"Free To Be...You And Me" and History

Marlo Thomas's pathbreaking record album Free To Be You and Me turned forty last month, an anniversary that has occasioned a fair amount of reflection online and elsewhere.  Slate ran an interesting three-part series about the making of the album and its legacy.  Yesterday, NPR's Weekend Edition featured a story about Free To Be...You and Me. Comedians Rob Kutner and the Levinson Brothers have even issued a parody album in celebration of the anniversary.

But there appears to be surprisingly little scholarship on Free To Be...You and Me.  There's a good chapter on it by Leslie Paris in the Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature (2011).  And Lori Rotskof and Laura L. Lovett have edited a collection of essays on Free To Be entitled When We Were Free To Be: Looking Back on a Children's Classic and the Difference It Made, which was published by UNC Press last month (and which, I should add, I haven't had a chance to look at).

The relative lack of attention is surprising for at least two reasons, the first of which is probably obvious to those of you who were born in the Sixties or Seventies.  Free To Be...You and Me, first as an album and later as a book and tv special (both of which followed about a year-and-a-half later in early 1974), was a major part of early-to-mid 1970s children's culture. The album sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The book was a best-seller and a winner of an American Library Association Award.  The TV special won an Emmy and a Peabody.*  The songs, stories, poems, and skits associated with Free To Be in its various incarnations have since become major objects of nostalgia for many in my generation. It was one of the first CDs that my wife and I bought our kids, as much a necessary import from our childhoods as Where the Wild Things Are or Goodnight Moon.

The second reason for my surprise for the relative lack of scholarly attention given to Free To Be is of more particular interest to readers of this blog.




As the historiography of the U.S. in the  last third of the twentieth century has ballooned in recent years, one common, emerging narrative thread is the notion that the left won the "culture wars," while the right won the battle over political economy. Often, these two developments are seen as two sides of the same coin.  Indeed, in its strongest versions, there's a kind of dramatic irony to this tale: the right (or at least some major piece of it) is surprised that neoliberalism cannot serve as a bulwark for traditional values, as all that is solid melts to air before it (to steal one of Andrew's favorite phrases of Marx); but the left (or at least some major piece of it) is equally surprised to discover that racial, gender, and, most recently, sexual liberation does not undermine The System or create a world of greater economic egalitarianism.

Whether or not one accepts this as the big story of the end of the (first?) American Century (and I go back and forth as to whether or not I do), Free To Be...You and Me would seem to fit such a narrative fairly well.  It marked a moment in which the Seventies were emerging out of the Sixties and helped achieve a series of fairly significant cultural changes that still fell very much within the context of consumer capitalism.

The album, book, and tv show were the product of an extraordinary moment of second-wave feminist activism.  As Leslie Paris points out, during the first years of the 1970s, a number of feminist organizations set about studying the content of children's books. Their concerns grew out of a conviction that much sexism flows from what children are taught about gender roles. What they found was that children's books tended to feature many more boy protagonists than girl protagonists. And that the boy protagonists tended to be much more active in the world at large.  Girls sometimes started stories as "tom boys," but by the end they tended to adopt more "normal" female behavior patterns (a story type that feminist critics identified as "the cop-out").  While Marlo Thomas describes her conception of Free To Me...You and Me in much more personal terms (she was disturbed at the books that her niece was reading and unable to find better alternatives in the bookstore), in fact she was part of a larger movement. Indeed, Thomas was close friends with Gloria Steinem and Free To Be...You and Me was co-created by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, an editor at the still-young Ms. magazine, which had. by 1971, already become involved in the effort to publish "stories for free children."**   As a second-generation major television personality--her father was Make Room for Daddy star Danny Thomas and she had just had her own hit with That Girl-- Thomas was able to bring an amazing set of entertainment stars to the project, including Alan Alda, Harry Belafonte, Carol Channing, Mel Brooks, Diana Ross, Rosey Greer, Shirley Jones, and Tom Smothers.

