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Jumat, 06 Juli 2012
California's Golden Jubilee
Today's guest blogger, Mark Robertson, received a MA in American History from San Jose State University in 2012. Currently he is working with Dr. Margo McBane and Dr. Anne Fountain (both of SJSU) on a project entitled, “From Cherries to Chips,” investigating early 20th century agricultural workers of Santa Clara County -- now the hub of Silicon Valley's tech industry. He also blogs and tweets at Gilded Empire and @Calhistorian, respectively.
California's Golden Jubilee
by Mark Robertson
About a year ago, I was working my way through some historical literature in order to gain a better understanding of the emergence of California's sense of itself as a political community – a uniquely Californian identity if you will. Upon stumbling upon a reference to California's “Semi-Centennial” discovery of gold, I was intrigued by the lack of historiographic coverage of the event. Little has been written beyond a few passing references, yet as I read through the newspapers it became quite apparent that this was not small event, but a very large civic celebration. Can this event offer a similar window into a San Franciscan identity similar to the Mid-Winter Fair (1894)? What do mass public commemorations teach us about how citizens think of themselves and their city? What differences and similarities exist in interpreting this event and the Mid-Winter Fair? As Barbara Berglund has suggested, do massive civic events organized by the few structure the reality of the many? What does the celebration say about the regional competition between San Francisco and Los Angeles for supremacy in California? These were only some of the questions which first came to mind.
California's Golden Jubilee and Mining Fair (CGJ) was held in San Francisco from January 24 to March 5, 1898. In the midst of the accelerating Yukon gold rush, a rebounding regional economy, and San Francisco's growing preeminence on the Pacific, a disparate coalition of associations representing San Francisco's “commercial-civic elite” transformed a private legacy of commemoration into a mass civic celebration.[1] The legacy of remembering James W. Marshall in San Francisco reveals that as the anniversary approached, conflicting imaginings of the city's past and future were made to be reconciled for the sake of shared civic gain. By looking at the ways in which the ideas of profit and promotion prompted the coalition of commercial-civic elite in 1897-98 (led by Mayor and politician James D. Phelan and flanked by the San Francisco Miners' Association, the Society of California Pioneers, and the San Francisco Merchants' Association) to transform this small, parochial private commemoration of James W. Marshall's discovery of gold into a mass civic celebration of San Francisco's economic growth, social development, and the city's position in an expanding American empire, we can better understand how massive celebrations like the CGJ reinforced and reoriented California's Pioneer Myth within the context of a new international mining frontier and the city's progressive insurgent leadership of the late 1890s.
Every January the Society of California Pioneers had privately observed the anniversary of that golden event which inspired the California gold rush. However in 1897, as San Francisco's elite were preparing for a new era in the city's future, three of the most prestigious associations began planning a cooperative commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of James W. Marshall's discovery of gold on the American River. The resulting celebration opened to a grand cavalcade of fraternal, civil and military strength, a procession of historical pageantry demonstrating San Francisco's progressive growth from its sleepy Latin past, and finally closed with an extravagant five week long exhibition of the natural, manufacturing, and industrial advantages of San Francisco. The grandest spectacle was the opening of the Golden Jubilee Mining Fair, Saturday, January 31.[2] With a procession gathering around San Francisco's famed Mechanics' Pavilion, the turning of a golden key in Washington D.C. by President William McKinley ignited the electric lights and drew the giant curtain aside revealing the entrance the Golden Jubilee Mining Fair where dozens of exhibits, demonstrations, and spectacles vied for the public's attention.[3]
In this way, the Golden Jubilee projected what Robert Rydell referred to as a symbolic universe - a symbolic representation of San Francisco's dominant culture's collective sense of itself. Fairs like the Golden Jubilee, “make the social world comprehensible[, where] the directors of the fairs attempted to organize the direction of society from a particular...perspective.” But as Rydell reminds us, exhibitions like the Golden Jubilee also “perform a hegemonic function precisely because they propagated the ideas and values” of the “political, financial, corporate, and intellectual leaders” offering their ideas as the “proper interpretation of the social...reality.” In so doing, the Golden Jubilee coalition structured a version of the present by providing visitors with a “galaxy of symbols that cohered as symbolic universes.”[4] In San Francisco, once a small merchant community along Yerba Buena cove, the California Gold Rush seeded a new American city, and also “a new urban society” on the edge of an expanding national empire. The rapid influx of a diverse population, the overwhelmingly male society, and the prospects of economic opportunity created a seemingly “disorderly city.”[5] But by the 1890s many Californians looked at San Francisco as the natural urban metropolis of the Pacific coast that had triumphed in a struggle for order in a land so long ignored by the competing empires. No one communicated this better in the Golden Jubilee coalition more directly than James D. Phelan, Mayor of San Francisco from 1897-1902.[6] In his efforts to lead and fund the celebration and exhibition, Phelan did more than anyone else to structure the celebration's symbolic vision of the city's history, present, and future. In essence, California's Golden Jubilee presented a reflection of the dominant Pioneer Myth of late 19th century California, while orienting San Francisco's collective identity forward into futurity.[7]
However the celebration did not succeed without conflicts and compromises. The organizers of the Golden Jubilee each envisioned a different reading of San Francisco's past and present greatness, and thereby its future. The most significant conflict between the competing visions of the Golden Jubilee coalition, was in the overall structure of the commemoration. The Society of California Pioneers demonstrated a desire to extol the advantages left by the earliest pioneers, extend praise to those still living who had witnessed the discovery, and also to give respect to what they saw as a city built by California pioneers. The California State Miners' Association on the other hand saw little reverence or even respect of the earliest pioneers. Mainly farmers and merchants, the legacies of California's earliest pioneers were particularly troublesome to the mining men centered in San Francisco. The 1880s debris controversy demonstrated that little reverence was given to non-industrial processes and those whom disdained progress. To the mining men, San Francisco was a product of gold, labor, and capital, not community, art, or culture. In slight contrast but still in line with the CSMA, Mayor James D. Phelan saw the city as the agglomeration of all that had come before, pastoral and industrial. To Phelan, and as exhibited in hist leadership of the Golden Jubilee, San Francisco was the Pacific Metropolis of the American Empire, the apex of urbanity and civilization in the American West. In deciding to cooperatively celebrate their community's shared history however, organizers were confronted with reconciling these differing views on how best to commemorate the anniversary.
