Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 92

November 5-6, 2022: Anya Jabour’s Guest Post on Legionnaire’s Disease

[Anya Jabour is Regents Professor of History at the University of Montana. She’s the author of a number of American Studies books, articles, & projects, including the great Sophonisba Breckinridge: Championing Women’s Activism in Modern America (2019).]

Hallucinating History: A Feminist Historian’s Reflections on Legionnaire’s Disease and Medical Mistreatment, from the Victorian Age to the Covid Era

In September 2022, I went to Poughkeepsie, New York, for a four-day work trip. My four-day visit turned into a four-week ordeal. More specifically, it became an extended experiment in surviving pneumonia, as well as contending with an often-frustrating medical system. It also offered me valuable insights into my own teaching and scholarship. Finally, it revealed the ways in which the medical profession’s historical mistreatment of women persists to this day.

During a visit to Vassar College to honor Professor Emerita Miriam Cohen on her retirement, I got suddenly, terribly, and violently ill. Although I’d felt poorly the entire time, I had chalked up my symptoms—headache, lack of appetite, and fatigue—to my recent shoulder surgery. Even after I ate at a highly-recommended Italian restaurant my first night, and found I was unable to enjoy my meal, I assumed it was nothing serious. I was pretty sure I couldn’t have COVID, since I’d had my fifth booster prior to my trip and I had worn a mask on the 12-hour trip from Missoula, Montana to Poughkeepsie, New York (although nobody else did!). 

So, I carried on with my planned agenda for the next two days. On Monday, I happily conducted research in Vassar’s Archives and Special Collections for my current book project, a biography of Progressive reformer Katharine Bement Davis. On Tuesday, I toured campus and mentally prepared to give the talk that Cohen had invited me to give about Davis, a Vassar College alumna (Class of 1892). I felt worse and worse, but I was well-prepared, and I spoke pretty much on autopilot. Although Cohen and others later told me the talk went well, I don’t remember much of it. What I do remember is that afterward, when I went to a celebratory dinner at the same Italian restaurant where I had eaten my first night in town, I enjoyed about a third of my meal before suddenly projectile vomiting all over myself, my plate, the table, and my fellow diners. 

The next day, an Urgent Care visit confirmed my illness was not Covid, although it presented much like it (lack of taste/appetite, vomiting/diarrhea, fever, headache). I also did not have Influenza A or B; my double vaccine prior to my journey had done its job. 

What, then, was wrong with me? Urgent Care staff said it was a stomach bug, advised me to rest and hydrate, and assured me I'd be better in a day or two.

They were wrong. 

Despite valiant efforts by Vassar faculty and staff to care for me first in my hotel room, and then in a faculty member’s home, my condition worsened over the next two days.

I was dehydrated and delirious.

At the insistence of my Vassar caregivers, I went to Vassar Brothers Medical Center, where I was diagnosed with pneumonia. Specifically, I tested positive for an extremely rare and especially virulent form more commonly known as Legionnaire's Disease. Wait! I hear you cry. I wasn't expecting Legionnaire's Disease! Well, one doesn't, does one? (For days, I found myself replaying the Monte Python skit, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” in my head—I even posted the meme online—because I was so gobsmacked by this news.)

It’s actually a good thing that I was in such bad shape that I ended up at the ER because they did an amazing job diagnosing a really confusing set of symptoms—and even more confusing labwork! My bloodwork not only confirmed that I had Legionnaire’s Disease, but also revealed that my white blood cell count and other markers of my body’s ability to fight off infection were dangerously low, which explained how I had managed to become desperately ill from an infection that only manifests in 1% of those who are exposed to the bacteria. (I had known I had been suffering from burnout, but I did not know, until I saw the lab tests for myself, that my exhaustion and frustration had severely reduced my body’s ability to resist and fight disease.)

Fortunately, my team of talented physicians were able to figure it out. They probably saved my life. As I later learned, Legionnaire’s Disease is an especially lethal form of pneumonia, causing death in 70% or more of those afflicted without prompt diagnosis and treatment. And my case was stubborn, requiring 10 days of an increasingly powerful antibiotic regimen to respond to treatment. 

Meanwhile, throughout my week in the hospital, I was in danger of liver failure. Legionella pneumonia, unlike run-of-the-mill pneumonia, attacks the liver as well as the lungs—indeed, symptoms such as cough are slow to develop (my own cough did not manifest until I had been in the hospital about five days, more than a week after the initial onset of symptoms). Despite my antibiotic regimen, my daily bloodwork revealed that my condition was worsening, rather than improving, each day. 

The pulmonology specialists called in a team of infectious disease specialists to join my team. Three new physicians—in addition to the original ones, who still visited daily—monitored me around the clock and met to discuss my case daily. They switched me to an antibiotic that targeted Legionella specifically, rather than pneumonia generally. They ran additional tests to ensure that there was no medical reason that I was failing to respond to treatment. (Spoiler alert: There wasn’t. It was a result of three years of burnout and overwork resulting from the ongoing pandemic, policies at every level that denied the seriousness of the situation, and a dramatically increased workload as I—like teachers everywhere—learned Zoom and designed online classes with no warning and no institutional support—that had destroyed my body’s ability to fight infection.)  Finally, my condition began to improve, and the hospital’s head doctor discharged me after a week in the hospital. 

Scary stuff, huh? But, being a feminist historian, I dealt with this in the usual ways: by researching the ailment and by drawing comparisons to the past.

Legionella Pneumophilia was first identified and named (and what a great name, right?) at a 1976 American Legion gathering. So the disease has absolutely nothing to do with scary men in military uniforms, which is somehow what the name Legionnaire’s Disease connotes to me.  Although the mental image of men in military uniforms is rather intimidating, the Legion is an organization formed in 1919, just after World War One. They were all men, but the tie-in to my own research on women’s history in the era made this all seem much more familiar. 

While historically associated with men, Legionella affected women too—probably many more than we knew about, since it’s entirely possible that earlier influenza outbreaks, including the deadliest of all, the misnamed “Spanish Flu” pandemic that swept the globe in 1918, included patients actually suffering, and dying from, Legionella.

Although most sufferers, historically, are men, the feminine-sounding, lyrical name Legionella Pneumophila, as opposed to the masculine, militaristic Legionnaire’s Disease, sounded more welcoming to me. It also placed me firmly in the Victorian feminine malady camp, a world I know well through reading and research in nineteenth-century women’s history and literature.

Symptoms that are vaguely defined, seem to have no clear cause, and include headaches, fevers, cough, and fatigue are all reassuringly (to me!) reminiscent of Victorian ladies' ailments (consumption, for instance, as tuberculosis was called in the nineteenth century), as do symptoms like impaired cognition (brain fever, anyone?) and personality changes (how about hysteria?). While the condition is rare and mysterious, it can kill, so that familiar Victorian trope of the youthful (white) fragile beauty dying young (and thereby staying lovely forever) fit perfectly. 

On from contemplating lovely corpses to reflecting on hallucinating history. One of the most memorable parts of my whole medical nightmare—I mean that literally since I was delirious from lack of nutrition and hydration, as well as cognitive problems and personality changes resulting from Legionnaire's Disease—was my long night in the emergency room prior to my official admission to the hospital.

Yes, it turns out the Legionella has all kinds of fun bonus symptoms. Yay! Over the course of the next few weeks, I would suffer not only from what we now call brain fog but also dyslexia and dysgraphia. I didn’t know any of this at the time, of course. I mean, who expects to get Legionnaire’s Disease in this day and age? Furthermore, most people who are exposed don’t get it. I was just unlucky.

