Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 70

July 26, 2023: Korean War Studying: Films

[On July 27th,1953 an armistice signed by President Eisenhower ended the KoreanWar. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that endpoint and other Koreanconflict contexts!]

On threefilms from just a three-year period that nonetheless reflect three stages ofKorean War cultural representation.

1)     Retreat, Hell! (1952): WorldWar II was unquestionably the first American military conflict which featured propagandafilms made and released while the war was ongoing. But it seems to me thatthe Korean War, shorter as it was, saw the release of even more Hollywood featurefilms, with morethan 20 released between 1951 and 1953. Every one is its own text and worthindividual analysis of course, but overall they clearly served as culturalpropaganda for the war effort, as illustrated with particular clarity by Retreat, Hell! U.S. forces had by thetime of this film’s February 1952 release indeed retreated backto the 38th Parallel after their initial invasion of North Korea—butfrom its title on, the film made the case for resisting or at least reversingthat retreat and continuing the offensive. Douglas MacArthur was no doubt afan!

2)     Cease Fire (1953): Asthis week’s series illustrates, the U.S. offensives did not continue and thewar did indeed end in July 1953 (or at least was permanently paused, as I notedon Monday). Released just a few months later, Cease Fire thus portrays the war’s final events and conflicts,reflecting quite strikingly how these cultural representations evolved inreal-time alongside the histories. But CeaseFire also features another, even more striking and pretty fraught innovation:it featured extensive footage of real soldiers and ammunition filmed onlocation in Korea, not stock or newsreel footage but new footage filmed for themovie itself. Long before the Gulf War’s evolution of the controversial conceptof “embeddedreporters,” here we have nothing short of an embedded film production,which I’d call an even more controversial concept!

3)     The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954): Illustrativeas those two films are of different stages and innovations of Korean Warfilmmaking, neither they nor any other of those 20-plus films released duringthe conflict have occupied much of a place in the cultural zeitgeist over the70 years since. The first Korean War film that has really endured is 1954’s Bridges—and while that’s unquestionablydue to its impressive pedigree (it was based on anovel by James Michener and stars William Holden, Grace Kelly, FredricMarch, and Mickey Rooney among others!), I would argue that it also reflectshow even a year of distance can allow films to serve as thoughtful historicalfiction, rather than immersive propaganda. Bridgeshas been described as a subtleanti-war film, and I’d say that’s exactly right—its portrayal of thedestructive effects of war on individual soldiers and their loves makes for anexcellent pairing with the even more famous WWII film TheBest Years of Our Lives (1946). All these films are worth remembering,but Bridges stands out for goodreason to be sure.

Next posttomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Any other Korean War contexts you’d highlight?

July 25, 2023: Korean War Studying: MacArthur and Truman

[On July 27th,1953 an armistice signed by President Eisenhower ended the KoreanWar. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that endpoint and other Koreanconflict contexts!]

On what significantlydifferentiates the war’s most prominent American leaders, and what links themnonetheless.

Last March,I wrote about the 80th anniversary of General Douglas MacArthur’sfamous departure from the Philippines in thispost. It provides important contexts for what I want to say in the remainderof this post, so please check that one out if you would and then come on back.

Welcomeback! As I detailed in that post, MacArthur had a longhistory of disobeying presidential orders by the time of the Korean War,which began with him in the role of SupremeCommander for the Allied Powers (in post-WWII Japan, but it transferredmore or less directly to Korea). But to my mind the division between him andPresident Harry Truman wasn’t simply about the chain of command, although thatwas the overt and understandable (and Constitutional) rationale for Trumanrelieving MacArthur of his position in April 1951. I would emphasizeinstead the stunningly reckless attitudes MacArthur took toward both China and (especially)theuse of nuclear weapons to achieve “total victory,” attitudes which ifpursued to their endpoint would almost certainly have resulted in the thirdWorld War that was always possible during the Cold War. While Truman’s descriptionof the Korean conflict as a“peace action” is certainly a complicated one, it does reflect his crucial unwillingness(particularly compared to his top general) to pursue total warfare.