Significantly, the Golden Jubilee coalition reoriented the interpretation of the city's past, by presenting and displaying San Francisco's wealth as an entirely “new urban society” distinct from not only the region's Latin past, but also its more recent domestic struggles between labor and capital.[8] Through two months of political competition and compromise, the Golden Jubilee coalition cobbled together an entirely voluntary contingent of some 17-20,000 official participants, at the cost of some $40,000 (including floats, music, and entertainment) that declared their “Sunset City,” as the Pacific metropolis.[9] In celebrating California's shared past, the Golden Jubilee coalition saw it as another opportunity to distinguish the present from the city's mythic and fabled past and its often tumultuous struggle for order.[10] In so doing, the resulting celebration demonstrated the ways in which civic celebrations project a “distinctive collective identity for people of different classes, ethnic backgrounds, and lengths of residence who happen to live in the same locale.”[11]
Civic commemorative activity like California's Golden Jubilee, presents a rich lens to discern the character of a dominant urban identity. By investigating how the Golden Jubilee displayed the city's past, we can get a sense of how the Golden Jubilee coalition of commercial-civic elite reconciled their own views in 1898. It is in this temporal orientation of the past, the collective memorial path linking the past with the present, that also outlines the perceived path to the future. It was in this vein that Barbara Berglund characterized the California Mid-Winter International Exposition (1894) as “imagining the city.”[12] The Mid-Winter Fair in aggregate, with its orientalist symbolism and Roman imagery, displayed a symbolic universe communicating the city's orientation towards its future in linking the West with the East; slighting the past for an emphasis on what was perceived as the probable future. The same theme of progress presented in the Golden Jubilee paralleled that of the Mid-Winter Fair, but emphasized a longer view which stretched much farther into the past into a progressive future. What would become California's Golden Jubilee and Mining Fair provided yet another opportunity for San Francisco's elite to present and project an image of the city drawn from what they saw as its honorable beginnings, traced into the future. But as the Mid-Winter Fair was national and international in scope, California's Golden Jubilee was local and regional, enveloping the domain dominated by San Francisco's economic tentacles.[13] Can we not look at this as a reflection of a regional California identity, a sort of broad, macro-collective understanding of the past and the present?
The Golden Jubilee was more than the commemoration of a shared history found in the anniversary of John W. Marshall's discovery of gold as the Society of California Pioneers had done since 1856, it was a structuring and declaration of a dominant culture's vision of San Francisco's pioneer identity, and its perceived progressive future.[14] Interestingly however, the closing of the Golden Jubilee Mining Fair on March 5 and any reporting of its impact were barely recorded in local newspapers. The local coverage was saturated with a topic of particular interest to San Francisco, but was quite another affair than celebration and civic pride. Some three weeks prior on February 16, 1898, as the Golden Jubilee entered its fourth week, San Franciscan's awoke to the morning's headlines, likely with some trepidation. “Maine Destroyed in Havana Harbor,” proclaimed the San Francisco Call. To many in the city, San Francisco represented the hub of American empire in the Pacific. With the escalating tensions within Cuba and the speculation over what actually happened to the USS Maine in Havana harbor, the Golden Jubilee's presentation of the region's military capabilities were quickly reified in that tragic event – as San Franciscan's themselves seemed to be involved in their own island revolution in the Pacific where one of their own, the Spreckels family, vied for control of the Hawaiian paradise. Little reference would be reported of the celebration in the newspapers, popular culture, or historiography of San Francisco or California. Does this indicate, as Glen Gendzel has suggested that the central inspiration of a Californian identity shifted from San Francisco to Los Angeles at the turn of the century?[15]
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[1] Ethington, Philip, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). The term “commercial-civic elite” refers to a common group of urban elite who are largely involved in commerce and politics, as opposed to cultural elite or business elite. This usage is borrowed from Patricia Hill, Dallas: The Making of a Modern City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).
[2] Golden Jubilee Committee, Official Souvenir of California’s Golden Jubilee - Held at San Francisco, California - Beginning January 24, 1898 and Ending January 29, 1898. Containing the Programme of Each Day’s Events, With Much Reading Matter of Interest Pertaining to the Discovery of Gold, and Many Illustrations (San Francisco: H. S. Crocker Company, Printers, 1898).
[3] “The Call’s Golden Jubilee Edition,” The San Francisco Call, 29 January 1898, 6.
[ 4] Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 2-3.
[ 5] Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press Of Kansas, 2010), 1.
[6] Ethington, 288.
[ 7] Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 49.
[8] Berglund, 1.
[ 9] The number of official participants was calculated by multiplying the reported twenty divisions, which reportedly ranged from as low as 700, but as high as 3,000 per division. The above estimate is rather conservative compared with many of the newspaper's boastings. Additionally, the Golden Jubilee Week and the Golden Jubilee Fair reportedly cost $20,000 each with some odds and ends to be added up at a later date.
[10] Gray A. Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (University of California Press, 2006).
[11] David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 61.
[12] Berglund, 171.
[13] Here “tentacles” carries the connotation of the reach of the rail roads centered in the San Francisco Bay region, critiqued in Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (Doubleday Books, 1901).
[14] David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner, eds, “Forging a Cosmopolitan Civic Culture: The Regional identity of San Francisco and Northern California,” Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1997).
[15] Glen Gendzel, “Pioneers and Padres: Competing Mythologies in Northern and Southern California,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (April 2001), 55-79.
Senin, 10 Oktober 2011
Two Deaths: Whiggery vs. "Great Men" in Contemporary US Public Memory
Last Wednesday, October 5, 2011, two Americans of great historical significance passed away: Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and Steve Jobs.* Shuttlesworth's death was announced in the morning. His memory was quickly framed by his relative lack of fame compared to the one civil rights leader that all Americans know. "Marching in the shadow of Dr. King"--which would serve as the title of Diane McWhorter's NYT op-ed the next day--was the theme of most of the news stories that morning about Shuttlesworth, which rightly focused on his crucial importance to the movement in his home base of Birmingham, Alabama. If Shuttlesworth seemed--then and now--to be in King's shadow, he shouldn't be remembered that way. For it was Shuttlesworth who convinced an initially reluctant King to take the movement to Birmingham following the SCLC's failed 1961 campaign in Albany, Georgia. And when the focus finally did shift to Birmingham in 1963, the clashes between peaceful protestors and the violent police force under the direction of Bull Connor helped galvanize national opinion in favor of civil rights.
But if Shuttlesworth in life marched in King's shadow, in death he would soon find himself in Steve Jobs's. When Steve Jobs's death was announced in the evening, the news coverage immediately began to focus more on the entrepreneur and technological innovator than the civil rights leader. Jobs's fame had been greater--and more recent--than Shuttlesworth's. And the changes that he wrought in American life were also more recent. Most Americans take the lack of racially segregated public facilities entirely for granted. We are, for better or for worse, more amazed by our iPads. 