Or maybe lucky. As my best friend from grad school, a fellow Victorianist, later observed, I got to be my own Victorian heroine! Even at my worst, I found this oddly amusing and strangely comforting. I spent a lot of time thinking about the cultural trope of the lovely maiden who dies young in nineteenth-century art and literature. As I became increasingly weak and wan, I told myself that at least I got to be a pale and interesting invalid, like Ruby in Anne of Green Gables, one of my favorite series of books as a girl! (The problem with this scenario is that she dies, but let's bracket that for now.)

So anyway, I was in the ER, slipping in and out of consciousness .  . . have I mentioned I have a history of fainting and I fainted when the ambulance came to take me away? no? sorry-not-sorry, one of the super-fun symptoms of Legionella is brain fog! (Reader: Heavy sarcasm intended here. It is not fun at all!)

And when I was conscious, I could hear a woman down the hallway alternately pleading, demanding, and ultimately screaming to be let out. It went something like this:

Patient (almost a whisper): please somebody help me

Patient (tiny bit louder): please somebody get me out of here

Patient (louder): Nurse! Somebody! Please help me!

Patient (louder still, shouting):  Nurse! Somebody! Please help me!

Patient (louder still, shouting): LET ME OUT! GET ME OUT OF HERE! I WANT OUT NOW!

Background: quiet indistinguishable murmur, presumably from nurse or tech

Patient (escalating from shouting to screaming): PLEASE HELP ME! LET ME OUT! I WANT OUT! SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME! ANYBODY!

Now this was all super-disturbing, of course. But in a weird way only fellow Victorianists and women’s historians will understand, it was fascinating. It was so Yellow Wallpaper! For those not in the know, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a phenomenal writer, a visionary economist, and a feminist force in turn-of-the-century America. Her autobiographical short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”—now a major motion picture!—is based on her own experience with being diagnosed as “hysterical” and treated by way of “the rest cure.”

When Gilman manifested symptoms such as nervousness, lethargy, and melancholy following the birth of her first child, her husband sent her to S. Weir Mitchell, the preeminent “nerve doctor” of the era, who diagnosed her with “hysteria,” a catch-all diagnosis for any behavior that prevented elite women from fulfilling their assigned roles as wives and mothers. (Note for non-Victorianists; Gilman probably was suffering from what we would now call postpartum depression.)

The popular treatment at the time was the so-called “rest cure.” Many elite women likely enjoyed the “rest” from their onerous domestic duties at luxurious hotels in bucolic settings that offered fine dining, excellent service, and ample opportunities to bathe in natural hot springs, engage in outdoor recreation, and participate in social dances and parlor games, all in the company of other women.  While many women “took the waters” accompanied by their children, they were accompanied by a retinue of retainers who performed routine childcare tasks to allow the wealthy—and not always sickly!—mothers to enjoy rest, relaxation, and recreation.

Gilman’s physician recommended a more restrictive regimen. He insisted not only on no physical exertion but also on no mental stimulation and no social interaction. In her later writings, Gilman said that she attempted to follow the prescription of the famous Dr. S. Weir(d) Mitchell, which included social isolation and a total ban on self-expression. It also included entire absorption in motherhood, even though Gilman’s own written account of her case indicated that her melancholy deepened the more time she spent with her newborn. Dr. Mitchell declared: “Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time. . . . And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.”  Gilman later explained that she attempted to follow this advice, only to become "perilously close to losing my mind."

In the fictionalized account, the protagonist, a thinly veiled alter-ego for Gilman, receives direction from her husband, John. Like Dr. Mitchell, John insists on social isolation, indoor confinement, and bed rest; unlike him, John also insists on separating the new mother from her child. (Although atypical for the “rest cure,” this was common for women deemed to be suffering from postpuerperal psychosis, as physicians feared women would harm their infants)

At John’s direction, Jane is literally locked in her room. The bed is bolted to the floor; the windows are barred. Alone and unable to use her considerable intelligence, she fixates on the hideously patterned wallpaper, ultimately becoming convinced that there is a woman—perhaps several women?—trapped in the yellow wallpaper.

I think of yellow as a cheerful color; in fact, I purposely painted my living room yellow because I like the color and find it invigorating. But that's not at all what the color connoted at the time! It meant, among other things, disease and quarantine, and of course both Gilman herself and the main character of the “Yellow Wallpaper” were considered diseased and were in fact quarantined!

Plus, this was a hideous, poisonous yellow. Gilman’s protagonist’s first impressions were negative in the extreme. She describedthe unhealthy hue: “The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.  It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.” 

So anyway, Gilman's protagonist tries to rescue the trapped woman by peeling off the wallpaper. In my memory at the time I was hospitalized, she does this by circling the room, peeling the wallpaper in a single strip, like I sometimes try to do with an orange or a tangerine. Maybe that's how it happened in Gilman’s story. Or maybe not. I teach this every spring, but my memory is not reliable just now. (Remember: Legionnaire’s Disease causes memory loss! So, in yet another way, it’s the quintessential Victorian ailment, in that it induces that perennially popular female failing, amnesia!)

I was in the ER for close to 12 hours before being transferred to the hospital, and during that time, I felt like the distressed woman down the hallway actually was Gilman begging her husband/physician not to diagnose her with "hysteria" and sentence, er, "treat" her with the "rest cure.” Moreover, as I was slipping in and out of consciousness, I began to hallucinate. In my own mind, Ibecame the woman in the ER begging to be released.

This was of course profoundly disturbing, but it also offered me phenomenal personal insight into something I have studied and taught for decades. But it was especially meaningful at the time because I was (and now, am again) working on a research project that involved wrongful incarceration. The subject of my current book, Katharine Bement Davis, first directed a female reformatory and then was in charge of all of New York City’s jails, prisons, and reformatories. She always claimed that she advocated institutionalization, not incarceration—reform, not punishment. But even in my addled state, I understood full well that being locked up against your will without committing a crime is a function of the carceral state, not the caring state.

I also knew from my ongoing research that women could be confined to “reformatories” on suspicion of “immoral” behavior” in Victorian America. And during World War One—and well after it, more’s the pity—many so-called “promiscuous” women were imprisoned on suspicion of engaging in sex work or carrying sexually transmitted infections and subjected to dangerous, painful, and ineffective treatments with actual poisons like mercury and arsenic!

This was part of the “American Plan,” ostensibly designed to curb STIs among American GIs and keep them "Fit to Fight!" I had previously learned of the American Plan when supervising Kayla Blackman’s MA thesis; fittingly enough, Blackman is now my research assistant who helped me transform my fevered tweets into a (very) rough draft of this blog post! Although the title of Nancy Bristow's book on the subject, Making Men Moral, indicated that men were the targets of these new “public health” policies, in fact (as Bristow makes clear), the real effect was to further criminalize women’s behavior.

So, anyway, my ER ordeal (which was no way near as bad as that of the poor woman down the hall, who may very well have been experiencing a psychotic break and was probably sent to the psych ward, which they also tried on me at my second ER visit, but that is another story for another time!) gave me a lot of insight not only into the “Yellow Wallpaper” but also into my work-in-progress on Davis, who (thankfully) ultimately became an advocate of sexual freedom and self-expression despite her record of incarcerating suspected prostitutes and supporting the American Plan.

