Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 94

October 14, 2022: RunningStudying: Three Current Runners

[With my older son in the midst of his high school cross-country season, and both sons gearing up for their next seasons of indoor and then outdoor track, running has become a huge part of this AmericanStudier’s life these days. But it’s long been part of both my life and America overall, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy different sides of running, leading up to a very special Guest Post from one of those aforementioned youthful AmericanStudiers!]

On AmericanStudies takeaways from three 21st century runners.

1)      Tiffany Chenault: Look, I’ll take any opportunity to share one of the many amazing Guest Posts folks have contributed to this blog; but my SSN Boston colleague and friend Tiffany’s Guest Post is also highly relevant to this week’s and today’s subjects, as it’s a moving and important reflection on race, community, and sports in the 21st century. Check it out and then come on back for two other 21st century runners!

2)      Sydney McLaughlin: If any current runner could be called an heir to the two amazing women I wrote about in yesterday’s post, I think it would have to be Sydney McLaughlin, the young American hurdler who has set, reset, and obliterated world recordsover the last few international competitions. She’s the daughter of a mixed-race couple of former 1980s track standouts, Willie McLaughlin and Mary Neumeister McLaughlin, a heritage that opens up multiple AmericanStudies contexts. But I would argue that McLaughlin is also one of the first American track and field stars to fully embrace social media (yes, even when she takes a short break from it), a side of the sport that will only become more influential in coming years.

3)      Eliud Kipchoge: Two-time Olympic marathon gold medalist and current world record holder Kipchoge is from Kenya, where he still lives and trains, so he’s obviously not an American athlete. I’m partly highlighting him in today’s post because he was suggested by the young RunningStudier whose Guest Post I’m so excited to share this weekend, and I can’t imagine a better reason than that! But it’s also unquestionably the case that the most significant trend in long-distance running for at least the last few decades has been the total dominance of Kenyan runners on the international scene. No sport happens in a single national vacuum, and certainly a sport like running is more about the global community and the events where it comes together. Nearing 40 years of age, Eliud Kipchoge continues to dominate such global events, a particularly striking reflection of the broader trend of Kenyan dominance.

Extra special Guest Post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Running connections or contexts you’d share?

October 13, 2022: RunningStudying: FloJo and JJK

[With my older son in the midst of his high school cross-country season, and both sons gearing up for their next seasons of indoor and then outdoor track, running has become a huge part of this AmericanStudier’s life these days. But it’s long been part of both my life and America overall, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy different sides of running, leading up to a very special Guest Post from one of those aforementioned youthful AmericanStudiers!]

On two interesting AmericanStudies contexts for a pair of interconnected all-time greats.

I imagine that this remains relatively common knowledge way beyond the relatively small community of track and field fans, but in case not: Florence Griffith Joyner (1959-1998) and Jackie Joyner-Kersee (1962- ) weren’t just a pair of athletes who dominated track and field and the Olympics in the 1980s and 1990s, both laying claim at one moment or another to the title of greatest female athlete of all time (one bestowed specifically on Joyner-Kersee by Sports Illustrated for Women, since JJK competed in and dominated the many different events comprised by the heptathlon); they were also, as their names suggest, related by marriage. In 1987, Florence Griffith married another Olympic champion, 1984 triple jump gold medalist Al Joyner, who was Jackie Joyner-Kersee’s brother (Jackie had married her coach, Bob Kersee, a year earlier). There’s plenty of competition for the greatest athletic family, of course, but I have to think this is the most athletically talented pair of sisters-in-law ever!

That in and of itself makes for an interesting lens through which to AmericanStudy this pair, but they were much more than their familial relationship; so I also want to highlight one compelling context for each woman individually. Jacqueline Joyner was born in March 1962 and named after First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, but that’s not the American connection I want to share for her: it’s her birthplace, the confusingly named East St. Louis, Illinois (a city directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, but obviously across a state line as well). In the early 20th century East St. Louis was home to a blossoming African American community, and in early July 1917, that community was targeted by a multi-day white supremacist racial terrorist massacre that came to be known as the East St. Louis Race War (or race riot, but as I’ve written elsewhere, that term is particularly problematic). As was the case with so many of those ubiquitous massacres, the community was decimated for many years thereafter, but it didn’t vanish; and I find it incredibly moving that nearly fifty years later a newborn African American baby was named after the First Lady and would go on to become one of the truly first ladies of American and world sports. Ain’t that America?

