged frequently enough about mystery fiction (and films) to illustratejust how seriously I take the genre as art well worth our analytical time.There are lots of reasons why, but a prominent one would have to be just howmuch the genre, by its very nature, can teach us about society. That is, thedetective’s job, or at least a necessary corollary to his or her job, is tolearn about the world around him or her, whether specific (as in AgathaChristie’s town of St. Mary Mead or Ross MacDonald’s California) or broad (as in the mysteries of human nature with which Sherlock Holmes seems so frequently to grapple). And while it’s notimpossible for those deductive revelations to include inspiring lessons (aboutlove or courage in the face of threats, for example), the genre’s nature likewisemeans that most of the time the lessons entail literal falls from innocence,recognitions of the guilt not only in those who commit crimes but (much of thetime) in the world as a whole.

I know of few mystery novels that better exemplify those multi-layered,sobering revelations about the world than Scott Turow’s legal thriller Presumed Innocent (1987). Turow’s first-person narrator, prosecutor RustySabich, stands accused of killing the woman with whom he was having anextra-marital affair; the evidence against Rusty is overwhelming, and althoughhe is eventually acquitted, the cause is simply another level of guilt: Rustyand his lawyer discover that the case’s judge has been taking bribes, and usethe information as leverage to force an acquittal. Moreover, virtually everyother character in the novel is guilty of something significant as well; thecop who first investigates the case, for example, is a longtime friend ofRusty’s and illegally disposes of evidence in an (unsuccessful) attempt toshield Rusty from suspicion. Rusty’s story and world are so choked with guilt,so driven by it from start to finish, in fact, that the title begins to feelless like a legal concept and more like a sardonic social commentary.

Moreover (double SPOILER ALERT for this paragraph!), the novel’s finalrevelation adds two intimate and even more compelling falls from innocence tothe mix. In the closing pages, Rusty discovers evidence that makes clear thatthe murderer was his wife, who had uncovered the affair, confronted and killedthe mistress, and then tried to frame Rusty for the crime instead (going so faras to plant his semen at the scene of the crime). Even on its own terms, thisfall from innocence, connected as it is to the woman with whom he has spent hislife and has a family, is the novel’s most shocking and damning. But Rustychooses not to turn his wife in, and the reason is his recognition of thestory’s fundamental layer of guilt, its original sin, the fall from innocencethat started it all: his affair. Which is to say, the book’s ultimaterevelation is that its first-person narrator, its voice and perspective, and (asin almost any first-person book) its most intimate connection to its audience,is the most guilty party of all.

Last fall tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

September 27, 2023: Cultural Falls: The Body and Stand by Me

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American cultural representationsof the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn!]

On the novella that’s explicitly about the “fall from innocence,” and thefilm adaptation that’s less so.

In 1982, frustrated by his inability to publish works that weren’t part ofthe horror genre in which he had risen to fame, Stephen King decided to releasefour such novellas as one collection, Different Seasons, with each novella linked to one of the four seasons.The most famous, thanks to its cult classic film adaptation, is almost certainly thecollection’s first piece, Rita Hayworth andthe Shawshank Redemption (seasonalsubtitle: Hope Springs Eternal). Butnearly as well-known, thanks in large measure to its own popular filmadaptation Stand by Me (1986), is the collection’s third piece, The Body (seasonal subtitle: Fallfrom Innocence). (The collection’s summer novella, Apt Pupil: Summerof Corruption, has also been made intoa film, and is, in itsportrayal of a teenage boy corrupted by a former Nazi war criminal, a candidatefor both this week’s series and thisone on Nazis in America.)

On the surface, The Body and Stand by Me are almost identical: ineach forty-something novelist Gordie Lachance narrates the story of a teenageadventure with his three best friends, a trip that the four boys take afterhearing about a dead body out in the woods near their hometown. Moreover, eachends with (among other things) Gordie informing the audience that his best bestfriend, Chris Chambers, worked his way out of a poor and violent upbringing toreach college and law school, only to die in a random and tragic stabbing, adetail that certainly symbolizes the loss of childhood innocence as theprotagonists move into the often brutal and cold adult world. Yet the change intitle from the novella to the film illustrates a broader thematic shift: RobReiner’s movie is far more centrally concerned with the camaraderie and joys ofteenage friendship (its last line is “I never had any friends like the ones Ihad when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”, which appears in the middle ofKing’s book and is thus emphasized far more in the film); while King’s novelladepicts the world’s brutalities much more consistently, including a savagebeating that all four boys receive at the hands of an older brother and hisfriends.