She eventually became an advocate of birth control and comprehensive sex education as well as a pioneering sex researcher whose 1929 magnum opus, Factors in the Sex Life of 2200 Women, openly and nonjudgmentally discussed masturbation, orgasm, and lesbianism! (I argue that Davis’s candid and sympathetic discussion of lesbianism was a product of her personal experiences as well as her statistical analysis; she herself was in a long-term, long-distance same-sex relationship.)

(Full disclosure: Both Gilman and Davis, for all their advocacy of rights for women like themselves—white, well-educated, and well-to-do—denied rights to women of color, poor women, and women they judged mentally or socially inferior. In short, they both advocated eugenics, although each later quietly retreated from their earlier commitment to institutionalizing or even sterilizing “unfit” girls and women.)

But back to me!  Even when I was fairly certain I was not losing my mind, I still had trouble sleeping, which exacerbated my symptoms, especially a severe cough, brain fog, dyslexia and dysgraphia. Perhaps most troubling of all for a professional historian, I also found that time became “slippery,” and I was unable to place even recent events in chronological order. 

While delirious in the ER, despite my addled state, I nonetheless recall being asked questions about the onset of my symptoms. The person who took me to the ER reported that I became ill Tuesday evening, but I knew my symptoms had actually begun on Sunday evening, just hours after my arrival. I kept staring at my phone, not understanding what I was seeing, stabbing at the “buttons” on the calendar app and willing them to make sense. 

My mental image of myself afterward was of a Neanderthal suddenly introduced to 21st century technology. Or, worse, of a mental patient; as the days and my symptoms progressed, those around me became increasingly convinced that I was severely cognitively impaired. Within a few days, I felt just fine in my own head, except for symptoms I understood, by then, as lingering after-effects of my illness. Because I couldn’t communicate this, however, the people around me continued to tell me that I was permanently damaged, unintentionally gaslighting me and causing me to worry that they were right and I was wrong. It was not until I had a virtual appointment with my therapist back in Missoula that I felt reassured that I was not, in fact, “irrational.” 

While I was no longer hallucinating, I began once again to feel like the main character in the “Yellow Wallpaper”: confined to a single room, unable to interact with others, and forced to rest without thinking, reading, or writing. I wasn’t well enough to enjoy the lovely home in which I was staying, because even visits to the bathroom brought on prolonged coughing fits, which often led to violent vomiting. Although I had around-the-clock care and company during the weekend following my release from the hospital, by Monday, everybody—logically enough—returned to their jobs. Indeed, I rejected offers for visitors, because I was unable to talk anyway. Besides, by this point, I had become suspicious of the whisper campaign I suspected was occurring behind my back. I was too exhausted to think or read, or even to watch TV or listen to music. Even when I felt the urge to create, I couldn’t write, either—at least not legibly. I also had great difficulty typing, in that I could not make my fingers actually strike the correct keys. 

When I could think and type, I posted about my horrific experiences on social media. But these posts, which were both my only artistic outlet and my only way of expressing myself since I could no longer speak as my cough worsened, soon created new problems. Because they were riddled with typos and often inarticulate, and because my frustration led me to an uncharacteristic use of profanity, my social media commentary convinced those around me that I was having a psychotic break. Ultimately, they advised me to stop posting entirely—which reminded me even more of Gilman, whose prescription had included giving up pen and paper.

I also worried that I might never be able to resume the work I loved, and that worry, no doubt, exacerbated my symptoms. It was a vicious circle.

But . . . I also had the green light from my physician to leave New York and return home to Missoula, which is exactly what I did just two days later. Now that I am finally home, reunited with my beloved partner and dog, receiving treatment from providers who listen to me, and surrounded by supportive friends, I am almost completely recovered from “Long Legionella.” That is to say, I can sleep, think, read, research, write, and type again. (Although this blog post began with captured social media posts, I’ve done additional research and writing since my return home, and it’s now roughly twice the length of the compiled tweets. I’ve also written a 32-page version of this story for submission to a local press’s nonfiction chapbook competition!). I can watch TV, and I can even hike with my dog! My lingering symptoms (short-term memory loss, an inability to focus on the printed page, and bone-deep fatigue) will, I am confident, resolve with time (lots of time! my estimated recovery time is up to two years!). I am ready, as I told a friend and fellow Victorianist, to enjoy a real “rest cure”—the kind that the elite women enjoyed at luxury hotels conveniently located near healing hot springs more than a century ago.

But most of all, I have reclaimed control over my own life. As the narrator of the “Yellow Wallpaper” puts it after her escape from her prison: “I’ve got out at last . . . and you can’t put me back.”

[Special anniversary series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?]

November 4, 2022: Symbolic Scares: The Shinings

[Horror has long been as much about the sources of the scares as the jumps they produce, and American horror is no exception. In this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy some of the symbolisms behind our scary stories. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post on a very scary disease, past and present.]

On what we can make of the two opposed endings to the novel and film versions of the same scary story.

I don’t like losing readers, even for the best of reasons; but if you either haven’t read Steven King’s The Shining (1977) or haven’t seen Stanley Kubrick’s film version (1980) of the novel, and are interested in checking them out sometime, you should probably skip this post, as I’m gonna spoil the heck out of the endings to both. Because while there are definitely stylistic and even thematic differences between the two versions throughout, it’s really the endings where they become not only distinct but starkly contrasting and opposed. I won’t spoil every single detail, but suffice it to say that King’s novel ends hopefully, with notes of redemption for its protagonist Jack Torrance and especially for his relationship to his son and family; whereas Kubrick’s film ends with Torrance murderously pursuing that same son with an axe and, thwarted, freezing to death, more evil in his final moments than he has been at any earlier moment in the film.

There are various ways we could read this striking distinction, including connecting it to the profoundly different worldviews of the two artists (at least as represented in their collected works): King, despite his penchant for horror, is to my mind a big ol’ softie who almost always finds his way to a happy ending; Kubrick has a far more bleak and cynical perspective and tended to end his films on at best ambiguous and often explicitly disturbing notes. Those different worldviews could also be connected to two longstanding American traditions and genres, what we might call the sentimental vs. the pessimistic romance (in that Hawthornean sense I’ve discussed elsewhere in this space): in the former, such as in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the darkest supernatural qualities give way by the story’s end to more rational and far happier worlds and events; in the latter, such as in his contemporary Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (also 1851), the darkness is only amplified and deepened by concluding events, leaving us adrift (literally and figuratively) in an eternally scary world.

King’s and Kubrick’s texts, and more exactly their respective conclusions, certainly fit into those traditions. But given that both create similarly horrifying worlds and events right up until those endings, I would also connect their distinct final images to the dueling yet interconnected ideas at the heart of my fourth book: dark histories and hope. Where the two versions differ most overtly, that is, is in whether they offer their audiences any hope: in King’s novel, Torrance finds a way through his darkest histories and to final moments of hope for his family’s future (achieved at great personal sacrifice); in Kubrick’s film, hope has abandoned Torrance as fully as has sanity, and both his family and the audience can only hope that they can survive and escape his entirely dark world. Obviously you know which I prefer; but I would also argue that, whatever the appeal of horror for its own sake, without the possibility of hope and redemption it’d be a pretty bleak and terrible genre.

Special election post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?