Rather predicatably, Jobs dominated the frontpages of the nation's papers the following morning. The traditionally staid Wall Street Journal gave him a six-column headline. But from the moment that Jobs's death was announced, a dissenting view began appearing online that Shuttlesworth was simply the more significant figure...and that all the focus on Jobs revealed what a hopelessly materialistic, shallow, and/or forgetful culture we had become. Certainly a common theme among African American writers online rang true: without Jobs, they wouldn't have their MacBooks; but without Shuttlesworth they wouldn't have their freedom. But I was most struck by a notion that I saw in a number of comments on websites and on Facebook to the effect that, while we'd still have personal computers without Jobs, African Americans wouldn't have civil rights without Shuttlesworth. I found this argument fascinating precisely because I think it takes a Whiggish attitude I find from many of my students about the Civil Rights Movement and applies it, exclusively, to the technological revolutions of the last several decades. By positing that a change was essentially an inevitable result of inevitable social or technological progress, the contributions of (potentially) "Great Men" can be ignored or downplayed. Both the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the technological revolution of the late 20th and early 21st century are the kinds of changes that so transformed American society that they are very easily naturalized and made part of the kind of Whiggish narrative of progress that constitutes the backbone of American public memory (when it's not in the jeremiad-laced apocalyptic mode, at any rate). In such stories of inevitable progress, the risks taken by important historical actors can easily get forgotten. But they are both also precisely the sorts of stories that we like to tell in terms of a tiny handful of Great Leaders who are imagined as bringing them about. What Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were to the turn of the last century, Jobs and Bill Gates are to the turn of this one. And King (occasionally assisted by Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, and, once he became a major motion picture, Malcolm X) plays a similar role in the narrative of the Civil Rights Movement.
My own view is that virtually nothing in history is inevitable. Movements and social and cultural forces, featuring many important actors beyond the tiny handful of leaders let into the pantheon of public memory, are necessary to produce changes like the civil rights and technological revolutions. While it is as wrong to understand the modern personal computer as the creation of Steve Jobs, Solitary Genius, as it is to see the phonograph and motion picture as emerging fully formed from the head of Thomas Edison, that does not mean that the real contributions of either should be ignored. And the nature of obituaries is that they focus on individuals and their contributions, not movements and social forces. It's certainly unfortunate that Fred Shuttlesworth's extraordinary and often under-appreciated work in the black freedom struggle once again became overshadowed on the day of his death. Like Jobs, his extraordinary individual accomplishments deserve to be remembered and celebrated
But in a sense the greatest importance of rescuing Shuttlesworth from (public semi-) obscurity was that doing so encouraged the public to look beyond the leaders they already knew, not simply to a larger handful of leaders, but to the civil rights movement as whole. And to foster such a richer public memory of a social movement we will never be able to rely on obituaries.
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* In fact, a third significant American also died that day, legal scholar and critical race theorist Derrick Bell. Like Shuttlesworth, Bell was a figure of some importance in the ongoing civil rights movement. Though early in his career he was, briefly, the only African American in Eisenhower's Justice Department (he was asked to resign his membership in the NAACP so as to avoid appearing to have a conflict of interest; he quit his federal job instead), he became best known as a legal academic, who reached his greatest fame as a scholar--and protester against Harvard Law School's hiring policies--in the 1980s. But it's taking little away from Bell to say that he was a less consequential figure than Shuttlesworth. And even more than Shuttlesworth, public memory on the day of his passing fell victim to the coincidence of more famous men dying on the same day.
Selasa, 06 September 2011
Approaching 9/11/11
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| The National September 11 Memorial, New York |
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.
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* 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.
Senin, 29 Agustus 2011
The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial and Public Memory
It's utterly unsurprising that the Memorial is controversial. Every memorial to appear recently in and around the National Mall has been (as were such now iconic monuments as the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials at the times of their construction).
The National Review called the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, when its design was announced in 1981, an "Orwellian glop," while Vietnam veteran (and future Princeton history PhD) Tom Carhart denounced it as "a black gash of shame."
The World War II Memorial was criticized for its blandness, its authoritarian style, and its effect on the sweep of space between the Washington and Lincoln Monuments.
The FDR Memorial was criticized for the initial decision not to depict Roosevelt in a wheelchair, for its eventual decision not to depict him with a cigarette, for its downplaying of Eleanor Roosevelt's role in the FDR White House, and, most importantly for its overall effect. "The tragedy of the memorial," wrote Allida Black in Public History,
is that with all this promise, with the intricate care give to FDR's programs and their recipients, the horror of war, and the promise of the United Nations, the individuals responsible for this sit on pedestals, parodying themselves. Rather than personifying the leadership the Roosevelts exuded, the statues stand in frozen stoicism.
The same could be said about the figure of Dr. King in the new memorial.
Indeed, the controversy surrounding the King Memorial is similar to these other recent public debates. Unions are angry that, despite promises to the contrary, non-union labor was used to construct the monument. The Washington Post cultural critic Philip Kennicott has chided the design for being "stuck between the conceptual and the literal" and has argued that
the memorial is focused on the anodyne, pre-1965 King, the man remembered as a saintly hero of civil rights, not an anti-war goad to the national conscience whose calls for social and economic justice would be considered rank socialism in today’s political climate.*Others have questioned the decision to have a Chinese sculptor design the likeness of MLK, either because of his national identity, his "socialist realist" aesthetics, or a combination of the two.
But what is surprising is how muted this whole debate is. Only twenty years ago, in the early 1990s, the federal holiday celebrating Dr. King was still bitterly opposed in a handful of states, with opponents citing King's associations with "a great many communists" and his opposition to the Vietnam War. Today, even the majority of the critics of the King Memorial at least pay lip service to the notion that King is a figure worthy of such celebration. And its biggest fans include some voices on the right, like columnist Charles Krauthammer.
What has changed over the last two decades? There's some truth in the Whiggish story of racial progress that is the most popular explanation for what's different today. Although it certainly didn't herald a "post-racial" America, Obama's election in 2008 remains a touchstone of this progress. But our racial progress is, of course, much more incomplete than the self-congratulatory bromides of that election night suggested.
Just as surely a "safe" Dr. King has emerged in recent years, a figure whose career seems to have begun and ended at the March on Washington. Today, everyone can celebrate the end to legal segregation. If King's message were no more or less than the fact that Jim Crow was a massive injustice, and his greatest accomplishment was framing that message in soaring rhetoric, we could all marvel at the "I Have a Dream" Speech and pat ourselves on the back for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 (even as today's Republican Party tries to undo some of what the latter bill accomplished).
This King is safe not merely for those supportive of our new racial consensus. Over the last two decades, the ghost of Martin Luther King, Jr., has been invoked as supporting such unlikely causes as the destruction of affirmative action programs and support for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In fact, it's almost become a cliché to point out that King was much more radical than he's often remembered as being. Cornel West is entirely correct to argue in the New York Times that "MLK Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial," but this message is hardly new.