In addition to being a quite successful intervention in children's culture, Free To Be was also part of the larger spread of feminism into the American mainstream. Two important things ought to be noted about this. First, many of the album's messages about gender roles and gender stereotypes were quite challenging in the early 1970s.  For examples, "William Wants a Doll," which appeared on the album, worried executives at ABC television because, according to Thomas, they feared that it "would turn every American boy into a homosexual." Thomas had to fight for its inclusion in the tv version of Free to Be.***

Secondly, as Leslie Paris notes, Free To Be is very much an example of liberal feminism. Its chief concern is fighting sexism and gender stereotypes. Its message is deeply individualistic; all children, boys and girls, should be whatever they want to be....and can be if they simply embrace their individuality. Though it suggests a kind of joyful racial and class egalitarianism, at its center is a traditional, heteronormative vision of the family.  "William Wants a Doll," emphasizes that William is, otherwise, "normal," and that his desire to have a doll is reasonable precisely because he may be a father someday.  Indeed, "William Wants a Doll" is  prominently mentioned, for just this reason, in the negative review that fran pollner gave the album in off our backs, arguably the single most important radical feminist journal.  "Nowhere are free and loving relations between two girls or two boys depicted," wrote pollner, who suggested that the album was aimed entirely at straight, middle-class women (and women-to-be).****

One might also note that absent from Free To Be...You and Me is any very clear sense of an antagonist, beyond sexist individuals.  One of the great goals of the Sixties' New Left had been, in Paul Potter's phrase, to "name the system;" Free To Be...You and Me doesn't even attempt to do this.  There's very little sense of what one might need to do, beyond consuming the album itself,  to achieve, in the words of its opening, title song, a land where "every boy...grows to be his own man" and "every girl grows to be her own woman."  Indeed, the song simply suggests "it ain't far to this land from where we are" and "the time's comin' near" when we'll achieve it.  Indeed, the entire album is almost relentlessly upbeat and nearly utopian in tone.*****   

We might, indeed, put Free To Be...You and Me in the broader context of the kind of hopeful, earnest liberalism regularly produced by the U.S. entertainment industry, from the social problem films of the Thirties and Forties, through the Fifties and Sixties films of Stanley Kramer, to the sitcoms of Norman Lear in the 1970s and The Cosby Show in the 1980s.  What was new, however, with Free To Be, was its feminism and its focus on very young children.

Over the course of the 1970s, the kind of anti-stereotyping message that was found in Free to Be became quite common in American children's culture. You might remember, for example, this PSA produced by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Carter years:

Throughout my years in elementary school in the Seventies, I remember being taught that sexism and racism were evils, and that they were caused by "prejudice" and "ignorance."  Where prejudice and ignorance came from was never made very clear.  And the implication was that knowledge itself could cure prejudice and ignorance, which made the stubborn persistence of prejudice, ignorance, sexism, and racism somewhat mysterious.  All of my peers certainly heard NFL star Rosey Greer sing "It's Alright to Cry," but as an occasionally emotionally fragile young boy, I knew damn well from personal experience that, in fact, it was not socially alright to do so. 

It's interesting to note that, following off our back's initial negative review, Free To Be...You And Me showed up over the next several decades in its pages as an object of bitter-sweet nostalgia, a key feminist text of the early Seventies that was nonetheless inadequate.  "We knew there was more to being lesbians than playing 'Free to Be You and Me' at three a.m.," wrote Sally Sheklow in a 2003 article, "but we didn't know what to do."******

More pointedly, Marilyn Webb, one of off our back's founders, tallied up the successes and failures from the vantage point of 2005:

When my daughter was born, her generation was socialized as we never were. They were supposed to be tiny feminist soldiers in training, raised on Free to Be You and Me and expected to move right through that glass ceiling. All the while, they were also supposed to understand the treachery of American arrogance and global capitalism. But today we have George W. Bush, not socialism, Condoleeza Rice, and repeated attacks against legalized abortion, national health and childcare, and the planned destruction of Medicare, whose benefits are proportionally greater for older women since we live longer than men. Yes, we opened female doors: to Little League, to medical and law offices, and to the U.S. Senate. But most American women still have to work--as I did, by the way--and still not for equal pay. And all but the rich still also have only shaky options for childcare.*******

It's somehow fitting that, two years ago, the album's title song, shorn of any transformational political message whatsoever, was very effectively used in a back-to-school Target commercial.  Whatever else Free To Be...You and Me accomplished (and I think it accomplished a fair bit that was good), it can still very effectively be used to move product, especially to the generation that initially consumed it.