November 3, 2022: Symbolic Scares: The Lost Boys

[Horror has long been as much about the sources of the scares as the jumps they produce, and American horror is no exception. In this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy some of the symbolisms behind our scary stories. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post on a very scary disease, past and present.]

On mindless pop entertainment, and what it can still symbolize.

Roger Ebert wrote of Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987) that it ends up devoid of anything deep or lasting, becoming “just technique at the service of formula”—and as usual, Rog was right on point. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect anything else of a film that stars both of the ‘80s Coreys (Haim and Feldman), each in his own way a symbol of the decade’s tendency toward style over substance. Certainly hindsight should clarify for us just how much “style over substance” seems to define Joel Schumacher’s directorial mantra. But in any case, the salient question about The Lost Boys isn’t whether there’s any there there—it’s why on earth I’m writing about it in this series and this space when there so clearly isn’t.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to make the case for hidden depths to the film—I like the “and yet” second paragraph transition as much as anybody, but it has its limits. But what kind of AmericanStudier would I be if I couldn’t find cultural symbolism in even the most vapid pop entertainments? For one thing, I think it’s possible to see The Lost Boys as originating—or at least representing a very early example of—one of the most significant cultural trends of the last couple decades: turning vampires into sexy, cool teenage icons. Vampires have been alluring since at least Dracula, of course; but when it comes to Angel, Edward Cullen, the cast of The Vampire Diaries, and so many other teen-demographic forces on our recent cultural landscape, I think Kiefer Sutherland and his fellow Lost Boys might have really gotten the ball rolling. Which, given the momentum that ball now possesses, would make Schumacher’s film pretty darn influential.

But I also don’t think we have to look into the subsequent decades to find significant symbolic value to The Lost Boys. I’m pretty sure that Schumacher didn’t think about it on this level—and I don’t even know that the trio of screenwriters can be credited with any part of this insight—but the film seems to me to reflect a significant and interesting cultural tension in its portrayals of the era’s titular young men. On the one hand, Kiefer and his fellow vampires are pretty much pure evil, young punks whose appearance and affect precisely parallel their darkest intentions. But on the other hand, protagonist Jason Patric is drawn to the vampires because he’s quite a bit like them in every way—and he and his younger brother (Haim), the sons of an overworked and somewhat absentee single mother, seem scarcely less lost than the vampires they end up fighting (with the help of a couple of similarly wayward boys, including Feldman’s character). So are the lost boys villains or heroes, a threat to their small towns or the saviors of those places? They seem, in this slight yet symbolic film, to be both and all of those things.

Next scary story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?

November 2, 2022: Symbolic Scares: Last House on the Left

[Horror has long been as much about the sources of the scares as the jumps they produce, and American horror is no exception. In this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy some of the symbolisms behind our scary stories. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post on a very scary disease, past and present.]

On the horror film that’s more disturbing in what it makes us cheer for than how it makes us scream.

The Last House on the Left (1972) was Wes Craven’s directorial debut, as well as one of the only films that he wrote and edited as well as directed (although it was at least partly based on Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring [1960], as Craven has happily admitted and discussed). But despite launching one of the late 20th and early 21st century’s most significant horror talents, Last House is far less well known than Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street series, or even (I would argue) his other prominent early film, The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Partly that’s because Last House feels extremely raw in execution, the product of a talent still figuring out much of what he could do; but partly it’s because it also feels raw in another and more troubling way, one that makes us more deeply uncomfortable than horror films generally do.

That rawness is most obviously comprised by the extended and very graphic abduction, rape, and murder sequence that opens the film—a sequence that feels less like horror than like cinema verité of an extremely disturbing kind. But even more raw, both in its emotional brutality and in the places it takes the audience, is the film’s culminating sequence, in which the killers find themselves in the home of the parents of one of the murdered girls—and the audience finds itself rooting for those parents to take the bloodiest and most violent revenge possible on these psychopaths. I suppose it’s possible to argue that we’re not meant to root in that way, or that we’re meant to feel conflicted about these ordinary and good people turning into vengeful monsters—but to be honest, any audience that has watched the film’s opening seems to me to be primed instead to cheer as the killers get their violent comeuppance, even—perhaps especially—if it requires this transformation of grieving parents into their own terrifying kind of killers.

To be clear, if we do find ourselves cheering for the parents, we’re doing so not just because of how Craven’s film has guided us there. We’re also taking the next step in what I called, in this post on the comic book hero The Punisher, the long history of vigilante heroes in American culture; and perhaps at the same time living vicariously the most potent (if extra-legal) arguments for the death penalty. Yet the rawness of Craven’s film, whether intended or simply a result of its stage in his career, serves one additional and crucial symbolic purpose: it reminds us that vigilante justice and executions, however deserved they might feel, are also grotesque and horrifying, as difficult to watch as they are to justify when the heat of the moment has cooled off. Last House is scarier for what it reveals in ourselves than for anything that’s on screen—but what’s on screen can also help us examine that side of ourselves honestly, and that’s a pretty important effect.

Next scary story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?

November 1, 2022: Symbolic Scares: Sleepy Hollow

[Horror has long been as much about the sources of the scares as the jumps they produce, and American horror is no exception. In this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy some of the symbolisms behind our scary stories. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post on a very scary disease, past and present.]

On the original American scary story that’s also an ironic American origin story.

I still haven’t had a chance to catch any of the Sleepy Hollow TV show that ran for four seasons a few years back—if you have, please feel free to share your thoughts in comments!—but it’s certainly further proof of the lasting influence of one of America’s earliest professional writers, Washington Irving. Certainly much of Irving’s extensive body of work, including the metatextual masterpiece the History of New York about which I wrote in that hyperlinked post, has largely vanished from our collective national consciousness; but two of the stories in his first published collection of fiction, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819), have endured across those nearly two hundred years about as fully as any American literary works (from any century) have. I’m referring of course to that hen-pecked sleeper Rip Van Winkle and to the focus of today’s post, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

“Sleepy Hollow” has endured because at its heart, as the 21stcentury TV show seems (from what I’ve seen and read about it anyway) to understand, it is about a simple conflict that is at the heart of many scary stories: between an extremely ordinary everyman (awkward and shy schoolteacher Ichabod Crane) and an equally extraordinary supernatural foe (the terrifying Headless Horseman). Like many scary story protagonists, Ichabod has an idealized love interest, the buxon Katrina Von Tassel; and finds himself competing for her affections with a far more popular and confident rival, Brom Bones. The culminating intersection between the two plotlines—between Ichabod’s supernatural and romantic encounters—engages the audience on multiple emotional levels simultaneously, just as so many contemporary horror films strive to do. Indeed, the only significant divergence from the now well-established formula is that the everyman hero loses—the Horseman scares Ichabod Crane away, Brom Bones escorts Katrina Von Tassel to the altar, and Ichabod’s story becomes the stuff of local legend.

That resolution lessens the story’s scariness factor (it seems clear that Brom was masquerading as the Headless Horseman), but at the same time amplifies its status as an originating American folktale. For one thing, Irving’s fictional narrator and historian Diedrich Knickerbocker presents Ichabod’s story, like Rip Van Winkle’s, as precisely such a folktale, a part of the collective memory of his turn of the 19th century Dutch New York and thus of Early Republic America more broadly. And for another, it’s possible to read Brom Bones’ triumph, and his resulting union with the town’s powerful Von Tassel family, as an ironic reminder—much like Rip’s concluding images—that the more things seem to have changed in this post-Revolutionary America, the more in at least some ways they have stayed the same. America’s landed elites maintain their power, manipulating our folk legends (even our scary stories) to do so—and our overly ambitious schoolteachers flee in terror before that social force, remembered simply as a funny and telling part of those stories.

