Sixty-four: Resist and Survive

Patrick Henry, the 2013-14 Ida E. King Distinguished Fellow, gave a very interesting presentation for the 10^th Annual Kristallnacht Lecture yesterday (October 29th). Dr. Henry is the author of We Only Know Men: The Rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust (Catholic University of America Press, 2007), and he gave his reflections on the occasion of the 75^th anniversary of Kristallnacht, when the Nazis engineered a pogrom in which 1500 synagogues and thousands of Jewish business were destroyed and scores of Jews were killed throughout Germany. Sponsored as it was by the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center, the Sam Azeez Museum of Woodbine Heritage, the Holocaust and Genocide undergraduate minor (director, Carol Rittner, below) the Masters Program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (director, Michael Hayse, below), along with the Student Senate, the turnout for the lecture was excellent and the Campus Center was filled with a fittingly solemn audience. All present would agree, I think, that the lecture was terrific, both informative and nicely argued. It will make a fine addition to our published collection of Kristallnacht lectures given by the Ida E. King Fellows.

Dr. Henry’s lecture was entitled, “Jewish Resistance against the Nazis,” and in it he endeavored to lay to rest that old canard about Jewish passivity during the Holocaust. Pat provided the audience with a brief historiography on the notion of Jewish passivity, asserting that the Nazis themselves had recorded the events in such a way as to build an archive that would suggest that there was little Jewish resistance. This was a simple case of blaming the victim, either suggesting to the rest of the Europe and the world that there was no problem and that the Jews were going along with many of the things being done to them (e.g., being moved to ghettos), or asserting that the Jews were less than men and deserved this fate. Other nations also bought into this notion of passivity as it calmed their consciences regarding their failure to act in opposition to the crimes. Perhaps surprisingly, the idea remained uncontested after the war; Jewish intellectuals themselves frequently suggested that Jews had been passive during the Holocaust, in part to promote the notion that in future any such intimation of a threat to the Jewish people would be met with a strong and immediate response.

History, truth, and our understanding of what Jews were doing throughout Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s clearly suffered in the construction of this unflattering archive. While other historians have now done much to refute most of the claims of this school of thinking about the Holocaust, Pat was pleased to inform us, the key elements of the critique have yet to gain wide currency, and the myth of Jewish passivity still has many adherents. So Pat set about dismantling the myth at all levels.

Pat took us through the elements of violent resistance occurring in many of the ghettos, like the one in Warsaw where Jews managing to hold off the Nazis for several months, in spite of being armed with very primitive weapons compared to the might of Nazi Germany. He informed us of other violent resistance occurring in several of the death camps, and the many partisan units throughout eastern Europe, and he then provided information about the participation of Jewish soldiers in the various armies opposing Hitler (including half a million in the US army). Clearly violent resistance was formidable.

Where I was most intrigued, though, was in the detailing of all the forms of non-violent resistance. These were many and varied, covering all kinds of activity from helping Jews to escape and survive, to vigorously resisting the attempt to annihilate the humanity of Jews, which was so clearly a part of the Nazi approach to setting the stage for their liquidation as a European people. In many situations violent resistance was futile and so Jews maneuvered through a lot of different approaches to promote or secure their survival, which in the end was the ultimate form of resistance, as Primo Levi frequently asserted.

I was struck by the similarity in the discussion of the Holocaust victims’ passivity to that of the slaves of the Old South. Slavery propagandists had claimed that slaves were happy under slavery and it was their natural condition, and in most instances Northerners and those from other nations who benefitted from the slave-produced commodities were happy to agree. Even after the Civil War (which it has to be noted was largely won by the actions of the slaves themselves, carrying out what W.E.B. Du Bois described as a General Strike, and bolstering the Union army at a time when it was facing huge difficulties in securing willing recruits from the white population, who had no interest in fighting a war to eradicate slavery), the myth survived and became the basis for specious claims that African Americans weren’t "ready" for equality and citizenship.