But even the emergent, "safe" King is more complicated than first meets the eye. Among the fourteen quotations on the new King Memorial, is one in which he explicitly expresses his opposition to the Vietnam War: "I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world." What's missing, oddly enough, is any quotation which focuses on African American civil rights as such (though there is a reference to Montgomery, African Americans themselves go utterly unnamed among the quoted materials).
Philip Kennicott's complaint that the memorial focuses on "the anodyne, pre-1965 King" in a sense misses the point. First, there was nothing anodyne about the early Civil Rights struggle. Indeed, part of the problem with the "safe" King is that it retroactively makes the black freedom struggle not much of a struggle at all. While it's critical to remember the unfinished business of King's life--from his pacifism to his social democratic commitments to end poverty regardless of race--it is just as critical to remember that there was nothing at the time safe about the goals for which King fought in the 1950s and early 1960s that now receive essentially universal acclaim in the public sphere. That King, pre-1965, has become anodyne is, itself, much of the problem (after all, the chief fault of Whiggish views of history are their tendency to assume that progress is inevitable).
But, second, as that quotation about Vietnam suggests, the Memorial does not, in fact, focus entirely on the pre-1965 King. Perhaps the problem isn't this Memorial, but any memorial to a figure whose politics were as firmly in the prophetic mode as Dr. King's. Memorials celebrate. Memorials morn. But memorials--at least official, national ones--rarely call us to further action, especially not against the powers-that-be that create them.
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* Given that a healthcare policy that is the direct descendent of Mitt Romney's Massachusetts system and Bob Dole's proposals from the early 1990s is considered rank socialism today, Kennicott substantially understates this last point.
Senin, 02 Mei 2011
The Death of Osama bin Laden: V-J Day or Glorious Victory Over the Forces of Eastasia?
Ultimately, I decided to put together this rather post in part because I was so struck by the public memory conversation that began even before President Obama spoke last night. I found out about bin Laden's death in a perfectly 21st-century fashion: a push notification from the New York Times on my iPad at around 10:15 pm CDT alerted me to the upcoming White House announcement, so I turned on MSNBC (which had the regular NBC news team's coverage) and waited. As crowds gathered outside the White House, singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and chanting "USA! USA!," one of the network talkingheads opined that this was going to one of those moments about which you'll always remember what you were doing when you heard the news.
If bin Laden's death is going to one of those moments (and with the media's declaring it to be one, it may be well on the way there), how will we remember it? Will this be the end of a period in our history that began on 9/11/01? Or will this be just another great triumph in the neverending Global War on Terror (or Whatever We're Calling It This Week)?
Much like the immediate aftermath of 9/11, this great moment of national unity is (perhaps predictably) featuring a number of important political actors jockeying to attach their particular spin to what has happened. The most obvious source of controversy so far seems to involve claims that bin Laden's death vindicates George W. Bush's foreign policy. At least in a narrow sense (that Bush, as opposed to Obama, somehow deserves credit), this argument seems doomed to fail. But I expect the broader idea that yesterday's killing of bin Laden vindicates the broad, bipartisan consensus around the War on Terror (or Whatever) will go largely unchallenged in mainstream American public discourse.
But there really are questions to be asked here: could another approach have captured bin Laden more quickly? was an (apparent) assassination (as opposed to actually bringing bin Laden, alive, to justice) the right goal? how much was this success the result of the broad, new powers that the national security and surveillance state accumulated for itself in the aftermath of 9/11? will the rest of the world be as giddy about what this operation's success says about the United States as our pundits think they will be (Donny Deutsch, for example, was crowing about how good this will be for America's "brand" overseas)? and what, ultimately, is the relationship of Osama bin Laden (and the now-concluded hunt for him) to the larger post-9/11 role of the US in the world?
Watching the crowds in New York and Washington, DC on tv late last night, I was filled with mixed emotions. On the one hand, there was a certain America, F**k Yeah! quality about the celebration that seemed to reduce the whole thing to a kind of sporting event. Given the direction that it took, I have no nostalgia for our immediate post-9/11 bout of national unity and have no desire to relive it. I remain suspicious of a civil religion built around the notion that (in the words of a fellow Normanite) "we'll put a boot in your ass / It's the American way."
On the other hand, the American people have been through a decade in which our nation has fought two wars (and numerous side conflicts) that have cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives (including thousands of American ones). The toll on military families, in particular, has been severe (and in very military states like Oklahoma, you can really feel the strain on those around you). And though we'd spent twice the length of World War II doing so, before last night, we had yet to achieve our most clearly articulated goal: getting bin Laden, in the words of our last President, dead or alive. This is one of the few moments in this long conflict in which Americans might tell ourselves, "finally, it's over." Of course, that's absolutely not the message that our leaders are conveying this morning (even as they are congratulating themselves on the operation). But I find some hope in the desire of our nation for this to be the V-J Day of the Global War on Terror.
_____________________________
* At times this task feels like being a Daily Worker reporter and having to find a class angle on, say, a high school basketball game.
The Death of Osama bin Laden: V-J Day or Glorious Victory Over the Forces of Eastasia?
Ultimately, I decided to put together this rather post in part because I was so struck by the public memory conversation that began even before President Obama spoke last night. I found out about bin Laden's death in a perfectly 21st-century fashion: a push notification from the New York Times on my iPad at around 10:15 pm CDT alerted me to the upcoming White House announcement, so I turned on MSNBC (which had the regular NBC news team's coverage) and waited. As crowds gathered outside the White House, singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and chanting "USA! USA!," one of the network talkingheads opined that this was going to one of those moments about which you'll always remember what you were doing when you heard the news.
If bin Laden's death is going to one of those moments (and with the media's declaring it to be one, it may be well on the way there), how will we remember it? Will this be the end of a period in our history that began on 9/11/01? Or will this be just another great triumph in the neverending Global War on Terror (or Whatever We're Calling It This Week)?
Much like the immediate aftermath of 9/11, this great moment of national unity is (perhaps predictably) featuring a number of important political actors jockeying to attach their particular spin to what has happened. The most obvious source of controversy so far seems to involve claims that bin Laden's death vindicates George W. Bush's foreign policy. At least in a narrow sense (that Bush, as opposed to Obama, somehow deserves credit), this argument seems doomed to fail. But I expect the broader idea that yesterday's killing of bin Laden vindicates the broad, bipartisan consensus around the War on Terror (or Whatever) will go largely unchallenged in mainstream American public discourse.
But there really are questions to be asked here: could another approach have captured bin Laden more quickly? was an (apparent) assassination (as opposed to actually bringing bin Laden, alive, to justice) the right goal? how much was this success the result of the broad, new powers that the national security and surveillance state accumulated for itself in the aftermath of 9/11? will the rest of the world be as giddy about what this operation's success says about the United States as our pundits think they will be (Donny Deutsch, for example, was crowing about how good this will be for America's "brand" overseas)? and what, ultimately, is the relationship of Osama bin Laden (and the now-concluded hunt for him) to the larger post-9/11 role of the US in the world?