Next scary story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?

October 31, 2022: Symbolic Scares: The Wendigo

[Horror has long been as much about the sources of the scares as the jumps they produce, and American horror is no exception. In this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy some of the symbolisms behind our scary stories. Leading up to a special weekend post on the scariest and perhaps the most symbolic 2022 story of all—the midterm elections!]

On the supernatural legend that also offers cultural and cross-cultural commentaries.

I’m not sure what kind of collection it was—whether it was an anthology of folk tales, of scary stories, of cultural myths and legends, of Americana—but I do know that only one story from it impacted this young AmericanStudier enough to stick with me nearly four decades later: an account of a party of hunters in rural Canada encountering the demon known as the Wendigo. I can even remember the way I felt inside when my Dad read the lines about the rising and howling wind, which at least in this version of the tale signaled the imminent arrival of—or perhaps even contained—the creature. Let’s just say that, unlike the boy who left home to find out about the shivers, from then on I knew exactly what that condition felt like, and didn’t need to venture outside of the pages of that very scary story to do so.

So I’m here to tell you that the Wendigo is, first and foremost, a deeply effective scary story. But the creature and story, across their many versions, also offer complex and compelling lenses into American cultures, on two distinct and equally meaningful levels. For one thing, apparently Wendigo stories can be found in the belief systems and communal myths of numerous Algonquin-speaking native tribes across both the United States and Canada, including the Ojibwe, the Cree, the Naskapi, and others. While those tribes share a basic language system, they are as culturally and socially distinct as they are geographically widespread—and yet they share closely parallel images and accounts of these cannibalistic demons of the woods. While we have to be careful about how we read such potentially but ambiguously symbolic shared mythic figures—Joseph Campbell-like, sweeping structuralist pronouncements being largely discredited these days—there seems to be no question that the Wendigo represents a part of the collective identity and perspective of these tribes.

But as they have evolved, Wendigo stories have also come to represent something else, and perhaps even more telling: tales of the perils of cross-cultural exploration and exploitation. That is, in many of the last century’s Wendigo tales, including both the Blackwood one linked above and the one that I remember from my childhood, those being threatened or destroyed by the creature tend to be non-native hunters, often if not always venturing into native territories, encroaching on previously protected or sacred spaces, or otherwise seeking to make their mark on a land not quite their own. As my friend Jeff Renye has traced at length throughout his evolving scholarly career, Weird Tales such as Blackwood’s often highlight the dangers posed by an sort of spiritual boundary-crossing, so this particular trend is certainly not unique; but in these cases, I’m arguing, the boundaries being crossed are not only spiritual but also, and perhaps more importantly, cultural. Which is to say, while the Wendigo has always been cannibalistic, the particular identity of those upon whom he feasts has significantly, and symbolically, shifted over time.

Next scary story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?

October 29-30, 2022: Tiffany Wayne’s Guest Post on The Jewel City: Suffrage at the 1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition

 [Tiffany Wayne is a historian of women, gender, and feminism and the author or editor of eight published works in U.S. history, women’s history, and literary studies. The following post is drawn from a paper presented at the Western Association of Women Historians conference, Costa Mesa, California, Spring 2022, and is part of ongoing research for a forthcoming book project, Suffrage Road Trip: Three Women, Three Thousand Miles, and a Meeting with the President, the story of the suffrage envoys who drove from the 1915 world’s fair in San Francisco to Washington, D.C. to deliver a signed petition demanding a federal suffrage amendment directly into the hands of President Woodrow Wilson. You can follow her work here.]

On the evening of Thursday, September 16th, 1915, under a “bright-starred, deep-blue California sky,” more than 10,000 visitors to the San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) gathered in Golden Gate Park to send three suffragists off on an epic cross-country road trip. The suffrage envoys on center stage that evening were Sara Bard Field, by 1915 already a veteran of several western state suffrage campaigns in California, Oregon, and Nevada, and Maria Kindberg and Ingeborg Kindstedt, two Swedish-American suffragists from Rhode Island who owned the brand-new Overland car and knew how to both drive and maintain an automobile. Another prominent national suffrage organizer, Mabel Vernon, traveled by train ahead of the car and connected with local suffrage chapters to set up events, parades, and meetings with mayors and other dignitaries in every major city the envoys visited and, most importantly, to make sure their activities received extensive press coverage. Between September and December 1915 they drove through 21 states from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. with the end goal of hand-delivering to President Woodrow Wilson a petition of signatures gathered in support of a simple message: We demand an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, enfranchising women.

At the celebratory send-off at the fair’s Court of Abundance, a procession of young women dressed in the traditional costumes of Norway, Finland, and other nations where women already exercised the right to vote, spotlighted how the United States lagged behind in the international progress of suffrage. By 1915, women had full voting rights in Finland, Norway, Denmark, Latvia, Australia, and New Zealand, and American women could vote in eleven states, all in the West: Wyoming (1890), Colorado (1893), Utah and Idaho (both in 1896), Washington (1910), California (1911), Arizona, Oregon, and Kansas (all in 1912), and Montana and Nevada (both in 1914). But the denial of voting rights to any U.S. citizens was an embarrassment to a democratic nation trying to display its strength and innovation on the world stage, both at the fair and soon to be abroad in world war. Stretched across the Congressional Union booth at the Expo, a banner reminded visitors: “The world has progressed in most ways, but not yet in its recognition of women.” 

The three women, empowered by their powerful purpose, then drove away from the Expo, a choir singing and the crowd waving goodbye:  

Orange lanterns swayed in the breeze; purple, white and gold draperies fluttered, the blare of the band burst forth, and the great surging crowd followed to the gates...Cheers burst forth as the gates opened and the big car swung through, ending the most dramatic and significant suffrage convention that has probably ever been held in the history of the world. 

The gathering in San Francisco on that evening in September 1915 was the culmination of a three-day Woman Voters’ Convention, sponsored by the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU), a committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and led by Alice Paul. This was the first convention to emphasize the voices and collective power of now four million women voters in the United States, a number the suffragists repeated again and again in the press coverage. California was still fresh from a suffrage victory in 1911 and the Congressional Union planned to capitalize on this fact at the Expo by emphasizing that enfranchised western women were no longer asking men for the vote, they were demanding it based on their own political power at the polls.

The send-off of the road trip envoys on the final night of the Woman Voters’ Convention was a highly publicized and carefully orchestrated spectacle, but it was the culmination of a nearly year-long presence of the Congressional Union at the (PPIE). Amidst the escalating international crisis of world war, San Francisco hosted 18 million visitors between February and December 1915 to “The Jewel City,” the theme of the PPIE. Like California itself, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition was a celebration of the future – of new ideas and new technologies, of progress - and, specifically, a celebration of the opening of the Panama Canal. The United States had not yet entered into the world conflict, but the women’s movement was already made up of international alliances as many prominent American suffragists also worked as pacifists in support of international human rights and peace. In 1915, the same year of the PPIE, the Woman’s Peace Party was founded by Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt (president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association), and others. On June 5, 1915, five hundred women participated in the “Pageant of Peace” at the Expo, and the International Conference of Women Workers to Promote Permanent Peace (ICWWPPP) held their convention there that summer as well. 