But, the scholarship about resistance has also shifted. There used to be an assumption that only “manly” and violent resistance should count, as in the movie “Glory,” where one is led to believe that the soldiers earned their right to freedom by proving that they were real men, when the right was theirs even without these actions. There is now more of an understanding of the gendered nature of resistance, and the fact that survival itself can be a form of resistance – though in a system of labor extraction, where the slave is considered property – suicide might be a form of resistance also.

Anyway, as with all good lectures, Pat’s got the gray matter churning. As he spoke, one immediately wanted to make connections, to look for similar themes elsewhere, and connect up the dots in this tragic tapestry of death and destruction, speckled though it is with serious endeavors to promote happiness and the well-being of others, that we call human history.

Rob

Sixty-three: Muffin Wrong With It -- except...

I had been transcribing my father’s letters, which he had written home from India during the Second World War. He had been sent out to Bombay in 1943 and had, almost as soon as he arrived, been struck with a very bad bout of dysentery. He recovered after quite a bit of time in hospital only to be struck down again with it and to be laid up once again. As a result of this, he missed two opportunities to be commissioned and sent out to fight against the Japanese. In effect, therefore, getting dysentery probably saved his life and allowed me and my siblings, and all our sons, daughters, and now grandchildren, to grace this earth.

The letter that struck me was one in which he mentioned the fact that the doctors were telling him that he had fallen foul of this disease and suffered more than the other soldiers, owing to the fact that he had low amounts of acid in his stomach. All the junk that was getting in there, the doctors were telling him, wasn’t being broken down, and was sitting around in there able to do all its mischief.

This struck me as very intriguing, as I had frequently wondered whether my father had had an allergy to bread, which he consumed in large quantities. I had been thinking this ever since I had known two twins on my son's soccer team, both of whom had been excellent players when they were 11, but one had grown to around 5-10 in his early teens, while the other remained around 5-2, or something like that. As a result of this the one had stayed playing very competitive soccer, while the other had been dropped down to B teams. At some point, however, it was realized that the shorter boy had celiac disease, and once this was known, and he was given a gluten-free diet, he shot up to the same height as his brother – and, not coincidentally, started playing on the same level teams.

Why this had occurred to me as intriguing was that my father was around 5-4, but almost everyone else in his family was around 5-10. And going back to look at some pictures of the Thomson family (his mother was Winifred Thomson) it is evident that in the 1890s, there were two heights for the five or six male siblings – about 5-4 and about 5-10. Interestingly, the shorter ones seem to have succumbed to consumption in their youth, though that is probably not linked to this little saga.

Furthermore, the story of the short twin was somewhat similar to what I had experienced. While my brothers had grown very quickly to the height they are now (they were well on the way to that height by the time they were 13), I had remained at about 5-2 until around the age of 15, and suddenly shot up to be the height I am now (the same as them). As I recall, this coincided roughly with the time when I moved from a diet of large quantities of bread, though I may be reading this back into it.

But my father complained bitterly of some food ailments. He hated garlic with a passion and thought this caused him all kinds of issues. Garlic bread or pasta would be very problematic for him. My siblings and I had somewhat scoffed at this, but when I started having the same issues, I began to think there was something to it. But, on reducing the garlic from pasta, I noticed this didn’t make much difference, and so I began to conclude that it wasn’t the garlic, but it was the gluten that was the issue.

But my father had died before any of these hypotheses could be tested, and I was now reading these letters and discovering that there had been an issue earlier in his life. But this got me thinking that perhaps the low stomach acid was something that I shared; and, moreover, perhaps low stomach acid is often connected to gluten intolerance. A quick tour around the web confirmed that this was so, or at least true enough from my perspective, and I thought that I should try going gluten free immediately. So I believe it is fair to say that from the moment that I read that letter I began a gluten-free diet, which I have kept to to this day.

The impact on me was so stunning – remarkable even – that I would never even consider going back to eating gluten again. Here is a list of the different things that improved once I gave up gluten:

1) Sensitive Skin. My skin was no longer sensitive. Prior to giving up gluten my skin was extremely sensitive to such an extent that I could not wear any deodorant or antiperspirant, because I would be itching and in absolute agony all day. Furthermore, I developed a skin abnormality where I used to wear a watch with a metal strap. It looked like I had some cancerous growth, but this had been confirmed as not being one, and it was the only mark on my body of this nature. It was a definite allergic response to the metal, but had my skin not been so sensitive from eating gluten, I don't think I would have it -- certainly wearing a watch doesn't irritate the way it used to.