Watching the crowds in New York and Washington, DC on tv late last night, I was filled with mixed emotions. On the one hand, there was a certain America, F**k Yeah! quality about the celebration that seemed to reduce the whole thing to a kind of sporting event. Given the direction that it took, I have no nostalgia for our immediate post-9/11 bout of national unity and have no desire to relive it. I remain suspicious of a civil religion built around the notion that (in the words of a fellow Normanite) "we'll put a boot in your ass / It's the American way."
On the other hand, the American people have been through a decade in which our nation has fought two wars (and numerous side conflicts) that have cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives (including thousands of American ones). The toll on military families, in particular, has been severe (and in very military states like Oklahoma, you can really feel the strain on those around you). And though we'd spent twice the length of World War II doing so, before last night, we had yet to achieve our most clearly articulated goal: getting bin Laden, in the words of our last President, dead or alive. This is one of the few moments in this long conflict in which Americans might tell ourselves, "finally, it's over." Of course, that's absolutely not the message that our leaders are conveying this morning (even as they are congratulating themselves on the operation). But I find some hope in the desire of our nation for this to be the V-J Day of the Global War on Terror.
_____________________________
* At times this task feels like being a Daily Worker reporter and having to find a class angle on, say, a high school basketball game.
Senin, 11 April 2011
Forgetting Anniversaries
 |
| Medal Produced by the Civil War Centennial Commission, 1961 |
Readers of this blog in their mid-to-late fifties or older might remember the previous, major national celebration of our nation's past: the Centennial of the Civil War. Created by act of Congress in 1957, the Civil War Centennial Commission oversaw a national commemoration of that conflict that was more deeply troubled than the later Bicentennial effort.
This year, the nation faces two major historical anniversaries: this week marks the beginning of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War. And five months from today will be the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Yet it appears that neither of these anniversaries may receive the sort of unified national commemoration that our federal government provided for the nation's Bicentennial and the Civil War Centennial. What, if anything, should we make of this apparent refusal to commemorate?
I
In the words of the historian Robert Cook, author of Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965 (LSU Press, 2007), the national celebration of the Civil War's centennial "came close to being an unmitigated disaster." The Centennial fell at arguably the most difficult time for such a celebration, with the Civil Rights movement in full swing and Southern states turning to the legacy of the Confederacy for rhetorical ammunition as they pursued massive resistance to integration. The Civil War Centennial Commission, led by Gen. Ullyses S. Grant III and Karl S. Betts, embraced a by-then hoary view of the conflict as a "brothers' war," a narrative that ignored African American agency, marginalized the issue of slavery, and celebrated the conflict as a tragic but ultimately heroic tale of an essentially white nation reuniting. Thus the CWCC found itself deeply out-of-step with both African American and Southern white contemporary memory of the conflict. It only became a flashpoint of national controversy, however, when at its 1961 annual meeting in Charleston, SC, the New Jersey delegation precipitated a crisis by demanding, over the objections of Grant and Betts, that one of its African American delegates be given a room at the segregated hotel at which the meeting was taking place.
Writing on HNN in 2007, the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the CWCC, Robert Cook recalled the failures of the CWCC and gave advice for those planning national Sesquicentennial celebrations. Cook seems to simply have assumed that such celebrations would take place. But in fact, Congress has never authorized a national Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission, despite repeated attempts at its creation. Indeed, as far as I can tell, it's never even become a serious enough possibility to create a major public debate about it. The latest attempt, launched in the House this February, has foundered, in part due to the current bipartisan mania for budget cutting. The Obama Administration, disappointingly but utterly unsurprisingly, has been utterly silent about the Sesquicentennial. Though a number of states, localities, and private organizations have launched their own Sesquicentennial commemoration efforts--and some of these have made national news, largely for negative reasons--it now appears that there will be no high-profile national commemoration whatsoever.
Not that the federal government is entirely ducking this anniversary. The National Park Service, steward of the most important battle sites, has a website devoted to the Sesquicentennial, which features events "Then" (currently Congress adjourning with the nation divided on March 28, 1861) and "Now" (bizarrely Strom Thurmond filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957....which doesn't seem very much like "now" to me, unless the NPS is engaged in an ironic and very surprisingly critical stance on the current functioning of our Senate). And the Library of Congress is quietly archiving websites devoted to the commemoration of the Sesquicentennial, though as far as I can tell, they haven't made any effort to publicize this on their own website.
What accounts for the failure to mount a more robust national commemoration?
II
Surely the problem isn't a lack of national interest. Along with World War II, the Civil War remains the single event in our nation's past that most interests the general public. Civil war reenactment--an activity that is in many ways a legacy of the Centennial celebration--continues to attract a large and enthusiastic group of participants. And less demanding forms of Civil War memory are even more popular.
Nor is the problem the absence of a viable national story about the war. If anything, reaching consensus on the meaning of the war seems more likely in 2011 than in 1961. As Cook noted in his 2007 HNN piece, wildly popular works like Jim McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom and Ken Burns's Civil War have forged "a liberalized version of the brothers’ war/national salvation trope, one that incorporates the political achievements of the war (emancipation as well as Union) but still attempts to find evidence of national purpose and greatness." Though four years ago Cook argued that overcoming this new narrative was the first great challenge of the Sesquicentennial effort, the existence of this narrative would seem to form the basis of a national celebration, however inadequate Cook might find it to be. (Though I may be biased having studied with him, it seems to me that one can do a lot worse than Jim McPherson's understanding of the conflict.)
More positively, Kevin Levin, high school history teacher and author of Civil War Memory (winner of the 2007 Cliopatria for Best Individual Blog), argues that what he calls the "Continuing War Narrative" about Civil War memory is very overdrawn:
The sesquicentennial commissions of former Confederate states are engaged in activities that would have been impossible to imagine 50 years ago. Museums and other historical institutions throughout the nation are presenting the general public with programs that introduce the latest Civil War scholarship.
. . . I’m not suggesting that some kind of victory be declared over the interpretive problems that have plagued Civil War historiography and, by extension, the form it took in popular culture, but we would do well to acknowledge the changes. We should do so if only to more precisely point out the gaps and distortions that persist.In short, there are still problems, but the public memory of the Civil War seems healthier and, if anything, less divided than it's ever been before.
III
Perhaps this refusal to forge a national commemoration of the Sesquicentennial is nonetheless a result of what Dan Rodgers calls the "Age of Fracture" (you didn't think I was going to get through this post without mentioning USIH's current scholarly obsession, did you?). Rodgers does write about the weakening of "civil religion," once so strong in Cold War America. And, indeed, Robert Cook argues that the Centennial celebration was deeply linked to the sort of Cold War cultural and political imperatives that Rodgers argues began to fade in the 1970s.