That’s avital point, indeed quite possibly a world-saving one, and I don’t intend toundermine it with this third paragraph. But at the same time, it’s difficult toargue that Truman’s decision to involve the United States in the Koreanconflict at all wasn’t driven by his own belief that this was aproxy war against Communism, was part of larger Cold War conflicts with boththe Soviet Union and China. Because of the respective lengths of the conflictsand numbers of U.S. casualties and presence in popular consciousness and so on,I don’t think the Korean War has ever received anything close to the kinds ofcritiques that theVietnam War did, not in their own respective eras nor since. But this wasanother global conflict in which the United States did not have to be involved,and at least in part Truman involved the U.S. because of parallel perspectivesto those which motivated MacArthur. The drastic differences in their actionsand goals notwithstanding, those perspectives are a frustratingly shared partof these histories.  

Next posttomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Any other Korean War contexts you’d highlight?

July 24, 2023: Korean War Studying: The Armistice

[On July 27th,1953 an armistice signed by President Eisenhower ended the KoreanWar. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that endpoint and other Koreanconflict contexts!]

On whattook so long, what changed, and what lingers.

There area lot of things that are distinct about the Korean War from most other 20thcentury military conflicts (at least those that involved the United States),including the fact that it wasn’t officially a war at all: after North Koreainvaded South Korea inJune 1950 the United Nations (led by the U.S.) launcheda “police action” in response, and that’s what it remained throughout. Therespective sides also spent significantly longer trying to negotiate an end tothe conflict than they did simply fighting it: negotiations toward a possible peacetreaty began as early asJune 1951, just over a year into the conflict, but were not concluded untiltwo years later (as this week’s 70th anniversary series reflects).Although that two-year period has come to be known as the stalemate,brutal fighting certainly continued throughout, and indeed exacerbated the centralproblem with the negotiations: the question of whether and how POWs fromboth sides would be repatriated (many captured North Korean soldiers apparentlydid not want to return, for example).

Evolutionsof and eventual solutions in those negotiations undoubtedly played a role inhow and when the armistice was eventually signed. But so too did regime change,in two distinct but somewhat parallel ways. In March 1953, JosephStalin died of a stroke, and in the aftermath of that world-changing eventthe Soviet Union’s power players were far more interested in internal politicsand entirely uninterested in continuingto support China and North Korea in a distant conflict. In the UnitedStates, Dwight D. Eisenhower won the 1952presidential election, meaning not only that a Republican would be in officefor the first time since 1933 but also that one of the chief supporters of theKorean conflict (PresidentHarry Truman, on whom more tomorrow) was replaced by someone muchmore skeptical of whether and how it should continue. I don’t mean tosuggest in any way that a democratic election and a peaceful transfer of powerare at all comparable to the death of a dictatorial leader and the ensuingpower struggle. But both of these changes do reflect how much individualleaders can contribute to both a nation’s path and the course of internationalconflicts.

In anycase, after those years of negotiations the respective sides finally agreedupon and signed the KoreanArmistice Agreement in July 1953. Even then, however, this conflict wasdistinct from others—one of the key players, South Korean President SyngmanRhee, refusedto sign the armistice; another, the North Koreangovernment, claimed at the time and has continued to claim ever since that itwon the war; and there was never an actual peace treaty, meaning that theconflict remains officially suspended rather than definitively concluded. Whilethe first two details might be seen as semantics or political posturing, thethird is embodied in a very real way by the most overt result of the armistice:the fraught, contested, ladenwith landmines KoreanDemilitarized Zone (DMZ) which separates the two nations. To my mind, theDMZ is very much like the Berlin Wall, not simply in its separation of twohalves of a potentially unified nation and people, but also in its existence asan uneasy state of constant potential violence and conflict. The fact that itisn’t emphasized in the U.S. anywhere near as much as the Berlin Wall wasthroughout its existence reflects, I would argue, anti-Asian prejudice far morethan any particular distinction.