2) Cold sores. In a related vein, I haven’t had a single cold sore since I gave up gluten. This related to my sensitive skin. I had been having cold sores since I was around eleven, as my father had had, and my other siblings had never suffered through the pleasure of one of these. They are incredibly traumatic for any child, and to have finally seen the end of them, or to hope that I have done, really is quite profound for me. Every time I had been in a situation of stress, I had had them. A change of temperature, or a time of sudden exertion; whatever it was, it led to a cold sore. If you have ever turned up at Harvard for an interview and arrived with a major cold sore on your lip, you know exactly what this feeling is like. Any interview might do it, but the Harvard one was a doozy.

3) Nose Bleeds. One of the impacts of ingesting gluten was congestion. As a result of this I would always be trying to clear my nose, and the sensitivity of my skin resulted in nosebleeds – all the time. Again this would relate to nervousness, and when I was about to be interviewed, for example, I would invariably experience a nosebleed, which wasn’t the most pleasurable experience. Since giving up gluten, I have not had a single nosebleed.

4) Eyes watering. Related to the congestion, my eyes now no longer constantly water, in a way that makes it look like I am crying. This, though, remains a good sign for evidence of gluten in the food. If I start sniffling and my eyes begin to water, I know it is time to take a Gluteneze pill, which limits the effects by helping me digest the gluten.

5) Snoring.  My snoring, I am led to believe, owing to the transformation that has occurred, was caused by inflammation in the throat, as a result of eating gluten. I can only assume this because I was incredibly loud by any reports prior to giving up gluten, while afterwards, the only problems have occurred when I have unknowingly eaten some gluten – an Indonesian meal, for example, or drinking beer. Now, provided I don’t consume the gluten, I don’t snore.

6) Knees.  I was on the verge of getting an ACL taken care of by an operation, but when I gave up gluten, miraculously all my knee problems evaporated. Gluten appears to inflame and make joints work less well. Perhaps my father might not have needed the hip replacement that led to his death, if he had been avoiding gluten. But that is just speculation. I thought I would have to give up squash and any major exercise, but once I gave up gluten, my mobility was markedly improved, and I have no need for an operation.

7) Brain.  The swelling that results from gluten seemed to put the brain in a fog. One seemed to become drowsy and even depressed as a result. Attention deficit has sometimes been linked to gluten intolerance, and I can certainly see why. While I am still not always as clear thinking as I would like to be, I am certainly appreciably better than before.

8) Sensitive stomach. Obviously.  For years, I had believed that eating a fried breakfast was a major problem, or at least a problem if bathrooms were not easily accessible. But once I gave up on the sausage and the toast, I found that the rest was not a problem. I have always enjoyed an English breakfast, so now I do so without any concerns.

9) Dandruff.  This is obviously related to the first item, sensitive skin. Before giving up gluten it was necessary every day to use Head & Shoulders, or some such product. If I used a regular shampoo, I would be itching and dandruff would appear. Now, I sometimes use H&S out of habit, but if I find myself without it for several weeks, it makes no difference; I am fine – so long as I am not consuming any gluten.

10) Weight.  Eating muffins and bagels regularly it was hard work keeping the weight down. Almost immediately, giving up the gluten I lost about 15 pounds, and this has largely stayed off. When I haven’t exercised for a while I am now always surprised that my weight hasn’t gone up much, and it certainly never climbs back to where I was on a gluten diet (even while exercising).

11) Gums of Navarone. Related to sensitive skin, a trip to the dentist would feel like the reenactment of the Battle of the Somme, accompanied by complaints by the dental hygienist that my gums were extremely sensitive and I needed to take better care of them. It did not matter how frequently I went and how much care I took, it was always the same. But those were the old days. I just returned from the dentist having neglected to go for two years -- who wants to reenact the Somme? -- and it was a pain-free and bloodless experience. And the hygienist said nothing about the condition of my gums. Coincidence that this was the first time I had been since I had become gluten free? I don't think so.

