I think I hadn’t understood till now how completely radical it was to tell this story in 1946. Put it together with that Superman radio show, and you’d think telling truth to power was actually in vogue.
No wonder Willy Wyler, who saw his cameraman shot up over Europe, ended up having to fight Joe McCarthy too.
You’d think that someone who started out her interest in military-GI issues advocating for women in the military, working hand in hand with the likes of Linda Grant de Pauw, Rep. Patricia Schroeder and Captain Barb, who therefore knew about women in every war fought by the U.S, would have women as characters easily laced throughout the history I’m writing.
You’d think that a dyke who loved being able to give Walt Whitman’s boyfriend voice in my Civil War chapter would be on the alert for the gays described by Allen Berube, who dissented in their very presence in World War II — and not have to had thown at me the compelling example of Guadalcanal vet Paul Moore, a running buddy of William Sloane Coffin. (Below is a clip of his daughter Honor, who wrote a book about his double life.)
And you might even think that a girl who is obsessed with Bayard Rustin and led her earlier chapters with dissenters of color —William Apess, Lewis Douglass, W.E.B. duBois— wouldn’t draft a chapter with a nearly all-white cast, with the exception of Medgar Evers. That a girl who squinted at and photocopied stuff from A. Philip Randolph’s Committee Against Jim Crow in the Armed Services would have naturally devoted a few lines to the NAACP’s 1942 “Conscientious Objectors Against Jim Crow.” That she’d at least have included 73-yr-old du Bois sighing that ‘ We fight for democracy not only for white folk but for yellow, brown, and black…We fight not in joy but in sorrow with no feeling of uplift.”
Nope: as currently drafted my World War II chapter, like the war itself, features an all-male, nearly all-white cast. I slapped myself upside the head last night when I realized it. Better now than later, when Cynthia Enloe and Linda Bird Francke would do it more publicly on reading the final product.
To use the kind of language we used in the 1980s: I know I’m twisted by white privilege, but when did the frigging patriarchy decide to colonize my thinking?
A few of us, in Binghamton, New York , stood in a circle and sang this song the day after Lennon died. We were already stunned by an electoral victory like last month’s, but in the reverse direction. We felt that we had just begun the worst of times.
Last night, Elizabeth reports at my other shop, Yoko One was in Tokyo, memorializing John along with thousands of Japanese youth too young to remember, but who know the Beatles playbook by heart. Go see – and you’ll find Ann Northrop and Liza Minnelli, too,
It’s Pearl Harbor Day – a day I’m writing about right now in my chapter, when a lot of my characters felt put on notice. And right now so do I, with my deadline screaming at me. My most recent blogging has been at a Facebook page I put together for Ain’t Marching, rather than constantly clogging this one with meditations on spoiled priests and mortar blasts. (If you want to know more, please do stop by there.)
A few mostly-unmilitary matters I’ve meant to note here, though:
I swore yesterday to try to write nothing about Mumbai, besides linking to helpMumbai.com and NDTV. Certainly you should first read the reflections of Suketu Mehta, who I met at Nieman two years ago and thought of immediately this week. But I thought of something simple to bring to the party – spurred by the 1982 film I finally saw for the first time Friday night, which suddenly felt sort of timely. What would the guy above be feeling this week? (I’m not the only one asking, it seems.)
Above, you see Ben Kingsley as the young lawyer coaching fellow Indian-descent South Africans in the ways of satyagraha: later, in clips much less available, he strenuously opposes partition. But what did he say on the subject? I wondered. I guessed rightly that better scholars than I had asked the same, and found what I was looking for here and here. (No doubt there’s even better than that by Indian scholars, but I’m still in baby steps here.) Gandhi particularly saw the trouble that the two-state solution would mean for Bengal and for Kashmir – and he visited the latter, he wrote, he was heartened by the co-mingling of cultures, where acolytes of all religions had gathered to host him:
We have drunk the poison of mutual hatred and so this nectar of fraternization tastes all the sweeter and the sweetness should never wear out. … In the present exuberance one hears also the cry of “Long Live Hindustan and Pakistan,” from the joint throats of the Hindus and the Muslims.
But the political realities of each component elite (I’m not qualified to go into detail) crossed with British hurry to be rid of the expensive Raj – and the result is actually well limned in Deepa Mehta’s 1998 film, which led my fiancee to pledge war against all things British.