Next posttomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Any other Korean War contexts you’d highlight?

July 22-23, 2023: The 21st Century Women’s Movement

[July19-20 marks the 175thanniversary of the SenecaFalls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in thisweeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important earlyconventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ve AmericanStudied ahandful of contexts. Leading up to this weekend post on our 21stcentury movement!]

We allknow the myriad challenges facing American women in 2023, but fortunately wehave a phenomenal group of activists of all types helping fight them. Here are justa handful of them (add more in comments, please!):

1)     Terry O’Neill: The closestthing we have in the 21st century to the women’s rights conventionsof the 19th is organizations like the NationalOrganization for Women (NOW). Any one of NOW’s recent leaders would be wellworth highlighting in this slot, but I’m gonna go with O’Neill, theorganization’s president from 2009 to 2017. Anybody who got their start inpolitics fighting againstDavid Duke’s campaign for Louisiana Governor gets a gold start in my book,and O’Neill has also become a leadingvoice against transphobia, which it shouldn’t need saying is also a 21stcentury women’s rights issue (but too often seems to).

2)     JudyChicago: While this week’s series focused specifically on a social andpolitical event, the women’s rights movement has always been driven as much byartists and cultural figures as by political ones. For more than half acentury, one of America’s foremost feminist artists has been Judy Chicago,whose artinstallations in particular have traced many of the issues, debates, ideas,and identities at the movement’s heart acrossthose decades. The upcoming NewMuseum retrospective promises to capture much of what has made Chicago sucha key part of the women’s movement for so long.

3)     Roxane Gay:One of my favorite not-yet-written ideas for a column or post or whateveryagotwould be to put FannyFern, one of our greatest journalists and writers, in direct conversationwith the late 1840s & early 1850s women’s movement (of which she was anexact contemporary as she was first rising to strikingprominence). When it comes to 21st century journalists andwriters, none are more talented nor more interconnected with the women’smovement than Roxane Gay—and that’s despite (or really more related to) her callingone of her first books BadFeminist (2014). If historians and the world are around 150 years fromnow, they’ll be reading Gay alongside today’s movement just as much as I’d putFern alongside her era’s.

4)     JaneFonda: Most of the women involved in organizing the Seneca Falls conventioncontinued to be active in the movement for decades after, a reminder that anyone moment is part of a much longer continuum (for individuals and movementsalike). If anything, advances in medical care and other factors have allowedfolks not only to live longer on average than ever before (and certainly thanin the mid-19th century), but to remain hugely active as they do.And no one embodies that trend more than Jane Fonda, whose activism in her 80s—activismwhich has consistently beenon behalf of women’s rights, although not limitedto any one issue or angle to be sure—is as impressive as that of any 21stcentury figure.

5)     JacquelineWernimont: Obviously I was gonna include a public scholarly voice andactivist in this list, and I don’t know any who is doing more interesting andmeaningful women’s rights public scholarlywork (among many other subjects) than Wernimont. To cite just one particularlyinfluential example, her co-edited (with Elizabeth Losh) book Bodies ofInformation: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (2018)offers a vital model for how to link feminism, DH scholarship and work, theoryand practice, and more, reminding us that scholars and researchers have our ownrole to play in every social and political movement, including the 21stcentury women’s movement to be sure.

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 21, 2023: Seneca Falls Studying: The Historic Site’s Site

[July19-20 marks the 175thanniversary of the SenecaFalls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in thisweeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important earlyconventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy ahandful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21stcentury movement!]

On threeof the many interesting things you can find on the Women’s Rights National HistoricalPark’s website.

