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Issue 15
September 2006
The Vietnam
War and Civil
Rights
2
In this year’s issue
is the official journal of the
American Studies Resources
Centre, The Aldham Robarts
Centre, Liverpool John Moores
University, Mount Pleasant Liverpool L3 5UZ
Tel & fax: 0151-231 3241
e-mail: [email protected]
web site:
www.americansc.org.uk
3
The Memin
Penguin
Controversy
News and events
25
Dr Ezekiel Mobley examines the
impact of the furore over a set of
offensive postage stamps issued
in Mexico on Black-HispanicAmerican Relationships in the
States
Helen
Tamburro
r e por t s
on
a
landmark visit
Editor-in-Chief: Ian Ralston
Editor: David Forster
27
Editorial assistant: Helen Tamburro
11
© 2006, Liverpool John Moores
University and the Contributors.
America’s “Great
Satan” in Action
and War Films
The journal is published with
the aid of financial assistance
from the United States Embassy.
Please email us at
16
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The Vietnam War
and the Civil
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Brendan Gallagher considers how
the two events are inextricably
bound up
Photo credits
21
Ezekiel Mobley pp 3 -10
American History Slide Collection: Cover and page 23
Lenny Quart pp 2 & 21
Helen Tamburro pp 24 & 25
Jeanne-Marie Kenny pp 26 & 44
Ralph Donald pp 2 & 11
Ian Ralston pp 2 & 28
Photo of US Ambassador on p
28 courtesy of US Embassy
28
Ralph Donald looks
at
the
changing
stereotypes
of
America’s enemies in
movies from WorldWar 2 to the “war on
terror”.
Articles in this journal may be
freely reproduced for use in
subscribing institutions only,
provided that the source is acknowledged.
Letters from New
York
More dispatches from
the Big Apple by Lenny
Quart
Altman’s Oscar Night
The New York Post
Public Life
We stopped at
Perfect Days
Jeanne-Marie
Kenny holds an
exhibition
in
Liverpool
Layout and graphics: David
Forster
The views expressed are those
of the contributors, and not necessarily those of the centre or
the university.
Ezekiel
launches
Pittsburgh link
with Liverpool
students
BAAS Teachers
and Schools
Awards 2006
Book Reviews
29
Literature
32
Culture
37
History
40
Politics
40
Race
42
Gender Studies
43
Textbooks
3
Relations between Hispanic
and African Americans in
the U.S. today seen through
the prism of the "Memin
Pinguin" Controversy
According to the 2000
Census, Hispanics have
now exceeded AfricanAmericans as the largest
ethnic minority group in
the United States. The recent Memin Pinguin controversy, in which the
Mexican post office issued
stamps featuring a racial
caricature of an AfroMexican, highlighted the
fact that the Hispanic community is itself racially diverse, and that AfroMexicans have been an
invisible and underprivileged community. In this
lecture, delivered at the
Liverpool John Moores
University in March this
year, Dr. Ezekiel Mobley
argues that African Americans should become
aware of their Latin cousins, and that the controversy also has lessons
which Britain could learn.
W
e’ve all grown accustomed to thinking
of
African
Americans as the
most significant ethnic minority
population in the United States,
in terms of sheer numbers, cultural impact and political
strength. African Americans,
themselves, have become accustomed to this same kind of thinking. So, when we think of issues
of race in the United States, we
tend—primarily through inertia, I
would maintain—to define these
solely in terms of “black and
white.” We have invested so
The author in Yanga
equal, and in fact have exceeded,
African Americans as the largest
ethnic minority group in the U.S.,
constituting some 40 million
people, which is at least 13% of
the American population.
And, unlike that percentage of
the American population that
derives its descent from Africa,
the Latino population continues
to grow very rapidly through
immigration, at present primarily through illegal immigration,
but also potentially through legal “guest worker” programs. A
recent study by The Pew Chari-
The series of Mexican postage stamps which ignited the
controversy
much in how we have defined
ourselves over the past 200
years to the point where we
have ignored, or didn’t fully absorb, the “brown” relationship.
That must change now. The issue of race in the United States
is far more complex than “black
and white.” According to the
year 2000 Census count in the
United States, Latinos now
table Trust estimates some 12
million Latinos are now residing
in the U.S. illegally, and it is
again estimated that those numbers will increase by 850,000
each year. When we “do the
math,” then, we would estimate
there are currently more than 40
million Latinos residing in the
US, but how much more nobody
actually knows.
4
Large flows of legal and illegal
immigrants from Mexico and
Central America have very farreaching implications for U.S.
national economic and security
policy. U.S. media reports and
possible legislative initiatives
from the Bush administration
bear out the sheer urgency of
the immigration crisis. But, my
this now, intellectually and emotionally. African Americans, especially, must accept this fact in
a definitive way.
Furthermore African Americans
and Latino Americans occupy
the same urban space in the
United States and, as such, will
be in competition for, at first, the
Afro-Mexicans in Yanga
discussion will mainly serve to
highlight this immigration impact on African Americans and
their displacement as the number one ethnic group in the U.S.,
and the repercussions therefrom.
The changing fabric of
American racial Landscape
the
Now, to understand the fabric of
the changing American racial
landscape, you must, and I say
emphatically must, have a fuller
comprehension of the Latino
factor. It will take years of reeducation among African Americans in the U.S., and likewise
years in the United Kingdom,
along the lines of a wholly new
cultural awareness in order to
fully grasp this phenomenon.
The rapid expansion of the Latino population, alone, has profound implications for people
living in the western hemisphere: Spanish is the number
one language in the western
hemisphere. We must deal with
lowest level jobs and the lesser
public offices. And, while Latino
Americans are lagging behind
African Americans in a number
of areas, especially education,
they have one advantage within
their common urban space: they
uniformly speak Spanish and
maintain close family ties.
As a result of all this, there will
be some real crises in the next
few years and it will take creative approaches to find synergies between these two minority
groups in the US population
landscape.
The Memin Pinguin Controversy
I will begin with an examination
of the now media famous (or
infamous) “Memin Pinguin”
controversy in Mexico and the
U.S. “Memin Pinguin” is perhaps a metaphor for understanding many issues symbolic
of the African American and Latino American relationship in the
US. The Memin Pingiun contro-
versy has released a set of issues that have galvanized the
attention of the African American population at a time when
the immigration issue is at the
forefront of the American media
and the halls of Congress. U.S.
Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY),
for example, highlighted the
immigration controversy recently by suggesting that if Jesus Christ were alive today, he
would be caught in the net as an
“illegal” immigrant.
Last July, I reported on the famous "Memin Penguin" cartoon
character in The African Times
newspaper (see Mobley 2005).
The Memin Pinguin comic books
have been a broad staple of
many Mexican households for
the last 60 years. In 2005, the
government of Mexican President Vicente Fox issued a new
federal postage stamp commemorating the likeness of
Memin Pinguin. This commemorative stamp was interpreted by
African American religious leaders Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton as a direct slap in the face to
African Americans, and a subsequent and very public controversy ensued. Jackson and
Sharpton pointed out the physical similarities of Memin Pinguin
to certain racially stereotypical
U.S. radio and television characters of the 1930s through 1960s,
such as the infamous “Amos n'
Andy” comic duet. These personalities and others like them
were much more often than not
perceived as derisive and ridiculing of African Americans and,
furthermore, supporting, exhorting, of white racial supremacy.
“Comedy masks tragedy,” the
Rev. Jesse Jackson said at a
meeting of civil rights leaders in
Little Rock, Arkansas. “In this
instance, it’s comedy with a demeaning punch line and we
hope that President Fox will take
it off the market.”
“Black Mexicans: Forgotten Africans?” pointed out that the
Memin Pinguin debate in Mexico and the U.S. was merely a
harbinger of things to come. For
example, it had unintentionally
opened a “Pandora’s Box,” re-
5
vealing the plight of AfroMexicans who now populate the
Mexican states of Coahuila, Veracruz, Guerrero and Oaxaca.
You see, Afro-Mexicans have a
long history, which is in much
need of detailed and public examination. For instance, not
many are even aware of the African element in the population of
Mexico, let alone that it was in
1608, when a west African
known as Gaspar Yanga led a
significant slave rebellion in Veracruz, Mexico, that created the
first “free” African town in the
Americas. And, two of the four
black heroes of the Mexican War
of Independence from Spain
(1810-1821)—Vicente Guerrero
and Jose Maria Morelos—had
Mexican states named for them.
Afro-Mexicans:
people
the
forgotten
The story of Mexico’s failure to
credit and acknowledge its AfroMestizo history is painful, given
what else has happened politically and socially since the
early 1990s. For example, in
Chiapas, the southernmost
state of Mexico bordering
Guatemala, a rebel indigenous movement took up
arms and threatened to
overthrow oligarchic landowners to relieve the burden
of generations of near-feudal
rule. The rebels have successfully petitioned for increased federal government
attention to land reform,
education and health needs.
And, the current president,
Vicente Fox, was freely
elected from an opposition
party, which had not happened in Mexico for over 70
years.
Blacks have been officially
“invisible” in Mexico because until recently the federal government did not recognize them in census
counts. This was tolerated over
the centuries by the policy of
mestizaje or “cosmic mixture”
of
exclusively
Spanish
(Europeans) and indigenous
(Indian) peoples. This policy was
perpetuated by a mythology that
neatly fit with the ideology of
the early 16th century conquests
by Hernan Cortes, a representative of the Spanish crown, who
subdued the Aztec emperor
Montezuma II, pre-colonial ruler
of most of Mexico and Central
America. Afro-Mexicans therefore, until recently, had no official recognition and it was consequently easy to dismiss them.
However, due to the emergence
of the recent “third root” movement, that is increasingly difficult to do. In that regard, some
institutions like the University of
Veracruz presently sponsor academic courses that emphasize
the African impact and history.
But, this divergence is still rare.
In modern Mexico, the so-called
“Third Root” movement is
headed by Afro-Mexicans and is
dedicated to recognizing and
improving the civic, social and
economic conditions of this
much-neglected group. Mexican
blacks have had a significant
history not well recognized by
towns near border crossings
between Texas and Mexico’s
Coahuila state. She is the cocurator of a significant museum
exhibition in Chicago, Illinois,
that boldly spells out the AfroMexican contribution to modern
history. “It’s the most important
thing we’ve ever done,” said
Mexican Fine Arts Museum in
Chicago president Carlos Tortolero. “‘The African Presence in
Mexico’ tells a virtually unknown
and still-unfolding story.”
Mexican filmmakers such as
Rafael Rebollar are receiving
recognition for their documentary work illustrating “La Raiz
Olvidar” (The Forgotten Ones)
and “Los Moscogos.” The latter
film concerns so-called “Black
Seminoles,” a mixed-race people of Native American and African slave heritage, who were
forced into submission by
American general, later President Andrew Jackson, and ultimately were forced to abandon
Yanga mural in Penguela
the government and media. But
some groups of Afro-Mexicans
have started to speak out. Mexican scholars such as Sagrario
Cruz-Carretaro, at the University
of Veracruz, bring attention to
Afro-Mexicans and have made
studies of Yanga and the black
their traditional lands in the
states of Georgia and Florida for
a life of neglect in Oklahoma and
Texas in the 1840’s. Descendants of these same people later
gained distinction from the U.S.
Army as scouts, who won four
Medals of Honour for military
6
campaigns against the Apache
and Comanche nations in the
south-western United States.
Intellectuals like Cruz-Carretaro
and Rebollar have, in their respective fields, started to organize and demand a strong public
acknowledgement of the role of
Afro-Mexicans in shaping Mex-
Yanga crest
ico’s national character.
Although the percentages were
low, the population of enslaved
Africans in Mexico had a huge
presence in colonial Mexico
(1521-1810) working as domestic
servants, day labourers, cattle
ranchers, artisans and miners on
haciendas (large plantation estates).
You see, there was, and to a
wide extent currently is, outright
denial about a tangible African
bloodline running through Mexico's population. I recall quite
clearly more than a decade ago,
listening to a television interview with an official of the Mexican government. The official
was describing the ethnic makeup of the Mexican population,
and nowhere did she mention
any African population element
in the entire country. This “racial
amnesia,” as it has been termed,
officially exists despite the fact
that some 200,000 Africans were
brought to Mexico during the
early years of the slave trade. In
fact, historians estimate that the
African population of Mexico
constituted
around a halfmillion persons
by 1810.
And would it
surprise you to
know that Vincente Guerrero,
a leading general of the Mexican War of Independence and
the new nation’s
second
president, appears to
have been of
African descent.
And,
finally,
photographs of
the great revolutionary
hero
Emiliano Zapata
show
clearly
that he was of
African descent.
Even modernday rebels from
Mexico’s souther n
Chi apas
state proudly called themselves
“zapatistas” during the 1990s.
Dating to the years immediately
following the beginning of the
Mexican Revolution in 1910,
official national ideology defined
the Mexican population as a
unified one, created out of the
mixture of Spanish and indigenous population—mestizo. The
African element was completely
and unambiguously excluded. In
fact, since 1928, Mexico has
celebrated October 12 as "The
Day of the Race" and this singular Spanish-Indian mix denies
the African-descended population. In that early era, even Mexican public commentators, media
officials and university scholars
were in total denial of the African contribution to Mexican his-
tory.
The Third Root
The "Third Root" movement—
deriving its name from this third
and African population element-is now bringing a sea change to
that mind-set of race denial in
Mexico. In 1992, the Mexican
government finally acknowledged Africa to be Mexico's
"Third Root" but, securing a
wholesale list of democratic reforms, employment opportunities, adequate housing, minimal
education and health care for
Afro-Mexicans will take a long
time and much public pressure.
And, the political will to accomplish something dramatic is
needed as well.
Afro-Mexican population centres
in the Costa Chica area (in Guerrero and Oaxaca), Veracruz and
Coahuila maintain very strong
cultural examples of racial heritage through song, dance and
other art forms. These people
often endure in isolated, but
unmistakably “African” communities. In the state of Veracruz,
for example, you can find towns
named Mandinga, Matamba and
Mozambique, which clearly denote the historical African presence in Mexico.
When the Pinguin controversy
started to gather steam in the
U.S. media in 2005, Bush White
House insiders conveniently
seized the moment to join with
African American leaders in denouncing Mexico's President
Fox. Many conservative U.S.
policy-makers were thoroughly
annoyed at Fox’s pro-Mexican
immigration announcements
and opposing construction of
hundreds of miles of “barbedwire fence” between Mexico and
the U.S. Of course, these announcements further encouraged conservative groups in the
U.S., who were already reeling
from the daily headlines Mexican “illegal” immigration.
Who is Memin Pinguin?
Well, who is “Memin Pinguin,”
the comic book character, and
why does he figure so prominently in understanding the
7
Mexican psyche today? Obviously, the look, feel and characterization of Memin Pinguin ridicule African and African American individuals. In fact, Memin
Pinguin does not even look reasonably human like the other,
white, characters in the comic
books. The dialogue of many
“Memin Pinguin” comic books
portrays the character as a very
meek, gentle and well-meaning
character (not a real person) that
you would hardly give any responsibility. He is often dimwitted. His look is radically different, e.g. simian or animal like,
from the other characters. In fact,
until you actually see Memin
Pinguin himself, in the comic
books, you can hardly believe
your eyes. Why is this the case
and why was the character perpetuated for so many years?
Why does an image like this exist in 2006? Why did the Memin
Pinguin character become
prominent enough to be placed
on a federal stamp of the Mexican republic?
What was the controversy really
about?
"Memin Pinguin," substantively
and symbolically, is one of the
principal "next steps” a comprehensive understanding of Latino-African American relations.
There are several important reasons for this. For decades, African Americans held a centre
stage position in the neverending civil rights debate. The
legacy of legal slavery until 1863
and legal discrimination until the
1960s in the United States, was
so pervasive and fundamentally
important to American social
history, that to consider it any
other way was, and continues to
be, often publicly ridiculed.
But, frankly we knew very little
of “Memin Pinguin” beforehand
because Americans are not serious students of our neighbours
to the south, in matters of culture, society and habits. That is
apparently one main reason why
we were so shocked by the
stamp issued last year which
bore the likeness of Memin Pinguin. Most of us had never seen
Memin Pinguin before last year.
Our American recollections of
Mexican life and culture were
until recently mainly influenced
by media images of characters
like “Speedy Gonzales” and the
“Taco Bell” Chihuahua dog, not
“Memin Pinguin.”
On average, Americans really do
not mix socially with Mexicans
on their vacations, preferring
instead to enjoy themselves frolicking on the clean beaches of
Acapulco and Cancun. We don’t
really understand how necessary and easy it was for Mexican
society to create, maintain and
flourish with “Memin Pinguin”
in acceptable fashion. This image was perpetuated by notions
of a mestizo (mixed race EuroIndian society), wholly absent of
considerations of race and class
as they historically existed in the
United States. In other words,
“Memin Pinguin” in comic book
version could flourish for many
years without social criticism
from Mexicans—even as AfroMexicans suffered from discrimination. Thus, the “Memin
Pinguin” cartoon character remained an unchallenged daily
staple of Mexican popular culture since the 1940s, when author Yolanda Vargas Dulche conceptualised the character.
Unfortunately, the Memin Pinguin controversy, spilling over
into the U.S. last year, is making
many African Americans look
urgently, for the first time, at
Mexican history and society.
Many of them are asking questions about the 19th century
abolition of slavery in Mexico.
They are asking questions about
the ill-treatment and decadeslong lack of social advancement
for Afro-Mexicans in the states
of Coahuila, Veracruz and on the
Pacific Ocean coast. Inhabitants
of these lands and elsewhere are
demanding more recognition
and rights for Afro-Mexicans,
especially in some of the border
towns (like Nacimiento) between
Mexico and the U.S.
This interesting situation raises
other questions. For example,
African Americans are frequently focused on the African
Diaspora. Then, why do they
sometimes reject the Latin
American black experience?
The answer may be that African
Americans are not rejecting the
black experience in Latin America, but rather that they have
never been exposed to it. Their
eyes have always been traditionally focused on Africa, where
English is spoken in Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa. Now
they must deal with the black
experience in Latin America, and
tackle the hurdle of the Spanish
language, whether they like it or
not.
Hispanics the biggest minority
A dramatic event happened in
the year 2000 that had no precedent...ever! In that year, according to the US national census,
Latinos exceeded African Americans as the leading minority
population group in the U.S.
This has a far reaching impact
currently unknown to social scientists, government officials,
media commentators and just
ordinary people. Latinos now
comprise officially over 40 million persons in the U.S. This
does not include the 10-12 million people of Latino and ethnic
background caught in the web of
illegal immigration across the
immense Mexico-U.S. border.
That border stretches for nearly
2,000 miles along the southern
portions of the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and
Texas, not including the Gulf of
Mexico its own waterline from
east Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
Most of these “illegal immigrants” end up in teeming
“inner-city” areas.
Professor Jennifer Hochschild of
Harvard University recently
wrote, “In 2000, the racial/ethnic
makeup of US residents was:
White, 69 percent; Hispanic and
Black, 13 percent each; and
Asian and other, six percent. By
2050, these percentages are projected to be: 50, 24, 15 and 13.”
Looking closely at studies dealing with Hispanics, Hochschild
notes that
“the sheer magnitude of immigration and the high birth rates
8
Street scene in Penuela
among Latinos who share a language, religion, and background
and who mostly live in a distinct
section of the United States are
creating a de facto split between
a predominantly Spanishspeaking United States and an
English-speaking United States.”
Making matters worse, the political gains African Americans
have made in the inner city areas, since the 1960s Civil Rights
era have, relatively speaking,
disappeared by the 1990s. For
example, in the 1980s the largest
U.S. cities, such as New York,
Chicago and Los Angeles, all
had African American mayors,
voting blocks that assured their
re-election. But, with increased
opportunities for racial integration in the suburbs of these
large cities many middle-class
African Americans simply
moved out of the inner-city.