That’s all I can think of for the moment; there may be other things to add that I am just not able to recollect at the moment, but they are probably just small things. Obviously, it sounds like I was a complete wreck beforehand, and that you would have seen me hobbling and smelling down the corridors or along the street. Well, no, for many of these things there were products created that helped one deal with the item of concern. But it’s great not to have to get these products anymore, and the extra cost of the gluten-free food, is basically covered by the fact that I don’t need to purchase chondroitin or B-vitamin, or Ginko, or products for hyper-sensitivity (that cost more than the regular ones), to take care of each of the issues.

And the availability of the gluten-free products just continues to increase. Every supermarket now has a gluten-free section, so pasta (which was my favorite food) can be consumed again. Cereals are also available, particularly with Chex endeavoring to make most of its line gluten free. Nuts and raisins become a snack substitute for muffins, and there’s muffin wrong with that!

The only way to end is with a ditty, written specially for the occasion:

I used to go a-swimmin'

And the wheat would way me down,

I used to go a-swimmin' 

And I would feel like I would drown.

Walkin' on water

The gluten-free way,

Walkin' on water,

It's better that way.

Cos there's muffin wrong

with being gluten free

So create your own song,

and you'll end up on Glee.

Sixty-two: Mario and the Magicians

I had been asked to write a paper for an edited volume called After the Imperial Turn. My intention had been to write a piece that linked Progressive social reform back to Emancipation predicaments, beginning with Daniel T. Rodgers’ Atlantic Crossings and winding its way back to Eric Foner’s Nothing But Freedom. A car accident intervened, however, and I was laid up during the Spring of 2001 recovering from a broken neck. The deadline was approaching fast and I could not imagine how I was going to finish the essay I had promised to write. Fortunately, two things came together to help me produce a paper, albeit a rather different one from the one I had initially conceived of writing. First, the report from the OAH-NYU "Internationalizing American History" project arrived on my doorstep, and secondly, some rather effective psychedelic painkillers allowed me to cut through all my inhibitions and write down what I really thought of this mailing. Within a couple of days I had written "Making the World Safe for American History," a rather biting response to the OAH-NYU pamphlet, and an essay that possibly fit the projected volume better than my original idea would have done. Here’s a taster.

Like myself he was half American, and here I must resist the temptation to digress on a fascinating topic: England’s intellectual debt to America.  Nearly all the remarkable Englishmen of the last fifty years have a strong seasoning of Yankee blood.  Great is the temptation to dwell on Winston Churchill and develop a theme which has not yet received proper attention.  Where would the modern poetaster be without T.S. Eliot?  But I shall forbear: perhaps we have suffered too much from racial theorists.

            Sir Harold Mario Mitchell Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete[1]

Never judging a book by its cover is not always to be trusted as a sound rule. For the Report La Pietra, judging by the cover seems only fair, and for most people it may be a time-saving device. It is fair since the lavishness of the pamphlet’s presentation is intended to make an impression, albeit a positive one. What follows is the impression it made on me:

The pamphlet’s cover presents us with the title of the pamphlet, an interesting photograph of Villa La Pietra (with Greco-Roman statues on the imposing gate), and mention of sponsorship by the OAH. Right from the get-go, this identification between a project on internationalizing the study of American history and an Italian villa seems rather an unfortunate lapse. When we learn, by turning to the Preface, that this connection is by design not misfortune, we certainly have to wonder whether we need to read further. This is from the preface:

The title [of the report] is taken from the Villa La Pietra, where the international body of historians who participated in the project met. It was thought appropriate, given the theme of the project, to meet abroad, and the availability of meeting facilities at Villa La Pietra, New York University’s magnificent center in Florence, Italy, made that possible.[2]

On the surface, convening a meeting overseas for a conference on internationalizing of American History seems like a sensible plan. In fact, though, internationalizing American History might be more effectively demonstrated by endeavoring to bring out the global buried within the local. Of course, attempting this, perhaps by holding the conference in one of the less attractive locations in the United States that may be thirsting for our international band’s dollars, might not be quite so appealing to a group of professionals used to meeting only in Sheratons and Hiltons, not to mention Adams Marks. 