[UPDATE 12/11: I realize that I had forgotten to add a citation for the pollner review of Free To Be when I originally posted this yesterday.  I've just done so.]

_________________________________________
* Leslie Paris, "Happily Ever After: Free To Be...You and Me, Second-Wave Feminism, and 1970s Children's Culture" in The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature (Oxford, 2011), 520.

** On "Stories for Free Children," see Margaret B. McDowell, "New Didacticism: Stories for Free Children," Language Arts, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan. 1977), 41-47, 85.

*** Paris, 531.

**** fran pollner, "free to be...," off our backs, Vol. 3, No. 6 (February/March 1973), 19.

***** Lest you think I'm being unfair asking a children's book to be anything but relentlessly upbeat, let alone to suggest a systemic, political antagonist, compare Free To Be...You and Me to Dr. Seuss's 1971 environmental classic, The Lorax.

****** Sally Sheklow, "Blast from the Past," off our backs, Vol. 33, No. 5/6 (May-June 2003), 32.

******* Marilyn Webb, "Giving Birth and Birthing off our backs: one of the founding mothers of oob talks about motherhood then and now," off our backs, Vol. 35, No. 5/6 (May-June 2005), 23

Has Intellectual History Had a Kuhnian Revolution?

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book which clearly belongs on any list of the most significant historical works of the twentieth century.  Over the weekend, the UK's The Observer featured an excellent journalistic account by John Naughton of the significance of Kuhn's book, both within the history of science and in the wider sphere of (at least educated Anglophone) culture, which got me thinking both about my encounters with the book (and Kuhn) and about the place of Kuhn's vision of of the past in intellectual history beyond the history of science.

I first read Structure as a first-semester freshman in Science A17, the first half of Owen Gingerich's history of science survey course that, as part of Harvard's Core Curriculum, was a direct heir to the Gen Ed science course whose formulation had led Thomas Kuhn from physics to the history of science and to the metahistorical revolution embodied in his book.


Usually one encounters a famous book's reputation long before actually reading the book. But reading Kuhn as a first-semester freshman in the early 1980s, I had absolutely no preconceptions.  I had no idea of the book's significance within its field. And the explosion of paradigm talk in the wider culture had yet to occur. So my sense of wonder at reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was relatively unmediated (though, of course, the fact that it was being assigned and discussed in a class was itself a form of mediation).  It was, I think, one of the first times that I experienced how a work of history can fundamentally change the way one understands the world, not simply through revealing what happened in the past, but also through its critical understanding of what happened in the past.  And, like many others who encounter Kuhn for the first time, I and my classmates began busily applying the idea of paradigm shifts to realms beyond science.  I remember my section leader cautioning us that Kuhn himself was very insistent that his idea of scientific change applied only to science.  That made us slow, but not stop, our excited, undergraduate Kuhnification of everything.

Sometime during my senior year I found myself at a reception with Thomas Kuhn himself.  It was, I think, a celebration of some anniversary of the Harvard Society of Fellows, of which Kuhn was a particularly notable alumnus (and with which I, it should be said, have never had a direct affiliation).  I spent much of the reception trying to work up the nerve to talk to Kuhn, who had really made an enormous intellectual difference to me, but I could never figure out what I might say to him.*

Kuhn's direct impact on the rest of my college education was slight (I took only one other history of science class), but his name frequently showed up in reviews of recent works in the history of science that I read during those years in various periodicals. I was struck both by the hostility with which many philosophers of science and scientists treated Kuhn, and by the tendency to dismiss him as an epistemic relativist. The latter was a charge that particularly puzzled me, as Kuhn's understanding of scientific revolutions relies on the appearance of anomalies in the results of "normal science" to trigger a paradigm shift.  It seemed to me that a theory-independent reality was necessary to generate those anomalies.