While many suffragists worked simultaneously for the vote and for peace during the war years, the emphasis for the Congressional Union at the 1915 PPIE was a permanent booth at the Palace of Education and Social Economy to promote their singular goal: a federal suffrage amendment. And the San Francisco Expo was the first time that women’s suffrage had its own focus and booth at a world’s fair.

Previous world’s fairs held in the United States – the Centennial Exposition (Philadelphia, 1876), World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial (New Orleans, 1884), World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis, 1904) – had been important sites for highlighting women’s contributions across a variety of fields and causes. Unlike some of these previous fairs, however, there was no dedicated “Woman’s Building” at the PPIE in San Francisco; rather, politically-engaged suffragists, peace advocates, temperance activists, and a variety of women’s professional and educational organizations and clubs were active throughout the Expo. Envoy Sara Bard Field acknowledged the wider role of women throughout the fair, beyond the suffrage booth, noting that “One need not be a fanatical feminist to see the persistent permeation of the essentially feminine in every exhibit in this Palace of Progress.” There were exhibits by the National Council of Jewish Women, the American Federation of Labor (noting that “eight million working women of the land need the vote”), and the presence at the fair of other consumer and reform committees led by women. As a pacifist, Field happily concluded that the only place in the entire fair where women were happily not represented was in exhibits related to war and the military.

Preparing for the Expo 

By late 1914, plans were already underway for a suffrage booth at the PPIE, and the Congressional Union began fundraising for and publicizing the booth in the months before the exposition opened in February. Alice Paul sent fundraising letters to CU members and contacts, explaining that money was needed to purchase “literature, banners, placards, and all kinds of exhibits of a propagandistic nature, and finally to pay a suffrage worker to remain in charge of [the booth] and explain the suffrage situation to passers-by, to hold meetings, etc.” That salaried suffrage worker was Margaret Fay Whittemore, chair of the CU in Michigan, who was paid $70 a month to direct the booth in San Francisco from February to May. Paul explained to potential donors that “The booth is the only place that suffrage will be presented at the Exposition and it seems imperative that the opportunity which the Exposition opens to us should not be lost.” The PPIE officially opened on February 20, 1915 and booth leader Whittemore reported to Alice Paul that an “enthusiastic deputation of San Francisco Congressional Union Member[s] marched” in the grand opening parade “wearing the colors,” i.e. the purple, white, and gold of the suffrage movement.

Opening Day 

The official dedication of the suffrage booth at the PPIE happened a few weeks later, on March 4th, 1915, with a large gathering of speakers and then a reception at the booth itself which was “all dressed up in C.U. colors, flags and flowers.” Whittemore presented “a brief review of the actual things accomplished by the Union in the [past] two years,” followed by a speech by Gail Laughlin, a Maine suffragist and lawyer who eventually moved west and was active in the Colorado and California campaigns, who “gave a most powerful address on the Federal amendment…and a great deal in regard to the objections of all politicians on the grounds of states rights.”

The goal of suffragists at the PPIE throughout 1915 was to create an attractive booth that would draw visitors in, but one which also represented the individual states’ contributions to the national suffrage movement. Organizers solicited contributions from state suffrage groups and gathered the following items for the booth: 

Rhode Island sent a portrait of Susan B. Anthony which became a showcase of the booth Connecticut sent a collection of dolls to represent women of each of the enfranchised western statessuffragists in Michigan pledge to send a framed suffrage map showing states where the vote had been wonthe Women’s Political Union of New York sent photographs of some of their recent public events, including a 1912 march to the state capital in AlbanyArizona sent a banner, but suffragists in San Francisco wrote back to ask for a poster or photographs or “something a little more decorative”the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association built a miniature Bunker Hill monument to display at the booth, representing women’s involvement in founding the countryMrs. Austin Sperry (identified as the oldest member of the Susan B. Anthony Club of California) gifted a purple, white, and gold banner to the boothand from headquarters in Washington, DC, Alice Paul sent copies of cartoons that had been published in The Suffragist to frame and decorate the booth; in return, she asked Whittemore to send photos of the booth to publish in The Suffragist.

Things came together at the booth and Margaret Whittmore was pleased to report to Alice Paul that “Our Booth is getting very full of fine Exhibits, many of the States are admirably represented.”

Another key feature of the booth was also the brainchild of Whittemore, who came up with the idea of displaying “a large cloth sign, giving the record of the vote of every Senator and Representative in the 63rd Congress...I got the idea, to be sure, from the Cover of THE SUFFRAGIST, for February 27,” which showed a “Mrs. William Colt, Member of the Advisory Council of the Union, Explaining the Vote of N.Y. Congressmen on the Suffrage Amendment.”

Just a few weeks after Whittemore first shared the idea, the San Francisco Examiner described the giant panel displaying the suffrage voting record of “446 Congressmen” as the largest exhibit in the Educational Palace at “18x19 feet and in six columns.” The chart of the Congressmen’s votes became a centerpiece as a visual representation of CU’s sole purpose at the Expo:

All American visitors were asked to look up the record of their Congressman; to discover how he voted on the Suffrage Amendment: they were asked to sign the monster petition to Congress. 

Day-to-Day Activities at the Booth

The main work at the booth throughout the summer of 1915 was gathering signatures for the grand petition to be carried across the country to President Wilson, signing up new CU members and subscribers to The Suffragist, and distributing pamphlets, buttons, pennants, and anything else the suffragists could give away to promote their organization and their cause. In response to news that Expo rules prevented the CU from increasing their fundraising efforts by selling any items from the booth, Paul recommended to Whittemore: “If you cannot sell the Suffragist on the Exposition grounds I would advise that you sell at the gates of the Exposition.”

Booth organizers also held open-air lectures and sponsored talks throughout the exposition grounds. High-profile speakers and visitors to the Congressional Union’s booth included Mary Beard, Crystal Eastman Benedict, Helen Keller, May Wright Sewall, and Secretary of State William B. Wilson. The suffragists took advantage of a steady stream of dignitaries, celebrities, and state and national politicians who visited the PPIE throughout the summer, attempting to lure prominent visitors to the booth and heavily publicizing their responses to and records on suffrage. There was even an interactive attraction when the head of the American Voting Machine exhibit invited visitors to try his machine by voting on a real issue: a mock referendum on a federal suffrage amendment. The editors of The Suffragist predicted that, “By the time the Exposition closes, the machine will have registered an honest record by which to gauge public sentiment on the amendment.”  

At the same time as she was busy setting up and managing day-to-day booth activities, almost immediately after the booth opened, Alice Paul asked Margaret Whittemore to “begin work for the Conference of Women Voters. We thought the best time to have this would probably be about the end of August.” Paul may have wanted to start planning for the WVC (which was eventually held in September, not August), but first Whittemore had another idea for a summer event, proposing a large International Suffrage Meeting to coincide with the wartime gathering of the Women’s International Peace Conference at the Hague; this meeting took place at the San Francisco Expo on June 1st and 2nd, 1915.

After three months as director of the Congressional Union suffrage booth, Whittemore reported on her progress – “We have been able to procure about 400 members since the opening of the Exposition” – before leaving San Francisco and returning home to Michigan where she thought she could be more useful among the people and organizers she knew. Alice Paul just missed seeing Whittemore at the Expo as Paul arrived in California at the end of summer to help prepare for the Woman Voters’ Convention. With help primarily from Doris Stevens, Iris Calderhead of Kansas, and Elizabeth Kent of California, it was another suffragist, Ella Morton Dean, who took Whittemore’s place and took charge of day-to-day operations at the booth.