More often than not, the “innercity” areas are frequently inhabited now by recent immigrants
from Mexico, Central and South
America.
Latinos have made not only general population gains, but they
are also beginning to take over
the seats of municipal power in
a few of the largest U.S. cities.
Latino mayor Antonio Villarai-
gosa's election in 2005 as mayor
of Los Angles, California certifies
the newest trend in “brown”
power. The population demographers have predicted even
more pronounced Latino gains
will surface politically as the
new inheritors of American cities become more sophisticated
about how to exercise the right
to vote and demand political
power. I’ll wager the gain made
by Villaraigosa is a clarion call to
other Latinos to try their hand at
high government office.
African Americans now will have
to learn how to share the political, economic and public affairs
stage with Latinos, the “new”
ethnic group in the coming
years. Even now, there is a
growing sense that African
Americans could be challenged
by Latinos, especially at first,
politically. For example, I for one
never imagined that the first
non-white U.S. Attorney General
woul d be t he Mex i candescended Alberto Gonzalez. I
always assumed the Democratic
Party, when it occupied the
White House, would appoint an
African American to the position
of chief law enforcement officer.
But alas, it took the republican
administration of George Bush
to manage that hurdle.
Rapid U.S. domestic
job increases by the
Latino
population
group
are
being
matched by tandem
influences throughout
the Western Hemisphere in foreign relations. Often, U.S. media commentators forget, or do not pay attention to the fact, that
Spanish and Portuguese (the linguistic
cousin Portuguese is
spoken in Brazil with
170 million people) are
the chief languages in
the Western Hemisphere spoken by over
500 million people in
the Caribbean Basin,
Mexico, the countries
of Central America
and South America.
In January 2006, the
U.S. government had no clear
plan to tackle the thorny problem of immigration. The backlog
of cases, some taking years to
sort out, created nightmares for
the national Immigration Service.
This problem was different from
that facing “illegals” which was
still simply a matter of apprehending them and adjudicating
a quick return to the Mexican
side of the border. But, more
than once the problem of
“return cases” people trying to
escape across the U.S.-Mexican
border became a matter of people coming back for a second or
third try. And, “illegals” from
Mexico were increasing targets
of so-called “vigilante” groups
operating on the U.S. side of the
border. Sometimes, these confrontations would be violent.
This is why there are now several legislative proposals before
the U.S. Congress to finally
manage the “illegal” immigration issue. Many of the proposals will take months to work toward some overall consensus,
perhaps with a conclusion in the
early spring of 2006. Even
though there are strong, unyielding voices on both sides of
the controversy, including a proimmigration stand by Roger Car-
9
dinal Mahoney, head of the millions-strong catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, who suggested that the faithful go outside the law, if necessary, to
protect undocumented Mexicans.
As I write, there have been significant protest demonstrations
in high population cities around
the United States in recent days.
In the meantime, Republican
legislators may be scrambling to
hold on to their congressional
seats and maintain small majorities in both houses of Congress
while President Bush settles into
his “lame duck” status.
Afro-Hispanic Relationships
African Americans who are inescapably in low-wage categories
and therefore can not flee the
inner cities are compelled to live
beside recently settled Mexican
or other Central American immigrants, “illegal” or not. These
African Americans severely lack
education, job skills or other
means of advancement. In a
personal way, I am most familiar
with the urban cauldrons of the
great “megalopolis” centres in
New York City and Los Angeles
where many times working class
blacks, who previously occupied
t he nei ghbour hoods and
proudly showed their political
and economic strength, now
share streets crowded with Latino “bodegas” (small item
neighborhood stores) and
“carnicerias” (stores to purchase
meat, fish and other ethnic staples). If there are inner-city
“flashpoints” they will be seen
in urban areas where poor African Americans and often
“illegal” Mexican and Central
American population groups can
not manage their urban spaces
and/or overcome their beleaguered economic conditions.
Clearly, the present government
of President Vicente Fox of Mexico put itself into a terrible fix by
supporting the 60-year legacy of
the cartoon character Memin
Pinguin. That is, considering the
opposite views of the American
Reverends Jessie Jackson and
Al Sharpton and the Bush White
House. But, Fox has a social and
historical situation at home that
was hard to compromise. In any
event, he had absolutely nothing
to lose politically by taking a
pro-Memin Pinguin stand. His
presidential six year term expires with the new elections in
July ’06. And, according to the
Mexican constitution President
Fox is prevented from seeking a
second term in office.
True, there was a huge controversy last year surrounding the
cartoon character Memin Pinguin, both in Mexico and the
U.S., but like most flurries the
big headlines merely lasted only
a while. Those headlines have
been replaced by “illegal” immigration from Mexico. Reverend
Jessie Jackson was shrewd
enough, during the debate with
President Fox, to publicly encourage African American college students to begin studying
the Spanish language in earnest.
That way, the students could
learn for themselves if the Mexican people really shared President Fox’s sentiments. Only time
will tell if Reverend Jackson’s
legendary persuasiveness compels large numbers of black university students to study Latin
American language, culture and
history.
The current U.S. societal prob-
now facing directly before the
U.S. Congress. These legislative
bills will never make everyone
happy. But, they were never specifically designed to do so.
My local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a frontpage news article with the title
“Black Latinos can find race
niches hard to accept” only two
weeks ago on Sunday, February
26, 2006. The story was about
personal insights of darkerskinned Latinos, who recently
immigrated to the U.S., and how
they were treated in their
adopted homeland. The accounts are very instructive, and
sobering, in some ways. For
instance, the article highlighted
the case of Marisol Del Orbe, a
mestizo of mixed-race origin like
many inhabitants of the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. She
was never just black – until she
came to the U.S. She felt, for the
first time, a special cultural and
racial isolation that was markedly absent in Puerto Rico. Del
Orbe, like others in her situation,
often finds examples of discrimination, from many, in the majority of Americans. And, people
like her reject the discrimination
foisted upon her immediately
upon arrival in the U.S., simply
African Americans now will have
to learn how to share the political, economic and public affairs
stage with Latinos, the “new”
ethnic group in the coming
years.
lems and friction, if any, between Latin Americans and African Americans will not easily go
away. This is particularly true
when urban resource pressures,
caused by rapid illegal immigration from Mexico, begin to be
taken in account. Soon, we
should know the final outcome
of the many immigration bills
because of her skin colour. I was
quoted in the article saying “one
issue uniting blacks in this nation [the U.S.] is the historical
struggle against racism. So,
when black Latinos can’t identify
with that, because of pride in
their mixed heritage, some
blacks see them [Latinos] as running away from the issue.”
10
According to a recent study on
race-mixing among Latinos,
blacks and whites in the U.S, a
large majority (over 70%) of
white Hispanic children have
parents who are both white Hispanic. In contrast, it is less common (only 31%) that a black Hispanic child has two black Hispanic parents. For nearly half of
the black Hispanic children, one
of the parents is non-Hispanic
black. This result suggests that
intermarriage is the most important source of the black Hispanic
population, with a strong likelihood of having a non-Hispanic
black parent.
Light at the End of the Tunnel
I do see a proverbial “light at the
end of the tunnel” in our evolving circumstances between Latin
Americans and African Americans in the U.S. However, the
complex and confusing tableau
of “race relations” will not make
things easier. Neither will the
unyielding competition for jobs,
decent housing and meaningful
education from the bottom-up
for recent Spanish-language
immigrants who find themselves
also competing with black
Americans for scant social resources.
Now that Latinos are, since the
year 2000’s enumeration, the
largest non-white ethnic group
in the U.S. with over 40 million
people, the American media,
and the federal, state and local
governments will increasingly
focus upon them. African Americans must adjust, however painfully, to that fact. African Americans must look for their own
place in this new “race mosaic.”
One future link could be identification and unification with the
black experience in the wider
context of Latin America—AfroLatinos.
Perhaps, the new reconciliation
would be easier and more fruitful in a lasting sense if African
Americans simply began learning the Spanish language in order to live comfortably next to
their new neighbours in the
“inner cities.”
Britain can use this experience
of American racial dynamics to
understand their own issues of
immigration. It needs to be able
to absorb the American experience and use it as an analogy.
Bibliography
Aguirre
Beltrán,
Población Negra
La
Mexico.
Gonzalo.
de
(Fondo de Cultura Económica,
1984).
Cuevas, Marco Polo Hernández.
African Mexicans and the dis-
course
on
modern
nation
(University Press of America,
Dallas, 2004).
Hochschild, Jennifer L. “Looking
ahead: racial trends in the U.S.,”
Daedalus. Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
(Winter, 2005).
Krauze, Enrique. “The Pride in
Memin Pinguin,” The Washington Post (July 12, 2005).
Logan, John R. How Race
Counts for Hispanic Americans
(Lewis Mumford Centre for
Comparative Urban and Regional Research, University of
Albany, NY, 2003).
McKinley, James C., Jr. “New
Racial Gaffe in Mexico; This
Time It’s a Tasteless Stamp
Set,” The New York Times (June
30, 2005).
Mobley, Ezekiel. “Black Mexicans: Forgotten Africans?” The
African Times, Vol. 18, No. 9
(July 15-31, 2005).
Nance, Kevin. “Exploring the art
of Mexico’s ‘Third Root’,” The
Chicago Sun-Times, February 14,
2006.
Vincent, Ted. “The Blacks Who
Freed Mexico,” The Journal of
Negro History, Vol. 79, No. 3
(Summer, 1994), pp. 257-76.
11
America’s “Great Satan” Then And
Now In Action and War Films:
Subtle Shifts, changing Stereotypes
By Ralph Donald, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Department of Mass Communications
D
Ralph Donald
The image of the
Great
Satan,
the
archetypal
monster
who exemplifies the
current enemy, has
always
been
a
powerful stereotype
in Hollywood movies.
In this fascinating
article, Ralph Donald
considers how the
model for the beast
constantly changes to
reflect
America’s
changing
foreign
policy objectives over
the years.
uring World War II, the
feature film came into
its own as a potent
propaganda
tool.
When American film propagandists used what rhetorical critics
call “devil terms” to disparage
America’s Axis enemies, they
often used a shorthand to characterize them. American propagandists characterized the enemy as what Iran’s Ayatollah
Khomeini would later call a
“Great Satan”: a single, stereotyped image – often a person,
sometimes a loathsome label -to represent the enemy as a
whole. In Khomeini ’s case, he
referred to both American President George Bush Sr. and the
United States, but in many films
of World War II, filmmakers used
three individual, although sometimes interchangeable, “Great
Satans”: Hitler – (occasionally
Josef Goebbels or Hermann Goering) for the Germans, either
Prime Minister Tojo or Emperor
Hirohito to represent Japan, and
Benito Mussolini for the Italians.
But there was also room for generic anti-Nazi and ferociously
racist anti-Japanese propaganda
in American films, radio and
print media.
After World War 2
But what has happened in the
years following World War II?
How is the Great Satan propaganda device used today in
American films? And has there
been any evolution in its use?
This article will examine evidence that the Great Satan is
still alive and well in many new
and different forms in the films
produced by Hollywood.
After World War II, American
intentions around the world became less clear and legitimate to
both outsiders and to many
Americans. As American wars
and foreign interventions became more controversial, images of the “Great Satan” in
Hollywood’s feature films often
became less clear. In reaction to
McCarthyism in the 1950s, Hollywood’s Great Satan of the Korean War was the fuzzy image of
the “yellow peril” – Korean and
Chinese communists -- a nameless, faceless communist enemy.
In a few films about the Vietnam
War, Ho Chi Minh was invoked
as America’s Great Satan. But
even during the apex of that
terrible conflict, few Americans
would have recognized North
Vietnam’s president if they ran
into him on the street. Ho Chi
Minh was a ghost to most
Americans – except perhaps for
the few young people who protested the war by waving North
Vietnamese flags and wearing
silk-screened “Uncle Ho” Tshirts. In most American films
about Vietnam, the enemy
Americans saw on the screen
was – like the enemy in the Korean War – just another faceless,
nameless communist adversary.
Hollywood has occasionally put
America on notice that not all
Great Satans reside across the
seas. The Ku Klux Klan, for one
example, has been Satanised in
a number of modern motion
pictures, including films such as
12
Ghosts of Mississippi (1996),
Mississippi Burning (1988), The
Chamber (1996), and, more recently, in the comedy, O, Brother,
Where Art Thou? (2000). But
again, no grand dragon’s name
jumps to the forefront as the
common symbol for this hate
group. In American culture, especially in the 1960s and 70s,
former Alabama Gov. George
Wallace was arguably the most
accepted symbol of Southern
racism. But while he espoused
some of the Klan’s prejudices,
Wallace was never directly
linked to the Klan as a member.
Instead, the KKK is portrayed as
a collective Satan, shown as
individuals who do their jobs by
day, go home for dinner with
their families, but then slip out
late at night to don white robes,
burn crosses and chant racist
slogans.
Even more obscure was the
nebulous communist enemy in
the few films that depict America’s invasion of Grenada. For
example, Clint Eastwood plays
Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway
in Heartbreak Ridge (1986).
Highway and his Marines make
short work of the faceless, generic communist threat.
Sylvester Stallone in Rambo III
(1988) provided viewers with a
combat film about the fight
against Soviet Great Satans occupying Afghanistan.
In this
film, Rambo resorts to his usual
mayhem as he rescues his friend
Colonel Trautman from the
clutches of a group of sadistic
Soviet Army brutes. In The Living Daylights (1987), Timothy
Dalton as James Bond finds
himself in the clutches of similar
Soviet Satans in Afghanistan,
but as usual, he rescues himself,
his girlfriend and a mujahideen
commander (insert your own
Osama Bin Laden irony here).
The Cold War
Throughout the Cold War, the
Soviets often achieved Great
Satan status.
In every other
James Bond film, Soviets are
pictured as a nameless, faceless
Russian bear of an enemy. With
no “Uncle Joe” Stalin as a
strongman image, and especially with a succession of lacklustre premiers through the
years, no Satan in particular –
except perhaps Nikita Khrushchev – captured the American
imagination anywhere near the
same as our adversaries in
World War II. And Satan-types
didn’t appear in that many Hollywood movies until quite recently,
when Enemy at the Gates (2001),
the story of a mini-war between
a Soviet sniper and his German
counterpart during the siege of
St ali ngr ad, f eat ures Bob
Hoskins’ studied portrayal of
Khrushchev, a ruthless commander ordered by Stalin to
save Stalingrad at any cost.
One of the best films to put a
more human “face” on the generic Russian bear was The
Beast (1988). In this picture, a
Soviet tank crew is lost in the
Afghan desert, pursued by
vengeful mujahideen guerrillas.
The tank is commanded by a
cruel Russian tyrant, played by
George Dzundza. Interestingly,
in both The Beast and the World
War II submarine thriller Das
Boot (1981), directors Kevin Reynolds and Wolfgang Petersen
ask audiences to identify with
and even cheer for sailors and
soldiers representing America’s
former Great Satans. But in The
Beast, Dzundza’s tank commander character is so hateful
that audiences cheer when he
dies. And to confuse things further, the protagonist, a young,
Russian tank crewman played by
Jason Patric, ends up changing
loyalties and joining the muja-
hideen.
This film’s image of the BearSatan has more clarity than the
predictable, chew-the-carpet
maniac images of Soviet Great
Satans found in the Bond films.
Consider Steven Berkoff’s chewthe-carpet, psychopathic General Orlov in Octopussy (1983).
The general plans to detonate a
nuclear bomb at an American air
base in West Germany, hoping
the disaster will cause NATO to
withdraw strategic nuclear
weapons from Europe. Then,
after the withdrawal, with no on-
site threat of nuclear retaliation,
Soviet superiority in troops and
tanks stationed in the Warsaw
Pact nations would permit him
to invade and conquer Western
Europe. Of course, the British
spy foils Orlov’s plans, and
Europe is saved.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, America stands alone as the
sole superpower on the planet.
To wound such a seemingly invincible enemy, neo Great Satans must find another approach.
Of late, terrorism is the strategy.
But before turning to the terrorist villains that now occupy our
minds, we should examine
some of our recent history’s
lesser-remembered Great Satans. For a short time before
and during the U.S. economic
boycott against South Africa that
helped hasten the demise of the
apartheid government there, a
few South African Satans graced
American screens. For example,
in Lethal Weapon II (1989), Joss
Ackland’s sinister Arjen Rudd
and Derrick O'Connor’s homicidal Pieter Vorstedt were South
Africans dealing in illegal drugs
and currency in Los Angeles
under the safety of “diplomatic
immunity.”
So perfectly did
these villains portray Nazi
stereotypes that Mel Gibson’s
police detective character, Martin Riggs, gave Rudd the nickname of “Aryan” instead of Arjen, and referred to Vorstedt as
“Adolph.”
Terrorists
The IRA has provided Americans
with some interesting terrorist
Satans in films such as Patriot
Games (1992). Tom Clancy’s
hero, Jack Ryan, formerly of the
Marines and the CIA, is vacationing with his family in England,
and coincidentally is at hand to
thwart an extremist IRA faction’s
attempt to assassinate a member of the British royal family.
One villain escapes, and he and
his band of terrorists illegally
enter the U.S., bent on revenge
on Ryan and his family. After
that attempt fails and the terrorists escape from the U.S., in an
all-too-close parallel to future
13
events, the CIA launches an assault on the Middle Eastern desert hideaway of the terrorists.
Although many are killed in this
assault, the chief terrorist again
escapes. Now even more enraged, he launches a second,
bolder attack in the U.S. This
time it’s an assault on Ryan’s
own home.
Ultimately, Ryan
helps repulse the attack and kills
the terrorist.
Brad Pitt ironically portrays a
terrorist with a conscience in
The Devil’s Own (1997). Pitt’s
character, a fugitive IRA member
who employs a phoney passport
to enter the U.S., is thwarted by
a New York policeman, also
played by Harrison Ford. Again
September eleventh comes to
mind.
In Nighthawks (1981), a terroristfor-hire named Wolfgar bombs
Harrod’s department store in
London and then tries to commit
similar bombings and murders
in New York City. Another New
York detective, this time Sylvester Stallone, steps in to foil
Wolfgar’s plans. And in the denouement, as in Patriot Games,
Wolfgar seeks revenge by trying
to murder a member of Stallone’s family. Having been frustratingly one step behind Wolfgar throughout most of the film,
Stallone finally learns that to
defeat a terrorist, he must think
like a terrorist. He anticipates
Wolfgar’s next move and for
once is there ahead of Wolfgar,
waiting to kill him.
Drug Lords
Between American involvements in outright wars, Hollywood created another kind of
interim Satan: the powerful
South American drug lord. In A
Clear and Present Danger (1994),
the CIA’s Jack Ryan again does
battle with American enemies,
this time a pair of ruthless and
very stereotypical drug-dealing
Great Satans, one of which is a
very transparent Pablo Escobar
clone. In License to Kill (1989),
an even more outlandish drug
lord invades U.S. soil, murders
CIA agent Felix Leiter’s wife on
her wedding night and feeds
Leiter to a shark. Somehow Leiter survives. James Bond, in
typical ironic fashion, assassinates this drug lord using a cigarette lighter, a wedding gift from
Felix.
We’ve not yet seen any American-made feature films about
Great Satan also-ran – now war
crimes defendant, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. However, the conflict in
the former Yugoslavia is not
forgotten: Behind Enemy Lines
(2001) deals with the race to rescue a downed American pilot
from (appropriately) blackbereted, homicidal Serbians. It’s
clear that the Serbs are the villains, but Milosevic’s role as
head villain is not a part of the
film.