It certainly is—but so in its quite different and unique ways is Los Angeles, the city in which Florence Griffith was born two and a half years earlier than Jackie, in December 1959. Of course Los Angeles, like much of the West, had been significantly changed by the Great Migration, and Griffith’s family took part in that movement, with her grandparents having moved from the South to Los Angeles a couple decades earlier. But what I want to highlight here is the multi-layered, complicated role of public institutions in Florence’s young life in California: her upbringing by her single mother (a seamstress also named Florence Griffith) in the prominent Jordan Downs public housing complex in the Watts neighborhood of LA; and then her experiences as a student-athlete at two universities in the UC system, first California State University at Northridge and then UCLA(with a short gap in between where she worked as a bank teller while seeking a scholarship to return to school). California is of course not at all unique in the role that public housing and public education alike played in its development in the 20th century, but it was one of the states most connected to those trends—and it’s telling that one of the most famous athletes and Americans born in the state in the mid-20th century was so interconnected with those public institutions and communities.

Last RunningStudying from me tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Running connections or contexts you’d share?

October 12, 2022: RunningStudying: Prefontaine on Film

[With my older son in the midst of his high school cross-country season, and both sons gearing up for their next seasons of indoor and then outdoor track, running has become a huge part of this AmericanStudier’s life these days. But it’s long been part of both my life and America overall, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy different sides of running, leading up to a very special Guest Post from one of those aforementioned youthful AmericanStudiers!]

On a telling storytelling difference between the two late 90s Prefontaine movies.

There are plenty of impressive American sports stories, plenty of inspiring ones, and plenty of tragic ones, but I’m not sure any such story combines all three of those modes more clearly or in a more condensed period of time than the story of Steve “Pre” Prefontaine. One of the first internationally acclaimed and successful American distance runners, Prefontaine achieved a striking series of milestones in the few years after the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics(at which he competed as a 21 year old, amidst a collegiate career at the University of Oregon in which he never lost a cross-country race and was only beaten twice in any events, both in the mile). That amazing stretch included his setting American records at every distance from 2000 to 10,000 meters over those few years, with his 13:21.9 in the 5K at the 1974 World Games a particularly stunning result. And then in May 1975, when a still only 24 year old Prefontaine was deep into his training for the 1976 Olympics, he was tragically killed in a single-car accident near his home in Eugene, Oregon.

Prefontaine’s legacy has lived on for the nearly fifty years since his death, including in a famous 10K road race that bears his name and is run every September in his hometown of Coos Bay, Oregon. But in pop culture specifically, there was one interesting late 90s moment when two competing films brought Prefontaine more prominently into the public eye: 1997’s Prefontaine (starring Jared Leto as Pre) and 1998’s Without Limits (starring Billy Crudup). [AmericanStudies aside: I’ve long been fascinated by the trend of competing movies on a very similar subject that are released very close together, and the 90s were particularly prone to that phenomenon; note for example the dueling 1997 volcano films, Dante’s Peak and Volcano!] Without Limits is certainly better known, likely because it was written and directed by the great Robert Towne and co-starred Donald Sutherlandin an acclaimed performance as Prefontaine’s coach Bill Bowerman (later a co-founder of Nike); but as ever, I think an additive approach, putting these texts in conversation, is especially illuminating.