But even if we accept the need for a foreign venue, we need to ask ourselves whether this was indeed either the most convenient or the cheapest one? It was certainly one that most Americanists would find attractive and to which they would wish to travel. It was also readily available through the auspices of NYU, which had been given the building for the purpose of holding international conferences. But, even if it were truly the most convenient (which I doubt), is convenience always to override the importance of avoiding a symbolic Euro-American bias that such a venue might signify?

More than convenience, however, the preface continues by letting us know of the villa’s own symbolic credentials:

In fact, the recent history of the villa illustrates in its own way the transnational theme of the conferences. The villa was given to NYU by Sir Harold Acton, whose father had purchased it after marrying an American woman from Cleveland who brought to the marriage the resources that made the purchase possible. And it was this American connection that prompted Sir Harold Acton to offer the villa to an American university, which dedicated it in part to be a center for international academic conferences.[3]

So, dare we suggest a subconscious desire to revive the great Anglo-American marriage lurking beneath this enterprise? If this is the extent of our internationalization –- an Italian villa, purchased by what appears to be an Englishman, with American money –- then we haven’t advanced very far from the beginning of this century, when such arrangements fed the dreams of many an Anglo-American racial supremacist: a Theodore Roosevelt, a Winston Churchill, or a W.T. Stead (all of whom were chart busters in the globalization business).[4]

But, if we listen closely, we may hear rumblings of a text lying dormant beneath the weight of this preface. First, we may learn from Sir Harold’s memoirs that, in fact, the Mitchell money that bought La Pietra was from Chicago rather than Cleveland, which, as the “capital of the West” back then, may perhaps do more for our globalizing sensibilities than Cleveland.[5]  As Sir Harold might have said, it is so much more delicious an idea to conjure with. And, when we add to this the strong probability that some of the Hawaiian money flowing into the family was coming (directly or indirectly) from sugar plantations, then our taste buds really just tingle with excitement. And, in the wake of this foppery, for which Sir Harold was renowned, we are not surprised to learn that our host was the model for Anthony Blanch, that “prancing faun” Evelyn Waugh’s character in Brideshead Revisited. When we factor into our consideration Waugh’s provision of a South American mother for Blanch, racializing Sir Harold’s aesthetic, as well as all the imperial imaginings that wandered through the minds of Sebastian Flight and Charles Rider, then we do have a delightful feast, the smells of which may indeed emanate from within the walls of villa La Pietra.[6]

But the magic of the transnational embodied in Sir Harold’s aesthetics is present neither in the cover of this report, which gives no signal beyond the Euro-American, nor in the material that lies within. For, this conference was constructed on a foundation made up of that steely alliance of Academy and Foundation – what we will for convenience dub the Foundation-Academy-Complex (FAC). Scholars of un-American history will remember that it was the FAC which brought us (with heavy State Department and CIA backing) Area Studies. Indeed, the FAC was able to establish conformity over intellectual endeavors in quite formidable ways, as witnessed in the emergence of the Chicago (St. Valentine’s Day) School with its distinctive and largely hegemonic approaches to urbanization, immigration, ghettoization and development, among other things. One can see this beginning to be replicated in the case of internationalizing history. Those organizing the La Pietra conference are donning the mantle of “godfather,” so that as new global and international history centers are established in universities around the United States their positions will be filled either by those scholars who were participants in the La Pietra meetings, or by people recommended from within this family of scholars. New publications in this area will also seek the imprimatur of the family’s inner circle, and we can predict that Rethinking American History in a Global Age will receive sufficiently heavy marketing to give it iconic status.[7] The Foundations, meanwhile, are busily looking for the alternative to their earlier, now-failed ventures in area studies, and are ready to fund anything coming downstream that appears programmatic.[8]  

Let’s be honest now. My real beef with the OAH’s conference on internationalizing the study of American history at La Pietra was that I wasn’t a participant. Had I been invited, let’s face it, I would be endorsing the La Pietra report in a snap, like all the other worthies on the participant list.  Maybe – maybe not!