The Middle East
Followers of Mu’ammar Ghadhafi of Libya and the Ayatollah
Khomeini
launched effective
terrorist attacks against the U.S.
and other western nations, such
Tasker, spoils an attempt by Aziz
and his followers to use a stolen
nuclear bomb to obliterate Miami. In an eerie and ironic reversal of the tragedy of September eleventh at the World Trade
Center, Schwartzenegger uses
an airplane – this time a Harrier
jet – to annihilate terrorists
holed up in a high-rise building.
Andrew Davis is the director of
another Schwartzenegger film,
Collateral Damage, originally
scheduled to be released in Fall
2001, which was shelved by
nervous studio executives until
Spring, 2002, because of vague
similarities to the September
eleventh tragedy. In this film,
the California governor played a
fireman (formerly a bomb squad
member) whose family was
killed in a terrorist attack. Later
Schwartzenegger takes the law
into his own hands, uses the
bomb-making skills he learned
on the job as he seeks revenge
against the terrorists.
To be successful, action film
scripts must create strong
villains.
as the destruction of Pan Am
flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the taking of American
hostages in Tehran. Although
Ghadhafi and Khomeini
are
relatively well-known, American
filmmakers rarely used them as
symbols of the Great Satan in
quite the same way, or to the
degree, that Hollywood used
Hitler, Tojo or Mussolini in
World War II. It seems that Hollywood prefers to create its own
stylised, stereotyped Arab fanatic. An excellent example of
Hollywood’s version of this fanatic is Art Malik’s wild-eyed alQa’eda-type detachment commander, Salim Abu Aziz, in the
Arnold Schwartzenegger spyaction film, True Lies (1994). In
a film articulating threats voiced
by President George W. Bush as
an excuse to invade Iraq,
Schwartzenegger, as spy Harry
In an interview on public radio in
September, 2001, director Davis
confirmed that the Great Satan
device is still on Hollywood’s
minds when he said that to be
successful, action film scripts
like his must create strong villains. Since Saddam Hussein’s
forces overran and occupied
Kuwait, the then-Iraqi dictator
became perhaps the clearest,
most recognizable movie Great
Satan icon since Hitler. In Courage Under Fire (1996) and Three
Kings (1999), Saddam became a
household name – and sometimes a curse word. But nameless, mostly faceless Iraqis stand
in for the dictator. Interestingly,
in Iron Eagle (1986), David
Suchet’s “minister of defence”
for an Iraq-like rogue Arab state
fits Hussein perfectly. Interestingly, this film was released
nearly five years before Opera-
14
tion Desert Storm and during a
time when Hussein was publicly
considered almost an American
ally. And in this fantasy, a teenager who commandeers an
American fighter jet shoots
down a half-dozen inept enemy
fighters, including one piloted
by the Saddam clone himself.
Speaking of fantasies, there is
Naked Gun: From the Files of
Police Squad (1988), in which
Leslie Nielsen assaults a room
full of America’s Great Satans,
including Yasser Arafat, Ghadhafi, Khomeini, Idi Amin and
Mikhail Gorbachev. Nielsen gets
to do what so many Americans
would love to: kick some serious
villain butt. Likewise, in Hot
Shots, Part Deux (1993), a lunatic, cross-dressing Saddam is
insulted, beaten up and generally manhandled by the good
guys as Rambo-style commando
Topper Harley leads a rescue
mission into Iraq. His mission
(see if you can follow this) is to
liberate some rescuers who
went in earlier to rescue the previous rescue team who were
assigned to rescue hostages left
behind after Desert Storm.
For a very short period, Somali
warlord Gen. Mohamed Farah
Aidid became to Americans as
hated a Satan figure as Saddam
Hussein – this mostly because of
the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers
and the wounding of dozens
more in the battle of Mogadishu
in 1993. This military disaster is
portrayed in Ridley Scott’s dark
film, Black Hawk Down (2001).
Although never pictured, Aidid
was made out, both in the film’s
opening graphics and later in
dialog, to be the principal cause
of all the suffering and starvation in Somalia. Out of all the
Somali warlords, producer Jerry
Bruckheimer singled out Aidid
as the sole person responsible
for preventing food aid from
getting to his people. Director
Ridley Scott helped emphasize
Aidid’s Great Satan status with a
terrible scene at the beginning
of the movie in which Somali
civilians were shot down just for
standing in line to beg for grain
at U.N. food trucks.
If he hadn’t been killed in 1996,
Aidid might still be on America’s
radar as a potential target. Somalia still remains an object of
American concern.
Defence
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
listed Somalia (due to its support of Osama bin Laden’s alQua’eda network) as one of the
next possible targets of America’s war on terrorism. And the
tragic confluence of events that
led to Aidid’s men dragging an
American soldier’s corpse
through the streets of Mogadishu may have had another
negative effect. The Philadelphia Inquirer quotes both former
U.S. Ambassador to Somalia
Robert Oakley and Mark Bowden,
author of the original book,
Black Hawk Down, as saying that
al-Qua’eda and Osama bin
Laden “… looked at our retreat
from Lebanon in 1983 and from
Somalia in 1993 [after the Battle
of Mogadishu] as signs of fundamental U.S. weakness in the
face of casualties.”
In what has now become a cautionary tale for America, in The
Siege (1998), the CIA abducts an
agent of the Great Satan, in this
case a notorious Muslim leader.
In retaliation, terrorists carry out
a number of bomb attacks on
New York City. The head of the
FBI/New York Police Department
Terrorism Task Force teams up
with a CIA operative to arrest or
kill the members of the terrorist
organization responsible for the
bombings. Uncannily similar to
al-Qa’eda, these terrorists work
in cell groups, ignorant of the
activities and membership of
other cells -- including those
operating in the same city. As
bomb attacks on New York continue, The U.S. sends the Army
into the city and the Army’s general-in-charge declares martial
law. The remainder of the picture is a conflict between civil
liberty-minded civilians and the
military, which is persecuting
Arab-Americans, holding them
in makeshift concentration
camps without warrants, and in
some cases, torturing and killing
them.
And most recently, due to the
U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, the attack on the U.S.S.
Cole and, of course, the Sept. 11
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Osama bin
Laden has risen to the top of
FBI’s most wanted list of “Great
Satans,” offering a $25 million
reward. But at this writing, we
still have seen no American motion pictures that feature this
villain.
But there have been films made
about the kind of individual who
could very easily become an alQa’eda-type true believer. Although The Peacemaker (1997) is
a rather predictable, hackneyed,
action-filled, George Clooney/
Nicole Kidman vehicle about
retrieving a stolen nuclear bomb,
it gives viewers a revealing view
inside the mind of a suicidal terrorist: a man who has lost so
much that all that remains is
blind, self-immolating fury – the
kind of rage that in another reality could result in a tragedy such
as September 11.
In The Peacemaker’s denouement, Clooney and Kidman foil
this Bosnian terrorist’s plan to
detonate a stolen nuclear bomb
at the United Nations building in
New York. But terrorist Dusan
Gavrich doesn’t know this when
a few days earlier he records a
taped message to the world –
which he assumes will be found
only after his suicide mission is
successful:
You will look at what I have
done and say, "Of course -why not -- they are all animals. They have slaughtered each other for centuries." But the truth is, I'm
not a monster. I'm a human man -- I'm just like you,
whether you like it or not.
For years, we have tried to
live together, until a war
was waged on us, on all of
us: a war waged by our
own leaders. And who supplied the Serb cluster
bombs, the Croatian tanks,
the Muslim artillery shells
that killed our sons and
daughters? It was the governments of the West who
drew the boundaries of our
15
countries -- sometimes in
ink, sometimes in blood -the blood of our people.
And now you dispatch your
peacekeepers to write our
destiny again. We can
never accept this peace that
leaves us with nothing but
pain, pain the peacemakers
must be made to feel.
Their wives, their children,
their houses and churches.
So now you know, now you
must understand. Leave us
to find our own destiny.
May God have mercy on us
all.
This is the newest, post-modern
face for America’s Great Satan: a
man who has lost everything
and rightly or wrongly blames
the U.S. for his misery -- a man
whose only desire is to make
Americans share his pain and
suffering. No greed, no imperialistic aims, just blind, inscrutable fury.
U.S. leaders would rather paste
the Taliban’s and Osama bin
Laden’s faces on this new kind
of Satan, because from a propaganda standpoint it’s much easier to make a loathsome enemy
out of a gaggle of fanatic mullahs, a wild horde of riflewielding desert-dwellers or a
renegade millionaire sheik than
a wounded, despondent man
willing to kill himself and murder thousands just to make a
point.
Conclusion
This article has examined the
phenomenon of the Great Satan
in American action and war
films and tracked its evolution
through a small sample of pictures produced since World War
II. Only rarely, such as in films
made during World War II, have
we seen a correlation between
clear American goals and popular opinion and the personification of an individual Great Satan.
Most often since then, these
Satans were created as generic
villains, carefully stereotyped for
public consumption. The clearest exceptions were Saddam
Hussein, the warlord Mohamed
Farah Aidid and Osama bin
Laden. Hussein’s savage rule in
Iraq paved the way for the
“regime change” caused by the
American military intervention
in 2003. Aidid was murdered by
rivals in his own country, or Somalia might have also been a
part of President George W.
Bush’s “Axis of Evil.” (Jan. 29,
2002) The United States’ intervention against the Taliban in
Afghanistan was aimed at capturing or killing bin Laden and
defeating al-Qa’eda.
out over the following years,
American filmmakers will probably draw the terrorist Great Satan in much clearer strokes.
Bibliographic notes
Bush, George W.
President
Bush’s State of the Union address,
Jan.
29,2002.
www. whi t ehouse. gov/ news/
r e l e a s e s / 2 0 0 2 / 0 1/ 2 0 0 20 1 2 9 11.html
Davis, Andrew. Comments in an
interview on “Talk of The Nation” on National Public Radio
Sept. 25, 2001.
So far, through the creation of
suitably odious Great Satans,
the American people have been
Rickey, Carrie. Review of the
persuaded to support military
film, Black Hawk Down, Philaactions against many of them,
delphia
Inquirer, Jan 17, 2002.
moving in near-ideological unison in a earlier cases. As the
war against terrorism plays itself
Filmography
Title
Year
The Beast
Behind Enemy Lines
Black Hawk Down
Das Boot
The Chamber
1988
2001
Kevin Reynolds
John Moore
Director
2001
Ridley Scott
1981
1996
Wolfgang Petersen
James Foley
A Clear and Present Danger
Courage Under Fire
1994
Phillip Noyce
1996
Edward Zwick
The Devil’s Own
1997
Alan J. Pakula
Enemy at the Gates
2001
Jean-Jacques Annaud
Ghosts of Mississippi
Heartbreak Ridge
1996
1986
Rob Reiner
Clint Eastwood
Hot Shots, Part Deux
Iron Eagle
1993
Jim Abrahams
1986
Sidney J. Furie
Lethal Weapon II
1989
Richard Donner
License to Kill
The Living Daylights
1989
1987
John Glen
John Glen
Mississippi Burning
Naked Gun: From the Files
of Police Squad
Nighthawks
1988
Alan Parker
1988
David Zucker
1981
Bruce Malmuth
2000
Joel Coen
O, Brother, Where
Thou?
Octopussy
Patriot Games
The Peacemaker
Rambo III
The Siege
Three Kings
True Lies
Art
1983
John Glen
1992
1997
Phillip Noyce
Mimi Leder
1988
Peter MacDonald
1998
Edward Zwick
1999
David O. Russell
1994
James Cameron
16
The Vietnam War
and the Civil
Rights movement
The coincidence of the Civil Rights movement with
the Vietnamese war helped to radicalise African
American servicemen both in Vietnam and on their
return. In this article, Brendan Gallagher considers
how the two events are inextricably bound up.
W
hen the Vietnam
War escalated and
was wholeheartedly backed by the
White House, President Johnson
failed to realise the racial nightmare that American involvement
in Vietnam would create. Vietnam coincided with the protests
of the Civil Rights Movement
and the rise of Black Power during 1960s America. Whilst African-Americans were discriminated at home but also within
the U.S. armed forces, the effects of black power, the impact
of the Civil Rights struggle and
“the resurgence of black subcultural style, expressed through
dress, language and gesture”,
had been transferred to the war
zone.
One million African-Americans
had served in the Second World
War and returned home imbued
with the desire to possess the
full rights of citizenship so long
denied them. In previous wars
also, African-Americans had
fought not only for their emancipation but also for their firm
belief in democracy. When black
servicemen returned victorious
after having defeated Hitler and
the threat of fascism in Europe,
in 1945, they soon realised that
they were still denied basic human rights. Protest groups were
formed such as the Congress of
Racial Equality (C.O.R.E.). Subsequently, demonstrations, sit-ins
and boycotts pressurised the
authorities to integrate schools
and public buildings.
Amidst increasing tension, black
soldiers embraced Black Power:
culturally and politically. Vietnam was America’s first racially
integrated conflict. Black soldiers had fought in all of America’s previous military encounters, but in segregated units.
However, a small number of
segregated units still existed,
and “an officerless and forgotten platoon of anxious black
G.I.s despairingly shooting into
the darkness…in the last American outpost on the border between Vietnam and Cambodia”
was movingly portrayed in the
film Apocalypse Now.
Defending democracy abroad
Vietnam was a war against communism: it was a war waged to
promote liberal democracy instead of an imposed dictatorship.
Again, black Americans consequently trusted that if they defended democracy abroad they
were more likely to receive it at
home. They recalled the words
of the legendary leader of the
National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People,
W.E.B. Du Bois, when he advised during the beginning of
World War 1,
“Let us, while the war
lasts, forget our special
grievances and close
ranks
shoulder to
shoulder with our white
fellow citizens…fighting
for democracy. We make
no ordinary sacrifice, but
we make it gladly and
willingly.”
These words in turn echoed the
sentiment of former slave and
early African-American leader
Frederick Douglas when describing the fundamental requirements and rights of American
patriotism and therefore citizenship:
“..for once let the Black man
get up in his person the
brass letters, U.S; let him
get an eagle upon his button…bullets in his pocket,
and there is no power on
earth…which can deny
that he has earned the
right to citizenship in the
United States.”
Nevertheless, legislation still
segregated blacks in schools, in
employment and socially. Accordingly, Schaller depicts the
situation:
“The U.S. was fighting
enemies who proclaimed
the right to enslave or
exterminate inferior races.
Presumably, American
citizens were united in
detesting such hateful
ideologies. Yet American
minorities at home still
faced discrimination and
abuse.”
Before 1960, racial animosity
had been negligible: black soldiers were professional and
seeking a career. Moreover, for
some Black soldiers, Vietnam
provided an opportunity for escape from poor economic and
social conditions at home "I
thought the only way I could
make it out of the ghetto, was to
be the best soldier I possibly
could”. After years of discrimination, they viewed fighting in
the war as an opportunity to
prove their worth to their country.
Nevertheless, as a result of
greater awareness of black
17
struggle and identity, publicised
by media and widened television coverage, Vietnam became
the “black man’s” true subject.
The struggle for civil rights
The national March on Washington in 1963, in which over
200,000 blacks and whites participated, amidst widespread
media coverage, represented
one of the most powerful protests in American history. Symbolically standing in front of the
Lincoln Memorial, King called
for black Americans to be included in the American Dream.
His dream was that American
Negroes be fully accepted and
integrated into American society: that “little black boys” and
“little white boys” soon would
be able to go to school together.
Subsequently, in1964, the Civil
Rights Act was passed, bringing
de Jure, or legal discrimination
economic justice. King himself
warned: “millions of Negroes
will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in
black nationalist ideologies.”
As President Lyndon Johnson
increased the focus of American
foreign policy on the conflict in
Vietnam, statistics soon presented stark evidence of racial
discrimination. In 1965 there
were 23,000 U.S. servicemen in
Vietnam. By the end of 1967, the
number rose dramatically to
465,000 – the result of Project
100,000, initiated by President
Johnson in 1966. Qualification
standards were lowered meaning that black Americans who
had previously evaded the draft
owing to poor education opportunities, were now eligible and
so too, ironically, were racially
intolerant, poor white men from
the Southern States. 246,000
men were recruited between
Vietnam is a white man’s war.
Black men should not go, only
to return and fight whites at
home
to a close; and, effectively barring discrimination in public
places and employment.
In 1965, as part of a voter registration drive in Alabama, a third
protest march from Selma to
Montgomery took place after the
two previous attempts were
crushed by hostile local law officers using excessive violence.
Under heavy government protection, and even heavier international news coverage, the
marchers arrived in Montgomery on March 25. Consequently,
the Voting Rights Act was soon
passed, allowing AfricanAmericans in the Southern
states to register as voters. The
Civil Rights Movement then, had
made considerable gains for
African-American civil rights by
1965; however, there were dissenting voices arguing that
blacks had still achieved little
October 1966 and June 1969 –
41% were black, although black
Americans represented only
11% of the U.S. population.
58,000 lost their lives in the conflict, 22% of whom were black.
Less than 3% of the officers in
the Army were black, less than
1% in the Marines.
Black soldiers and the draft
Draft boards themselves were,
by their very nature, divisive and
discriminatory: in 1967 no black
Americans were present on the
boards in Alabama, Arkansas,
Mississippi and Louisiana. Jack
Helms, a member of the Louisiana draft board, was a Grand
Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan. He
described the long established
National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People
black civil rights group, as “a
communist-inspired, anti-Christ,
sex-perverted group of tennis
short beatniks.”
Soon rumours abounded that
the U.S. government were using
the Vietnam War as a form of
genocide. Money was being
pumped into Vietnam instead of
poor black communities in
America. Black Panther Eldridge
Cleaver noted the contradictory
situation, and complained:
“Black Americans are asked to
die for the system in Vietnam, in
Watts (a poor black suburb of
Los Angeles) they are asked to
die by it.”
Lance Corporal William L. Harvey also voiced his concern to a
Washington Post reporter:
“Vietnam is a white man’s war.
Black men should not go, only to
return and fight whites at
home.”
Black soldiers began to identify
with the enemy: they saw the
Vietnamese as, like themselves,
victims of white colonial racist
aggression. They were encouraged by anti-war demonstrations at home. White and black
students, representing the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating
Committee, regularly organised
marches and disruptive sit-ins.
Boxer, Muhammad Ali dared to
speak out: “ I ain`t got no quarrel
with the Vietcong.” and declared: “They want me to go to
Vietnam to shoot some black
folks that never lynched me.
Never called me nigger, never
assassinated my leaders.” His
subsequent refusal to enlist as a
serviceman led to a harsh rebuke from the American Government: he was subsequently
fined and sentenced to prisoneffectively stripping him of his
World title.
Martin Luther King voiced his
concerns and charged the U.S.
Government with being “the
greatest purveyor of violence in
the world today”, and urged
dissenting blacks to seek the
status of conscientious objectors
(as indeed Ali had done). Furthermore, other groups uttered
their discontent and disillusionment. “We recoil with horror,”
said an S.N.C.C position paper in
1965, “at the inconsistency of a
18
supposedly free society where
responsibility to freedom is
equated with the responsibility
to lend oneself to military aggression.” Outrage over the war,
and over the “disproportionate
number” of young black men
being drafted to fight it, contributed significantly to S.N.C.C’s
embrace of Black Power.
field became a stage of conflict
within the U.S ranks. Rebellion
and mutiny amongst black soldiers began to occur. Also, in
1970, seven black soldiers from
the 176th Regiment disobeyed
orders to go on patrol duty,
claiming their lives were being
“deliberately endangered by
racist officers”
After Martin Luther King’s assassination, white soldiers applauded his murder. Racist graffiti, cross burnings and Ku Klux
Klan material were tolerated on
some bases. Young AfricanAmerican recruits were confronted with the symbol most
associated with historical racist
oppression, the Confederate flag,
daubed on army machinery including tanks, jeeps and even
helicopters. Magazines such as
Ebony or Jet were not stocked
on some bases and neither were
tapes of soul music or books on
black American culture and history. Black servicemen were frequently sentenced to longer
terms than their white counterparts, and once inside prison,
Muslim inmates were refused
copies of the Koran. Influenced
by the Nation of Islam’s Malcolm X and later by Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers,
black soldiers embraced their
African cultural roots by wearing
black beads and black gloves
and flew the Black flag. A ritualised handshake, the “dap”, was
common amongst black personnel. Black Power salutes were
also used in private between
black privates and officers. Despite or because of segregated
bars and clubs, solidarity increased between black soldiers.