1)     The Pictures: One of my favorite things about NationalHistorical Park websites is the way they consistently use photogalleries to capture the kinds of artifacts and elements that mightotherwise only be accessible to in-person visitors to the sites. Of the manysuch photos on that page, my favorites are thosewhich present different angles and views of the statues in the VisitorCenter lobby exhibit The First Wave,including for example thisevocative close-up of the Frederick Douglass statue in that group. I’ve longargued that raising more statues to inclusive and inspiring historicalfigures is a key way to challenge our long history of problematic statues, andsince I haven’t yet had a chance to get to Seneca Falls, I loved seeing some ofthese statues through the website’s galleries.

2)     The Research: Historic sites aren’t justrepresentations of the past, of course; they are also repositories of the kindsof documents and evidence through which such representations have to beconstructed. That evidence might seem like something that really requires anin-person visit to encounter, but the Seneca Falls site offers an alternative:the Researchpage, where they present hyperlinked versions of a number of the documents(both historical and scholarly/analytical) out of which they’ve developed theirexhibits and interpretations. You could spend a whole day reading through allthose pieces, and I know I’m a deeply nerdy AmericanStudier but that soundslike a pretty darn good day to me.

3)     The Map: Those first two are things at thehistoric site that can also be included on the website; but there are alsothings that websites can do and offer more easily than an in-person site. Oneof my favorites on the Seneca Falls National Historical Park’s website is thisresource, located under the History & Culture: Stories tab. Manyscholars, among them myDad, are finding new and impressive ways to use digital maps to convey informationabout history, literature, and more; “The Erie Canal and the Network to Freedom”is a wonderful example of that trend, and something that really utilizes thedigital humanities potentials of a historic site’s site.

Contemporaryconnections this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 20, 2023: Seneca Falls Studying: Rochester

[July19-20 marks the 175thanniversary of the SenecaFalls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in thisweeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important earlyconventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy ahandful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21stcentury movement!]

On why thefollow-up convention was so important, and two of its more groundbreakingdetails.

In thatweeklong blog series hyperlinked in my intro above (and againhere, ‘cause why not?), I highlighted the October 1850 Women’s RightsConvention in Worcester, the first to bill itself as national and certainly animportant step into a more widespread movement. But when it comes to follow-upconventions to Seneca Falls, I’m not sure there could be a more significant onethan the August 2nd, 1848Women’s Rights Convention in Rochester. Taking place just two weeks afterand less than 50 miles away from Seneca Falls, the Rochester convention wasexplicitly defined as a “recovening” of the earlier one, and included forexample a formal approval of the Declaration of Rights. And I think thatinterconnected but sequential nature of the two conventions was cruciallyimportant—as I wrote in this week’s first post, the Seneca Falls Conventioncame about quite informally and haphazardly, and so the follow-up in Rochesterrepresented a vital reflection of the fact that this was indeed the start of a moreformal series and movement.

As you’dexpect, many of the same people who had organized and run the Seneca FallsConvention played similar roles in Rochester. But there was also a significantdifference in leadership: the Rochester Convention elected the prominent local activistand abolitionist Abigail Bushas its presiding officer. Bush was the first woman to preside over apublic meeting that featured men as well as women, and her election was thushugely controversial, with vocal opposition from fellow leaders like LucretiaMott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who“thought it a most hazardous experiment to have a woman President”). Bush laterrecognized both the toll and the stakes of her service, noting, “When Ifound that my labors were finished, my strength seemed to leave me and I criedlike a baby. But that ended the feeling with women that they must have a man topreside at their meetings.” Indeed, I’d say that this detail alone makes theRochester Convention as important as the Seneca Falls one, or at least again avital complement that also took the women’s rights movement forward in keyways.

Moreover,the Rochester Convention didn’t simply approve or continue the business fromSeneca Falls—it also featured new additions to the movement’s evolving anddeepening debates and platforms. Particularly striking was the convention’sattention to working women, both through an overt callfor equal pay for equal work and through the creationof a Women’s Protection Union in the city to investigate and address workingwomen’s circumstances and concerns. Speaking for myself, it’s far too easy tosee contemporary communities and movements like these women’s rightsconventions and the efforts of theLowell Mill Girls to organize and fight for their rights as entirelydistinct—while of course they were separate and unique in various ways, thesedetails and emphases from Rochester make clear that working women’s rightscould become part of the broader women’s movement, a hugely significant layerthat this follow-up convention added into the mix.