Which is to say, at the risk of oversimplifying the two works, Reiner’sfilm is ultimately pretty nostalgic about the world of childhood, while King’s novella complicates and to my mindultimately rejects that kind of nostalgia. Concurrently, the two could be readas depicting the loss of innocence in very different ways: Reiner’s filmportraying it as a moment of genuine shift, from one kind of life and world toanother; and King’s as more of a realization about the darkness of the world wehave always inhabited, even as young people. I think there’s a place in ournarratives and images for both stories, and that they complement each othernicely; but I also think that King’s story is a bit truer to the world of youngadulthood, which while certainly free of various adult responsibilities andpressures can still be (as the Knowles and Cormier books from Monday’s postillustrate) as fraught and perilous as the darkest realities of adult life.

Next fall tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

September 26, 2023: Cultural Falls: American Pastoral

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American cultural representationsof the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn!]

On a novel with over-the-top moments that practically scream “loss ofinnocence,” and the quieter scene that much more potently captures it.

To follow up the main idea from yesterday’s post, I experienced a verydifferent kind of teenage literary loss of innocence when I decided to readPhilip Roth’s Portnoy’sComplaint (1969) for pleasure in early high school(what can I say, I was a nerd and the son of an English professor to boot). Ican still quite distinctly remember arriving at Chapter 2, “Whacking Off,” andencountering for the first time just exactly how far Roth is willing to go—howobscene, how graphic, how flagrantly over-the-top. For reasons not quite knownto me, in my second semester at Fitchburg State I chose to put Portnoy on the syllabus of ajunior-level seminar on “Major American Authors of the 20thCentury,” and got to see 25 undergrads—24 women, by chance—having their ownsuch encounters with Roth, the novel, and that chapter in particular. Let’sjust say that it wasn’t just me.

Roth’s late masterpiece American Pastoral (1997) is a far more realistic and restrained work than Portnoy, but nonetheless Roth includes acouple of distinctly Roth-ian over-the-top scenes, both symbolizing quiteovertly his novel’s overall themes of the loss of innocence that accompanied the late 60s and early 70s in American culture andsociety. In the first, the novel’s now middle-aged protagonist, Swede Levov,meets with a seemingly innocent young women to try to learn the whereabouts ofhis missing daughter Merry; the woman turns out instead to be a brazen andcynical 60s radical, and she meets the Swede naked, graphically exposing andprobing herself in front of him (while daring him to, in essence, rape her). Inthe second, the tour-de-force set piece with which Roth concludes the novel, afamily dinner full of shocking revelations and betrayals is set against thebackdrop of the televised Watergate hearings, and culminates with an insanedrunken woman stabbing an elderly man in the head with her fork.

These scenes are as surprising and shocking as intended, and I suppose inthat way they make Roth’s point. But if he intends the theme of the loss ofinnocence to be tragic as well as disturbing and comic (which those two scenesare, respectively), then I would point a far quieter and to my mind far morepotent scene. In it, the Swede finally finds Merry and sees her again, for theonly time between her teenage disappearance (after she bombs a local postoffice in political protest and kills an innocent bystander) and his own laterdeath. He asks a few questions, but mostly what he does is listen (to her storiesof all the horrors she has experienced in the years since the bombing) andobserve (her literally fading life as a converted Jainist, one for whomany contact with the world is destructive and so self-deprivation and-starvation comprises the only meaningful future). As a parent, I can imaginenothing more shattering hearing and seeing such things from one of mychildren—and in the Swede’s quiet horror and sadness, Roth captures a far more powerfuland chilling loss of innocence.

Next fall tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

September 25, 2023: Cultural Falls: Young Adult Lit

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American cultural representationsof the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn!]

On two iconic YA novels that fractured my innocence right alongside that oftheir characters.

The early teenage years—those of late middle school into the beginning ofhigh school—seem to resonate particularly well with the idea of a loss ofinnocence. I’m sure that kids who grow up in far more difficult situations thanI did, or who have to deal with loss at a young age, or otherwise areconfronted with the world’s darker realities experience the shift from innocence to experience, naiveté to maturity, earlier. But even those of us who make it throughchildhood unscathed are going to come up against the harsher sides to life atsome point, and ages 12-15 seems like a pretty common such milestone. I saythat partly as a kid who was badly hazed by his cross-country teammates duringhis freshman year of high school—but also partly the one who read John Knowles’A Separate Peace (1959) and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974) and Beyond theChocolate War (1985) in 8thgrade.