Several groups were formed:
Blacks in Action, The Unsatisfied
Black Soldier, The Ju Jus, and
The Mau Maus. - they discussed
black history, the Civil Rights
Movement, Black Power and
soul music.
Inter-racial clashes were commonplace in military prisons,
army bases and even on aircraft
carriers. In October, 1972, a fight
Black Panthers in the army
The racial tensions in the ghettoes of Detroit and Chicago were
now echoed in the armed forces.
In July 1969, there was a race
riot in Lejeune Marine Camp in
North Carolina. Soon, the battle-
•
An end to the robbery by
the white man of our
black community;
•
Payment in currency as
restitution for slave labour and mass murder of
black people
•
Decent housing, fit for
shelter of human beings
•
Education for our people
that exposes decadent
American society
The Vietnamese would often
call out “ Go home soul man!”
to black soldiers on the battleground.
involving black and white sailors
aboard the attack aircraft carrier
Kitty Hawk, in the Tonkin Gulf,
left 33 men injured.
Groups such as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, encouraged violence against white
racism at home and in Vietnam.
Kathleen Cleaver the wife of Eldridge Cleaver (leader of the
Panthers), urged black soldiers:
“Right inside of the U.S. imperialist beast’s army, you are strategically placed to begin the
process of destroying him from
within.” Meanwhile, the Party’s
Manifesto promised a programme of social transformation
contradicting Johnson’s
The
Great Society programme of
greater public expenditure for
welfare, schools, housing and
cultural works such as libraries
and theatres (which had largely
been curtailed due to the spiralling costs of the war in Vietnam).
The Marxist rhetoric of the Panthers demanded and pledged
the following requirements for
black justice and equality in,
what they perceived to be a
white dominated society of
prejudice, hypocrisy and double
standards:
•
“Full employment for our
people
•
Exemption of black men
from military service for a
racist government
•
An end to police brutality
and murder of black people by organizing
•
Armed self-defense
groups
•
Freedom for all black prisoners because they haven’t had a fair impartial
trial
•
Black defendants should
be tried by a jury of their
peers
•
Land, bread, housing,
education, clothing, justice and peace
•
A United Nations plebiscite in the black colony
to determine the will of
black people as to their
national destiny”
Black students were moved by
the separatist ideology of the
Panthers. Consequently, a black
student uprising took place at
Cornell University, in December
1968. Armed agitators had taken
over an administration building
and their continued protests
resulted in the resignation of
several distinguished scholars-
19
and eventually Cornell’s President. Indeed, it had been a year
of turmoil for the U.S: the Tet
Offensive had proved disastrous
for the Vietnam campaign; in
April, Eldridge Cleaver was involved in a shoot-out in Oakland
between Black Panthers and
police that left one Panther dead
and Cleaver and two police officers wounded; and Democrat
Bobby Kennedy (who had promised better civil rights for blacks
and had promised an early end
to the war) had been assassinated - as had Luther King.
Recruitment with regard to Black
protest organisations was identified by the journalist Michael
Herr in his personal account of
his time in Vietnam, Dispatches,
:“…there were more than a
dozen Black Panthers in one platoon, one of which was an agent
for the panthers, sent over…to
recruit” In addition, a survey
produced by Time Magazine
illustrated the influence of Black
Power; and the growing racial
problems and conflicts in Vietnam and at home. Personal interviews were conducted with
400 black enlisted men “from
Con Thiem to the Delta” providing a measure of the attitude of
black men in Vietnam:
•
•
•
•
45% said they would use
arms to gain their rights when
they return to “the world.” A
few boasted that they are
smuggling automatic weapons back to the States.
60% agreed that black
people should not fight in
Vietnam because they have
problems back home. Only
23% replied that blacks should
fight in Vietnam the same as
whites.
64% believed that racial
troubles in Vietnam were getting worse. Only 6% thought
that racial relations were improving. “Just like civilian
life,” one black marine said.
“The white doesn’t want to
see the black get ahead.”
56% said that they use the
Black Power salute. Only 1%
condemned its use
•
•
55% preferred to eat their
meals with blacks. 52% preferred to live in all-black barracks.
41% said they would join
a riot when they returned to
the U.S. However, a nearly
equal number, 40%, said they
would not.
Evidently though, the most unsettling and worrying issue was
that black soldiers were dying in
greater numbers proportionately,
to whites, naturally leading to an
increase in discord amongst the
black ranks. One black private
protested forcefully against the
unfair conditions:
“You should see for yourself how the black man is
being treated over here
and
the way we are dying. When it comes to rank,
we are left out. When it
comes to special privileges, we are left out.
When it comes to patrols,
operations and so forth,
we are first.”
Propaganda was used by the
Vietcong to undermine the black
soldiers’ morale: leaflets were
dropped describing American
army racism and also images
depicting U.S. policemen beating black civil rights workers.
The Vietnamese would often call
out “ Go home soul man!” to
black soldiers on the battleground, shooting only at the
white soldiers.
Soon, a back street in downtown
Saigon known as Soul Alley became home for “somewhere
between 300 and 500 black
AWOLS and deserters”. Soul
Alley provided an ideal escape
from the restraints of army life
and conditions. One explained
the attractions of the surroundings to a Time reporter:
“You get up late, you smoke a
few joints, you get on your
Honda and ride around to the PX,
buy a few items you can sell on
the black market, come back,
blow some more grass, and
that’s it for one day.”
The Civil Rights Acts
The Civil Rights Acts at home, in
America, resulting in better employment and housing conditions for African-Americans put
pressure on the forces to respond to the increasing crisis.
General Chapman admitted in
1969, “we’ve got a problem.”
Investigations on discrimination
and prejudices were addressed
in all areas, from the lack of suitable provisions for black servicemen to the small number of
black officers.
Mandatory Watch and Action
Committees were introduced
into each unit, using the slogan
– “Racism can cost you your
career.” Eventually, AfricanAmericans won the right to
grow their hair in Afros; and
gradually racial tensions within
the ranks began to subside.
Colin Powell began his military
career in Vietnam, rising
through the ranks to become
General. Indeed, since Vietnam
many African-Americans have
been promoted to the highest
ranks of the U.S Army. Therefore, a positive legacy was left
for the new generation of black
servicemen, but at a cost: 40% of
black veterans suffered from
post-traumatic stress, compared
with 20% of white veterans.
African-Americans also suffered
after returning from combat
when faced with unforgiving
working conditions, particularly
in the North. Manufacturing
firms were relocating southward
because of cheaper land, lower
taxes, and lower union membership. Moreover, “the existence
of the right to work laws allowed
by section 14b of the TaftHartley Act, plus the social conservatism of the region ”meant
that black labour effectively became marginalized. Transportation, particularly in the South was cheaper and energy supplies necessarily, were closer:
“manufacturing firms are favoring the white South—Northern
Mississippi, the white hill country and north-western Arkansas.
They are not locating in the
black Delta towns. There are a
20
number of reasons for this new
form of racial discrimination…
Relocating manufacturers find
the hill country white workers
are free thinkers who reject unions, while black workers seek
the protection of unions. With
white labor, there is neither a
union problem nor a racial problem.”
Conclusion
Participation in the Vietnam War
without doubt heightened black
consciousness, and help politicise every black American as a
result of their being made
“clearly aware of the paradox of
fighting for democracy abroad
when they did not have it at
home.”
The growing prosperity of
whites, whilst African-Americans
continued to be sidelined- displaced and alienated thus remaining on the periphery and
margins of American societyemphasised the confusion of,
what Du Bois termed “doubleconsciousness”: that sense of
being American citizens but also
having an African past.
Unfortunately racism still exists
in America today and blacks
continue to suffer from discrimination in the armed forces and
in society as a whole. Although
the economic conditions of U.S
blacks have improved, the large
gap between blacks and whites
has remained, and has led to
racial tensions that have yet to
be resolved. There are still high
rates of failure for black pupils at
schools and colleges, high rates
of unemployment, and high
rates of crime committed by
African-Americans. Nevertheless,
the struggle for Civil Rights at
home, and on the battlefields
and jungles of Vietnam, underlined a new consciousness typified by Black Power. A radical
change had occurred: Vietnam
helped imbue African-Americans
with a fresh philosophy for freedom. They now shared a common identity provoked by
awareness of their own alienation: “The immediate cause for
racial problems here,” explained
Navy Lieutenant Owen Heggs,
the only black attorney in I Corps,
“is black people themselves.
White people haven’t changed.
What has changed is the black
population.” Now, soldiers
shared a common response to
the injustice their race had suffered:
“When an American force
stormed ashore south of Danang
this summer, young blacks wore
amulets around their necks symbolizing black pride, culture and
self-defense. They raised their
fists to their brothers as they
moved side by side with white
marines against their common
Communist enemy.”
Bibliography.
Bishop C. Vietnam War Diary:
1964-1975. (Italy: Aerospace,
2003).
Blair T. Retreat to the Ghetto. (
New York: Hill and Wang, 1978)
Blum J. Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 19611974. (U.S.A: W.W. Norton and
Company, Inc., 1992).
Cawthorne N. Vietnam: A War
Lost and Won. (Denmark: Arcturus, 2003).
Du Bois W.E.B. The Souls of
Black Folk. (1903; U.S.A: Dover
Publications, Inc., 1994).
Foner E. The Story of America
Freedom. (1998; G.B: Mackays of
Chatham plc., 2000).
Herr M. Dispatches. (London:
Picador, 1998).
Lee M. Dictionary of North
American History. (G.B: Larousse, 1994).
Louvre A. and Walsh J. Tell Me
Lies About Vietnam. (G.B: Open
University Press, 1988).
Quart L. and Auster A. American
Film and Society since 1945.
(U.S.A: Praeger, 1994).
Palmer M. “Seconds Out”, The
Times Magazine, 29/12/2001.
Ralston I. American Studies Today. (U.K: American Studies Resources Centre, Liverpool John
Moores University, 2003).
Schaller M., Scharff V.,
Schulzinger R. Present Tense.
(U.S.A: Houghton Mifflin Company, Inc., 1996).
Sternlieb G., and Hughes J. Post
Industrial America: Metropolitan
Decline and Inter-Regional Job
Shifts. (New Brunswick: Centre
for Urban Policy Research,
1976).
Woodiwiss A. Postmodernity
U.S.A: The Crisis of Social Modernism in Postwar America,
(G.B: Cromwell Press Ltd, 1993).
Maycock J. War Within War,
http:
//www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/A
rticle /0,4273,4256062,00.html,
(15/9/2001), 11/6/2004.
Woodland J. “How did Participation in America`s Wars affect
Black Americans?”,
http://www.americansc.org.uk/W
oodland.htm,(18/11/2001),
10/12/2004
Encyclopaedia Britannica. (CDROM). U.K: 2001.
21
Letters from New
York
By Lenny Quart
Our regular correspondent from New York
has sent us a further selection of letters giving his unique take on life in the Big Apple.
Altman’s Oscar Night
I
regularly watch the Oscars,
though I usually fall asleep
before the final awards are
handed out. The ceremony
can feel interminable, given acceptance speeches that are filled
with the endless thank-yous
Oscar winners tender their parents, wives and children, and the
countless people connected with
the making of the film, including
agents, hairdressers and lawyers.
What also irks me are: the 48
expensive advertising spots that
sometimes look like they are
competing for Oscars; the compensatory awards to make-up
artists, costume designers, art
directors for undeserving big
budget films that usually win
little else; the elaborate musical
numbers where the sets and
special effects overwhelm the
bland songs; and the habitually
pointless montages of Hollywood classics that give us little
sense of the character of the
films.
But there are always a few high
points during the evening. The
Daily Show host Jon Stewart’s
master of ceremony’s dry, sarcastic, clever, and subversive
humour was an apt antidote to
Hollywood self-promotion and
sentimentality. Stewart is no
Billy Crystal, who as eight-time
Oscar MC conveyed warmth,
quick wit, and the feeling of
somebody totally at home in the
show biz world. But, though
Stewart may not be as comfortable with the Hollywood community as the less subtle Crystal,
he seemed at ease on the stage,
sufficiently confident to wittily
deflate Hollywood’s liberal pretensions and smugness, and, at
the same time, make a funny
crack at Vice President’s Cheney’s expense. It probably wasn’t Stewart’s sharpest performance, but while being civil and
controlled, his trademark irreverence was intact.
I also liked the fact that a number of the year’s best picture
nominees— like Good Night and
Good Luck, Brokeback Mountain,
and Crash —were small budget,
limited box office films that dealt
with a variety of politically controversial issues without being
crude polemics. And if none of
them were transcendent, risktaking works of art, they were all
generally intelligent, extremely
well acted, and stylish.
For me the evening’s apotheosis
was Lily Tomlin and Meryl
Streep’s introducing Robert
Altman in the freewheeling,
overlapping dialogue-style of his
films. Like Sidney Lumet, last
year’s honoree, Altman is a stillworking octogenarian (his latest
film A Prairie Home Companion
will be out soon) who has had a
luminous and prolific career—
directing 37 films in a career that
spans more than 50 years. But
despite having received five
Academy Award nominations
for best director, he — like Hitchcock and Scorsese (a testimony
to Hollywood’s aesthetic obtuseness)— has never won an Oscar.
Altman is a visionary, iconoclast
and Hollywood outsider who
has made such fine films as
M*A*S*H, The Player, Short
Cuts, Thieves Like Us, and Gosford Park, and great ones like
Nashville, McCabe and Mrs.
Miller and The Long Goodbye.
He has had his failures—the
egregious Prêt-à-Porter and the
pretentious Quintet among others, but Altman has produced a
body of films that compares favourably with the work of illustrious contemporaries like
Scorsese, Coppola, and the late
John Cassavetes.
Altman, in his best films, emphasized behaviour rather than
plot and exposition, used a great
deal of improvisation, and
packed his films with dazzling
and intricate aural effects and
visual images. His open-ended,
dynamically cut films also often
parodied and inverted Hollywood genre conventions (e.g.,
the western, film noir, and the
armed service comedy), and his
work was trenchantly satirical
and critical of American mainstream values and institutions.
In his masterpiece, Nashville
22
(1975), for example, Altman interweaves twenty-four characters that either are already top
country and western music performers or who are obsessed
with getting their big chance.
The country and western stars
are manipulative, vain, and hysterical—driven by crowd applause and having a successful
careers— while the public’s behaviour towards them ranges
from breathless adulation to
petulance and rage. Altman succeeds in creating a country and
music milieu that becomes a
metaphor for an image-driven,
callous American society—a
chaotic din where everybody is
struggling for their version of a
gold record.
The film also includes an invisible, pseudo-populist presidential
candidate who prophetically
seeks national moral renewal by
promoting nostalgia and bumptious iconoclasm. The candidate’s new political party is all
image without substance: young
female boosters and a sound
truck hawking the vagaries of a
platform the same way record
albums are hyped over the
opening credits.
Though Hollywood may be a
more sophisticated, politically
liberal universe than Nashville, it
shares many of its attributes.
And in a film like The Player
(1992), Altman’s keen satirical
eye extended from the world of
country and western music to
the movie business’ mores and
manners. With great flair Altman
assembled a Hollywood of
amoral studio executives—men
and women devoid of even a
scintilla of integrity and loyalty—
whose commitments, despite
their artistic posturing, never go
The New York Post
W
hen I was growing
up, my father and
many other Jewish
working and lower
middle class people like himself
treated The New York Post as
their political Bible. In those
years it was a tabloid, owned by
a wealthy, politically liberal,
Dorothy Schiff. Despite emphasizing scandal and human interest stories, the paper boasted a
lively sports page, some distinctive columnists like the elegant
and ironic enemy of cant and
political and economic privilege,
Murray Kempton, and passionate liberal ones like Mary
McGrory, and its courageous
chief editor, James Wechsler. It
also had literate streetwise reporters like Pete Hamill, some
unique comic strips like Pogo
and Mary Worth, and a hardhitting, if unsubtle, political cartoonist—Herblock.
But the city began to change by
the 70s, and the sons and
daughters of its working class
readership had either moved up
the social class ladder and begun to read The New York Times,
or left the metropolitan area altogether. And those who remained embedded in the working class had moved politically
to the right on many issues, just
as the city itself became more
psychically enthralled with people who lived high or were famous—turning away from its
socially committed ethos of earlier decades.
The Post also had lost its
edge— becoming much duller—
and it was losing money. Consequently, Schiff sold the paper to
Australian media baron Rupert
Murdoch in 1977. Murdoch
gradually turned the Post into
what it looks like today—a right
wing scandal sheet with bold,
catchy headlines (its most
memorable, ”Headless Body in
Topless Bar”), a great many celebrity gossip columns, and
scoop-driven, politically slanted
news coverage where the dis-
beyond the bottom line. In
Altman’s version of Hollywood
there is no magic— just crass
manipulation.
Given Altman’s critically caustic
take on Hollywood, he clearly
has never been their favourite
son. Still, though somewhat frail,
he was up there on stage this
time to accept his Oscar. His
manner neither sentimental nor
arrogant, he simply stated with
consummate dignity that he felt
fortunate that he never had to
make a film he didn’t choose to
direct. And that he never tired of
making films.
Altman deserved every bit of the
long ovation he received. If Hollywood had more directors like
him—men and women who
make personal, formally adventurous, socially corrosive films—
it would be a far more incandescent, far less superficial place.
tinction between reportage and
opinion is blurred.
The New York Post has an honoured history. It is one of the
oldest newspapers still published in the United States. Alexander Hamilton founded it in
1801 as The New York Evening
Post, a broadsheet quite unlike
today's tabloid, and its most
famous 19th-century editor was
the poet William Cullen Bryant, a
strong Abolitionist and defender
of free speech. And from 1883
on, its editor was a reform Republican, E. L. Godkin, who relentlessly attacked Tammany
Hall, describing its leaders as
“dive-keepers” and “pugilists.”
Today the Post’s style and substance is far removed from its
august 19th century ancestor.
The Post also loses a great deal
of money, but Murdoch (who is
chief executive of News Corp.,
that owns the Fox Broadcasting
Company, Twentieth Century
Fox and many other media outlets in the U.S. and abroad) has
big pockets and is engaged in a
newspaper war with the city’s
other tabloid, The Daily News,
23
owned by billionaire real estate
developer, Mortimer B. Zuckerman. Most big U.S. cities have
only a single daily, but New York
is the exception—it has four. The
News remains much the
stronger paper financially (its
advertising revenues are much
greater), but in the last five years
the Post boosted its average
weekday circulation by 49%, to
686,207 papers. And the Post is
going all out to destroy its tabloid competitor by lowering its
newsstand price to 25 cents, as
well as building a new $250 million printing plant that has
greatly improved the paper's
look.
Scanning the Post the last few
weeks it’s clear that its appeal
rests much more in its sensational coverage of crime, sex,
accidents, natural disasters and
the foibles of the famous (“Jude
[Law] Woos Sienna”) than in its
conservative politics. A couple
of weeks ago I picked up the
paper and the front page carried
a headline “Wasted”, and beneath it a large colour photo of a
beautiful co-ed who died of a
drug overdose on the Lower
East Side. Inside the paper there
is a story about a “randy” 79year-old rector at St. Patrick’s
Cathedral who had an affair with
his married aide, another about
John Gotti’s prison conversations, and a salacious gossip
item about the underwear that
Westchester DA, and Republican
Senatorial candidate, Jeanine
Pirro, buys. On another day
there is a gruesome piece about
a thug with AIDs who spat blood
on the cops who arrested him.