There are plenty of expected parallels between the two films, particularly in their depictions of both Pre and Bowerman (played by Tommy Lee Jones in Prefontaine). But there’s also a really interesting and telling difference in the films’ structures and uses of perspective: Without Limits focuses closely on Prefontaine and Bowerman and their relationship; while Prefontaine uses two relatively supporting characters, Assistant Coach Bill Dellinger (Ed O’Neill) and Pre’s girlfriend Nancy Alleman (Amy Locane), as the principal lenses on the runner and his story. To this viewer at least, that distinction means that Prefontaineis more interested in images and narratives of Pre, in how he was perceived and his meanings for those around him (within but also outside of the sports world); while Without Limits is a somewhat more conventional sports story, interested in groundbreaking athletic achievements and the coach who was instrumental to them. Both those lenses have a lot to tell us about why and how an individual athlete like Steve Prefontaine becomes an enduring presence in and out of sports, so lace up your running shoes and cue up a double feature!

Next RunningStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Running connections or contexts you’d share?

October 11, 2022: RunningStudying: The Boston Marathon

[With my older son in the midst of his high school cross-country season, and both sons gearing up for their next seasons of indoor and then outdoor track, running has become a huge part of this AmericanStudier’s life these days. But it’s long been part of both my life and America overall, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy different sides of running, leading up to a very special Guest Post from one of those aforementioned youthful AmericanStudiers!]

On three layers to the histories of the first, 1897 Boston Marathon.

1)      The B.A.A.: The Marathon was far from the starting point for organized athletics in the city. Ten years earlier, in 1887, the Boston Athletic Association had been founded, reflecting the rising national interest in both amateur and professional sports in the late 19th century. The BAA built an impressive clubhouse in the city’s Back Bay neighborhood, with facilities for numerous sports including boxing, tennis, and water polo; and it began hosting track and field competitions and other athletic events, including an annual Spring competition known as the BAA Games. In 1897, perhaps in part to commemorate the BAA’s 10th anniversary and inspired by the marathon at the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens, the Association’s leadership decided to conclude those Spring games with a marathon of their own. BAA member and Olympic Team Manager John Graham worked with local businessman Herbert Holton to choose and design the 24.5-mile course. 

2)      Patriots’ Day: That overall Spring timing was to coincide with the end of the BAA Games, but the specific timing of April 19th was due to another factor: the newly-created holiday of Patriots’ Day. The then-Massachusetts-specific holiday was just three years old at the time, having been first celebrated in 1894 after the Lexington Historical Society petitioned the MA Legislature to create a holiday honoring the 1775 Revolutionary War Battles of Lexington and Concord. And running the Marathon on that date was even more specific than that, as the BAA sought to link the American Revolutionary effort and spirit to that displayed by the Athenian soldiers at the 490 BC Battle of Marathon for which the race had been initially named. A bit of a stretch, perhaps, but the Boston Marathon has never been anything less than grandiose!

3)      JJ “Little Mac” McDermott: The winner of that first Boston Marathon (known then as the B.A.A. Road Race) was quite a grandiose figure himself. Not in size, as the Irish American lithographer and amateur runner John J. “J.J.” or “Little Mac” McDermott was just 5’6” and 124 pounds when measured before the race. But as that hyperlinked article puts it, this was America’s first great marathoner, and I would argue one of the 19th century’s greatest American athletes: he won the first marathon run in the U.S., in New York in September 1896; and won the first Boston Marathon just seven months later, quite possibly while running with the tuberculosis that would kill him less than a decade later. It’s not clear whether McDermott definitely had TB when he won in Boston, but when it comes to the first iteration of such a legendary race, I’m going to print the legend.

Next RunningStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Running connections or contexts you’d share?

October 10, 2022: RunningStudying: Ragged Mountain Running

[With my older son in the midst of his high school cross-country season, and both sons gearing up for their next seasons of indoor and then outdoor track, running has become a huge part of this AmericanStudier’s life these days. But it’s long been part of both my life and America overall, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy different sides of running, leading up to a very special Guest Post from one of those aforementioned youthful AmericanStudiers!]

On a childhood influence who exemplifies the best of community.