As John Naughton notes in his Observer article, in the ensuing decades, Kuhn--or at least Kuhn-speak--has spread throughout the culture...though it's an interesting question why this is the case and whether popular talk of "paradigm shifts" suggests real Kuhnian influence or just the shallow importation of a piece of jargon, rather like Gramsci's rising popularity in the '70s and '80s made "hegemony" a common word without actually suggesting that its users were notably Gramscian.

Certainly the rise of paradigm-talk has helped cement the book's status as a key, late 20th-century text, well beyond the history of science.  While I expect that we'll see many changes to the latter chapters of Hollinger & Capper's American Intellectual Tradition, the excerpt from Structure has a very secure place in the volume, not least because it's a fine, early example of the postmodern turn in American thought.

All of which brings me to the question posed in the post's title: what has been the impact of Kuhn on the practice of intellectual history?  Of course, that title has something of a double-meaning. It might also be read as: does the practice of intellectual history undergo Kuhnian paradigm shifts?

I actually think that this second question is easier to answer than the first: Kuhn's vision of the practice of science seems radically unlike the way intellectual history is practiced.  In Kuhn's view, "normal science" consists of problem solving within a paradigm, until anomalies in the results build up to the point that a revolutionary paradigm shift needs to take place. Under normal science, the paradigm within which science works is not only unquestioned, but in effect unquestionable.  And the new paradigm is, according to Kuhn, incommensurable with the old paradigm, hence the need for a revolutionary leap.**

This all seems very unlike the way historians (and most other humanists) work. In particular, the stark division between "normal science" and a scientific revolution simply doesn't exist. Yes, we can all think of plodding bits of archival work that do nothing but add a further example to an established historical story. And works that truly alter our sense of how historical change takes place are few and far between. But, in principle at least, our narratives, our metanarratives, even our most basic methodology are all always up for grabs.  We don't need a single stable paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense) in which to work. Nor is it possible to claim that our paradigms (in the looser, popular sense) are in any way incommensurable with each other. Indeed, much of the most vibrant activity in history involves paradigms (in this looser sense) facing off against each other.***

But if intellectual history itself doesn't quite fit the Kuhnian, er, paradigm, perhaps what we study might.  Interestingly enough, at the very moment that Kuhn was (if you'll pardon the expression) revolutionizing the history of science, a parallel revolution of sorts was going on in intellectual history: the rise of the Cambridge School.  This is not the time or place to enter into a close comparison of Kuhn and Pocock, so I'll just note that it seems to me that their visions of historical change--and historical study--are quite distinct from one another, yet clearly emerge from the same broader intellectual moment.****

History is sometimes said to be the pirate discipline, and I have no doubt that many intellectual historians have raided the Kuhnian castle in their efforts to understand the past. But I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I can't think of any really successful attempt to write a strictly Kuhnian history of any non-scientific aspect of thought. Back in 1997, Adolph Reed, Jr., wrote critically of what he believed were misplaced attempts to write about African American thought in a Kuhnian way [h/t to Lauren Kientz Anderson for drawing my attention to that Reed piece].  And though Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions played an absolutely central role in my admittedly modest intellectual biography, I cannot honestly say that I pattern my own thinking consciously after his ideas (though I'm sure that he contributed to my--and my generation of historians'--general suspicion of historiographical Whiggishness).

Was Kuhn an influence on your development as an historian? Is he an influence on the way you think and/or write about the past?  What works of intellectual history (outside of the history of science) seem to you to be most influenced by Kuhn?

____________________________
* The only other person I can think of around whom I was similarly utterly tongue tied was Tom Lehrer, with whom I was at another reception that same year. 

** The Marxian notion of revolution is, of course, a very important intellectual context for the Kuhnian notion of a scientific revolution (a phrase which had previously been used to describe a single, particular moment in the history of science in a not-particularly-Marxian way).

*** I should add that the idea of the incommensurability of paradigms remains one of the most controversial aspects of Kuhn's thesis.

**** In the early days of this blog, Tim Lacy drew some interesting parallels between John C. Greene's 1957 essay on "Objectives and Methods in Intellectual History" and Kuhn's work.