The paper’s columnists include
the sinister Robert Novak and
the insidious inside-dopester
Richard Morris—the ex-Clinton
adviser whose columns now
regularly bash the Clintons and
other Democrats. Other columnists also adhere closely to a
conservative line. Even gossip
columnist, Cindy Adams, derided Jane Fonda for being
“born with a silver hoof in the
mouth” because of her anti-Iraq
war statements. And on any
given day the editorials will predictably support Wal-Mart
against demands for more generous employee health insurance and, without a hint of em-
A New York News stand about 1900
barrassment, ask the Democratic
candidates for New York’s
mayor to take “notice of the extraordinary service” George W
provided the city after 9/11 instead of attacking him.
The Post paradoxically is both
anti-elitist, and loves big money
tycoons when they are on top,
and supports legislation that
only gives aid and comfort to
the wealthy and corporations.
(Come to think of it, a large
swathe of the American public
shares those same contradictory
impulses.) Despite his right wing
conservative agenda, Murdoch
is pragmatic enough to support
Tony Blair and on alternate days
say nice things about Hillary. He
likes winners, and takes care to
keep on the good side of those
who hold power.
Though I personally find the
Post repellent, Murdoch has created a skilfully seductive tabloid
built on the notion that a public
that is primarily interested in
sensation and titillation may, at
the same time, absorb some of
the hard right politics that the
paper incessantly promotes.
24
Public Life
Most of us live with a number of
personal frustrations and miseries, but the city always offers
innumerable activities, sensations, and pleasures that allow
one the chance to escape for a
time. Clearly, one of the city's
strongest assets is that its public
world provides the kind of solace that can, at least temporarily,
cauterise one's private pain.
For example, in the last month
my wife and I ate at two elegant
restaurants during New York
Restaurant Week - two winter
weeks where, as a promotion,
some of the best of the city restaurants offer three-course prixfixe menus for lunch or dinner at
prices people of ordinary means
can afford.
Our normal style is to eat out at
reasonably priced ethnic restaurants that offer good food, but
make little fuss about their service or how they look. So I'm a
bit wary of eating at a restaurant
like Danny Meyer's (also of Union Square Cafe fame) Gramercy
Tavern that has extremely attentive and knowing waitresses and
waiters, that serves inventive,
subtly flavoured food displayed
like a carefully composed work
of art (e.g., a dessert of passion
fruit sorbet on top of coconut
tapioca), and that has a warm,
inviting rustic-style decor. I was
put at ease, however, by the fact
that the diners at the surrounding tables weren't formally
dressed and exuded neither
wealth nor hauteur, but were a
comfortable mix of Japanese
tourists, retired secretaries,
schoolteachers and academics,
and young corporate executives
and students. Eating at Gramercy Tavern was pleasurable,
but given my usual ascetic
lunches of farmer cheese, nonfat yoghurt, and fruit, I felt the
food and accompanying sauces
were much too rich for me to
indulge in more than once or
twice a year.
On another afternoon we visited
NYU's Grey Art Gallery, located
on 100 Washington Square East
that offers four to six art exhibits
(Diane Arbus: Family Albums) a
year. Their latest, The Downtown Show: The New York Art
Scene 1974-84, from January 10
to April 1, 2006, displays the
work of 175 painters, sculptors,
photographers, musicians, performers, filmmakers, and writers
who could afford the now inconceivable low rents of SoHo lofts
and Lower East Side tenements.
Downtown artists bridged the
gap between high art and mass
culture; they removed avantgarde art from isolation in elite
circles, and directly confronted
social and political concerns. It
was a world of ferment and experimentation, and the gallery is
filled with posters, photographs,
paintings, videos, and books and
magazines from the era. I don't
have great affinity for most of
the art exhibited, but still there
were a number of original, raw,
and subversive works that
pushed the limits of traditional
artistic categories, and grew on
me with repeated viewings.
But if one's intellectual and artistic predilections are not so
avant-garde - like mine - the city
offers a plethora of lectures and
symposiums (most of them free)
almost every night of the week at the 92nd Street Y, Cooper
Union, the CUNY Grad Center
on 365 Fifth Avenue (e.g., this
spring Joan Didion reads from
her latest book and Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. is on a panel on
Jacksonian Democracy) and the
New York public library, among
other places.
Having spent my professional
life lecturing and taking part in
symposiums, I don't usually feel
an urge to attend lectures. But
one evening I did go with a
friend to the 42nd Street Library
to listen, with a great many
other white-haired people, to a
number of writers and critics
perceptively and, at moments,
eloquently discuss the work of
Henry Roth on his centenary.
Roth was the author of one of
the masterpieces of American
literature, Call it Sleep - a mixture of Joycean modernism and
richly textured urban realism. He
also wrote, after six decades of
silence, Mercy of a Rude Stream,
an autobiographical quartet of
novels that depicts, in a more
direct but less literary writing
style, his painful coming of age
in the Harlem of the teens and
twenties.
There are also more active ways
to enter the city's life than by
going to a restaurant or attending a lecture. I always have my
city walks. So one morning, the
streets still packed with mounds
of snow and grey slush, I
trudged from my apartment towards the meatpacking district,
located near the Hudson River in
the northwest corner of Greenwich Village. It was once home
to 250 slaughterhouses and
meatpacking plants, but is now
filled with a hip young crowd
(e.g., actors, models) and with
clubs, high-end fashion designers, the ultra- chic luxury Hotel
Gansevoort, and a spacious,
handsome bistro like Pastis that
serve them. One can only be
hopeful that the meatpacking
district's recent designation as a
protected historic area will preserve what is left of its distinctive cobblestone streets, brick
facades, metal awnings, and
remaining meatpacking plants.
It was merely a walk, but for the
moment it made me happy-just
as the rest of the city's public life
acts as a balm to those who are
able to open themselves up to
its infinite delights.
25
News and Events from the ASRC
Pittsburgh journalist launches link with
Liverpool students
Report by Helen Tamburro
I
n March the American
Studies Resource Centre
was host to US journalist
and broadcaster Dr. Ezekiel
Mobley and his wife Dr. Cathy
Grabowski, Director of Channel
21 Community TV in Pittsburgh
and Administrator at the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Mobley, a journalist for the
African Times newspaper, delivered a lecture entitled, Issues of
Latin American and African
American Relations in the US
today seen through the prism of
the ‘Memin Pinguin’ controversy, following last year’s race
row between Mexico and the US
caused by a Mexican commemorative stamp.
The controversial image of a
traditional Mexican cartoon figure from the 1950s, Memin Pinguin, led to Jesse Jackson and
President Bush denouncing the
stamp when it was published by
the Mexican government. The
stamp depicted a black cartoon
character with exaggerated thick
lips and big eyes. Mexico’s
President Fox defended the
comic strip as a fundamental
part of Mexican cultural life.
Ian Ralston, Director of the
American Studies Centre, explained: “It’s hard to imagine a
Royal Mail commemorative series stirring up such an international crisis but the publication
of the Memin Pinguin stamps
did just that because they are
such offensive racist caricatures.”
During the lecture, Dr Mobley
reflected on why Mexico’s black
population and black history is
Ezekiel and Kathy with Helen Tamburro
barely represented. Some commentators speculate that this
could be the result of Mexico’s
longstanding drive to eliminate
ethnic distinctions and build up
a national identity based on the
idea of ‘mestizaje’ or mixed race.
Ian Ralston commented, “Most
Mexicans are loyal to a traditional concept of mestizaje that
by definition denies the existence and importance of black
people in their country. It’s not
surprising then that this has put
them on a crash course with
leading figures such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson as well as
the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People
in the US.”
Dr. Mobley and Dr. Grabowski
were in the country for a few
days and Dr. Mobley spoke passionately about the city,
“Liverpool is tremendous! For
Americans the great fame of the
Beatles is always an attraction,
but it also reminds me of my
own mother, a well-known activist from New York. She loved
the social and political views
expressed through Lennon’s
music. I am also fascinated by
Liverpool’s compelling black
history - it was of course the
centre of the British slave trade
and during the American Civil
War, the Confederate States
maintained an embassy in Liverpool, the only diplomatic post in
England.”
Dr. Mobley and Dr. Grabowski
also visited Toxteth TV, a community station training young
adults in television production,
and both found the visit to be a
valuable experience, “Toxteth
TV is an amazing facility and a
fulfilling experience for the
26
young adults in training. I’m
awed that the station receives
supervision directly from the
British Ministry of Education and
over £1.8 million was spent on
construction and development. I
hope that training the variety of
students will lead to truly gainful
employment and I say that because in the States at times we
have superficial feel-good social
programs that appear to tackle
employment problems but don’t
ultimately lead to meaningful,
long-term jobs and progress for
people.”
The American visitors were also
highly impressed by the Toxteth
students, ‘‘They were very
highly motivated and I applaud
the instructors, particularly Sue
Scott, for their willingness to
work hard for the success of the
local community. I was also
thrilled by the Q & A session
organised by the students. They
showed a keen hunger for information and a perspective from
the US.”
Dr. Mobley was happy to comment on the similarities and differences between Toxteth TV
and their US counterpart, Pittsburgh Community TV (PCTV),
“They are similar in that PCTV
provides a local news and fea-
ture outlet and a platform for
views and opinions that are not
frequently covered by other stations. We also give in-depth
training on equipment and students learn to produce shows.
Differences may be found in
approach and concentration. For
example, Toxteth TV has a
strong focus on training students from the community college to prepare them for employment, whereas PCTV focuses more on the community
based broadcasting aspect.”
Since their visit to Liverpool, Dr.
Mobley and his wife have established a solid link between the
two television stations. I asked
what their hopes and aims were
for this relationship and how
beneficial they thought it would
be for those involved on both
sides of the Atlantic in terms of
cross-cultural understanding.
“As soon as I returned to the US
I initiated informal talks with our
Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) faculty
about forging a joint relationship
with Toxteth TV to include media product exchange (film and
TV shows) and therefore utilising the media of both stations,
in a context of combining TV
production, ‘streaming video’
and ultimately sharing curriculum and perhaps students between Liverpool Community
College and CCAC. Both PCTV
and Toxteth TV staff and students will gain enormous benefit, training and perspectives
from cultures in both countries to see how the other side
works.” Toxteth students produced several mini productions
for PCTV which were aired in the
US in April.
Local news is also big news and
can often be more relevant to
people because of its direct impact in a local area. This is particularly true of the American
media, such is the vastness of
the country. I asked Dr. Mobley
for his thoughts on the issue.
“You’re exactly right! Reemphasis on local news and
valuing the local perspective is
important. The curative process
that is local news reminds us
that ‘the little people’ can make
big things happen too! In the US
there’s an old saying, All politics
is local and standing up for
these goals ensures that our
democratic way of life remains
robust and vital.”
We regret to announce that, following complications after minor surgery, Dr Mobley died on
10th June.—eds.
Schools Conference 2007
The Depression, Hoover, Roosevelt and the
New Deal
A one-day conference for A-Level and Access students of American Government and
Politics, American History and Media Studies.
Wednesday January 24th 2007
Topics will include: Hoover and the Depression; How Successful was the New Deal;
Roosevelt, Congress and the Supreme Court; Chronicling the Depression through the
music of Woody Guthrie. (This will include live performances of songs of the period.)
Booking forms will be sent out in late November or check the ASRC web site
(www.americansc.org.uk) for details and booking form.
27
We stopped at Perfect Days
Jeanne-Marie holds exhibition in Liverpool
AS Today welcomes the return
to Liverpool of an old friend of
the Centre, the artist JeanneMarie Kenny. She recently had
an exhibition of her work at the
Arena Studios in Liverpool with
the title “We stopped at Perfect
Days”. She works in a variety of
genres, and the exhibition
showed a great deal of imagination. The colours were vibrant
and exciting, and the compositions showed an excellent sense
of form. Jeanne-Marie is a master of a wide variety of styles
and genres, and the overall effect was very pleasing. She
writes this about it.
This body of work spans the
past 3 years and includes paintings, drawings, and photographs. The title of the exhibition is from a poem by Richard
Brautigan which alludes to a
moment in time or a pleasant
memory from the past. In my
approach to making art, I transform mundane images that are
produced for specific purposes
(usually advertising) into
glimpses into an alternative
dream world. Like Brautigan’s
writing, my art is based in reality
Where the World Was New by Jeanne-Marie Kenny
but is also quietly surreal.
The work mainly includes figurative paintings in oil on canvas.
The imagery revolves around
women in various settings and
derives from men’s magazines,
hair ads, old Viewmaster reels,
and my own photographs. Also
included are pen & ink drawings,
digital illustrations as well as
digital photographs from an ongoing series all of which fit in
with the overall theme of
‘femininity as performance.’
28
British Association for
American Studies
Teachers and Schools
Awards 2006
As part of its far ranging commitment to promote the study of
the USA at all levels of education, three awards specifically
aimed at teachers and students
in sixth form colleges and
schools were presented at this
year’s British Association for
American Studies (BAAS) conference at the University of Kent
at Canterbury on 21st April.
The winner of the Ambassador’s
Schools Essay Prize was Jessica
Edwards of Loreto College in
Manchester for her essay on
Lyndon Johnson and the Great
Society. Jessica was presented
with a certificate of merit and a
cheque for £250 by the US Ambassador to the UK, Robert
Holmes Tuttle. (see photo.)
The recipients of the two Teachers Fellowships, made by BAAS
in conjunction with the Thomas
Jefferson Foundation (TJF) and
Kathryn and Jessica showing off their
certificates
the International Center
for Jefferson Studies
(ICJS), were John Siblon of City
of Islington College, who received the Monticello-Stratford
Hall award and Kathryn Cooper
of Loreto College Manchester,
who was awarded the Barringer
Fellowship. Both John and Kathryn will be based in Virginia.
John will be spending two
weeks working alongside American teachers at Stratford Hall,
while Kathryn will be researching and putting together teaching materials on Thomas Jefferson and American history at the
Moticello Center. These materials would then be made available to all UK teachers who have
an interest in this area of study,
or who are directly involved with
its teaching.
A total of twenty-eight awards
were presented at the confer-
ence, ranging from schools to
postgraduate. It is hoped that all
of these awards and fellowships
will be available in future years
John Siblon
and that BAAS’s continued support for the school and college
sector will continue to go from
strength to strength.
For further details, and how to
apply in 2007, check the BAAS
web site at www.baas.ac.uk/
awards/awards.asp
Advertisement
AMERICAN INDIAN
LECTURES
Topics include history
from 1492 to the
present. The lectures
last about 45 minutes
with 15 minutes Q&A.
For information contact
Mr. C. L. Henson
Jessica Edwards receiving her prize from the US Ambassador
[email protected].
29
Book Reviews
Literature
A Routledge Literary
Sourcebook on Herman
Melville’s Moby-Dick,
edited by Michael J.
Davey
(New York: Routledge, 2004)
ISBN 0-415-24771-3. List price
$26.95.
Reviewed by Natalie Aldred,
Bath Spa University.
This is one of
Routledge’s
more
recent
instalments in
a series which
seeks to contextualise key
literary texts.
This specific
sourcebook
looks
at
Moby-Dick; or
The
Whale,
first published
in 1851 and written by Herman
Melville (1819 – 1891). It is
meant for the first-time reader of
Melville’s text, but is also intentionally accessible to a range of
student ages from school to undergraduate level. Through its
less orthodox avenues, presenting the reader with a staggering
amount of contemporary reviews, criticism, and context,
this sourcebook has much
higher aims than most other
student ‘guides’ to literary texts.
Unfortunately, this does have a
slightly detrimental effect: some
of the critical essays picked were,
quite clearly, originally written
for a scholarly audience, possessing language which is therefore outside the grasp of some
students (‘the Melville of MobyDick discerns in Jefferson’s two
arch-principles of inalienable
rights and consent an unresolved tension’). However this
greater degree of sophistication,
coupled with the presentation of
the sourcebook as a sometimes
Reader - down to giving a brief
contextual overview of each
critical essay - means that it also
serves as an excellent preliminary resource for both the academic and the scholar. As a consequence, however, the aims of
the sourcebook are slightly contradictory, presenting itself as a
legitimate and necessary read to
audiences with conflicting requirements. Nonetheless, although a text of this length
could never expect to be an
over-arching authority, what is
here is concise, interesting, and
extremely informative for all
readers.
The sourcebook is a fresh and
inviting look at an otherwise
well-studied and frequently cited
literary text, drawing together a
slightly paradigmatic but nonetheless much-needed set of contextual apparatus. Thus it is divided into four obvious parts:
contexts, interpretations (which
provide the reader with early
and ‘modern’ criticism), key passages from Moby-Dick, and suggested further reading. The section on contexts is a very patient
and accumulative look at surrounding historical issues, from
America’s antebellum period to
documents which highlight Melville’s struggle to write MobyDick. The critical essays are just
varied enough to give a taste of
the shift in perceptions and literary preoccupations of the twentieth-century (a ‘narrative history’ as Davey calls it), providing
the reader with extracts designed to prompt one into further reading, not do all the work
by re-printing entire essays
(Davey has pre-empted one potential problem by ensuring that
all extracts, including those from
the earliest date of 1919, are still
in print today). My only major
concern with the scope of the
modern criticism is that it stops
short at 1998: this silently suggests – incorrectly - that critical
attention has recently turned to
other areas of American studies,
shunning a text which Routledge
otherwise calls ‘central’ and
‘powerful’. The section on key
passages is a predictable way of
approaching student-orientated
guides – it is here that the more
advanced reader may wince, but
will perhaps feel comforted by
Davey’s assurances that the passages ‘have been selected because […] critics have returned
to [them] time and again when
discussing Moby-Dick no matter
what the discussion or methodology.’ The further reading gives
a varied and annotated account
of the available publishings on
both Melville and Moby-Dick,
although, once again, some of
Davey’s comments are at odds
with the more specific intentions
of the series, as the sources
cited give frequent indications
that, upon compilation, Davies
predominantly had in mind academics, scholars, and the more
advanced students.
This is an exciting text crammed
with useful sources and information, even finding room for Melville’s own voice through letters
to his peers, and would not be
out of place on the bookshelf of
any reader recently acquainted
with Moby-Dick, from the student to the literary scholar.
Tim Hunt (ed.), The
Selected Poetry of
Robinson Jeffers
(Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001) ISBN: 0804741085
£21.50
Reviewed by
Lucy Le Guilcher
The last edition of Robinson Jeffers’s
poetry
was
published in
1938, and Tim
30
Hunt uses this fact as his justification for publishing the present
version. The inclusion of later
work, unpublished poems, prose
pieces, and the ‘Foreward’ to the
1938 edition written by Jeffers
himself, makes this edition different to its predecessor. Consequently, this publication – to use
Hunt’s own words – results in ‘a
broader, more accurate representation of Jeffers’s career’ (2).
Indeed the outcome is an edition
spanning Jeffers’s entire literary
career, which enables the reader
to see the developments in
Jeffers’s poetry.
The ‘Introduction’ is a useful
entrance into the study of Robinson Jeffers, giving a concise –
yet informative – account of his
life and work. Hunt discusses
Jeffers’s work in relation to
other poets – for example
Wordsworth – and Hunt moves
between the public and private
spheres of Jeffers’s life giving a
three-dimensional as opposed to
two-dimensional analysis.
Hunt has selected Jeffers’s poetry judiciously, and the result is
a collection which demonstrates
the versatility and complexity of
Robinson Jeffers’s work. The
selection enables the reader to
build up a picture of Robinson
Jeffers’s interests and motivations; his viewpoints, morals
and beliefs are built up through
the recurrent themes within this
particular selection, one being
the unreliability of life as opposed to the reliability of death.