Of the handful of experiences that have been genuinely defining across the course of my 45 years, I think long-distance running is likely the one about which I’ve written the least in this space (prior to this week’s series, that is). There’s a reason for that: the last consistent running I did (outside of on treadmills at various gyms, anyway, which really is an entirely different animal from running outside) was my senior year in high school, more than 25 years ago (he typed with a gasp). But for the seven years before that, starting in 6thgrade when my Mom and I trained for our first Charlottesville 10-Miler together (a race we would run almost every year between that one and my senior year), and including my three years on the CHS cross-country team (about which I did write, in a very different context, in this post on my experiences of hazing during my freshman year), long-distance running was as consistent a part of my pre-teen and teenage life as anything.

I will always associate running first and foremost with a community of two: my Mom and I, out there on early mornings, often with our dog Tiah. These days, as the upcoming Guest Post will illustrate, I’m also coming to associate it with a community of three, as my sons have become part of their high school cross-country (my older son) and track (both of them) teams. But in the broader community of Charlottesville runners, of which we became part through those Ten Milers and many other road races over the years, there was another figure who absolutely and beautifully came to symbolize running to me: Mark Lorenzoni. Along with his wife Cynthia, a seriously successful long-distance runner in her own right, Mark started and operated Ragged Mountain Running Shop, a store that became and remains a Charlottesville institution (we just got my younger son some new running shoes there while we were in town in June). But he also and especially became the most vocal and dedicated supporter of all things running in Cville, and most especially of young runners.

“The loneliness of the long-distance runner” is a clichéd but in many ways accurate phrase, not just because of the short story and film of that name, but because compared to many sports running is a profoundly individual endeavor, one where the battle is most fully against the voices in our own heads. Nothing and no one can entirely change that fundamental nature, not a running partner, not a team of fellow high school runners, and not cheering crowds as the Ten Miler (for example) always drew. But at the same time, given how much of teenage life can already feel isolated and lonely, it’s pretty important that we find ways to make sure young runners (and all runners, but in some particular ways young runners especially) also feel solidarity and support, the best kinds of community and comradery. Mark did that amazingly well, not just through formal events but through his very presence and voice, before races, after races, during races, and at so many other moments along the way. I can only hope that my sons find similar influences in their burgeoning running careers—and am determined to do whatever I can to carry Mark’s legacies forward.

Next RunningStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Running connections or contexts you’d share?

October 8-9, 2022: Anita Siraki’s Guest Post on Interview with the Vampire

[Anita E. Siraki is a librarian and independent scholar. She specialized in Book History and Print Culture at the University of Toronto where she examined mid-19th century American female authors focusing on Harriet Beecher Stowe and the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As Webmaster for the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at the EJ Pratt Library, she participated in several digitization projects. In addition, she is a reviewer for Booklist, Library Journal and other trade publications. She is a past recipient of the George H. Locke Memorial Scholarship from the Toronto Public Library in recognition of service in public libraries and high academic standing.]

A Critical Look at the Time Period Change in the upcoming Interview with the Vampire Television Adaptation 

The debut of the long-awaited television series adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is set to take place on October 2, 2022. Fans have been chewing on hints and other teasers throughout the year so far. The full-length trailer for the series that aired at the San Diego Comic-Con festival offered a more substantive look at what’s to come. In particular, the announcement of casting the mixed-race actor Jacob Anderson in the role of Louis de Pointe du Lac garnered a lot of buzz.

[Source: Jacob Anderson as Louis de Pointe du Lac; via Tumblr.]

Unfortunately, the announcement was also met with an onslaught of the horridly predictable phenomenon of racist and bigoted trolls getting angry. Any time an actor of colour is cast in a role, particularly in a literary adaptation in which a character is white, there is a vitriolic response. It happened several times over the course of the series The Vampire Diaries, with Katerina Graham, a biracial actress, in the role of Bonnie Bennett who was white in the L.J. Smith books. It also happened when Noma Dumezweni was cast in the the part of an adult Hermione Granger in the play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The mega-popular series creator JK Rowling has become very problematic since then for other reasons. Nonetheless, she defended that casting of a Black actress in the role.