Some Thoughts on the Port Huron Statement and U.S. Intellectual History

The Port Huron Statement used us to write itself, not the other way around….There’s no fucking way that I could have written it. It’s not possible if you read it.  And there’s sections of it I don’t remember at all. And I don’t know who wrote them.  So, it was fifty people at the crest of a great movement, having gone through the experience of jail in Mississippi and Georgia…There’s a way in which the words just came gushing forth….Something takes you over; it’s not that you are in charge.

-- Tom Hayden, "The Port Huron Statement at 50," Madison, Wisconsin, May 4, 2012 

MAUDE (Julianne Moore): Tell me a little about yourself, Jeffrey.
DUDE (Jeff Bridges):  Well, uh. . . Not much to tell.  I was, uh, one of the authors of the Port Huron Statement.--The original Port Huron Statement.
MAUDE:  Uh-huh.
DUDE: Not the compromised second draft. 

-- from The Big Lebowski (1998)

What’s gone on in the last 18 months is, to me, a fulfillment of virtually every dimension of participatory democracy, which was the dream at Port Huron fifty years ago, as outlined in the statement. And I hope to convince you that it’s a perspective and a framework that has a recurring life, independent of its authors, independent of its publication, because it always arises where people suffer too much and the institutions are too slow in making a response. 

-- Tom Hayden, "The Port Huron Statement at 50"

I

June 15, 2012, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement. This year has already seen a large number of academic events reflecting on the document's golden anniversary, including a conference at UC Santa Barbara in February, a dialogue on the Port Huron Statement between Noam Chomsky and Tom Hayden at MIT in April, and a short series of lectures at the Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change at UW Madison in May.  Many reflections on it have also appeared in print.  One of the constants at these events has been the participation of Tom Hayden, who is usually credited with writing the Statement.

Although any reflection on the Statement is historical, the concerns of the various fora on its fiftieth anniversary have not principally been historical, which is fair enough.  Hayden, and many others, see the Statement as a living text. And much of the discussion of it has involved its relationship to our current political situation.

Nonetheless, the Port Huron Statement is an historical text. Given the interests of this blog, I think it's worth briefly reflecting on its significance for U.S. intellectual history.

II

There is no question in my mind that the Port Huron Statement is a significant--and canonical--text in American intellectual history. Indeed, I'd argue that, now that Lester Frank Ward's "Mind as a Social Factor" has been restored, the single most significant omission from Hollinger and Capper's American Intellectual Tradition reader is the Statement.

Its historical significance lies in at least three things:  First, it richly reflects a number of important strands in twentieth-century American thought. Deweyite pragmatism, C. Wright Mills's analysis of the power elite, existentialism, as well as the ideas swirling around the ongoing Black freedom struggle, are perhaps most clearly reflected in the text. But it is also in creative dialog with the mainstream of post-war liberalism and, at least implicitly, the Marxism of the Old Left.

Second, it captures a very particular, important, and brief moment in American history and thought.  The Statement truly could not have been written three years earlier and would not have been written three years later.  It emerged most directly from then very recent experiences of the civil rights movement in the South. Both Tom Hayden and Paul Potter had been beaten while working for civil rights in Mississippi earlier in 1962.  The point of view of Port Huron is very much that of people of relative privilege already bound up in others' struggles for justice.

Though it emerged from these social struggles and a sense of the failures of the status quo, the Statement also reflects the optimism of the early Sixties. One of the first things that Tom Hayden did when the Port Huron Statement was drafted was to travel to Washington, D.C. in the hopes of presenting it to President Kennedy.  They managed to get a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who apparently did get a copy of the Statement to the President.

Within three years of the Statement's writing, however, LBJ had begun to escalate the War in Vietnam and the black freedom struggle had begun to split over questions of goals and tactics. The War would come to dominate the politics of the New Left in the second half of the decade. And the relationship of SDS to both those in power and to the Marxist legacy of the Old Left began to change dramatically and rapidly.  By the end of the decade, a younger generation of SDS leaders had largely repudiated Port Huron as too "reformist."