Given this week, I’m guessing Gandhiji would no longer do the same. We can only hope that the arc of history does bend toward justice – even if it’s as slow as he suggested in 1921:
“As yet I only see as through a glass darkly, and therefore have to carry conviction by slow and laborious processes, and then, too, not always with success.”
In the department of stuff you come across while looking for something else, I found this radio show (the link brings on streaming audio). Click, and you can listen to a “thousands of GI’s” protesting “racial discrimination in state hiring,” and a kind of unusual ally has their backs: Superman, who flies in to stop the state troopers ordered to fire on the vets. Not unusual, it turns out, for the Superman radio show of 1940-1951, whose stories never appeared in comics and which also featured Superman vs. The Clan of the Fiery Cross (also known as the KKK).
This is all old news to true geeks, and doubtless other better writers than I, like Michael Chabon. But I stumbled across it while poking around for something almost no one remembers (sort of my specialty): the American Veterans Committee.
AVC was a short-lived World War II veterans’ organization whose slogan was “Citizens First, Veterans Second.” And that story about the veterans protest was grounded in the same reality that gave AVC nearly a million members at its start.
By mid-1946, when that story ran, literally 12,000 active-duty soldiers were busy protesting at bases around the world, accusing the Truman administrationof dragging its feet in getting them home. One famously told Truman, “Give us our independence or go home to yours!” AVC, founded by the fellow below (who is not, as he seems, Orson Welles), had on its board civil rights icon Medgar Evers and Howard Zinn, among others. Many were writers, like Benjamin Bradlee and E.J. Kahn, and doubtless others found their way to that Superman show. In September of ’46, the AVC issued a special commendation to the producers of the show for its quiet linking of veterans with “social tolerance.”
Actually, the VFW had issued a similar award the month before, though it was for promoting “the American way” – code for crushing “commie” stuff like those “tolerant” Superman shows, which shut down in 1951 in favor of the commie-busting TV version. No place in the new Cold War for such thoughts — or for a veterans group that saw itself as composed of angelic troublemakers (e.g. sleeping in L.A. streets as a housing protest). By the time the 1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency tamed Superman completely, the AVC had mostly collapsed under a not-unfamiliar perfect storm of personality clashes, sectarian-left noise (snooze) and McCarthyism. Leaving veterans of that war to choose between the American Legion and the VFW, as odious to them as to many OEF/OIF vets now. Its founders basically did neither, choosing instead journalism, or film, or think tanks like the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace.
What happened next is still happening: some will be in the book. Stay tuned for some character sketches.
But I wonder if it would be too much of a cheat to lede my “necessary war” chapter with that fictional scene of “thousands of GIs.” (What do you think?)
It’s been an odd week, since I last posted: and now an odd Thanksgiving, with attention split between the chapter I’m working on (more on that in a bit), family stuff, and the desire to check the latest from Mumbai, as one of those surreally-huge crises threatens to split the world and our brains. Below are some quick links, in lieu of a full post.
Why am I otherwise AWOL? I think it’s like those first weeks working on the Civil War chapter, when I was struck dumb by the hugeness of its pain. Now, writing about what most call The Good War, I’m similarly cowed. I do think my chapter’s title will borrow instead from Samuel Hynes, who writes and speaks of a “necessary war,” as much of an oxymoron as that still feels. (While I can’t claim to have come up with a satisfactory alternative, that phrase that still feels a contradiction — the tool of the Mumbai gunmen, not sensible people.)
I’ll provide a little more later, but meanwhile:
At my other shop, an interesting riff on the woman who gave us the Thanksgiving holiday (and Vassar College), Sarah Josepha Buell Hale. While fact-checking the piece, I also found out that Hale’s son went to West Point, and suggested a poem by one of my almost-characters on her magazine: Edgar Poe, he son wrote, “is seen as a man of talent here, but he is too mad a poet to like mathematics.” That line could title a biography.When the frigging New York Times “Public Editor” is that clueless:
I said incorrectly last week that Matthew Shepard had been murdered in Colorado. He died in a hospital there. Thank you to readers who pointed out that the fatal beating took place near Laramie, Wyo.
It was all over the news, sir. Before you went to press, you could have double-checked, using The Google. Or even Youtube:
100 million: That’s how many people who felt as I did last week. Or at least as many as stood up yesterday to say: Not in our America.
Using the skills that were so essential to the election of the current president, a handful of kids-with-broadband organized the event in cities around the country. They used email, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube to provide a single, coordinated answer to the question so many were asking: “What do I do now?”