Before the release of the Interview trailer at Comic-Con, I wrote a post arguing that the casting of a mixed-race actor, Jacob Anderson, in the role of Louis made a lot more sense than viewers and fans might think. I wasn’t sure at the time if this television adaptation would stick to the 1790s as a timeline, as with the original novel and the 1994 film adaptation starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. I’ll soon get to my revised views after having watched the trailer. In the meantime, for those who need a refresher, the Louis de Pointe du Lac in Rice’s novels is a white male of Western European French ancestry. His family owns indigo plantations in the 1790s outside of New Orleans. When Louis’s father dies, he becomes the man of the house and needs to look after his brother, sister, and mother. He doesn’t talk a lot about how this means that he has become an enslaver, and that he has inherited his father’s property. In addition to the buildings such as the Big House mansion, he also became the new owner of the enslaved people of African descent that his father owned.

With the 1994 film adaptation, there’s no question that the roles of Lestat the vampire and Louis would be played by anyone other than white men--and in this case, pretty much the leading white men in Hollywood at the time. Although Rice expressed outrage at Cruise’s casting, she later retracted her statements when she viewed his performance. Since the film adaptation, the film and movie industries have changed drastically. A recent phenomenon that critics argue against is the use of diversity casting, in which a Black or non-white actor is cast in a role simply for the sake of making the show appear diverse rather than more meaningful reasons. I don’t think that’s what has happened here with Anderson, who is a gifted actor in his own right.

But as the trailer for the television adaptation establishes, we’re not in 1790s Louisiana anymore.

We’re in 1910 in New Orleans in a completely different age and era.

When I first saw that, my reaction was one of interest, because like most fans, I expected that the showrunners would stick to the landscape of the 1790s. Owing to that, I was curious as to how they would handle the fact that a mixed-race, light-skinned Black man is a plantation owner. It’s possible that one of the reasons for switching timelines may be to allow the show to dodge that scenario altogether. Having said that, I also think that it could just as easily be a situation in which the folks behind the AMC adaptation chose 1910 as a primary timeline to make this fresh and different. They want to ensure that this is not just a remake of the existing 1994 version, and to have a television adaptation that stands on its own. It could be any number of different things, or a combination of reasons for why this re-telling of the Interview story is set away from the 1790s and carving out its own space. However, I think it’s worth noting that the producers and creatives behind the show may have felt that it would be too confusing to viewers to have to explain why someone other than a white man was an enslaver. Unless people have read extensively on the subject or have a family history, most folks will not know that free people of colour in the South owned enslaved people of African descent (in some cases, their own family members.) For more on this, I highly encourage people to read Beyond Slavery’s Shadow by Dr. Warren Milteer Jr.

In the award-winning landmark book, They Were Her Property, scholar Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers directly refutes the popularly held belief that only white men were enslavers or that plantation mistresses busied themselves with crocheting and planning social events, but little else. In the book, Jones-Rogers also showcases the many instances of people of colour who owned enslaved people of African descent. Although in some cases, a free person of colour might have purchased one of their own relatives as a way of manumitting or freeing them, in other cases, they did not have any ethical dilemmas or hesitation about subjecting their own family members to chattel slavery.

Regardless of the reasons for switching the timeline of the Interview with the Vampire adaptation from AMC from the 1790s and indigo plantations to the glitz and glam of early 1900s New Orleans, hopefully fans will have something worthwhile to sink our teeth into.

 

Bibliography: 

Cotter, Padraig. “Why Anne Rice Hated Tom Cruise’s Interview With The VampireCasting.” Screen Rant. July 23, 2022. https://screenrant.com/interview-vampire-anne-rice-tom-cruise-lestat-casting-hate/#:~:text=Rice%20Hated%20Cruise's%20Interview%20Casting,a%20boycott%20against%20the%20star.