The third historical significance of the Port Huron Statement is related to the second: the text became almost instantly canonical.  SDS had come into existence when, two years earlier, the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the youth wing of the old, socialist League for Industrial Democracy, had changed its name. But SDS really as an organization in its own right with the framing of the Statement, which, in its movement away from anticommunism, also drove a wedge between SDS and its erstwhile sponsor, the LID.  The Port Huron Statement thus initially defined what SDS stood for.  And as SDS, along with SNCC, defined what the emerging New Left stood for, academics and public intellectuals turned to the Statement to understand what was going on politically on campus.  Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau's The New Radicals: A Report with Documents (1966) included a long excerpt from the Statement.*

But even as the Statement became an object of journalistic and academic analysis in the mid-to-late 1960s, its significance within the movement began to wane, as noted above.  By the late Sixties, those writing about it frequently noted that it had fallen into disfavor among the current leadership of SDS.  But the declining importance of the Statement for the movement only served to highlight its historical significance...and thus its canonicity.

III

In a sense the first two quotations with which I started this post reflect the extent to which the Statement is a generational marker, the first in a serious mode, the second in a humorous one.  In Hayden's account, the statement wrote itself...which is very close to saying that it was written by its historical moment (though not quite...and I'll get back to how below).  The Coen Brothers' use of the Statement as an important piece of backstory for Jeff Bridge's Dude in The Big Lebowski presents it as a different sort of generational marker.  Once, it would appear, the Dude was politically involved; now, we know, he's the ultimate slacker, more concerned about White Russians and the fate of his erstwhile rug ("it really tied the room together!") than anything else.  The absurdity of the former political commitments of Baby Boomers like the Dude have been a frequent object of humor in turn-of-the-millenium U.S. culture. And the cult popularity of The Big Lebowski apparently has led some young people today to associate the Port Huron Statement with the Dude.

But although the statement is often (correctly) seen as a product of its particular moment, Hayden and others of his generation frequently treat it as strangely timeless.  Much of Hayden's talk in Madison in May, from which the above quotations are taken, revolves around his presenting participatory democracy as a truly eternal idea. This is reflected in the last of the three quotes with which I started this blog post.  Participatory democracy, says Hayden, is "a perspective and a framework that has a recurring life, independent of its authors, independent of its publication, because it always arises where people suffer too much and the institutions are too slow in making a response."

This sense of the timelessness of the ideas of the Statement also appears in the comic entitled "The Port Huron Statement Today" that the historian Paul Buhle and the cartoonist Gary Dumm recently created for New York high school students.  Today's social struggles, the comic suggests, are exactly the same struggles that SDS addressed in 1962 and they admit of the same solutions.  This view is most immediately captured in this panel from the comic (which, incidentally incorporates an image from the late '60s rather than the period in which the Statement was actually framed):

I have no problem whatsoever with the desire to treat the Port Huron Statement as a living document. I think, in many ways, it is.  But I also think that, both politically and historically, treating its message as entirely eternal is inadequate.  Most obviously, the Statement is a document that is absolutely of its time, from its highly gendered language to its very existentialist assumptions. Anyone who tries teaching the document today will, for example, immediately recognize that this is a text written by and for people who have read Camus...and young people today by and large have not.  Understand this text entails, among other things, having a rich understanding of its moment.

But the vision of an eternal Port Huron Statement has another, equally important downside.  Put simply, the vision of the Port Huron Statement failed.  It did not even sustain the organization that produced it for half a decade. It did not transform the U.S. as its authors hoped it would. That does not, of course, mean that there is nothing of value in the Statement or that many of its ideas might not succeed in the future. Far from it. But grappling with the historical failures of the Port Huron Statement is a necessary part of understanding it historically...and, I'd argue, renewing a version of its politics (if one wants to do so).

This point is also poignantly illustrated by the third of the quotes with which I began this post.  Writing in the midst of the ongoing battle to recall Gov. Scott Walker, Hayden sounded an optimistic note in early May:  "What’s gone on in the last 18 months is, to me, a fulfillment of virtually every dimension of participatory democracy, which was the dream at Port Huron fifty years ago, as outlined in the statement."  But of course, that effort ultimately failed on June 5. Ever since, the internet has been overrun with a variety of postmortems trying to figure out what went wrong.  Though the left, like any political tradition, can and should find sustenance in its history, it will be better served if it treats that history in a slightly more hardheaded fashion.  The Port Huron Statement was a watershed of early New Left thought. But it didn't--and doesn't--provide all the answers.