But while Rodgers's account of national efforts to deal with important historical anniversaries shows fragmentation--from relative unity over the Bicentennial in the 1970s to "history wars" over Columbus and the Enola Gay in the 1990s--there's little in his narrative that would lead us to expect our federal government's withdrawing from such commemoration entirely.
Indeed, Rodgers devotes his final chapter to the growing importance--and often illusory immediacy--of the past in the late twentieth century:
As the very language for society threatened to break into fragments, the past became a sphere unto which desires for community and cohesion could be projected. A truly changeless society would have no need to dwell on its history. In contrast, a sense of living within fragmenting and accelerating time made history a point of acute importance. (p. 221)Although Rodgers focuses on the 1980s and 1990s in this chapter (entitled "Wrinkles in Time"), I don't think our culture has entirely abandoned this sense of the past as both crucial and immediate.* For example, "Wrinkles in Time" made think repeatedly of the Tea Party's invocations of the American Revolution (which David has previously discussed on this blog).**
Far from avoiding arguments about history, the American public and American politicians of the "Age of Fracture" tended to leap at the chance to enter the fray.
IV
Which brings us to this year's second major anniversary. If Congress and the White House can effectively duck dealing with this week's arrival of the Civil War Sesquicentennial, they will not be able to ignore 9/11/11. But in many ways, this anniversary will be much more difficult to commemorate than the Civil War. Civil War commemoration is, after all, a decades-old, multi-million dollar industry. And, as noted above, despite generations of division over the meaning of the Civil War, there's a handy, reasonably accurate narrative around which a national commemoration could be built.
9/11 is very different. Despite early insistence the event "changed everything" and brought the American nation together, as Dan Rodgers correctly suggests in the epilogue to Age of Fracture, this moment of national unification was very short lived. In our national elections of 2002, 2004, and 2006, 9/11 was repeatedly invoked for partisan political purposes. Only the utter failure of Rudy Giuliani's presidential aspirations served to partially discourage a Republican return to this political well in 2008. Last year's controversy over the "Ground Zero Mosque" suggests that this bloody shirt can--and will--continue to be waved.
Any attempt to avoid recognizing the anniversary of 9/11 will be subject to intense public criticism...as will any particular attempt to recognize it. The failure to create a robust federal commemoration of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 is thus both more understandable and less tenable than the avoidance of the Civil War Sesquicentennial.
The private developers of the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum are planning to open their memorial at Ground Zero on September 11, 2011. Given the importance of this site, the Memorial opening will undoubtedly be a centerpiece of our national commemoration.
What that national commemoration will look like is unclear, though my guess is that there are people--perhaps dozens of people--in the West Wing and the Capitol busily working on it.
This will be one anniversary that our political leaders will not be able to forget.
_________________________________________________________
* In the interest of full disclosure I should add that, at least in my first reading of Age of Fracture, "Wrinkles in Time" was probably my least favorite chapter in this terrific book. I felt that Rodgers's extremely evocative metaphors about the "folding" and "short-circuiting" of time too often substituted for more precise analysis of what linked the various views of the past that he discusses in this chapter. Nevertheless, as with the rest of the book, there's a lot of value in it, as my discussion above suggests.
** It is interesting that the Tea Party's rhetoric is so focused on the Revolution and tends to avoid the Civil War. Perhaps this is because the politics of the Tea Party challenges the legacy of the Civil War in important ways. To everyone's surprise (I think), nullification has made a comeback among our state legislatures. While a certain Neo-Confederate understanding of the "War Between the States" was extremely useful for white Southern opponents of the black freedom struggle in the Fifties and Sixties, for a variety of reasons, the Civil War--even in its more mythic forms--may provide a less usable past for the Tea Party. Just as Tea Partiers are at pains to deemphasize their connections to the Christian Right, they find themselves repeatedly defending themselves against the charge that their objections to Obama concern race. This may lead them to avoid invoking an event that now seems to most Americans to have been about race.
Forgetting Anniversaries
|
| Medal Produced by the Civil War Centennial Commission, 1961 |
Readers of this blog in their mid-to-late fifties or older might remember the previous, major national celebration of our nation's past: the Centennial of the Civil War. Created by act of Congress in 1957, the Civil War Centennial Commission oversaw a national commemoration of that conflict that was more deeply troubled than the later Bicentennial effort.
This year, the nation faces two major historical anniversaries: this week marks the beginning of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War. And five months from today will be the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Yet it appears that neither of these anniversaries may receive the sort of unified national commemoration that our federal government provided for the nation's Bicentennial and the Civil War Centennial. What, if anything, should we make of this apparent refusal to commemorate?
I
In the words of the historian Robert Cook, author of Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965 (LSU Press, 2007), the national celebration of the Civil War's centennial "came close to being an unmitigated disaster." The Centennial fell at arguably the most difficult time for such a celebration, with the Civil Rights movement in full swing and Southern states turning to the legacy of the Confederacy for rhetorical ammunition as they pursued massive resistance to integration. The Civil War Centennial Commission, led by Gen. Ullyses S. Grant III and Karl S. Betts, embraced a by-then hoary view of the conflict as a "brothers' war," a narrative that ignored African American agency, marginalized the issue of slavery, and celebrated the conflict as a tragic but ultimately heroic tale of an essentially white nation reuniting. Thus the CWCC found itself deeply out-of-step with both African American and Southern white contemporary memory of the conflict. It only became a flashpoint of national controversy, however, when at its 1961 annual meeting in Charleston, SC, the New Jersey delegation precipitated a crisis by demanding, over the objections of Grant and Betts, that one of its African American delegates be given a room at the segregated hotel at which the meeting was taking place.
Writing on HNN in 2007, the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the CWCC, Robert Cook recalled the failures of the CWCC and gave advice for those planning national Sesquicentennial celebrations. Cook seems to simply have assumed that such celebrations would take place. But in fact, Congress has never authorized a national Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission, despite repeated attempts at its creation. Indeed, as far as I can tell, it's never even become a serious enough possibility to create a major public debate about it. The latest attempt, launched in the House this February, has foundered, in part due to the current bipartisan mania for budget cutting. The Obama Administration, disappointingly but utterly unsurprisingly, has been utterly silent about the Sesquicentennial. Though a number of states, localities, and private organizations have launched their own Sesquicentennial commemoration efforts--and some of these have made national news, largely for negative reasons--it now appears that there will be no high-profile national commemoration whatsoever.