Harper, Stephanie. “The Truth about Kat Graham’s Time Filming ‘The Vampire Diaries’.” Black Girl Nerds. Accessed September 9, 2022. https://blackgirlnerds.com/the-truth-about-kat-grahams-time-filming-the-vampire-diaries/

Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E.. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

Lewis, Andy. “J.K. Rowling Defends Casting Black Actress as Hermione in ‘Harry Potter’ Play.” December 21, 2015. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/black-hermione-controversy-jk-rowling-850458/

Milteer, Warren E. Beyond Slavery’s Shadow : Free People of Color in the South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Neidenbach, ELizabeth Clark. “Free People of Color.” 64 Parishes. April 28, 2011. https://64parishes.org/entry/free-people-of-color

Siraki, Anita E. “Why the Casting of a Mixed-Race Actor for Louis in Interview is More Historically Accurate Than You Think.” Anita E. Siraki, Library Professional. April 23, 2022.

https://anitasirakibiblio.wordpress.com/2022/04/23/why-the-casting-of-a-mixed-race-actor-for-louis-in-interview-is-more-historically-accurate-than-you-think/

Speaks, Angie. “When Diversity Casting Hurts the Plot, It Hurts Black Actors—and Viewers | Opinion.” Newsweek. August 25, 2022. https://www.newsweek.com/when-diversity-casting-hurts-plot-it-hurts-black-actors-viewers-opinion-1736903

Weekes, Princess. “What Does It Mean to Have a Black Louis in Interview With the Vampire?” The Mary Sue. August 26, 2021.https://www.themarysue.com/black-louis-meaning-interview-with-the-vampire/

Westenfeld, Adrienne. “Interview with the Vampire Looks Sensuous and Bloody.” Esquire Magazine. September 9, 2022. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a37090376/everything-we-know-about-interview-with-the-vampire-tv-reboot/

October 8, 2022: Bad Presidents: Donald Trump

[October 4thmarks the 200thbirthday of Rutherford B. Hayes, a good-looking young man who went on to be a very bad-governing president. So this week I’ve contextualized Hayes and four other under-remembered bad (in the least good sense) chief executives, leading up to this post on the worst we’ve ever had.]

On two AmericanStudies sides to Trump’s truly unprecedented (and yes, unpresidented) badness.

Look, I could write a year’s worth of daily blog posts about the historic horrorshow that was the Trump administration and not come close to running out of new topics. While I know everything in 2022 America tends to be viewed through a partisan political lens, I honestly don’t think that sentence is even vaguely a political one—just a fundamental observation about the facts of the matter, plain as day to anyone who doesn’t believe in nonsense (and tellingly Trump-tastic) concepts like “alternative facts.” I also don’t imagine that I have to spend much time convincing readers of this blog that Trump was a truly lousy president; and if you do have a different take, well…while I’ve consistently and genuinely encouraged disagreement when it comes to all the other subjects I’ve covered in this space (and will always do so—I really love comments of all types, including contrasting views!), in this case I’ll ask you to keep that opinion to yourself. Life’s too short.

But all of that notwithstanding, it didn’t feel right to feature a series on bad presidents in late 2022 and not include the recent and very worst such example. So I wanted here to think about two AmericanStudies sides to Trump’s badness—one more small and symbolic, the other more sizeable and significant, but both I believe quite telling.

1)      Historic Ignorance: In part because he apparently doesn’t read, and in part because he’s clearly only interested in things that involve him, Trump was an American President who knew precisely nothing about American history (likely the first such, although who really knows what Chester A. Arthur knew?!). No single moment reflected that historic ignorance better than the rightly infamous Black History Month quote, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Or maybe it was the time Trump seemed pretty blatantly to suggest, in a speech for July Freaking 4th no less, that the Revolutionary War Continental Army “retook the airports.” I’m not suggesting that every president has to be an AmericanStudier, necessarily—but this level of stunning ignorance of every the most basic details of our collective history and story was, at the very least, hugely symbolic of the administration’s fundamental un- and anti-Americanness.