Final months of the Expo: 

For the most part, after the June meeting, the emphasis for the CU at the San Francisco PPIE was on preparations for and publicizing the Woman Voters’ Convention.

From headquarters in the East, the focus of CU efforts shifted after the September WVC to preparing for the road trip envoys to reach D.C. in time for the opening of Congress in early December. In October, an overwhelmed Ella Dean asked for more help at the booth, but Paul simply said they could not afford to pay another person because of the expenses of the WVC and the road trip and the meeting in D.C. Dean suggested that “We need some special event by which to arouse enthusiasm and hold interest” at the Expo, but by then Paul had already suggested Dean cut back on activities and simply greet people who come by the booth, noting that Expo attendance in general was probably diminishing by this point late in the year anyway.

But that was not Dean’s experience. In mid-October, a month after the thrill of the WVC, she reported that “the booth meetings have been interesting and well attended,” and that she was “getting as many new members daily if not more than in any other time in the history of the Booth.” But Paul had already moved on, feeling the CU had benefited all it could from the Expo and from diverting resources to San Francisco. She instructed Dean to collect on pledges made at the WVC so they could close out the books, and asked her to send photos and cartoons from the booth back to headquarters. The San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition officially closed on December 4, 1915.

The year 1915 was an eventful one for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. The Panama-Pacific International Exposition was over, the envoys made it to Washington, D.C. with some version of the petition they began at the PPIE suffrage booth, and got their meeting with President Wilson and spoke before Congress. Just a few months later, in early 1916, the Congressional Union was transformed into the National Woman’s Party and they were on to the next phase of their strategizing and the final push toward a national amendment. 

While preparation for the Woman Voters’ Convention consumed much of the CU’s organizational energy throughout 1915, the PPIE suffrage booth itself was an important point of activity, emphasizing the voices of western women voters in the suffrage campaign, and solidifying the CU organizationally and strategically as an independent organization separate from NAWSA. Indeed, among the many conflicts between NAWSA and the CU that year, NAWSA leadership rejected the CU’s platform at the Expo’s Woman Voters’ Convention of opposing any party (including the Democrats, the party of Woodrow Wilson) that did not support the federal suffrage amendment. 

As part of a 1915 U.S. tour, British suffragists and peace activists Emmeline Pethick Lawrence and Frederick Pethick Lawrence visited the PPIE in San Francisco several times and spoke at the CU suffrage booth. Impressed by the work there, Mrs. Pethick Lawrence “compared the Exposition in its breadth of scope and bigness of purpose to the [Congressional] Union and its policies.” Indeed, that “bigness of purpose” included settling for nothing less than an amendment to the U.S. Constitution protecting women’s right to vote and was certainly the vision the CU brought to a global audience at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition that year.

Further Reading:

Adams, Katherine H. and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (University of Illinois Press, 2008)

Boisseau, TJ, and Abigail M. Markwyn, Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World's Fairs (University of Illinois, 2010)

Markwyn, Abigail M., Empress San Francisco: The Pacific Rim, the Great West, and California at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (University of Nebraska Press, 2004)

Smith, Sherry. Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in Twentieth-Century America (Heyday Books: Berkeley, 2020)

[Halloween series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?]

______________________

“The Farewell to the Woman Voters’ Envoys,” The Suffragist (October 2, 1915).

Inez Hayes Irwin, The Story of the Woman’s Party (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1921),  p. 106.

“Sara Bard Field: Poet and Suffragist,” An Interview Conducted by Amelia R. Fry for the Suffragists Oral History Project (Berkeley: University of California Regents, 1979), Section 19, “The Demands of the Suffrage Movement: Suffrage Booth, Panama-Pacific Exhibit,” p. 294.

“The Farewell to the Woman Voters’ Envoys,” The Suffragist (October 2, 1915).

Sara Bard Field, “Woman and the Educational Building,” The Suffragist (September 11, 1915).

Alice Paul to Mrs. Joseph Fels, February 2, 1915, National Woman’s Party Papers, Part II: The Suffrage Years, 1913-1920, Series 1: Correspondence, 1891-1940.

Alice Paul to Mrs. Mabel Cronise Jones, February 9, 1915, NWP Papers, Correspondence.

Details on state contributions to the suffrage booth are drawn from Doris Stevens to Alice Paul, February 10, 1915 and February 23, 1915, and Alice Paul to Margaret Fay Whittemore, February 19, 1915, NWP Papers, Correspondence; Doris Stevens to Anne Martin, February 15, 1915, Anne Martin Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; and reports on the PPIE in issues of The Suffragist from March 6, 1915, April 3, 1915, and June 5, 1915.

 Margaret Fay Whittemore to Alice Paul, May 28, 1915, NWP Papers, Correspondence.

Margaret Fay Whittemore to Alice Paul, March 9, 1915, NWP Papers, Correspondence.

“S.F. Suffragettes Show Biggest Single Exhibit," SF Examiner (April 10, 1915).

Irwin, Story of the Woman’s Party (1921), p. 100.

Alice Paul to Margaret Fay Whittemore, February 23, 1915, NWP Papers, Correspondence.

“Anthony Amendment Favored at Exposition,” The Suffragist (May 1, 1915).

Alice Paul to Margaret Fay Whittemore, March 11, 1915, NWP Papers, Correspondence.

Alice Paul to Ella Dean, October 12, 1915, and Dean to Paul, October 13, 1915, NWP Papers, Correspondence.

Ella Dean to Lucy Burns, October 14, 1915; Alice Paul to Dean, October 13, 1915; and Dean to Paul, October 17, 1915, NWP Papers, Correspondence.

Margaret Fay Whittemore to Alice Paul, March 4, 1915, NWP Papers, Correspondence.

October 29, 2022: October 2022 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

October 1-2: Kelly Marino’s Guest Post on The “American Queen”: “Sweetheart” Bracelets, Jewelry Trends, and the World Wars: Another great month of Guest Posts was kicked off with Kelly Marino on material culture, identity, and American history!

October 3: Bad Presidents: James Buchanan: For Rutherford B. Hayes’ birthday, a series on bad presidents kicks off with the bad one who helps us resist narratives of inevitability.

October 4: Bad Presidents: Rutherford B. Hayes: The series continues with the birthday boy and why the election of 1876 was just the tip of the badness iceberg.

October 5: Bad Presidents: William McKinley: Two reasons why I can’t entirely mourn our third assassinated president, as the series rolls on.

October 6: Bad Presidents: Calvin Coolidge: How a pre-presidency moment foreshadows the worst of a 1920s administration.

October 7: Bad Presidents: Gerald Ford: The series concludes with a presidential and legal decision that set a very bad precedent indeed.

October 8: Bad Presidents: Donald Trump: But you didn’t think I could AmericanStudy bad presidents without some thoughts on our most recent and most bad bad president yet, did you?

October 8-9: Anita Siraki’s Guest Post on Interview with the Vampire: Another great Guest Post, this time Anita Siraki on the new adaptation of Anne Rice’s vampire stories!

October 10: RunningStudying: Ragged Mountain Running: A series on running kicks off with a childhood influence who exemplifies the best of running and community.

October 11: RunningStudying: The Boston Marathon: The series continues with three layers to the story of the first (1897) Boston Marathon.