I’d be lying if I said I remember much at all of the three books—that’smore than 30 years, and a whole lot of books, under the bridge. But what I doremember are a couple of specific and very dark moments, of literal andsymbolic falls: the seemingly accidental fall that Knowles’ protagonist Genepurposefully causes his friend Finny to take, a fall that eventually leads toFinny’s death (among other destructive effects); and a profoundly disturbingsuicide scene in Cormier’s sequel, one that locates readers in the perspectiveof a young student leaping to his death after being ostracized and abused forhis homosexuality by his peers and even a teacher. Obviously those weren’t thefirst literary deaths I had encountered—in 6th grade English I readAgatha Christie’s Ten LittleIndians/And Then There Were None (1939), forcrying out loud!—but they might have been the first in which kids my own agewere killed, at least in such purposeful and brutal ways (ie, not theaccidental drowning in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge toTerabithia [1977], traumatic asthat was for this young reader).

Perhaps it was that sense of proximity and (in a way) threat to myself thatled these particular moments, and the novels in which they occur, to hit me ashard as they did. Perhaps it was that all three books are deeply concerned withwhat it means to be a teenage boy, in some of the better but (I would argue)mostly some of the worst senses. And perhaps it’s a tribute to theirinteresting and almost entirely implicit engagement with the wars during whichthey’re set—Knowles does have his characters engage with World War II at times, and especiallytoward the end of his novel; I don’t believe Cormier mentions Vietnam at all, certainly not atlength, but his titular war certainly gestures in that direction. War, afterall, has long been one of the most overt and catastrophic ways in which youngmen—and their societies—lose their innocence; in my reading of these young adultnovels and their effects on me, I was led to feel such effects far moreintimately than might otherwise have been the case.

Next fall tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

September 23-24, 2023: AmericanStudying the Panic of 1873: 2023 Connections

[On September20th, 1873, the New York Stock Exchange closed for tendays, a key moment in the developing economic crisis that came to be known as the Panicof 1873. So for the 150th anniversary of that moment this weekI’ve AmericanStudied a handful of Panic contexts, leading up to this weekendpost on 2023 echoes of those histories!]

On one overtand two subtle (but perhaps even more important) echoes of the 1870s.

1)     Downturn: As I’ve traced throughout the week’sposts, the Panic and subsequent crash of 1873 spawned many years of intenseeconomic downturn and depression. That era came to be known as the LongDepression, but we’ve had plenty longer since, including the recession thatfollowed the 2008 crash. There’s a lot about 2008 that feels eerily similar to1873, including the central role of speculation in creating the circumstancesfor both crashes. And just as (it seems to me) we’ve downplayed the 1870sdepression in our collective memories, making it harder to engage with thevarious contexts I’ve highlighted across this series, I’d argue that we haven’tyet fully grappled with how significant and lasting (perhaps even into our ownmoment, despite narrativesthat it ended in 2009) the post-2008 downturn has been. Neither was quitethe Great Depression, but that doesn’t mean these weren’t defining downturns intheir own right.

2)     Prejudice: One of the most fraught debates ofthe last decade in American politics and society has been whether “economicanxiety” or white supremacy lies at the root of Donald Trump’s 2016electoral victory and the broader Trump/MAGA movement. But I would argue that the1870s reveal quite strikingly that this is a false choice: that in times ofeconomic downturn, white supremacist prejudice and hate toward Americans ofcolor and other minorities simply gain significantly greater purchase over fartoo many Americans (not that it’s ever far from us, but nonetheless that itbecomes even more dominant in these moments). The anti-Chinese Americanmovement had been present before the Panic of 1873 (see the 1871Los Angeles Chinatown Massacre for one telling piece of evidence), but I honestlydon’t know if it would have reached the level of national prominence requiredto produce the Chinese Exclusion Act without the decade’s economic crisis.

3)     Labor: As I wrote in Thursday’s post, I don’tbelieve there’s nearly enough connection drawn (including by me until I wasresearching this week’s series) between the first genuinely national laboraction, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and the Panic of 1873 and itsaftermaths. There would be various important effects of thinking through thoseinterconnected histories, but an important one would be to recognize the influentialand inspiring role that organized labor can play in responding to economiccrises and offering workers and all Americans an alternative vision ofsolidarity and community. Which makes it anything but a coincidence that we’rein the midst of the most significantseries of labor actions that the nation has seen in a long time, if notindeed since the late 19th century. Given the hugely meaningful successesand progress which that late 19th century labor movement achieved,it’s fair to say that this 2023 echo offers some real hope amidst so many morepainful such parallels.

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?