Not that the federal government is entirely ducking this anniversary. The National Park Service, steward of the most important battle sites, has a website devoted to the Sesquicentennial, which features events "Then" (currently Congress adjourning with the nation divided on March 28, 1861) and "Now" (bizarrely Strom Thurmond filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957....which doesn't seem very much like "now" to me, unless the NPS is engaged in an ironic and very surprisingly critical stance on the current functioning of our Senate). And the Library of Congress is quietly archiving websites devoted to the commemoration of the Sesquicentennial, though as far as I can tell, they haven't made any effort to publicize this on their own website.
What accounts for the failure to mount a more robust national commemoration?
II
Surely the problem isn't a lack of national interest. Along with World War II, the Civil War remains the single event in our nation's past that most interests the general public. Civil war reenactment--an activity that is in many ways a legacy of the Centennial celebration--continues to attract a large and enthusiastic group of participants. And less demanding forms of Civil War memory are even more popular.
Nor is the problem the absence of a viable national story about the war. If anything, reaching consensus on the meaning of the war seems more likely in 2011 than in 1961. As Cook noted in his 2007 HNN piece, wildly popular works like Jim McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom and Ken Burns's Civil War have forged "a liberalized version of the brothers’ war/national salvation trope, one that incorporates the political achievements of the war (emancipation as well as Union) but still attempts to find evidence of national purpose and greatness." Though four years ago Cook argued that overcoming this new narrative was the first great challenge of the Sesquicentennial effort, the existence of this narrative would seem to form the basis of a national celebration, however inadequate Cook might find it to be. (Though I may be biased having studied with him, it seems to me that one can do a lot worse than Jim McPherson's understanding of the conflict.)
More positively, Kevin Levin, high school history teacher and author of Civil War Memory (winner of the 2007 Cliopatria for Best Individual Blog), argues that what he calls the "Continuing War Narrative" about Civil War memory is very overdrawn:
The sesquicentennial commissions of former Confederate states are engaged in activities that would have been impossible to imagine 50 years ago. Museums and other historical institutions throughout the nation are presenting the general public with programs that introduce the latest Civil War scholarship.
. . . I’m not suggesting that some kind of victory be declared over the interpretive problems that have plagued Civil War historiography and, by extension, the form it took in popular culture, but we would do well to acknowledge the changes. We should do so if only to more precisely point out the gaps and distortions that persist.In short, there are still problems, but the public memory of the Civil War seems healthier and, if anything, less divided than it's ever been before.
III
Perhaps this refusal to forge a national commemoration of the Sesquicentennial is nonetheless a result of what Dan Rodgers calls the "Age of Fracture" (you didn't think I was going to get through this post without mentioning USIH's current scholarly obsession, did you?). Rodgers does write about the weakening of "civil religion," once so strong in Cold War America. And, indeed, Robert Cook argues that the Centennial celebration was deeply linked to the sort of Cold War cultural and political imperatives that Rodgers argues began to fade in the 1970s.
But while Rodgers's account of national efforts to deal with important historical anniversaries shows fragmentation--from relative unity over the Bicentennial in the 1970s to "history wars" over Columbus and the Enola Gay in the 1990s--there's little in his narrative that would lead us to expect our federal government's withdrawing from such commemoration entirely.
Indeed, Rodgers devotes his final chapter to the growing importance--and often illusory immediacy--of the past in the late twentieth century:
As the very language for society threatened to break into fragments, the past became a sphere unto which desires for community and cohesion could be projected. A truly changeless society would have no need to dwell on its history. In contrast, a sense of living within fragmenting and accelerating time made history a point of acute importance. (p. 221)Although Rodgers focuses on the 1980s and 1990s in this chapter (entitled "Wrinkles in Time"), I don't think our culture has entirely abandoned this sense of the past as both crucial and immediate.* For example, "Wrinkles in Time" made think repeatedly of the Tea Party's invocations of the American Revolution (which David has previously discussed on this blog).**
Far from avoiding arguments about history, the American public and American politicians of the "Age of Fracture" tended to leap at the chance to enter the fray.
IV
Which brings us to this year's second major anniversary. If Congress and the White House can effectively duck dealing with this week's arrival of the Civil War Sesquicentennial, they will not be able to ignore 9/11/11. But in many ways, this anniversary will be much more difficult to commemorate than the Civil War. Civil War commemoration is, after all, a decades-old, multi-million dollar industry. And, as noted above, despite generations of division over the meaning of the Civil War, there's a handy, reasonably accurate narrative around which a national commemoration could be built.
9/11 is very different. Despite early insistence the event "changed everything" and brought the American nation together, as Dan Rodgers correctly suggests in the epilogue to Age of Fracture, this moment of national unification was very short lived. In our national elections of 2002, 2004, and 2006, 9/11 was repeatedly invoked for partisan political purposes. Only the utter failure of Rudy Giuliani's presidential aspirations served to partially discourage a Republican return to this political well in 2008. Last year's controversy over the "Ground Zero Mosque" suggests that this bloody shirt can--and will--continue to be waved.
Any attempt to avoid recognizing the anniversary of 9/11 will be subject to intense public criticism...as will any particular attempt to recognize it. The failure to create a robust federal commemoration of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 is thus both more understandable and less tenable than the avoidance of the Civil War Sesquicentennial.
The private developers of the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum are planning to open their memorial at Ground Zero on September 11, 2011. Given the importance of this site, the Memorial opening will undoubtedly be a centerpiece of our national commemoration.
What that national commemoration will look like is unclear, though my guess is that there are people--perhaps dozens of people--in the West Wing and the Capitol busily working on it.
This will be one anniversary that our political leaders will not be able to forget.
_________________________________________________________
* In the interest of full disclosure I should add that, at least in my first reading of Age of Fracture, "Wrinkles in Time" was probably my least favorite chapter in this terrific book. I felt that Rodgers's extremely evocative metaphors about the "folding" and "short-circuiting" of time too often substituted for more precise analysis of what linked the various views of the past that he discusses in this chapter. Nevertheless, as with the rest of the book, there's a lot of value in it, as my discussion above suggests.
** It is interesting that the Tea Party's rhetoric is so focused on the Revolution and tends to avoid the Civil War. Perhaps this is because the politics of the Tea Party challenges the legacy of the Civil War in important ways. To everyone's surprise (I think), nullification has made a comeback among our state legislatures. While a certain Neo-Confederate understanding of the "War Between the States" was extremely useful for white Southern opponents of the black freedom struggle in the Fifties and Sixties, for a variety of reasons, the Civil War--even in its more mythic forms--may provide a less usable past for the Tea Party. Just as Tea Partiers are at pains to deemphasize their connections to the Christian Right, they find themselves repeatedly defending themselves against the charge that their objections to Obama concern race. This may lead them to avoid invoking an event that now seems to most Americans to have been about race.
Senin, 17 Januari 2011
The 2011 Ward Connerly Award for Martin Luther King, Jr. Revisionism goes to....