2)      History Repeating: Or, to put it more precisely, the way the Trump administration reflected and amplified the worst of America, past and present (including such ignorance and anti-intellectualism). Even before Trump’s inauguration, indeed just days after the 2016 presidential election, a spokesperson for the incoming administration sought to defend Japanese internment and make the case for a similar policy when it came to Muslim Americans. While the administration didn’t ultimately go there, they did make the Muslim Ban—a policy that echoed and extended the legacies of the most xenophobic and exclusionary narratives in American history—one of their very first proposals. And I would argue that every other “idea” put forward by the administration (I mean those scare-quotes very very fully, I assure you) similarly echoed and extended the worst parts of American history and culture, the moments and ways in which America has strayed most fully from its ideals. Which, y’know, is pretty damn bad.

Next Guest Post drops later today,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other baddies you’d highlight?

October 7, 2022: Bad Presidents: Gerald Ford

[October 4thmarks the 200thbirthday of Rutherford B. Hayes, a good-looking young man who went on to be a very bad-governing president. So this week I’ll contextualize Hayes and four other under-remembered bad (in the least good sense) chief executives, leading up to a weekend post on the worst we’ve ever had.]

I’m gonna keep this one pretty short and to the point. Gerald Ford was a big lovable dude, a former football star whose biggest problem seems to have been keeping his balance. In many ways, he was a perfect figure to return post-Watergate America to a place of greater normalcy and calm. But there’s the rub—one of the ways he decided to do so was by issuing a full presidential pardon for his predecessor, Richard Nixon, insulating Nixon from prosecution for his very real and very troubling crimes. Whatever we think of the case for that particular action (and I’m not a fan), there’s no doubt that is established some frustrating precedents that continue to inform our own moment—if one past former president had been rightly investigated for and charged with his crimes, that is, certain current former presidents (on whom more this weekend) and their supporters would have a far more difficult time arguing that such steps are unprecedented and out of bounds. For that and that alone, Gerald Ford deserves a spot on this list of under-remembered bad presidents.

Trump-tastic post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other baddies you’d highlight?

October 6, 2022: Bad Presidents: Calvin Coolidge

[October 4thmarks the 200thbirthday of Rutherford B. Hayes, a good-looking young man who went on to be a very bad-governing president. So this week I’ll contextualize Hayes and four other under-remembered bad (in the least good sense) chief executives, leading up to a weekend post on the worst we’ve ever had.]

How a pre-presidency moment foreshadows the worst of a 1920s administration.

As part of my September 2015 series on Dennis Lehane’s masterful historical novel The Given Day (2008) I wrote about the 1919 Boston Police Strike. That historical event provides the starting point for my ideas in this post, so I’d ask you to check that hyperlinked post out if you would and then come on back here for more.

Welcome back! Calvin Coolidgehad already been a Massachusetts State Senator, Lieutenant Governor, and then Governor by 1919, but it was his opposition to the police strike which truly launchedthe 47 year-old Coolidge onto the national scene and stardom within the Republican Party (which led to his nomination as Warren Harding’s Vice Presidential running mate in 1920). It’s logical enough that the governor of a state would oppose a labor action by public employees in that state, but it was the extreme way in which Coolidge framed the police strike that truly stood out to observers around the country. He didn’t go quite as far as President Woodrow Wilson, who called the strike“a crime against civilization.” But in a September 1919 telegram to labor leader Samuel Gompers that went viral, Coolidge quoted Wilson’s line approvingly and added that “there is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, at any time,” a stridently anti-labor assertion that directly contributed to such larger narratives of the strikers and the labor movement as a whole as not only outside of their rights, but fundamentally outside of American society and identity as well.