The selection enforces the seriousness of Jeffers’s work: he is
not a humorous poet, and his
work is laden with meaning.
Jeffers’s ambiguous moral position is highlighted through his
use of imagery which fluctuates
between the beautiful and the
horrific, causing the reader too,
to fluctuate in their opinion of
his poetry.
Jeffers’s poetry aligns itself with
other American ecocritical literature and thinking which despises
any traces of humanity in the
natural world. Jeffers’s political
agenda within the poetry clearly
emphasises that human actions
have permanent repercussions
on the natural world – a theme
explored in his collection ‘Dear
Judas’. In this selection Jeffers’s
belief in the importance of the
natural world and the harm humanity cause is undeniable. An
example of this is Jeffers’s
poem ‘The Excesses of God’,
which centres on the beauty of
the world from the grand
‘Rainbows over the rain’, to the
minute ‘secret rainbows/ On the
domes of deep sea-shells’ (17).
Jeffers is a poet whose work has
to be close read: his poetry is
full of imagery and symbolism
that needs to be untangled by
the reader, enforcing Hunt’s assertion that Jeffers is ‘a visionary poet’ (8). This emphasis on
close-reading
highlights
Jeffers’s suitability to being
studied in all aspects of academia: as an A-level student, an
undergraduate, a post-graduate,
or a lecturer aiming to integrate
new authors into new or already
established modules. Furthermore, the inclusion of sections
of Jeffers’s prose and other critical writing in this selection enables the reader to make comparisons between the different
modes of writing, and is also a
great teaching aid.
The title, however, is slightly
misleading: this volume includes
work other than poetry, and the
title fails to signify this. Unless a
potential reader looked at the
contents page or back cover
they would remain unaware of
the diversity of this edition, and
undoubtedly, this is one of the
publication’s strengths.
This selection is suitable for any
reader interested in Robinson
Jeffers. It can be kept on a bookshelf and just taken down now
and again, or it can be used extensively for teaching purposes.
The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. Edited by
Joy Porter and Kenneth
M. Roemer
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 343 pages.
ISBN: 0-521-52979-4
Reviewed by Elizabeth Rosen
While Native
Americans
have
been
contributing
to
written
literature
from
as
early
as
1772, Native
American
Studies, as
codified by
the academy,
is only about thirty years old,
and the formal entry of Native
American literature into the university canon is even more recent. No surprise, then, that
Cambridge University Press has
now stepped in to provide the
Cambridge Companion to Native
American Literature.
Companion volumes can do one
of several things: act as dictionary/encyclopedias about a complicated topic, provide further
critical analysis of an established
topic, or give a wide overview of
a topic. The Cambridge Companion chooses to do the latter,
and it manages to do this very
successfully. An initial and embarrassing comma-splice stumble in the first sentence of the
book soon resolves itself into a
conscientiously considered and
well-edited introductory book on
Native American literature(s).
Editors Porter and Roemer have
divided the volume into three
sections: ‘Historical and cultural
contexts’, ‘Genre contexts’, and
a section on ‘Individual authors’.
Of these, it is the first section on
historical and cultural contexts,
which shines. Roemer’s introduction is especially good:
thoughtful, comprehensive, and
cognizant of the complexities of
31
his topic. The introduction not
only discusses the limitations of
studying a ‘literature’ of which
the written portion is the smaller
part (much Native American
‘literature’ occurs in an oral,
rather than written form), it also
raises problems of mediation/
translation; how to label this
literature; the lumping together
of an enormous diversity of
tribes under one heading; and
even whether there is a group of
shared traits in these texts which
justify studying them under one
rubric. For each of these complex issues, Roemer provides a
clear explanation of both the
debates and current practices, as
well as the editors’ rationale for
following certain customs
throughout the volume.
Joy Porter’s essay on ‘Historical
and cultural contexts to Native
American literature’ is equally
concise, giving an excellent
overview of the history of Indian
policy, the Native American response to it, the kinds of expression traditionally used in response, and the intersection of
all these. The one thing left out
is a discussion of the problem of
translating an oral tradition into
a written form, but David
Murray’s very fine essay,
‘Translation and mediation’
takes up exactly this question.
Raising issues such as agency
and authorship, Murray declines
to locate the debate in the more
obvious question of who qualifies as a Native writer and instead concentrates on the linguistic and theoretical elements
of the subject. Adopting a neutral stance himself, Murray simply enumerates the points of
conflicts, listing arguments and
counter-arguments for different
parts of the debate.
Both the Genre and Individual
Authors sections of the volume
are ably, usually admirably, written. If there is a problem with
the Genre section it is that we
are in the early days of building
this canon and thus many of the
essays repeat the same information in their efforts to provide
context for their own topics of
non-fiction, life-writing, poetry,
fiction and theatre. Part III includes essays on all the major
players thus far. These chapters
not only give the biographic and
bibliographic details of each
author, but also discuss the major themes with which each is
concerned. If there is any shortcoming in these essays it is that
so few deal with the critical work
which has been done on each of
these writers, an oversight
which could easily have been
corrected in the Further Reading
section which concludes the
volume, but wasn’t.
The Cambridge Companion
won’t help anyone who wants to
learn details such as what the
Ghost Dance or Trickster is, but
it will provide a very thorough
and thoughtful overview to the
subject of Native American writing, the complexities of its study,
and the major authors who comprise its current canon.
The Cambridge Companion to Theodore
Dreiser (Cambridge
Companions to Literature) edited by Leonard
Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby
Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, February 12, 2004 ISBN 0-521-89465-4
pp. 258 $29.25
Reviewed by Jude Davies, University of Winchester.
Novelist,
journalist,
playwright,
and political
activist,
Theodore
D r e i s e r
(1871-1945)
is
best
known
for
two novels,
Sister Carrie
(1900), the
story of a country girl who
makes good in the big city and
the downfall of her middle-class
lover, and An American Tragedy
(1925) a three-volume bestseller
chronicling the effects of Ameri-
can success ideology on the impressionable Clyde Griffiths: the
drowning of his pregnant girlfriend and his execution in the
electric chair. Dreiser emerges
from Cassuto and Eby’s collection as a key writer on modernity in America, and has a good
claim to attract and retain the
interest of students of America
and of modernity more generally.
This is the third collection of
essays on Dreiser to appear
since the reshaping of literary
studies by cultural studies and
critical theory. Miriam Gogol’s
1995 collection Theodore
Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism reflected the increasing emphasis
on gender in literary studies,
while also sketching out approaches to Dreiser’s work from
a variety of theorised perspectives. Theodore Dreiser and
American Culture: New Readings, edited by Yoshinobu Haku-
tani (2000) offered a more
lengthy and diverse introduction
to the Dreiser oeuvre, emphasising the most frequently taught
novel, Sister Carrie, and also
covering previously obscure
aspects and unfamiliar work.
The focus of this new collection
is squarely on the major novels,
Sister Carrie and An American
Tragedy, contextualised by reference to Dreiser’s other writings, and supplemented by discussion of the ‘Trilogy of Desire’.
The contributors find interesting
perspectives on the major contemporary themes in Dreiser
criticism: the impact of modernity on selfhood and society;
desire; consumption; and the
equation between people and
commodities. The essays focus
on themes (rather than on specific texts or theories), which are
clearly announced by their titles
– ‘Dreiser and the history of
American longing’; ‘Dreiser and
women’; ‘Dreiser, class and the
home’. Taken as a whole, the
collection places Dreiser
squarely at the centre of major
tensions in American culture –
class and social mobility, gender
and ‘race’, and debates over
idealism and materialism.
32
It is invidious to select from the
uniformly insightful essays, but
brief reference to two, ‘Dreiser’s
style’ by Paul Giles, and Bill
Brown’s ‘The matter of Dreiser’s
modernity,’ will illustrate
Dreiser’s centrality to debates
over modernity in America. Returning to the oldest chestnut in
Dreiser criticism, Giles reads the
clash between Dreiser’s realist
style and mystical tendencies as
mediating between material and
spiritual understandings of the
world, between the world of
commodities and the world of
consciousness. Brown concerns
himself with similar tensions,
but where Giles emphasises
Dreiser’s oblique, ‘aslant’ view
of dominant American ideology,
Brown argues that dominant
American culture has been good
at integrating the ideal and the
material, and that Dreiser too
strives to ‘dramatize modernity
as a spiritual plight.’ The debate
will continue, fuelled by this excellent and accessible book.
No Mentor But Myself:
Jack London on Writing
and Writers, Edited by
Dale Walker
2nd Edition Stanford University
Press Hardcover - March 1999
ISBN 0804736367 £16.50
Reviewed
Bennett
by
Jenny
Elliott-
An informative, detailed
and interesting introduction
leads
well into the
collected
material. The
forty-three
collected
pieces in the
first edition
of No Mentor
But Myself: Jack London on
Writing and Writers have been
here extended literally, and explicated further, by the addition
of twenty-four new entries in
this, the expanded second edition.
Of this additional material, three
pieces are here published for the
first time. “Two Letters To
Charles Warren Stoddard (19001901)”, from page 218, and
“Letter To ‘Mr. Revision Editor’ (Woman’s Home Companion) (February 5, 1902)”, from
page 210.
The literary selection here has
been chosen to represent what
the Editors call London’s “three
broad general categories” of
“the writing business, the work
ethic, and mentorship” (xiv). As
with the first edition, the main
body of material is arranged
thematically in accordance with
these subjects, and presented
chronologically. The new material is added at the end, and,
though not in chronological order, it does continue with the
thematic order.
Header notes for each chapter
elucidate the practical questions
relating to each letter or group
of letters, explaining in what
circumstances they were written,
to whom and what role the recipient(s) took in London’s life.
Annoyingly, too often these
notes go on to dissolve into unnecessary reiterations of what
has come before in the Introduction.
London was an unconventional
man who led an unconventional
life. He travelled widely and was,
at various times, a labourer, an
illegal oyster pirate, an officer of
the California Fish Patrol, a
sailor, a homeless drifter, a
prison inmate, a street corner
speaker, a socialist party member, a gold prospector, a journalist, a war correspondent, a
writer, a designer and builder of
ships, and a rancher. In collecting pieces of his day-to-day correspondence, it would be impossible to produce an uninteresting book. This material is very
worthwhile reading in its own
right. As with his great literary
works, these letters reflect his
socialistic criticisms and ideologies, his concerns with innumerable and varied “issues of community”, and his love of the
natural world, whilst documenting the life of a writer and his
philosophies on writing profes-
sionally.
The Editors provide a useful and
interesting Chronology of London’s life, and their Bibliography
doubles as a Suggested Readings list. This extended book is
at once a literary-biographical
tool for students, an education
for writers, a sociology lesson,
and a very, very good read.
Culture
The Cambridge Companion to American
Modernism edited by
Walter Kalaidjian
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Paperback,
£16.99 ISBN: 0521536804; pp 358
Reviewed by Colin Harrison,
Liverpool John Moores University
The
resurgence of interest
in
modernism
continues –
par ti cul arl y
with respect
to visual culture – but
surveys specific to an
American
context have been somewhat
scarce. Daniel Singal’s special
issue of American Quarterly in
1987 (reprinted as Modernist
Culture in America) is still one of
the few to explore the different
fields of American culture and
society that modernism touched,
while also addressing important
issues to do with the relation
between modernism and nationhood: how does a particular kind
of modernism emerge in America, and how does a particular
construction of America emerge
in modernism? Walter Kalaidjian’s collection extends and
updates these approaches, providing an invaluable introduction to the subject, and is likely
to become a core text for many
undergraduate programs.
The Cambridge Companion to
American Modernism is pre-
33
dominantly literary in focus:
other artistic forms such as
painting, music and cinema are
treated but largely in the extent
to which they inform the writing
of the period. Kalaidjian states
in his introduction that the aim
is to map the “multiplicity, diversity, complexity, anarchy and
chaos” (2) that characterises
both the lived experience of
modernity and its cultural expressions. If this seems quite a
loose rationale for the book, it
does accommodate the contributors’ various attempts to
challenge embedded assumptions and open up the study of
modernism to new material.
Thus Rita Barnard offers a provocative new reading of modernist fiction by placing canonical novelists alongside lesser
known writers such as Nathan
Asch; Cary Nelson resists the
priority given to Imagism in accounts of modern poetry, arguing that it is both more formally
diverse than supposed and only
one aspect of a broader poetic
endeavour encompassing antiimperialist, feminist and proletarian writing; Mark Sanders
likewise
emphasises
a
“heterodox modernism” in
which the New Negro Renaissance plays a more central part,
and in which the preoccupation
with alienation and epistemological crisis is offset against a
more politically engaged project,
rooted in pragmatism, seeking
“to make real the promises of
Reconstruction.” (154) The cumulative effect of these approaches is to give a renewed
sense of a moment of unparalleled cultural activity radically
different from the previous era,
yet one whose own history is
being continually reviewed and
reinterpreted. As such, the book
ought to prove stimulating both
for new and more established
students of the era.
Given the emphasis on multiplicity and diversity, the least
successful essays are those that
cover a range of material at the
expense of theorisation or synthesis.
Marjorie Perloff’s account of the American avantgarde is overly biographical, and
while it does examine the correspondence between literary and
artistic experiment - through the
creative exchanges between
Stieglitz, Picabia, Stein, Williams
and others - it does not entertain
critical debates about the cultural significance of the avantgarde. To reflect on the passing
of New York Dada with the
vague words “a new ethos was
in the air” (216) also seems an
insufficient way to historicise the
movement. Equally problematic
is Paula Rabinowitz’s piece on
modernism and the city: riffing
on themes of density and mobility, her analogies between social
life and literary form are too
speculative, and her enthusiasm
for a “pulp modernism” in
which hierarchies between the
experimental and vernacular,
the exotic and familiar are broken down leads her to lose a
grip on her terms of analysis
(just what is and what isn’t modernist) - as the unhelpful label of
Esther Bubley as a “modern
(ist)” photographer illustrates.
(270)
The strongest essays are those
that engage explicitly with theories of modernity or situate their
material within a changing critical context – most notably Janet
Lyon’s, which shows how gay
and recent feminist perspectives
have generated a more nuanced
understanding of gender and
sexuality in the modern period
in the wake of Huyssen’s monolithic formulation of a feminised
mass culture as modernism’s
Other. Walter Benjamin is the
dominant theoretical presence:
both Rita Barnard and Michael
North usefully take up from his
claim that changes in the material world (in production, technology and space) produce
changes in perception, while
moving away from his melancholy emphasis on modernity as
anomie and alienation. For me,
North’s is the best piece here.
Placing visual culture at the centre of modernism, he traces a
tension between two competing
“scopic regimes” – vision as a
form of rationalisation, and a
chaotic “frenzy of the visible” –
evident in modern phenomena
from train journeys to photography and cinema, and which ultimately informs modernism’s
dual impulse towards synthesis
on the one hand and a partial,
embodied perspective on the
other. In the process, he shows
that avant-garde artists and writers are much better understood
not to be repudiating popular
culture but actively engaging
with it to capture the delight and
uncertainty of a world given
over to representation.
Elsewhere, it has to be said that
theorists of modernity are somewhat thin on the ground –
whether Benjamin’s Frankfurt
colleagues in debate during the
1930s over the relations between aesthetics, politics and
culture, or more contemporary
figures like Jurgen Habermas,
David Harvey, and Marshall Berman who have in different ways
attempted to assess the legacies
of the era. Postmodernism, indeed, hardly gets a mention.
Clearly, the book aims to concentrate on literary history, but it
seems a missed opportunity not
to entertain some of these wider
questions: has there been another paradigm shift since? Has
the modernist project ‘failed’, to
become little more than a degraded style, or can it be
thought of as a continuing process of critique and renewal?
Can such categories as ‘avantgarde’ or ‘mass culture’ be
meaningfully applied today?
While many of the essays in the
collection do an impressive job
of conveying the richness and
complexity of the period itself,
they underplay such matters and
in doing so they arguably obscure its relationship, and that of
modernism, to the present.
34
Suburban Xanadu: The
Casino Resort on The
Las Vegas Strip and
Beyond by David
G.Schwartz
(New York: Routledge, 2003,
£19.99, Pp xi + 242, ISBN 0-41593557-1)
Reviewed by Joe Kennedy University of Sussex
The
academy’s view
of Las Vegas
has
long
been that of
J e a n
Baudrillar d
in his America. We are
inclined
to
think of it as
a
desertbound
expression of the ‘pure baroque of
Disneyland’, played out to the
level of a (barely) real city, and
as such inseparable from a
sense of hyper-real superficiality
that masks fragility and dissoluteness with neon and cash.
Fictive representations have varied in their treatment, but the
ability to see Vegas as the natural home of mob operations
(Casino, 1995), the FBI’s biggest
crime lab outside of its headquarters (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, 2000) or even a solitary vampire preying on cocktail
waitresses (The Night Stalker,
1972) lend it a decidedly Dionysian edge which is at first not
easily reconcilable with the
picket fences of American suburbia.
By contrast Schwartz suggests
that the suburbanization of the
United States provides an interpretive framework through
which to understand the development of Las Vegas resorts, as
well as those in Atlantic City and
on Indian land throughout the
nation. We might, therefore,
construct a line of development
that begins not in Nevada at all,
but with the 1920s rise of the
private ownership of automobiles among the middle classes
and the change to the structure
of American cities that this precipitated, a change which the
need to build homes for returning soldiers following WWII ensured would characterize the
way America has grown and
developed in the past sixty years,
and the way its citizens understand their environments and
are socialized.
The casino resorts of Vegas developed, he tells us in his introduction and first chapter, along
the highway southwest to Los
Angeles, the road which was to
become the ‘Strip’ of today, in a
mimicry of suburban development of the time which created a
virtual subdivision for Southern
Californians to visit which was
as convenient to drive to as their
local strip-mall or drive-in theatre. The ‘suburban’ nature of the
casino resorts along Las Vegas
Boulevard is, for Schwartz, compounded by their nature as individual destinations, which strive
to provide their guests with everything they need for their vacations in order to ensure that the
majority of their guests’ disposable dollars are spent with them,
rather
than with
their
neighbours and other local businesses. This mirrors the building
of the post-war exurban sprawl
of ranch and colonial tract
houses in which the majority of
the bread and butter customers
from whom the resorts made
their money lived, entirely selfsufficient developments connected to one another by highways, not footpaths or public
transportation. By 1975, the
downtown Las Vegas of Fremont Street had begun to more
closely resemble the sprawl of
the strip than a conventional
Central Business District, and
the transformation of the modern gaming establishment into
an incontrovertibly suburban
and mall-like phenomenon,
rather than a mere business on a
city street, was confirmed, a
trend which Schwartz sees echoed in the casinos of New Jersey, Connecticut and elsewhere.
The great strength of this study
lies in Schwartz’s ability to
seamlessly blend the stories of
American suburbanization and
the Nevada, and later national,
gaming industry. The many fact
and figures, and architectural
details which the book contains
add to the seeming exhaustiveness of the analysis of the
changing physical environment
of the casino, and the transformation of the early oases among
the dust and scrub of the Los
Angeles highway into the staggering Disney-esque behemoths
of today. It is extremely accessible for an academic study and
deserves wide readership
among those who study the
twentieth century US, architectural history, and the postmodern condition.
New York Sights,
Visualizing Old and New
by Douglas Tallack
New York, Oxford: Berg, 2005
ISBN 1845201701
Reviewed by Anne-Marie Evans,
University of Sheffield.
Douglas
Tallack
offers an informed critique of the
ultimate
American
city in this
thoughtprovoking
and enjoyable reading
of
urban
culture. Using a vast array of
examples from literature, art,
photography and architecture,
Tallack writes an original account of the city as text, simultaneously considering the important and changing role of the
flâneur within the changing
panorama of the ‘New America’.