LastSeneca context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 19, 2023: Seneca Falls Studying: Douglass and Suffrage

[July19-20 marks the 175thanniversary of the SenecaFalls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in thisweeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important earlyconventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy ahandful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21stcentury movement!]

On threeways in which Frederick Douglass contributed significantly to the fight forwomen’s suffrage:

1)     Conventions and Communities: As I wroteyesterday, Douglass was akey participant in the Seneca Falls Convention, not only through hisattendance and support for the Declaration of Rights, but also (for example) inpushing other attendees to sign and support that document. Two years later, hewas also aprominent attendee and participant at the first national Women’s RightsConvention, in Worcester, Massachusetts. For these conventions to truly launchboth an overall national women’s rights movement and a specific fight forwomen’s suffrage, a number of things had to happen, but I would argue that twoimportant steps were the presence of men alongside women and theinterconnections with other social movements like abolitionism. Douglass wasnot the only presence to contribute to both of those trends, but he was in 1848and 1850 and certainly remained for the rest of his life a vital voice forwomen’s rights and suffrage on all those levels.

2)     Amendments by Addition: It’s become afrustratingly familiar fact that the women’s rights and abolitionist(turned Black rights) movements split almost immediately after the Civil War,and a principal cause was the fight for the 15th Amendment and Blackmale suffrage (which Seneca Falls organizer Elizabeth Cady Stanton latercharacterized by writing, “Surely there is no greater monopoly than that ofall men in denying to all women a voice in the laws they are compelled to obey”).Frederick Douglass supportedthat fight and amendment, as well he should have—but he also was at thattime and for the remaining decades of his life anardent advocate of an additional amendment for women’s suffrage. To my mindthat additive philosophy—seeing these amendments and fights not as acompetition or even a hierarchy but as complementary and connected elements ofa broader battle for rights, justice, and equality—was absolutely the rightcall, and it was one that Douglass continued to model despite the era’sdivisions.

3)     Literally Lifelong Activisms: Right up untilthe very end of his long life Douglass remained a key voice in and for thatfight. He did so most publicly through recollections of the Seneca FallsConvention, in anApril 1888 speech he delivered to the International Council of Women inWashington, DC—the speech where he famously and importantly argued that “noman, however gifted with thought and speech, can voice the wrongs and presentthe demands of women with the skill and effect, with the power and authority ofwoman herself.” But his activism continued until literally the last day of hislife—on February 20th, 1895 he took part in a strategymeeting for the women’s rights movement with Susan B. Anthony and others,and diedat home that evening of a stroke. Don’t know that any detail could bettercapture a truly lifelong commitment to a cause than that!

NextSeneca context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 18, 2023: Seneca Falls Studying: The Declaration

[July19-20 marks the 175thanniversary of the SenecaFalls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in thisweeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important earlyconventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy ahandful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21stcentury movement!]

On oneobviously important choice in a historic document, and one subtler one.

I’m quitesure that the Seneca Falls Convention would have had a lasting impact no matterwhat, not least because (as I’ll write about later in the week) it immediatelyspawned other such gatherings both near and far. But ElizabethCady Stanton, who as I wrote yesterday was one of the convention’s initialoriginators and organizers, took an extra step to make sure its defining ideasand conversations would endure, drafting a “Declarationof Sentiments” (also known as the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments”)that would be endorsed and signed by 100convention attendees (roughly a third of the group). As Frederick Douglass,who signed and also helped garner that widespread convention support for theDeclaration (and about whom I’ll write in tomorrow’s post), wrotein his North Star newspaper acouple weeks after the convention’s close, this document would become “thegrand movement for attaining the civil, social, political, and religious rightsof women.”