_________________________________________________
* The Port Huron Statement is a very long document and it is frequently reprinted in edited form without that fact being made clear.  Nowhere in Jacobs and Landau's book do they indicate that they were reprinted merely an excerpt (though the ellipses in the text would have informed the careful reader).  Similarly the link to the "full text of the statement" on the Wikipedia page on the Port Huron Statement currently leads until recently led to a different, long excerpt that appears on the University of Virginia's Sixties Project site, again without noting that the document has been severely edited (I just changed the link myself so that it now leads to an actual copy of the full text).

Approaching 9/11/11

The National September 11 Memorial, New York

The day after the killing of Osama bin Laden, I wrote a post on this blog asking whether the death of the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks would mark the end of the Global War on Terror (or Whatever We're Calling It This Week) or simply another (pseudo-) milestone in a war designed to be without end.

Although I found some hope in the celebrations that expressed an evident public desire to (rightly) declare victory in (and with it an end to) our longest war, I suspected that bin Laden's death would bring about no such thing.  And, indeed, it has not.

Now we are less than a week away from marking the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.   And somehow the meaning of those events--and the memories of them--seems more elusive than ever.

Among the many pieces that have already addressed the public memory of the attacks as we approach the anniversary, two that I've read stand out in my mind as particularly interesting for what they say...and what they don't:  David Rieff's "After 9/11: The Limits of Remembrance," which appeared in last month's Harper's and Rick Perlstein's "Solidarity Squandered," published in The American Prospect.

Rieff's piece makes two interesting, but somewhat contradictory, points about public memory. First, as much as we might like to think that events like 9/11 will never be forgotten, eventually their meaning fades.  Citing Pearl Harbor, which he sees as the closest analog to the 9/11 attacks, Rieff notes that the December 7 no longer has the resonance it once did. FDR, Rieff argues, was very clever not to say that that date would live in infamy forever.  The easy pieties about never forgetting the events of 9/11, he suggests, are belied by the limits of public memory.  Of course, historians will continue to be interested in the events of 9/11, but "though they are often conflated, history is the antithesis of remembrance."

But in the second half of his essay, Rieff suggests that public memory is potentially terribly dangerous:

As a reporter during the Bosnian war, which was in large measure a conflict fueled by memory (or more precisely, the inability to forget), I learned to hate, but above all to fear, collective historical memory. 

To say the least, Rieff's two central points stand in tension with each other.  Is public memory, the antithesis of history, transitory...or is "collective historical memory" terribly persistent and dangerous? Rieff is of course able to provide good examples of both.

But two things seem to be missing from his essay. First, not all persistent collective memories are destructive.  Holocaust memory, though not without its downsides, has been largely salutary, especially in Germany.  And the memories of moments of international solidarity--the example that leaps to mind is the Berlin Airlift--can build solidarity among nations as easily as it can frame conflict.  Second, the essay is largely silent on the actual state of 9/11 memory in America today. Rieff spends much more time on analogies than on the case that his essay ostensibly focuses on.*

As it's title suggests, Rick Perlstein's "Solidarity Squandered" elaborates on a common trope in writing about 9/11: noting that, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, "an almost radical birth of public spiritedness" appeared, Perlstein argues that a great political opportunity was lost, due largely to the cynicism of the Bush Administration. Perlstein recounts in detail the sordid lies and betrayals, the threats to the rule of law, the rise of a torture regime...much of which remain unchanged today, almost three years after the end of the Bush presidency.

Perlstein's portrait of the political aftermath of 9/11 is entirely on the mark. And though all the details are probably familiar, it is well worth reading.  If much of the political business of 2008 involved undoing the damage of the Bush years--much of which was directly connected to the response to the 9/11 attacks--that business remains largely incomplete.  Perlstein provides a very timely reminder of this.