Bringing this account up to date,
there is an investigation into
how visual perceptions of the
city have been changed by the
events of 9/11. Drawing on a
highly detailed structural knowledge of his topic, Tallack discusses differing views of the city,
from the growth of capitalism as
witnessed in Herman Melville’s
Bartleby: A Story of Wall Street,
35
to visions of the Gilded Age in
classic novels such as Henry
James’s The American Scene
and Edith Wharton’s The Age of
Innocence, to Paul Auster’s postmodern dissemination of the
urban in City of Glass.
The American
Intellectual Tradition.
Edited by David A
Hollinger & Charles
Capper
Addressing a range of visual
explorations of the city, this
richly illustrated text traces the
development of the civic scene
and its acknowledgement of
emerging modernities. Taking
into account historical developments, such as the fact that after
the population increased, New
York City become the largest city
in the world in 1925 (12), Tallack
investigates the city’s growing
preoccupation with verticality,
and offers an intriguing examination of different photographic
versions of a famous New York
landmark; the Flatiron Building.
Analysing work by Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen
and Alfred Stieglitz, Tallack explores how differing photographic techniques reveal how
ideas of Old New York were
gradually influenced by the onset of the New New York. Offering a critique of work by artists
such as George Bellows, John
Sloan and Georgia O’Keefe,
helps present an engaging and
wide-reaching study. The development of the transport network
in the city, the changing configurations of the New York skyline,
the development of the now
famous New York grid, and the
homes of the leisure class elite
are all assessed and evaluated
as part of this valuable art history.
Oxford University Press, New
York, 2001 Vol I: ISBN: 0-19513720-5, Paperback. Pages: 566
Vol II: ISBN: 0-19-513722-1, Paperback. Pages: 513
Well-written, persuasively argued and wide-ranging in topics,
New York Sights would be a
valuable asset to any American
Studies course, and of interest
to both undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as
academics working in the fields
of literature, art or urban studies.
Reviewed by John Wedgwood
Pound
MA
(Dunelm)
Ph.D Student,
University of
Birmingham.
These
volumes
are
conceived
for
college
and
undergraduate
students and
designed to
provide access to documents routinely
assigned by tutors. The depth is
considerable, the editors have
successfully aimed to provide
substantial excerpts rather than
a greatly expanded range of authors, whilst context building
segue text is kept to a minimum
based on the assumption that
sufficient background will be
provided by tutors.
This is a formula that works well.
The focus is intellectual history,
what the editors term the
“American Family Argument”.
Documents have been chosen
that represent a significant position and advance an argument
whether through sermons, letters, treaties, or essays.
This impetus for this revised
fourth edition comes from the
feedback received from the editor’s colleagues and thus reflects
recent scholarship with new
works on theology, psychology,
cultural theory, gender awareness and the role of the US in
world affairs.
The works are arranged thematically. The first volume initiates
the collection, as one might expect: Winthrop’s A Modell of
Christian Charity (1630). Also
included in part one of this volume, subtitled “The Puritan Vision Altered” are standard Puritan tracts by Cotton Mather and
Jonathan Edwards.
The Revolutionary period addressed in part two, “Republican
Enlightenment”, represents the
spectrum of republican thought
with Adams, (his 1765 Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal
Law is an inspired inclusion),
Paine, Jefferson, Hamilton and
Madison given their say. Abigail
Adams famously admonished
her husband not to “forget the
ladies”, and they are represented here by Judith Sargent
Murray’s 1790 essay On the
Equality of the Sexes.
Parts Three and Four, “The Protestant Awakening and Democratic Order” and “Romantic Intellect and Cultural Reform”,
take up the themes of religion,
reform and liberation. Charles
Grandison Finney lectures on
the Revivals of Religion, William
Lloyd Garrison ponders African
Liberation, Margaret Fuller takes
up the cause of Women in the
Nineteenth Century whilst Henry
David Thoreau’s Resistance to
Civil Government (1849) presages the themes of the fifth and
last section of this volume “The
Quest for Union and Renewal”.
The Civil War era is addressed
through a varied section embracing works on America’s
blacks, the emancipation of
women together with a number
Lincoln Texts.
For the editors, if the overarching themes of volume I are religious in nature, its successor is
concerned with science and
character – a focus well served
by selections dealing with secular culture, social progress, diversity and post modernity, from
William Graham Sumner’s Sociology (1881) to W.E.B. Du Bois’s
The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
The pieces on ideology and selfanalysis in the inter-war years
are thoughtfully chosen and the
post War dynamism and confidence of America (though including the concurrent conflicts)
is well served by selections from
Hannah Ardent, David Bell, Mal-
36
colm X, Thomas
Noam Chomsky.
Kuhn
and
This is a fine selection, of considerable value to A-Level and
undergraduate students, that
gives a real sense of the intellectual development of America.
The chronologies at the end of
each volume (with time-line details of American documents,
European documents and World
events) are invaluable for context and trend identification. One
criticism however is the dearth
of material from the 1980s and
1990s, with nothing dated after
1992. Where is 1980s monetarism, where are Newt Gingrich
and Ralph Nader? However, this
is primarily a targeted source
book, necessarily curriculum
dependent and I look to further
editions with a sense of anticipation.
The Business of
America: The Cultural
Production of a PostWar Nation. By Graham
Thompson.
London: Pluto Press, 2004. ISBN
0-7453-1808-8, pbk., £14.99 ix +
189pp.
Reviewed by
Lisa
Rull.
University of
Nottingham
When academic books
are expected
to
achieve
broad audience
sales
or satisfy a
specific textbook readership, they need to clearly establish their appeal early in the volume. One method is for the
contents page to outline the concerns and themes dealt with,
and depending on the use of
terminology this can also suggest those who may benefit
most from the full text: are the
chapters titled in such a way as
to invite or exclude specific
readerships?
In Graham
Thompson’s book, the chapter
titles arguably do him a major
disservice, for his incisive narrative is far more accessible and
focused than they may suggest.
The book is undoubtedly intellectually rigorous, but Thompson’s authorial voice wears this
lightly enough to present a work
appealing to a broader readership than may be initially suggested.
Thompson takes as his starting
point the paraphrasing of US
president Calvin Coolidge’s 1925
remarks on what defines America: ‘the business of America is
business.’ From here, he explores how this statement embodied “conflicting ideological
values” (1): as a slogan, Coolidge’s remark could both justify
the actions of American business and simultaneously critique
these actions as undermining
the true nature of ‘America’.
Thompson consistently uses the
term ‘America’ in those concept
quote marks to analyse the impact and negotiation of this often contentious concept as it is
conveyed in American literature.
In doing so, he interrogates the
formulation of American Studies
as a discipline both explicitly in
his introductory chapter, and
implicitly across the two parts of
the book via his thematic readings of specific texts.
Whereas Part I, “White Male
Literary Culture”, identifies the
struggles over the values shaping both American business and
white male culture, in Part II,
“The Difference of Gender, Race
and Sexuality”, these struggles
are reshaped and reclaimed by
those who have been positioned
on the outside. This results in a
narrative that ultimately explores the fundamental notions
of identity underpinning the
definition of ‘America’ as a nation. In both parts, each chapter
focuses on three or four examples of literary works or authors
and, largely, this is effective,
despite an inevitable assumption of prior knowledge on the
part of the reader regarding the
plots. Thompson gets around
this by grounding his own analyses within discussions of the
works’ contexts and summaries
of the existing critical commentaries. For example, his study of
Miller’s Death of a Salesman
convincingly expands the established psychological and geographic reach and focus of the
play from the domestic and the
north-eastern seaboard sales
region to the jungle. In this context, Willy Loman’s exhaustion
arises when “the American pioneer spirit and the requirements
of business in the jungle become incompatible” (33). Thus
the character of Uncle Ben becomes far more central in terms
of the discourses of business
than previous critical analyses
have acknowledged.
However, elsewhere Thompson
can allow other critical voices far
more domination, usually to the
detriment of his own arguments.
Some works suffer particularly
from this synoptic approach,
especially those set in more recent decades or notional futures.
Nevertheless, whilst clearly
comfortable throughout the
book discussing his mid-20th
century examples, the ambiguity
and challenges in Part II against
the white male concept of
‘America’, and therefore of the
discourses of business, also allow him greater freedom to express these analyses. Overall,
Thompson provides a valuable
overview to this aspect of the
cultural construction of
‘America’, albeit one that could
leave some readers wanting
37
History
more.
Neither Dead Nor Red:
Civilian Defence and
American Political
Development during the
Early Cold War by
Andrew D. Grossman
Pp. xx + 175. Routledge, 2001.
£16.99. ISBN 0-415-92990-3.
Reviewed by
David Seed
Liverpool
University
This study is
partly
an
exercise
in
revising mistaken
perceptions of
the
early
Cold
War,
like the conception that the USA
was a weak state at the time, or
that the state apparatus was
insulated from society. Andrew
Grossman refutes these views
and asserts a continuity between
the US institutions set up during
the Second World War and their
functioning during the late 1940s
and 1950s. He shows that by
1945 – in some areas by an even
earlier date – an ad hoc consensus had formed on the Soviet
threat and soon afterwards, in
the light of the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests in the Pacific,
a collective sense of America’s
vulnerability had taken shape
which was to influence US foreign policy. Grossman charts the
gradual construction of the national ‘civic garrison’ and the
projected continuous state of
national emergency which accompanied it. Under the combined impact of the Soviet
atomic test of 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War, in 1950
the Federal Civil Defence Administration was formed and it
is the operations of this agency
which form the central part of
Grossman’s study.
Following a wartime strategy of
media relations and propaganda
techniques, in the early 1950s
the FCDA began to produce a
stream of reports, pamphlets
(like Survival Under Atomic Attack) and special numbers of
magazines like Collier’s, which
issued a ‘future reportage’ coverage of World War III complete
with simulated photographs.
Local communities were mobilized (as described in Philip K.
Dick’s novel Time out of Joint),
elaborate nuclear drills were
devised, and the Alert America
convoy was formed. The latter
was a sort of travelling side
show designed to show the
course of a nuclear war. These
activities, together with the distribution of ‘home kits’ in case of
attack, all formed part of the
domestication of the nuclear
threat. Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound has to date been
one of the main sources for information on this civil defence
programme, but Grossman
takes her to task for assuming
that this programme simply
fixed women more firmly within
a narrow domestic function,
when in fact it opened up (again
as happened in World War II) a
range of roles for them.
Grossman’s study is impeccable
in its facts, figures and statistics,
but we still need books like
Homeward Bound to give a
physical impression of the drills
and all-pervading anxiety of this
period.
Lincoln’s Sanctuary –
Abraham Lincoln and
the Soldiers’ Home, by
Matthew Pinsker
(Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press,
2003, $30.00)
Pp.
256.
ISBN 0 19
516206 4
Reviewed by
Gary Smith Department
of
History,
University of
Dundee
Each summer between 1862 and
1864, the Lincoln family left the
White House and headed outside Washington to a cottage
located in the ground of the Old
Soldiers’ home, a residence for
disabled military veterans. Seeking an escape from the pressures of the presidency and the
endless visitors to the White
House, this residence offered
Lincoln sanctuary, and the perspective to think how best to
pursue the war
Despite Lincoln living at the Soldiers’ home for almost a quarter
of his presidency, his time at this
location has been rather overlooked by historians and the
general public, with the home
not declared a national monument until the year 2000. Matthew Pinsker highlights how this
has been a missed opportunity,
convincingly arguing that the
unfamiliar setting of the home
helps shine new light on familiar
events from Lincoln’s time in
office. The summers that Lincoln
was in residence coincided with
some of the most momentous
decisions of his presidency, particularly the summer of 1862
which saw his gradual progression towards a declaration of
emancipation. In well chosen
examples we see Lincoln struggling with the replacement of
Union commanders, military
setbacks and other wartime concerns; the secluded nature of the
home failing to shield Lincoln
from the responsibilities of his
position.
Although a large part of the
work highlights how Lincoln’s
stay at the home corresponded
with key wartime developments,
where it really shines is in its
depiction of the social benefits
that the home conferred upon
the President. Lincoln was often
deprived of the company of his
wife and son, particularly in
1863 when Mary and Tad were
away from the home for 10
weeks in the aftermath of Mary’s
carriage accident. The void created by their departure encouraged Lincoln to talk to the soldiers stationed there, entertain
visitors and callers, and spend
38
time with the Stanton family the Secretary of War also taking
advantage of the escape offered
by the soldiers’ home. What
emerges is a portrayal that
serves to humanise the legendary President. Whether he is
entertaining visitors while wearing carpet slippers, visiting a
nearby Contraband camp, or
riding through the grounds of
the home, his humanity and
character shine through.
disagree.
That it does so in such convincing fashion is testament to the
large variety of sources used by
Pinsker, many of them rarely
seen before. Of particular interest are the reminisces of soldiers
from Company K, 150th Pennsylvania, the army unit deployed to
guard Lincoln during his stay.
These men enjoyed unparalleled
access to the President, with
their recollections highlighting
how Lincoln would often come
down to their camp to listen to
their views, something that the
men used to their advantage in
order to gain supplies and provisions. While the number of visitors that passed through the
home during the Lincoln family’s stay was probably in the
hundreds, Pinsker’s work contains insights from 75 such visitors, a cross-section of society
that included generals, politicians, socialites and foreign dignitaries.
Reviewed by John Wedgwood
Pound MA (Dunelm) Ph.D Student, University of Birmingham.
These varied characters help
give colour to the narrative of
the book, and add another dimension to an already engaging
tale. Clearly argued and well
constructed, this work is a welcome addition to the existing
scholarship on Lincoln, showing
that even the most well documented event can still have new
light shed upon it. Pinsker argues that “The place was not
just a backdrop to great events
but also a participant in them.”
After reading this wellresearched book, it is hard to
Mr Jefferson’s Lost
Cause, Land, Farmers,
Slavery and the
Louisiana Purchase by
Roger G. Kennedy
Oxford University Press, New
York, 2003 ISBN: 0-19-515347-2,
Hardback. Pages: 350 List Price
$30.60
Kennedy,
Director
Emeritus of
the National
Museum of
American
History and a
former director of the US
National Park
Service, has presented a complex and controversial thesis –
that Jefferson’s misguided policy in the Old South was responsible for the Civil War.
Kennedy, supported by a wealth
of material, demonstrates at
length the idealism of Jefferson’s Agrarian republic vision
against the reality of planter
dominance, land speculation,
exploitation and betrayal. He
paints in rich detail a picture of
the South’s dependence on
slave labour, cotton, and British
economic power. This dependence is a central theme – it
drives the Virginians in the
White House to shamelessly
favour the Planters in maintaining a system only sustainable by
continual expansion into new
territories. Thus lay the imperative to acquire, by fair means or
otherwise, the backwater territories of distracted European Powers.
Kennedy’s style is intense but
unfocussed. The book is divided
into four parts, each roughly
chronological within itself but
not in relation to each other.
Each chapter within these sec-
tions is further divided, sometimes within two or three paragraphs, to deal with a precise
point or to elaborate, sometimes
tangentially, on a particular topic
or individual. These bijou diversions cover the wide range of
characters that contributed to
the “Lost Cause” and are often
fascinating, though sometimes
disruptive to the narrative - he
has a genealogist’s penchant for
emphasising, often irrelevantly,
their personal ancestry and
European ethnicity.
The style is intended to provide
a view across the piece, although this is imperfectly
achieved. However, the work is
particularly strong in providing
the background to the plantation
systems, the pressing geopolitical issues in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and in particular demonstrating how America, particularly the South, remained an
economic colony of Great Britain
for generations after the Revolution.
A particularly interesting aspect
is the account of the ecological
history, the scientific assessment of the Planter’s husbandry
and the effects on the soil of
intensive farming – in particular
the environmental impact of
slavery. The contrast with the
practices of the indigenous Indians is a theme that is well explored.
Kennedy is clearly sympathetic
to Jefferson, but his thesis is
devastating to his reputation.
One is forced to compare him
unfavourably with his principled
and disinterested predecessors
Adams and Washington.
This work would be of particular
use to undergraduates focusing
on the South in the period,
whilst its narrative style does
not lend itself to easy use as a
reference work the index and
chapter notes are comprehensive. For the postgraduate Kennedy provides a thought provok-
39
ing contribution to the debate.
The Conquest of the
Missouri. The Story and
the Life and Exploits of
Captain Grant Marsh, by
Joseph Mills Hansom.
With a new introduction
by Paul L. Hedren.
(Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, PA. 2003. First published
in Chicago by A.C. McClurg in
1909. $21.95 paperback.) Pp436.
ISBN 0-8117-2482-4.
Reviewed by Alan Lowe. B. A.
Manchester Metropolitan
University.
The Conquest
of
the
Missouri tells
the story
of Captain
G r a n t
Marsh’s
exploits as
a steamboat pilot and captain on the
Mississippi and Missouri Rivers
from 1846 to 1906. Originally
published in 1909, the style of
writing is quaintly old-fashioned,
but eminently readable. At times
I was unsure whether this was a
biography of Grant Marsh (18341916) or of the river he so ably
traversed in the early years of its
“conquest”, when he set speed
records never matched or
beaten and navigated further up
stream than any man before him.
Many of the earlier chapters are
charmingly mundane, though
even here I found an interesting
account of the Battle of Shiloh.
In later chapters the reader is
taken on a journey aboard
Marsh’s steamboat, the Far West
that will remain in the memory
for some time. The book conveys a strong sense of place - of
Sioux City, Yankton, Bismarck,
Rosebud, Powder River and the
romantically named Pompey’s
Pillar, places whose names are
redolent of an era now departed.
We are introduced to the 7th
Cavalry, the Sioux and Cheyenne Nations, and such luminaries as Generals Terry, Sherman
and Crook, Colonel George Armstrong Custer, Major Reno, Buffalo Bill Cody, Crazy Horse and
Sitting Bull. Hansom provides us
with a graphic description of the
build up to the Battle of the Little
Big Horn, the battle itself and its
consequences. Although Grant
Marsh takes no active part in the
actual campaign, the insights
gained from this new perspective are fascinating.
Mr. Hansom is probably overly
lavish in his praise of Captain
Marsh, but this matters little.
The book is certainly worthy of a
re-print and I commend it without hesitation to anyone interested in the area and era under
discussion, be they academics
searching for good source material or the general reader after a
good old-fashioned read.
Freedom From Fear: The
American People in Depression and War, 19291945 (The Oxford History of the United
States) by David M. Kennedy.
Oxford University Press, 2001.
ISBN paperback 0-19-514403-1,
pp. 936. List price: £15.00.
Reviewed by Dr. Wendy Toon.
American Studies Course Leader,
University of
Worcester.
This singlevolume edition, taking
its title from
FDR’s
famous 1941
speech, argues
that
the two key
crises,
the
Depression and the Second
World War, created a climate of
fear which the Roosevelt administration attempted to overcome
through a variety of policies
aimed at providing security.
Kennedy considers that this
drive for security, both domestic
and international, characterized
the Rooseveltian response and
hoped to secure for the American people one of the main
“four freedoms.” He highlights
the New Deal’s shortcomings,
contradictions and failures and
teases out the variety of determinants in American World War
II strategy. Context is emphasized and the author attempts to
give a feel of the times in which
the specific events took place.
Although this volume’s focus is
firmly on the American experience it does also consider the
other side, as it were, whether
that be the Republicans, the British, the Soviets, the Japanese or
the Germans.
This book’s main achievement is
the way in which it weaves
seamlessly through the various
aspects that shaped the American experience in these two pivotal decades. With a lightness
of touch, particularly in the first
half of this volume, Kennedy
deals with the full gamut of life.
The written style is sophisticated
yet accessible for undergraduates and above. As reader, you
are carried at pace through
these years by an entertaining
and colourful narrative that
binds the often complicated and
sweeping events together. Freedom From Fear provides the
reader with interesting portraits
of the main players in American
and world history in the 1930s
and 1940s. Their careers are
woven into the narrative from
the start, with the clever opening
in which key figures from various countries are linked at the
end of World War One. Chapters that focus on the often
rather dry topic of military history are still livelily written and
engaging.