It's important to recall that a little over a quarter century ago, when this day became a federal holiday, there was still fierce opposition to the idea of honoring King. In the Senate, that opposition was led by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC). The final Senate vote on the measure to declare a federal holiday in King's name was taken on October 19, 1983.* Helms was joined in opposing the measure by seventeen of his fellow Republicans and four Democrats:
James Abdnor (R-SD)
John East (R-NC)
James Exon (D-NE)
Jake Garn (R-UT)
Barry Goldwater (R-AZ)
Charles Grassley (R-IA)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Chic Hecht (R-NV)
Gordon Humphrey (R-NH)
Roger Jepsen (R-IA)
James McClure (R-ID)
Frank Murkowski (R-AK)
Don Nickles (R-OK)
Larry Pressler (R-SD)
Jennings Randolph (D-WV)
Warren Rudman (R-NH)
John Stennis (D-MS)
Steve Symms (R-ID)
John Tower (R-TX)
Malcolm Wallop (R-WY)
Edward Zorinsky (D-NE)
A couple interesting notes about that list. First, two members who voted against the holiday still serve in the Senate: Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch.
Second, there are surprisingly few Senators from the South on that list. Even Strom Thurmond voted for the holiday. Only Helms, East, Stennis, and Tower among the "no" voters came from states that had joined the Confederacy; arguably Randolph and Nickles could also count as Southern. The vast majority of Southern Senators voted for the measure. And fully sixteen of the twenty-two Senators who voted against the holiday were from regions other than the South. The fiercest opposition came from the Great Plains and the West. Indeed, Arizona led the national opposition, with its Republican Governor Evan Mecham rescinding the federal holiday as his first act in office, a move that prompted a boycott movement, the relocation of Superbowl XXVII from Tempe to Pasadena, and, following continued opposition by Mecham's successors, Public Enemy's "By The Time I Get To Arizona" (1991):
Arizona was joined by a number of other states in footdragging on the holiday, including New Hampshire, Utah, and South Carolina. Virginia decided to let King share the holiday with Robert E. Lee (whose birthday falls close by); Mississippi still does this. But today, all fifty states recognize the holiday in one form or another.
We've come a long way since the battles over the King holiday in the 1980s and 1990s. But one of the prices of King's transformation from a revolutionary figure to a national icon has been a deradicalization of his legacy.
Indeed, over the years, King has been repeatedly invoked in support of positions that he would have deeply disagreed with. Leading the way in this regard were conservatives who, starting in the 1980s, invoked King in opposition to affirmative action. In many ways the leading figure in doing this was Ward Connerly, who led the battle against affirmative action in the University of California system and later took his fight to other states, as well. Connerly has never ceased quoting King selectively in a desperate effort to make King into an opponent of affirmative action.
So in honor of the holiday and Ward Connerly's leadership in this regard, I'd like to present the 2011 Ward Connerly Award for Martin Luther King, Jr. Revisionism.
This year's award goes to Jeh Johnson (pictured above), the current General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Defense. In a speech in honor of MLK Day at the Pentagon last week, Johnson argued that, were he alive today, Dr. King would support our nation's current wars (h/t Salon.com):
I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.
Luckily, I happen to have Martin Luther King right here...
_____________________________________
* The Senate's own online database of votes doesn't go back to the 1980s, so for this roll-call, you'll need to descend behind the paywall of the New York Times.
The 2011 Ward Connerly Award for Martin Luther King, Jr. Revisionism goes to....
It's important to recall that a little over a quarter century ago, when this day became a federal holiday, there was still fierce opposition to the idea of honoring King. In the Senate, that opposition was led by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC). The final Senate vote on the measure to declare a federal holiday in King's name was taken on October 19, 1983.* Helms was joined in opposing the measure by seventeen of his fellow Republicans and four Democrats:
James Abdnor (R-SD)
John East (R-NC)
James Exon (D-NE)
Jake Garn (R-UT)
Barry Goldwater (R-AZ)
Charles Grassley (R-IA)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Chic Hecht (R-NV)
Gordon Humphrey (R-NH)
Roger Jepsen (R-IA)
James McClure (R-ID)
Frank Murkowski (R-AK)
Don Nickles (R-OK)
Larry Pressler (R-SD)
Jennings Randolph (D-WV)
Warren Rudman (R-NH)
John Stennis (D-MS)
Steve Symms (R-ID)
John Tower (R-TX)
Malcolm Wallop (R-WY)
Edward Zorinsky (D-NE)
A couple interesting notes about that list. First, two members who voted against the holiday still serve in the Senate: Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch.
Second, there are surprisingly few Senators from the South on that list. Even Strom Thurmond voted for the holiday. Only Helms, East, Stennis, and Tower among the "no" voters came from states that had joined the Confederacy; arguably Randolph and Nickles could also count as Southern. The vast majority of Southern Senators voted for the measure. And fully sixteen of the twenty-two Senators who voted against the holiday were from regions other than the South. The fiercest opposition came from the Great Plains and the West. Indeed, Arizona led the national opposition, with its Republican Governor Evan Mecham rescinding the federal holiday as his first act in office, a move that prompted a boycott movement, the relocation of Superbowl XXVII from Tempe to Pasadena, and, following continued opposition by Mecham's successors, Public Enemy's "By The Time I Get To Arizona" (1991):
Arizona was joined by a number of other states in footdragging on the holiday, including New Hampshire, Utah, and South Carolina. Virginia decided to let King share the holiday with Robert E. Lee (whose birthday falls close by); Mississippi still does this. But today, all fifty states recognize the holiday in one form or another.
We've come a long way since the battles over the King holiday in the 1980s and 1990s. But one of the prices of King's transformation from a revolutionary figure to a national icon has been a deradicalization of his legacy.
Indeed, over the years, King has been repeatedly invoked in support of positions that he would have deeply disagreed with. Leading the way in this regard were conservatives who, starting in the 1980s, invoked King in opposition to affirmative action. In many ways the leading figure in doing this was Ward Connerly, who led the battle against affirmative action in the University of California system and later took his fight to other states, as well. Connerly has never ceased quoting King selectively in a desperate effort to make King into an opponent of affirmative action.
So in honor of the holiday and Ward Connerly's leadership in this regard, I'd like to present the 2011 Ward Connerly Award for Martin Luther King, Jr. Revisionism.
This year's award goes to Jeh Johnson (pictured above), the current General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Defense. In a speech in honor of MLK Day at the Pentagon last week, Johnson argued that, were he alive today, Dr. King would support our nation's current wars (h/t Salon.com):
I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.
Luckily, I happen to have Martin Luther King right here...
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* The Senate's own online database of votes doesn't go back to the 1980s, so for this roll-call, you'll need to descend behind the paywall of the New York Times.
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