And yet, I'm suspicious of his framing narrative.  It seems to me that two kinds of solidarity bled into each other in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. One was entirely healthful: the solidarity that binds communities together in the wake of disaster.  As we saw in the Bay Area after the Pretty Big One of 1989, in Oklahoma City after the Murrah Federal Building bombing, or in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the directly affected communities drew together to rebuild. And the nation--and the world--sent help as well.  The search-and-rescue effort and the physical and emotional task of reestablishing some sense of normalcy partook of a kind of local and national solidarity that is wholly worthy of celebration.

But the 9/11 attacks simultaneously created a second sort of solidarity, the kind that often forms when a nation is attacked by a foreign enemy.  No less real than the first form of solidarity, this second form of solidarity is, at its base, about Us and Them.  And its expressions tend to be violent and often poorly focused.

As the journalist Chris Hedges puts it in his brilliant War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning:

In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb.

What Perlstein sees as a betrayal of a radical public spiritedness, seems to me to be a fairly typical example of the way modern nations--including the United States--behave when they go to war.  We are somewhat unusual in our ability to generally keep the worst ravages of our wars away from our shores.  But the loss of civil liberties and growth of state power, the acceptance of torture, and so forth are all too typical of wartime.  Far from betraying the wartime solidarity produced by 9/11, the crimes recounted by Perlstein are its fruits.

As Rieff points out in passing, memorialization is about building national solidarity. And the events commemorating the anniversary of the attacks will, doubtless aim at recapturing and reaffirming the very real solidarity Americans experienced in their wake.  As such, they won't distinguish between the more and less healthy strains of this solidarity. And perhaps they shouldn't. Most Americans experienced them as a seemless garment.  And to some extent, public memory's first duty is to be true to itself.

But among the unfinished business for the memory of 9/11 is our coming to grips with how our national response to that event helped create what are now some of our more intractable political problems.

Or perhaps that's a task for history.
_______________________________________________________
* As the only child of the late Susan Sontag, who produced one of the few dissonant notes from a public intellectual in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Rieff might well have an interesting personal relationship to this memory. Sontag was quite capable of going off half-cocked, but her criticism of our country in September, 2001, looks better in retrospect than it did at the time.

Fifty Years Ago Today: Newton Minnow's Vast Wasteland Speech

I'm cooking something else up that's more involved than this post, but as it's competing for my time with various end-of-the-semester duties, I wanted to at least note this important anniversary.

Fifty years ago today, on May 9, 1961, Newton Minnow, speaking to the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Washington, D.C., gave his first public address as President John F. Kennedy's FCC Chairman. It was a doozy.  Famously declaring that television was a "vast wasteland," Minnow attempted to lay out an alternative vision of television in the public interest.  This latter, positive goal was Minnow's intended focus. But his jeremiad is what is most remembered.  The speech lives on as an example of the rhetoric of Kennedy's New Frontier and a model for anti-television screeds for generations to come (though Minnow himself was as enamored of the possibilities of the medium as he was concerned about its actual performance).  Mike Dann, then a CBS executive, has called it "the Gettysburg Address for broadcasters."

An audio recording of the speech, along with a complete transcription, can be found here.

An excellent report on the fiftieth anniversary of the speech aired last Friday on NPR's On the Media.

Fifty Years Ago Today: Newton Minnow's Vast Wasteland Speech

I'm cooking something else up that's more involved than this post, but as it's competing for my time with various end-of-the-semester duties, I wanted to at least note this important anniversary.

Fifty years ago today, on May 9, 1961, Newton Minnow, speaking to the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Washington, D.C., gave his first public address as President John F. Kennedy's FCC Chairman. It was a doozy.  Famously declaring that television was a "vast wasteland," Minnow attempted to lay out an alternative vision of television in the public interest.  This latter, positive goal was Minnow's intended focus. But his jeremiad is what is most remembered.  The speech lives on as an example of the rhetoric of Kennedy's New Frontier and a model for anti-television screeds for generations to come (though Minnow himself was as enamored of the possibilities of the medium as he was concerned about its actual performance).  Mike Dann, then a CBS executive, has called it "the Gettysburg Address for broadcasters."

An audio recording of the speech, along with a complete transcription, can be found here.

An excellent report on the fiftieth anniversary of the speech aired last Friday on NPR's On the Media.