The focus on
“people” however is perhaps
uneven. There is surprisingly
little on the people (as in general
populace) in the discussion of
the Second World War. Despite
this, examination of the important actors and statesmen is
fleshed out with biographical
details presumably in an attempt
to emphasize that they were
people too. These portraits are
further coloured with their re-
40
flections on each other.
The author often exploits an
interesting collection of both
primary and secondary sources.
There is a clear awareness of
alternative interpretations for
many of the key events that
shaped these two vital decades.
Kennedy tests and challenges
some of the historiographical
understandings of this period.
However, much of the secondary information is based on
what would be considered classic but perhaps now slightly
dated volumes.
Footnotes,
maps, photographs, cartoons
and posters support the discussion. A comprehensive index
and illuminating bibliographical
essay are also included. The
bibliographical essay points to a
wide range of additional reading
and further exemplifies Kennedy’s extensive knowledge of
his chosen period. In summary,
Freedom From Fear is a great
example of the historians’ craft
of bringing the past to life in all
its fascinating detail. Although
daunting in its size, the years do
fly by.
Politics
The Intellectuals and the
Flag by Todd Gitlin.
New York: Columbia University
Press, 2006. ISBN 0231124929
Pp. 167. $24.95 (hardcover)
Reviewed by David Brian Howard, Associate Professor of Art
History, Nova Scotia College of
Art and Design University
Todd Gitlin’s
new
book,
The Intellectuals and the
Flag,
has
much in it to
recommend
to a reader
wanting to
reconstruct
the
critical
practice
of
American
intellectuals in the difficult aftermath of September 11, 2001.
With the self-stated goal of con-
tributing “to a new start for intellectual life on the left” (1)
Gitlin is sneeringly critical of the
role of identity politics and the
post-modern left in American
political life. With its roots in the
anti-war protests of the Vietnam
era, Gitlin argues that current
intellectual life on the American
left must re-conceive and reorganize itself if it is to have any
hope of confronting, “a disciplined alliance of plutocrats and
right-wing fundamentalist Christians”(2) that have come to
dominate particularly in the post
9/11 era.
With the remobilization of the left in mind
Gitlin tears into the American
Empire of the Bush years an era
which is both a “failing empire”
and a “failing democracy”(148).
Gitlin’s succinct summary of the
failings of American political life
is juxtaposed next to a postmodern left whose idea of
“resistance” and use of identity
politics was utterly incapable of
filling the democratic void that
had arisen in the United States
following the Vietnam War.
Gitlin calls for a renewal of a
“liberal patriotism, robust and
uncowed”(155) and draws upon
three neglected critical intellectuals of the United States in the
1950s and early 1960s to cue his
alternate vision of a leftist patriotism: David Riesman, C. Wright
Mills, and Irving Howe. These
stellar examples of a public intellectual life become a kind of
home-grown antidote to the
spurious influences of thinkers
like Michel Foucault on the postmodern left that Gitlin feels
must be relegated to the past if
liberal patriotism is to return.
While I wholeheartedly agree
with Gitlin’s critique of the
American Empire and his valorisation of three important, and
overly neglected, critical voices,
Gitlin’s book represents such a
caricature of so many other important critical voices on the
twentieth century left, and ignores so many others, such as
Gore Vidal, that it does far more
harm than good in re-imagining
what a re-motivated liberal patriotism could look like. The legiti-
mate critiques of the political
failings of the post-modern left
are lost in sweeping denunciations of such a broad range of
critical voices, ranging from an
undifferentiated critique of thinkers such as the Frankfurt School,
Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky and Edward Said. Conflating this broad range of thinkers
under the banner of a fundamentalist left that is mired in its
Manichean view of the world is
inaccurate, unjustified, and ultimately self-defeating to the very
project Gitlin advocates. Intellectuals as diverse as Theodor
Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and the aforementioned Edward Said were,
and are, consummate critics of
the manichaeism in the cultural
and political life of the twentieth
century and, I would argue, are
crucial to a reconceptualising of
a new critical left perspective in
American society that avoids
some of the missteps of postmodernism. It is a shame that
Gitlin is not more nuanced and
differentiating in his critical assessment of the contribution of
so many dissenting leftist voices.
Ultimately, Gitlin reveals an underlying conservatism, which
calls into question his vision of a
liberal patriotic renewal.
Race
The African American
Experience in
Cyberspace: A Resource
Guide to the Best Web
Sites on Black Culture
and History by Abdul
Alkalimat
(Stirling, VI, and London: Pluto
Press, 2004) ix + 294 pp., (paper)
ISBN 0 7453
2222
Review by
A n d r e w
Fearnley,
University of
Cambridge,
UK
This review
could
be
41
done in a few words: do not buy
this book. It is made redundant
by its own subject, and it is not
well presented. Such assessments hardly make for the most
enlightening review though, and
rather than just focus on the
limited uses of Experience in
Cyberspace, I want to look at the
views taken on this subject by
the author, Abdul Alkalimat, a
sociologist, and current editor of
the H-Af-Am listserv.
The book is an introductory
guide to the Internet, listing
websites that deal with various
aspects of the ‘black experience’.
To begin with, there is a certain
irony in the fact that someone
would print such a guide. As
Alkalimat himself recognizes,
“the web is alive and part of it is
born and part of it dies every
hour.” [105] From the moment
this guide left the press in 2004
it was already quickly falling out
of date, and one would have to
hope given the many pitfalls and
shortcomings of the current
work, that serious thought
would be given before a subsequent, updated edition was contemplated. Already some domains are obsolete. In printing
the web addresses of various
sites the work also presumes
that readers will type in lengthy
addresses rather than search
them via an engine. I wonder
how many people will key in
SNCC’s position paper on Vietnam, for example [204]
(lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/
HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/
Manifestos/SNCC_VN.html)?
Pitched at high-school students
and teachers, librarians, and the
general reader, the work is arranged in two parts, History (10
chapters) and Culture (20 chapters). Each chapter begins with a
passage about how such issues
have affected African Americans,
and a number of websites that
deal with various aspects of the
topic are listed thereafter
(ranging from 27 in a chapter
about gays/lesbians, to 60 on
music). Most of the sites I
viewed were really interesting,
and there is no doubting that the
author has provided a good
sampling of what is on offer.
Some sites do not chime with
the chapter topic however, like
when those relating to the ‘Civil
Rights Movement’ [85] are discussed in ‘Urban Life’. Discussion of the desegregation of the
US armed forces in a chapter on
‘Great Migrations’ is similarly illconceived. At the end of each
chapter further reading sections
are provided—sections annoyingly titled ‘Good Books’—and
these too are rather idiosyncratic.
A
chapter
on
‘DeIndustrialization’ notes the author’s own work [93], whilst failing to pay homage to Thomas
Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis [1996], a work that
catalysed recent discussions
about the topic.
Experience in Cyberspace cannot be recommended for its
prose or it stylistic merits: it has
neither. Yet our author seems
quite content with the few constructions he knows to the extant that in one passage five
consecutive sentences contain
some form of “there is/
are…” [25-6]. Repetition of
words does not just occur across
sentences, but within them too.
In the chapter on food a passage
is concluded with the warning
that “there are aspects of soul
food that need to be changed to
impact the types of diseases that
impact Black people.” [133] Alkalimat’s commentary is not just
difficult to read, it is also confusing. In an introductory section to
the chapter on health the reader
is told that “Black people have
been an essential source of labor, hence a minimal level of
health has been necessary to
keep the US economy going.” [114] Glib comments such
as “Black people work in all areas of health care” overlook significant details, like the lack of
African Americans in certain
areas of healthcare, for example
psychiatry.
Editing of this material is poor,
such that one has to hope that
the book was never edited. Indeed, there are more widows
and orphans here than in a nineteenth-century poorhouse; the
text has more cosmetic blemishes than a classroom of the
teenagers for which it is intended. Web addresses, for the
most part, appear in working
order, though I only sampled a
random number. On occasion
addresses are carelessly printed
twice, one needlessly under the
other [165, 230].
What rankled me most about
this work, however, and there
was much that did, was the author’s triumphalist praise for the
Internet. His feeling that it is the
“most democratic method for
gathering and [2] sharing information”,
available
to
“everyone” [1] overlooks the
factors of wealth, education, and
privilege that determine who
gets access to this technology.
Arguably the influence of such
factors is even more wide reaching than in publishing with everyone denied complete access
by institutional passwords, and
the need to purchase. Alkalimat’s lack of consideration for
the provenance of this material
is equally troubling. Descriptions
of websites seldom mention the
organization or individual(s)
who maintain the site, and a
number of references lead to
advocacy groups.
If anything good can be found in
this book, it is perhaps the hope
that some scholar will realize the
interesting discussion that could
be had about the Internet’s potentialities as a means for reconceptualizing understandings
of black diaspora. Although the
author’s indiscriminate use of
‘Black’ and ‘African American’
bludgeons such possibilities,
Alkalimat is surely correct in
claiming the technology’s unrivalled ability to connect people
across the globe. Exploring how
this might affect our understandings of race, political alliance,
and genealogy is surely a topic
worthy of pursuit.
42
Massive Resistance:
Southern Opposition to
the Second
Reconstruction edited
by Clive Webb
Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005, £38.99) pp. xiv, 244. ISBN
0195177851 (Hardback)
Reviewed by Emma Kilkelly
In the first
chapter Michael J. Klarman looks at
the Brown v.
Board
of
Education’s
declarati on
t h a t
‘segregation
in
public
schools was
unconstitutional.’(3) Klarman demonstrates
how the Southern Manifesto
aimed to preserve segregation
and discriminated against African-Americans who tried to vote,
or attempted to enrol their children at white schools - loss of
jobs, welfare benefits, and credit
refusal; harassment, assault,
burnings, bombings and murder.
Schools were closed to prevent
d e s e g r e g a t i o n ,
‘newspapers….boycotted and…
TV stations refused to air …
programs that discussed integration.’ (26)
In ‘Brown and Backlash’ Tony
Badger shows how segregationist candidates won elections,
and discusses African American
direct action of the 1960s.
Badger concludes that, ‘token
integration’ was ‘more effective
than massive resistance.’(47)
In Chapter Three, Adam Fairclough examines discrimination
against the NAACP, who had to
‘file… membership lists with the
secretary of state’(60) which resulted in loss of membership
and branch closures. Fairclough
analyses voting and discrimination in Louisiana, which resulted
in, ‘reducing the …black voters…from about 4,000 to
921.’(64)
John A. Kirk in the fourth chapter shows that ‘minimum compliance’ caused a ‘diluted form
of massive resistance….that actually wreaked chaos.’ (78) The
implementation of Brown had
no set deadline; many institutions could make token integration gestures.
In Chapter Five, Kevin M. Kruse
looks at the concept of
“Freedom of Association” white citizens wanted the right
‘to select their neighbors, their
employees, and their children’s
classmates.’(100) Whites withdrew their children from schools
and moved out of communities
frequented by African Americans: ‘On the Friday before the
black children were to arrive,
there were still 470 white boys
and girls…the following Monday,
they found only seven white
children.’(105)
George Lewis, in Chapter Six,
examines the connection between the Cold War and segregation rhetorical language of the
era: ‘white supremacists…claim
[ed] that civil rights activists
were part of an orchestrated,
communist plot.’(128)
David L. Chappell in ‘Disunity
and Religious Institutions in the
White South’ shows how
‘laypeople, not clergy’ (139) generally used the Bible for segregationist claims. Most religious
institutions did not comment on
segregation.
Jane Dailey in Chapter Eight
looks at segregation, miscegenation and religion, and shows
how a reading of the apostle
Paul’s arguments in Acts 17, can
be used both for and against
segregation. The segregationists
believed that ‘integration facilitated miscegenation. ’(158)
Dailey demonstrates how newspapers reported that integrated
schools would lead to intermarriage, and attempted sensationalist sex-slurs on the civil rights
marchers: ‘a Negro boy and a
white girl engaged in sexual
intercourse on the floor of the
church.’ (169)
In Chapter Nine Elizabeth Gillespie McRae focuses upon Flor-
ence Sillers Ogden, and her
newspaper column ‘Dis an’ Dat’
which purported white supremacist arguments for segregation.
Sillers was active in many
womens’ organizations and emphasized their duty to pass on
the ideologies of segregation to
their children: ‘to indoctrinate
the nation’s youth’.(191)
In the final chapter, Karen S.
Anderson looks at the peaceful
desegregation of Hoxie schools
in 1955, then the aftermath following the reportage in Life
magazine. Anderson writes that
a minister had even started telling his congregation that ‘God
would overlook violence committed in defense of white racial
“purity.”’(205)
This collection of essays is an
excellent source for students,
researchers and academics. It is
detailed, informative, extremely
well referenced, very interesting
and readable. It also suggests
areas for further research, such
as ‘school integration from the
perspective of teachers’ and the
‘ Citi ze ns’ Counci l For um
Films.’ (14)
Gender Studies
Women’s America:
Refocusing the Past, ed.
Linda K. Kerber, Jane
Sharron de Hart. 6th ed.
New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 751 pp., b/w
illustrations
ISBN 0-19-515982-9 (pbk.)
Reviewed by Alexandra Ganser,
M.A., University of ErlangenNuremberg, Germany
What is the
best way to
review an
encyclopaedia?
This question was a
major concern for me
while I was
reading
Women’s
43
America: Refocusing the Past,
realizing that this compendium
of scholarly essays, historical
documents, illustrations, and
bibliographical references was
truly encyclopaedic in nature.
Linda Kerber’s and Jane Sharron
de Hart’s edited compilation of
more than 400 years of women’s
history in the United States has
been reissued in 2004 in its 6th
edition (the first edition dating to
1982), and this alone acts as
overwhelming proof to the
book’s continuous importance
for students and teachers interested in any of the wide-ranging
aspects concerning women’s
lives in the U.S., past and present.
Structurally, Women’s America
is divided, after an introduction
to the history of (New) Women’s
History by the editors, into four
l ar g e h i st o r i ca l p er i o d s :
“Traditional America,” 16001820, a roughly one hundredpage section; the age of U.S.American industrialization, 18201900, covering a little over 150
pages; the 20th century up to
World War II of about 180 pages;
and the largest section, covering
post-war history and issues on
more than 200 pages. These four
sections, in turn, are divided into
academic articles--their perspectives ranging from history and
the social sciences to law, literature, and culture—on the one
hand and pivotal historical documents on the other. In both sections, the editors briefly introduce the subsequent article,
contextualizing it both in terms
of those concerns prevailing
throughout women’s history as
well as within the specific historical period at issue. These
introductory paragraphs are invaluable for the reader’s broader
understanding of the topic at
stake, as are the challenging
study questions that follow.
That most essays as well as all
the legal and other historical
documents are shortened and/or
edited by Kerber and de Hart is
no setback at all for this monumental (700+-pp.) compendium.
Instead, the incredible amount
of editorial work accomplished
here greatly helps the student
focus on the central aspects of
each work and, perhaps even
more importantly, enhances the
accessibility of documents written in alien idiom to many of us,
such as 17th century, nonstandard English or 21st century
legal jargon.
Regarding content, Kerber and
de Hart have done an equally
laudable job. I was unable to
think of a single topic in
women’s histories left uncovered by the book: from labour
organisation to reproductive
rights and marital laws, suffrage
and equality issues to
women’s—including enslaved
women’s--immigration experience, from women’s experiences during the Civil War to
witchcraft trials and the lynchings of African Americans,
Women’s America leaves hardly
any topic unexplored. We learn
of such icons in women’s history
in the United States as Pocahontas, Anne Hutchinson, Sojourner
Truth, the Grimké sisters, Betty
Friedan, Bella Abzug, the
Shirelles and Madonna, and
many more; notably, all of these
path-breaking, brave woman
warriors are situated against
their cultural backgrounds and
their times. Another feat accomplished in this respect is that the
black-and-white illustrations
give faces to these women’s
names, albeit perhaps not as
extensively as one would wish.
Yet personal accounts, such as
historian Gerda Lerner’s tale of
immigration, also balance off
the more theoretical sections
concerned with complex legal
matters, for instance.
Assembled in Women’s America
the reader finds excerpts from
such “classical” works as Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female
World of Love and Ritual” or
Susan Bordo’s Unbearable
Weight as well as recent contributions to women’s history like
the highly topical essays on
women in the first Iraqi War or
the ongoing struggle over abortion (written expressly for this
edition). In sum, this new addition of Women’s America: Refo-
cusing the Past again provides
the historically interested reader
with substantial information on
the richness and diversity of
American women’s lives and
struggles throughout the centuries.
Textbooks
Get Set for American
Studies by Edward
Ashbee
Edinburgh University Press 2004.
ISBN 0 74861692 6
Reviewed by Helen Tamburro
Ashbee begins
very
sensibly by
ad dr e s si ng
the very notion
of
studying
American
Studies. Any
American
Studies student
will
have sighed
when hearing the same old
question thrown at them,
'American Studies? What's
that?!' To many newcomers of
the subject it is an excellent
starting point as Ashbee concisely informs the reader exactly
why the study of America is so
relevant. American Studies has
grown in popularity and particularly since 9/11. Ashbee emphasises America's topicality and
relevance in the world we live in
today, highlighting US foreign
policy and discussing the notion
of the US as a hyperpower, also
due to its assumed world policeman status (no Team America
jokes please). For a guide to a
course there is actually a substantial amount of background
information provided, such as
the notion of the American
Dream; the impact of the US on
the rest of the world as Americanisation permeates the globe
and also global attitudes towards the US. America can
mean freedom to some, but the
opposite to others as we have
most notably witnessed in recent years.
44
Ashbee includes information on
course content and subject areas,
such as history, politics, literature and culture and the benefits
of both the multi and interdisciplinary aspect of American Studies. By no means for use as a
textbook, the subjects are broken down in such a way as
merely to give students an overview of the topics they are likely
to cover, such as the Civil War,
the Presidency and Congress
and major American authors.
Ashbee successfully conveys
how the understanding o£ these
varied yet connected topics is
enhanced, because of the multi
and interdisciplinary approach.
What is particularly effective
about his style of writing and
structure of the book is the way
in which fairly complex concepts
are simplistically conveyed,
whether Ashbee is referring to
Marxism or the Louisiana Purchase.
The list of UK courses provided
is a great feature, as is the section dedicated to study exchanges in the US. Ashbee provides case studies of American
Studies graduates, which really
are the best insight anyone
could get into life during and
following an American Studies
course. There are also examples
of final year modules that can be
taken, which again will be useful
to those considering the degree
course. Another practical feature
provided are the key terms associated with American Studies,
which are handy for any undergraduate.
thodical and informative guide
to American Studies. It acts as
an introduction to the subject for
newcomers and yet it can also
be a useful tool for university
students, although as Get Set for
American Studies is part of the
Get Set for University series of
books specifically aimed at AI
AS Level students, ultimately it
will prove too simplistic for undergraduates. Giving a good
idea of what to expect from a
degree course of this nature,
Ashbee's book is an effective
guide for potential American
Studies undergraduates and it is
therefore hard to fault the book.
This striking portrait of Hannah by Jeanne-Marie Kenny was in her
exhibition in Liverpool earlier this year. See the report on page 27.
In the second half of the book,
Ashbee focuses on study skills,
giving advice on writing essays
to degree standard and also emphasizing a greater need for individual based learning. There
are sample essay questions for
common topics - an excellent
source of preparation for all students that will provide any prospective American Studies student with a greater understanding of what to expect. There is a
also a list of helpful web sites
related to the degree.
Ashbee's book is a deliberately
basic, yet comprehensive, mePrinted by Rhodes Printing, Boundary Road, St Helens WA10 2QA