When President Harding died suddenly of a heart attack while in San Francisco as part of a speaking tour in the summer of 1923, his relatively unknown Vice President became President. Coolidge’s legendarily taciturn nature meant that he remained somewhat unknown through his 5+ years as president, but one famous quote is particularly telling: addressing the American Society of Newspaper Editors in January 1925, President Coolidge argued that “the chief business of the American people is business.” I would argue that taken together, a great deal of Coolidge’s administration can be summed up by these two moments and quotes: his thoroughgoing opposition to the 1919 labor action and his full-throated (especially for him!) support of business and the free market in that 1925 speech. From scaling back the Progressive-era regulatory state to levels not seen since the depths of the Gilded Age to extensive tax cuts that favored big business and the wealthy, Coolidge’s policies were driven again and again by this laissez faire worldview that favored money and industry over workers and collective action. Since all of that played a not-insignificant role in the oncoming Great Depression, I’d say it also makes Calvin Coolidge a pretty bad president.

Last bad president tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other baddies you’d highlight?

October 5, 2022: Bad Presidents: William McKinley

[October 4thmarks the 200thbirthday of Rutherford B. Hayes, a good-looking young man who went on to be a very bad-governing president. So this week I’ll contextualize Hayes and four other under-remembered bad (in the least good sense) chief executives, leading up to a weekend post on the worst we’ve ever had.]

On two reasons why I can’t entirely mourn our third assassinated president.

Lest there be any confusion on this score, let me be clear that my opening sentence there is hyperbolic—I’m not in this post going to argue in any way that President McKinleydeserved to be assassinated or that his death was a good thing. Like those of Presidents Lincoln and Garfield before him, McKinley’s September 1901 assassination exemplified some of his era’s most prominent historical trends: in this case, both labor activism and anarchist revolutionary movements, as , was a self-proclaimed anarchist who saw himself as avenging the treatment of Slavic miners during the 1897 coal miners’ strike. So the McKinley assassination was historically meaningful and offers a compelling window into its era—but it was also just as tragic and unnecessary a killing as those prior assassinations, and again it’s important for me to stress that I’m not trying either to make light of his death or to frame it as a positive.

Yet at the same time, neither can I say of McKinley’s death, in the early months of his second presidential term, what I have said in this space about Lincoln’s: that it was a historic tragedy which produced further, even more widespread negative effects in the years to come. For one thing, McKinley’s first term had featured a series of troubling and destructive policies and actions on issues of ethnicity and race, both abroad and at home. Atop that list would have to be the 1898 Spanish American War and especially its imperialistic goals and effects, as exemplified by the ongoing war in the Philippines against rebels resisting the American occupation of their nation. But just as troubling and imperialistic was the 1898 annexation of Hawaii, and the concurrent treatment of the nation’s exiled queen and native peoples necessitated by that action. And on the home front, it was a horrific moment of inaction that to me defines McKinley’s mishandling of racial issues: in the midst of the Wilmington coup and massacre and its weeklong orgy of violence against African Americans, an anonymous Wilmington woman wrote to McKinley with a desperate plea for help, imploring him to dispatch federal troops to save her community and city; and McKinley did nothing, leaving Wilmington’s white supremacist forces to complete their massacre unabated.

I can’t say that Teddy Roosevelt, the vice president who succeeded to the presidency upon McKinley’s death and a man whose reputation was based in large part upon his actions both on the frontierand in the Spanish American War, would necessarily have done anything differently in these cases (although his dinner at the White House with Booker T. Washington suggests he might have when it comes to Wilmington, at least). Yet to my mind there’s no question that the most enduring aspects of Roosevelt’s nearly two terms as president, for the Progressive movement’s reforms and battles, would never have been the case if the far more conservative McKinley had completed his second term. In both his political allegiances and his policies, McKinley embodied Gilded Age America and its emphases and ideals; whereas in his support for the Progresive movement, Roosevelt could be said to have helped usher in a new era in American life, one that challenged those Gilded Age narratives and signaled new 20thcentury possibilities for the nation. As noted in that last hyperlinked article, McKinley’s close advisor Mark Hannadetested the choice of Roosevelt for the 1900 vice presidential nominee—one more reflection of the differences between McKinley and Roosevelt, and of why in many ways the latter’s first term almost certainly represented an improvement on the former’s second.

Next bad president tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other baddies you’d highlight?