Stanton’smost famous choice and strategy in the Declaration is implied in its title: shemodeledher text quite closely on the U.S. Declaration of Independence. That’sespecially true in her opening paragraphs, which include such overtly parallel butimportantly revised lines as “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that allmen and women are created equal.” But the “Sentiments” section, for anotherexample, likewise closely parallels the list of “oppressions” with which theDeclaration of Independence charges the King of England, in Stanton’s textdescribing what “he” has done to “her.” This choice of Stanton’s is one of themost impressive in that long list of American texts and voices that havereused  and yet revised the works andideas of the Founding, and I would argue that it was particularly important asa way to link this 1848 Convention to the 1776 Continental Congress thatproduced the Declaration of Independence. I’ve written of AbigailAdams and other late 18th century American women writers thatthey were truly Revolutionary, but it’s fair to say that they often operatedindividually; the 1848 Convention was an overtly communal effort and Stantonhelped put it in direct conversation with the similarly communal framing of theAmerican Revolution and Founding.

Yet ifStanton’s Declaration were simply a parallel to the original, I don’t know thatit would have had that staying power that it did and has. It had to and didstand on its own as well, and the place it does that most powerfully is in the conclusionwhere she lays out “the great work before us…We shall use every instrumentalitywithin our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulatetracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlistthe pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will befollowed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.” I’mnot sure I’ve ever seen a statement of principles that includes such anextended and comprehensive (and quite practical) plan for how to achieve thosegoals, and again the immediate and consistent existence of additional suchConventions (for example) suggests that the practicality did indeed help putthe principles into practice. Inspired by the past but directly imagining andhelping produce the future—sounds like a recipe for a great text to me!

NextSeneca context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 17, 2023: Seneca Falls Studying: Quaker Communities

[July19-20 marks the 175thanniversary of the SenecaFalls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in thisweeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other importantearly conventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’llAmericanStudy a handful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21stcentury movement!]

On both a delightfullyspecific and an important broad layer to the Convention’s origins.

As Iimagine is the case with many significant historical moments and events, theSeneca Falls Convention came about quite haphazardly. A large number of Quakers(members of the Religious Society of Friends, formally) had made New York’s SenecaCounty (and specifically the county capital of Waterloo) their home overthe preceding half-century, including influential Quaker families (andabolitionists) like Thomasand Mary Ann M’Clintock and Richardand Jane Hunt. Perhaps no American Quaker was more famous in that era than LucretiaCoffin Mott, the abolitionist and activist who had gained a reputation asone of the nation’s most fiery and eloquent orators. Mott’s sister MarthaCoffin Wright lived in nearby Auburn, New York, and in the summer of 1848Mott and herhusband James traveled to the area to visit with her sister and also tocontinue their activist work on a number of local levels: with the region’s sizeablecommunity of formerly enslaved people; at the Auburn StatePenitentiary where Mott lectured; and on the nearby Seneca CattaraugusReservation.

On Sunday,July 9th, Mott attended a local Quaker worship and then joined agroup of these women from the area—her sister Martha, Jane Hunt, Mary Ann M’Clintock,and her fellow activist (and the group’s only non-Quaker) ElizabethCady Stanton for tea at the Hunt home. The conversation apparently and unsurprisinglyturned to the frustrating and unnecessary challenges that faced these women aswomen, both in their activist work and in every other arena of their lives inmid-century American society. They decided to take advantage of Mott’s visit andprominence and to host a women’s rights convention, creating on the spot anannouncement that began “WOMAN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION—A Convention to discuss thesocial, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman” and that ran in the Seneca County Courier beginning onJuly 11th. Other regional and national periodicals like FrederickDouglass’ North Star picked up the advertisement as well,and despite the short notice the word spread and a fair number of attendeesmade it to Seneca Falls and its newly constructed WesleyanMethodist Chapel for the July 19-20 Convention.