Notes

[1] Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 79.

[2] La Pietra Report, p. 3

[3]Ibid.

[4] See, for example, W.T. Stead, The Americanization of the World (NY: Garland, 1972 [1902]). 

[5] Acton writes: “My grandfather, William Mitchell, had taken an active part in Chicago’s growth, having founded the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank and a large family, ramifications of which spread to Hawaii, Spain, and, in our case Italy.’ He was however, “remote from the vulgar conception of a Chicagoan;” Memoirs, p. 18.

[6] Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993.).

[7] Now available from the University of California Press.

[8] The report’s author acknowledges the Ford Foundation’s efforts to “rethink area studies;” p. 24.

Sixty-One: Pretty Revolutions

We need our revolutions to be pretty. Well, not exactly pretty, like rosy, but pretty, like neat. They need to be comprehensible and easy to interpret; otherwise how usable will they be for those who come after. They need to be undertaken by the ‘good’ people, or -- if we are trying to resist change – by the ‘bad’ people. They shouldn’t be undertaken by a diverse group of people for conflicting purposes grounded simply in material self-interest. So, this brings us to a second rule: revolutions should be undertaken by idealists, whether or not we like them. That way we can find our own ‘better’ selves reflected through or in the revolution. If it is our fight, we will need to see the changes (often violent as they are) as being worth it because they are backed up by our high ideals. If it is someone else’s fight, we will want our side to be justified by a cause or two of our own, even if it is just the assumption that the status quo is the best of all possible worlds. Either way, we help define ourselves neatly in the process. 

But revolutions are never this way. While they may have half lives of idealism that can get the nations that emerge from them through a decade or two, or maybe even a century or two, they are always open to interpretation and questioning. Simply put, the new orthodoxy that gets established in the place of the old orthodoxy is still going to be inadequate as an explanation for the messiness of history. 

These two “truths” – that revolutions need to be pretty and idealistic – seem perfectly clear when we are looking at other people’s revolutions. Take the Russian – there were a bunch of Bolsheviks, a majority in nobody’s minds but their own – who imposed communist doctrine on an empire. Ditto China. But the idealism Petered out and the St. Paul of corruption turned Leninist idealism into Stalinist pogroms. Ditto the Cultural Revolution. The French: from Girondins, through Robespyre and guillotine, to bones apart – say no more. It is only when we come to the American Revolution that everything – history – comes unglued. Here a revolution that never made much sense to anyone who was involved in it – and certainly not much to the British who had other concerns to deal with – developed idealism half-lives that push well beyond strontium on the road to plutonium for some of the seediest of self-interested characters – 230 years and counting.

How does a society, your society, pull off this feat of repeatedly injecting idealism back into its revolution and continuing to find this comprehensible and historical? There are many answers. 

The first, of course, is that you need your revolution to have been considered a relatively insignificant affair – and indeed, the stakes were considered to be very low with regard to the American revolution. The fact that nobody cares about your revolution, because it simply isn’t seen to matter very much, really helps you to stake a claim for idealism and plant your seed firmly in this idealistic soil. Compare any other revolution and the responses they stirred. Haiti – slaves revolting, wow, stomp on that. Russia – proletariat acting out, let’s all invade. China – Mao or less insane, how about a war in Korea? America – well we don’t need its food anymore, because we’ve got Canada; we don’t want to do what it takes to win this thing, because we may lose our prosperous slave colonies in the Caribbean. Besides, who the hell wants New Jersey?