In Philly, the weather complied, with 70-degree temps warming the crowd of 5,000 clustered by City Hall. A group as diverse as my new city, in both ethnic composition and age. Families with small children, parents, ministers joined folks like myself and Rachel, or the guy with the sign “No More Mr. Nice Gay.” Or like white-haired Cass McGough, 72, who eyes were a soft match to her carved earrings, and whose sign said simply: I’M TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT. I didn’t ask her if she knew Harvey Milk, who would have been proud of the day.
“I never thought I’d live to see a black President,” McGough grinned as the crowd gathered. “But I also never thought they’d leave us so thoroughly out of this moment, either.”
Even more heartening, to me, was the Cataldi family — South Philly types who wouldn’t have looked out of place among my Bronx relatives. Dino Cataldi brought his entire family, whose signs were among those made famous on TV and here: A GAY MARRIAGE IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS MY FIRST, SECOND AND THIRD STRAIGHT MARRIAGE. When I asked one of them why they’d come, he said “My brother-in-law!” and pointed to Dino, a burly guy with wavy hair and muscle-y arms.
Upon learning his last name, I told Cataldi about my own Italian family, and that my coming-out process felt at best incomplete. “You wanna know how I came out? My father asked me one night at dinner, Are you queer? Before I could say anything, my brother answered for me: He’s not queer. He’s gay.” In other words, not creepy, not other. For all my San Francisco-bred comfort with the term ‘queer,’ the story moved me, and I wished I could tell one just like it.
Meanwhile, the kids just kept coming. I felt like I’d seen them canvassing for Obama, and they’d just gone on to the next logical goal. They were passionate about not, as columnists did, targeting not any demographic group, not even the Mormon Church — instead targeting the indifference of those to whom think gay and lesbian civil rights are a side issue, not worth showing up for.
Now, of course, comes the hard work of making even future protests share a goal. I’ll watch, and show up when I can. This could be the 21st-century ACT-UP, though so far we don’t have the artists to show for it.
(The video is from the 1981 Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, a benefit for Amnesty International. My title’s quote from The Police feels suddenly pretty on-topic.)
A few months ago Annette Gordon-Reed, professor, attorney and historian, launched her new book The Hemingses of Monticello. The book comes four years after DNA evidence finally quieted most critics that had claimed that Thomas Jefferson couldn’t possibly be the father of the children of the enslaved Sally Hemings. (Click the first link for video of her conversation with Charlie Rose.)
A while back, I caught up with Gordon-Reed for a brief chat— about history and women’s sexual power; how working at Rikers Island prepared her for controversy; and how it felt to raise a 15-year-old daughter while writing about a teenager who became pregnant by a President.
First of all, thanks for an incredible book. I think of it almost like a painting — it has all these layers and layers, and we kind of watch you apply each one. With each, the picture gets clearer and clearer.
It looks from the outside that you’ve reinvented yourself a few times, like most women at this point in our lives. On the way to becoming a breakthrough historian, you went from ow did you go from the uptown New York law firm Cahill ,Gordon & Reindel to general counsel for the New York City Board of Corrections?
Starting out at the firm, I learned how to work hard, and how to do the right thing. But then I saw an ad in the newspaper for this small, obscure agency. What the Bd of Corrections does is oversee the Dept of Corrections, and what we did is draw up minimum standards for the treatment of inmates.
In addition to helping set standards for religious observances, and so forth, my main job was to hear inmate appeals, for disciplinary hearings – which meant that I spent a lot of time going to Rikers Island.
That’ll change your life, right there.
Especially then, when we were hovering between 19,000 and 20,000 inmates at Rikers and area jails. It was eye-opening, though also in many ways frustrating and depressing — to see so many young people behind bars.
No wonder you decided to jump to academia.
Well, I’d always wanted to be a writer. I tried to do it as a lawyer, but I couldn’t make the time. Becoming a law professor gave me the chance. I’s thought about getting a doctorate in history —but I couldnt tell my husband, after he moved here with me from Southern California, thanks, I’m gonna stop working. Being a law professor, you’re supposed to write and publish. I thought about writing about the law, but then I went back to my first love — history.
Did your skills as a lawyer prepare you to handle the controversies around the Jefferson and Hemings families?
I knew that Jefferson is, will always be, in some ways a contentious figure. Especially after I decided to take on what people have written abt Sally Hemings. Continue reading
Incredible Panic Rules 