I reallylove how informal and intimate that origin point was, and again I think it hasa lot to tell us about how history is very often made and shaped (too often by informalgatherings of the powerful and privileged, of course, whether in smoke-filledrooms or otherwise; but in this case something quite different and far moreinclusive). But it’s also far from coincidental that this was a gathering ofQuakers, held at a prominent Quaker family’s home after a Quaker worshipservice. Other than briefly inthis post on one of my very favorite American writers and voices, JohnWoolman, I don’t think I’ve engaged nearly enough in this space with theoversized (given the community’s numbers) and inspiringrole that Quakers have played in American activist and social movements andprogress. That certainly included both theabolitionist and the earlywomen’s rights movements, the combination of which truly definedconventions like Seneca Falls. I’m not sure any historical detail bettercaptures that foundational presence and influence than an afternoon tea atwhich a group of determined Quaker women launched a national movement!

NextSeneca context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

July 14, 2023: AmericanStudying Summer Jams: All Summer Long

[Now that we’rereally in the dog days of summer, a series on AmericanStudies contexts for someof our most enduring summertime songs. Add your responses or other summertime favoritesfor a crowd-sourced weekend bbq—I mean, post. Okay, both!]

On classic rock,pseudo-nostalgia, and the undeniable role of pop culture in our lives.

Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long” (2008)features—repeats as the opening two lines of its chorus, no less—one of theworst “rhyming” couplets in recent years: “And we were trying differentthings/And we were smoking funny things.” So it’s fair to say that I shouldn’tnecessarily subject the song’s lyrics, or any Kid Rock-penned words, to themost rigorous AmericanStudier analyses. But while “All Summer Long” doesn’tquite rise to Dylan-like lyrical complexity, the song does comprise aparticularly striking example of what I would call the pseudo-nostalgia oftenfound in the very concept of “classic rock”: in its title line, “Singing ‘SweetHome Alabama’ all summer long”; in its concurrent, repeated evocation of thevital role of “our favorite song” and “play[ing] some rock and roll” increating its idyllic teenage memories; and even musically, in its samples ofboth the Skynyrd songand (randomly) Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.”

So why does asong about, as the opening verse locates us, “1989” and “summertime in NorthernMichigan” make such defining use of a 1974 song by a Jacksonville, Florida band whilesampling a 1978 one by a Chicagosinger/songwriter? To my mind, these classic rock references link KidRock’s song to one by his fellow Michigander (and oft-cited musicalinfluence) Bob Seger, “OldTime Rock and Roll”; Seger’s song is perhaps the clearest single expressionof classic rock pseudo-nostalgia, the attitude that music used to be great andhas sadly fallen off, and thus that the best we can do in the present is playthat old time rock and roll. I call this attitude pseudo-nostalgia in partbecause of the blatant irony and even hypocrisy involved in denigratingcontemporary music and pop culture while contributing to them; and in partbecause it seems to me less interested in the past itself in any specific ormeaningful ways, and far more in the seeming authenticity or coolness that suchan attitude grants its holder in the present.

On the otherhand, I can’t claim to know what songs or artists Kid Rock and his teenagegirlfriend and friends played on the beaches of Northern Michigan in 1989—andin any case it would be hypocritical of me to critique their classic rockaffinities, given how much classic songs and albums by artists like Skynyrd, Seger,Tom Petty, Pink Floyd, and, of course, BruceSpringsteen meant to my own youthful life and identity. Indeed, I wouldargue that my generation was the first for whom the popular culture of ourparents’ generation was at least as meaningful and constitutive of ourperspectives and identities as that of our own—a phenomenon that has only beenamplified since, thanks in large part to the ways in which YouTube and the restof the digital world have preserved so much of 20th century popculture into the early 21st century. Our 21st centurysummer playlists are indeed as likely to feature “Sweet Home Alabama” as “AllSummer Long,” not just in a nostalgic way but also and more importantly as avital part of our present culture and world. Works for me!

Crowd-sourcedbbq tomorrow,

Ben

PS. So one morechance to bring some food to the bbq: thoughts on this song? Other summertimefavorites you’d share?