October 12: RunningStudying: Prefontaine on Film: A telling storytelling difference between the two late 90s Prefontaine films, as the series strides on.

October 13: RunningStudying: FloJo and JJK: Two interesting AmericanStudies contexts for a pair of interconnected all-time greats.

October 14: RunningStudying: Three Current Runners: The series concludes with AmericanStudies takeaways from three 21st century athletes.

October 15-16: RunningStudying: Aidan Railton’s Guest Post on Strava: Definitely my favorite Guest Post yet, Aidan Railton on what social media has meant to his running career!

October 17: HUAC Histories: Three Precursors: For the 75th anniversary of the first HUAC trials, a series on the controversial committee begins with three precursors to its work.

October 18: HUAC Histories: The Blacklist: The series continues with three stages to HUAC’s divisive and destructive attacks on cultural figures.

October 19: HUAC Histories: Chambers, White, and Hiss: Espionage, railroading, and the true complexity of historical nuance, as the series rolls on.

October 20: HUAC Histories: McCarthy and Mythic Patriotism: An excerpt from my most recent book that highlights the mythic patriotism of Joseph McCarthy.

October 21: HUAC Histories: The Final Years: The series concludes with a few telling histories to the committee’s often-forgotten final couple decades.

October 22-23: HUAC and McCarthyism in Pop Culture: A special weekend post on two novels and four films that represent different sides to these fraught histories.

October 24: PBS People: Fred Rogers: A series on PBS people for Bob Ross’ 80thbirthday starts with why niceness and activism aren’t incompatible, and when niceness isn’t nearly enough.

October 25: PBS People: Jim Henson: The series continues with why it’s absolutely right, and not nearly enough, to connect the groundbreaking puppeteer to PBS.

October 26: PBS People: LeVar Burton: Why the host of an iconic PBS show was as important as the content, as the series educates on.

October 27: PBS People: NewsHour Hosts: AmericanStudies takeaways from two pairs of hosts for the long-running news program.

October 28: PBS People: Bob Ross: The series concludes with two influences on and one legacy of the artistic icon on his 80th birthday.

Halloween series starts Monday,

Ben

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

October 28, 2022: PBS People: Bob Ross

[October 29th would have been the iconic Bob Ross’ 80th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Ross and four other figures who have helped make PBS the cultural and educational force it is!]

On two influences on and one legacy of the artistic icon (beyond the hair and the phrase “happy little trees,” natch).

1)      Alaska: Ross was only 16 when he enlisted in the Air Force in 1961, and he’d spend the next twenty years in the service, working as a medical records technician (and eventually master sergeant) stationed at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska. I’m sure the Air Force had plenty of influences on the rest of Ross’ life and work and could have been an “A” entry in this list instead, but it seems to me that the stunning Alaskan landscapes, which in my experience are truly unique across all of America, loomed even larger in the paintings and artistic worlds for which Ross would become so well-known. Yet as always with artistic works, Ross’ paintings were a representation of and perspective on that subject, rather than the subject itself—for example, I’d say that Alaskan landscapes can be quite intimidating, especially in their reminder of our human smallness in the face of a wider world that doesn’t have much concern for or about us (nor should it); yet for Ross they were indeed filled with happy trees and other reflections of a peaceful and positive world, a reflection of his unique perspective and voice that were so instrumental in making him the icon he became.  

2)      Alexander: I have to believe that perspective and voice were very much Ross’ own, but both his artistic style and his TV presence were greatly influenced by another painter, the German American artist Bill Alexander. Alexander’s TV show The Magic of Oil Painting(1974-82) was an early and influential use of television to teach painting and art, and both the show overall and in particular Alexander’s “wet-on-wet” technique, which allowed him to create full paintings in about half an hour, were direct inspirations for Ross’ artistic and TV careers alike. So much so, in fact, that when Ross retired from the Air Force in 1981 he moved to Florida, studied with Alexander, and became a traveling salesman and tutor for his Alexander Magic Art Supplies Company. The two men eventually had a falling out over such familiar issues as a student surpassing a teacher and whether due respect was paid to the latter, and I would argue that Alexander and his show should be as well-known as Ross’. But in any case, there’s no Bob Ross without Bill Alexander.

3)      Art for All: That’s all part of how we should remember and tell the story of this iconic artist and PBS host. But to my mind, the simplest and most important part of that story is this: the transformation of art and painting from elite cultural products of talented individuals to work that anyone and everyone could create. I’m not suggesting for a moment that there aren’t particularly talented individual painters—I’ve had the chance to know some hugely talented professional painters and visual artists, including my aunt, and they had both skills and careers that reflect the medium as a serious artistic form. But I would say very much the same thing about painting that I’d say about writing: while levels of skill and talent can and will vary, everyone who wants to do it should do it, and should share what they do with all of us to add their voices and work to the conversation. That might seem like a truism, but I don’t know that it was before Bob Ross (and, yes, Bill Alexander among others I’m sure), and that’s a pretty darn important legacy to celebrate on his birthday.

Next PBS person tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other PBS people or shows you’d highlight?

October 27, 2022: PBS People: NewsHour Hosts

[October 29th would have been the iconic Bob Ross’ 80th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Ross and four other figures who have helped make PBS the cultural and educational force it is!]

On interesting AmericanStudies takeaways from the longrunning news program’s two pairs of co-hosts.

1)      MacNeil and Lehrer: The program that would eventually become NewsHour began, as so many aspects of modern American politics and journalism did, with Watergate. In 1973 Robert MacNeil, a veteran political journalist and moderator at the time of the PBS program Washington’s Week in Review(which remains on the air to this day!), teamed up with the younger journalist Jim Lehrerto cover every second of the Watergate hearings; their coverage won them an Emmy and led to the creation of The Robert MacNeil Report, which soon morphed into The MacNeil/Lehrer Report. That program lasted nearly two decades, and when MacNeil retired in 1995 Lehrer stayed on as the sole host, leading to the new name The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Throughout those decades, and for the subsequent couple as well (until Lehrer’s 2011 departure), the show embodied what I would call classic adversarial political journalism, of the type pioneered by folks like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite—and it’s perhaps not a coincidence that virtually all of those classic adversarial types, throughout the 20th century in America at least, were white men, possessing enough privilege and intrinsic power to speak truth to power in those important ways.

2)      Ifill and Woodruff: If that role and the assumptions and narratives behind it have begun to shift in 21st century American journalism, that hasn’t happened accidentally nor easily—it has required active efforts on behalf of journalism, the media for which they work, and their allies and supporters. One key moment in that evolution was the 2013 appointment of Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff as the renamed PBS NewsHour’s co-hosts, making them (at the time and to my knowledge still since) the only all-female anchoring team for a nightly TV news program. Unfortunately their co-hosting only lasted a few years, until Ifill’s tragic passing in 2016, but it was nonetheless hugely groundbreaking and influential. There are lots of factors in that legacy, but I’d say a particularly important one was that the fundamental tone and ethos of the show didn’t change with this transition and team—of course there’s no reason why it would or should, but it’s fair (if unfortunate) to say that narratives of “objectivity” and related journalistic questions had too often been associated specifically with traditional white male anchors and voices. Ifill and Woodruff challenged—and Woodruff continues to challenge in her NewsHour hosting role—every part of those narratives, and American journalism, media, and politics are the better for it.

Last PBS person tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other PBS people or shows you’d highlight?