The second is that you should, in spite of yourself and your best efforts to do otherwise, become a great nation. In this way, the seed firmly planted will grow into a strong plant, and the fact that the seed is being given miracle grow that allows it to shoot up in spite of, not because of, the idealistic soil will go largely unnoticed. A Louisiana Purchase is really all you need. This will take you from being a small nation hemmed in by empires that will be able to pick you off at a time of their choosing, to being an empire in your own right. You will have won the yellow bits on the Risk board – well the best spaces, anyway – and you can begin an expansion of your own. Your best efforts to do otherwise would be to say to Napoleon, as Jefferson did, hey, we don’t mind if you invade Haiti. We worry more about the success of a slave rebellion on our own plantations in Virginia than we do about the fact that you’ll bring your army to New Orleans, and establish the whole Louisiana territory as your breadbasket for your sugar colonies.

The third answer is that every time you go back to develop the teleology that you call history you must simplify the story so that the messy parts get left out. Essentially, this means you must forget New Jersey – home of the Sopranos and their ancestors. 

So what of New Jersey? If you are to understand the revolution, or at least comprehend all the dimensions of its incomprehensibility as a pretty revolution, you must learn about New Jersey. Who were the 18^th-century Sopranos. They were basically the Proprietors and their agents who wanted to ensure that they established a Scottish style landowning system at the expense of the yeomanry, who had settled on the land. While the landowners were clearing the land in the Highlands of Scotland, the would be owners of New Jersey, the Proprietors, were getting their agents to begin the process of clearing all the lowlifes (read regular people) from their lands throughout the colonies.

Arch villain in this is a man named James Alexander. 

The rise of the professional bar further alienated common farmers from the judiciary. In 17^th-century America, educated lawyers were rare. Many lawyers had no formal legal training, and some were only semiliterate. In the 18^th century this changed as London-trained attorneys (James Alexander being a prominent example) arrived in the colonies and established informal law schools in their offices. Soon, a trained legal cadre emerged and reignited a deep, latent hostility to the bar, variants of which were evident throughout Anglo-American society. The hostility of provincial yeomen toward lawyers was strong because they were understood as dispute-encouraging parasites. “There is,” wrote a young law clerk in 1745, “perhaps no Set of Men that bear so ill a Character in the Estimation of the Vulgar, as the gentlemen of the Long Robe.” The fact that James Alexander trained many of New Jersey’s lawyers in his office only reinforced popular hostility to the bar.

The Revolution in New Jersey was essentially a story of these lawyers endeavoring not to lose control of the position they had established under William Franklin, in the face of growing dissent against the Crown throughout the colonies. This meant that they needed to know which way the political winds were blowing and act accordingly. The result was that their loyalties were not firmly established, and they were quick to respond to whether or not General Howe or General Washington was on the ascendancy.

All of this is embodied in the person of Richard Stockton. He was a product of the East Jersey and New York law firms, a judge who was very much aligned with Lord Dartmouth and Franklin. He was the kind of person who would turn up at a convention of radicals and instead of immediately signing an idealistic declaration of independence, would ask for a recapitulation of the pros and cons; he was the kind of person who would later sign an oath of loyalty to the King, and then once Washington had reestablished control, change sides once again.

Revolutions are never neat, of course, but it is neat, as a historian, to see how the least idealistic of all the revolutions has gained ascendancy as the most determined by ideas. That is partly the result of so much history, all those messy bits, being suppressed so comprehensively.

Sixty: Bottoms-Up History

From 2005:

Following the success of “Rent,” several new musical ventures are about to hit the Broadway Stage. They are the product of the New Social Historians Musical Cooperative, social historians who have a sense of rhythm and have forgotten the blues. They are marked by the desire to celebrate the great achievements of white European laborers, without giving too much to revolutionary doctrine, all in the key of C major (minor keys are eschewed). This marks a key shift from the knees-up mentality of the 1970s to the bottoms-up mentality that will build that bridge to the second half of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Two musicals, in particular, are at the forefront of the New Social History Musical intervention. The first is the re-reading of the 1935 sit-down strikes at Ford in Detroit, titled “Sit”. The United States in 1935 was deep in the Depression, but the music is uplifting enough that unemployment is lost in the powerful harmonies and love songs that brought the fantasy world to life for the hard-working Ford employee. The song, “Driving in Neutral Again,” with its commentary on the failures of Herbert Hoover, really evokes the hardship of being a well-paid employee in a world in which so many around him are joining bread lines and having to beg for food. Its most touching moment comes when the main protagonist croons in heart-rending fashion, “How can you replace me with a woman,/or worse still [and there is a powerful pause at this point]/a black man from Alabami?” One really gets to feel for this man, just as he is about to become the prime force behind the sit-down strike. The high point in the show, however, must be considered the wonderful number, “My Caddy Lacks a Driver.” Here we ache for the Ford employee whose own Model T, somewhat old in design, has to be driven by himself. It becomes extremely moving when we begin to realize that he cannot afford to hire someone to drive him, like all of his bosses in their Cadillacs (though this does seem incongruous, since we imagine that they must really be driving cars made by Ford – artistic license, of course!), and that he even has to consider having his wife learn to drive. Tears come to the eyes as history really comes to life before you!

The second noteworthy musical is the work, entitled “Ship,” which recounts the impact of the mutiny on the Battleship Potemkin. Sergei Eisenstein has provided us with one view of the events surrounding this uprising (too Soviet-inflected for our taste), but as a silent movie it really cannot compare with the visuals provided in this dance extravaganza. Perhaps the most memorable piece in this show is “Tsar Nick does the Trotsky.” Cutting back and forth between the world of Tsar Nicholas and that of Leon Trotsky (just beginning to make his mark in Russia), new quite staggering break dance moves are presented – now commonly known in the dance clubs of Manhattan as “the trot.” The show ends with the arrival of the Cossacks, but these Cossacks seem less menacing than the fabled soldiers of the Eisenstein movie. Instead, the Cossack dancing presented in conjunction with the lines, “Just sing/There’s no need to be revolting,” seem to persuade the revolutionaries that Trotsky’s way is no way to really enjoy oneself. Equality has to give way when there is so much singing to be done! 

You’ve just got to love this new social history musical. What a fantastic departure, both for Broadway and the Academy! This is a marriage that has never before been so potent. 

Fifty-nine: Giving Frogs Legs

The origin of Frogs-Reimagined came while I was visiting Athens.  A group of faculty and students from Stockton were there in order to participate in a conference at the University of Athens and we were visiting the Acropolis. One of my faculty members, David Roessel, assigns to his students who go to Athens the task of going to the Theatre of Dionysus and reading from a play, and he let me know that it would not be a good show if a dean failed to complete this same task. 

So the student and I found a spot to sit in the theater and began to read from sections of Aristophanes’ Frogs. As I was reading I was struck by how wonderful the play was (particularly the obvious similarities between Dionysus/Xanthias and Don Quijote/Sancho Panza – Cervantes must have known the Aristophanes play!), and for the rest of my visit to Athens I was wandering around the city thinking about how the play could be adapted to the modern world – even contemplating setting it at a soccer game. [Of course, I didn’t know that Nathan Lane had already done a modern adaptation with Stephen Sondheim’s music, or I might have given up on the idea before I started.]

I made the mistake of saying to David that I was thinking along these lines, and he immediately said that we needed to develop a new version for ourselves and workshop it, as they say in the business, on the island of Rhodes the following summer. The only thing that was necessary before we could follow through on this would be for me to write something that we could workshop. To put pressure on me, he booked the rooms for six or seven people who would be there to work on the play. Clearly, I needed to write a new version of Aristophanes’ Frogs, which I thought would be a very daunting task.

The question I needed to grapple with was how to make the play accessible to the modern audience – how to give Frogs legs in today’s world.   In this regard there were two considerations to be dealt with. 1) The first was the question of what might have equivalent freight in modern society to that of tragic theatre in the Athenian world. The second, related question was how does one handle all the Choruses in the play, as this is an element that is alien to much modern drama? And this is a particularly significant question, after all, because this is a play that is named after one particular Chorus – Frogs.

1) The Modern Equivalent for Tragedy

Athenians put considerable stock in their theater, and tragedy was the most highly prized of the theatrical forms. They clearly believed that it had great social significance. If someone were to be brought back to provide important social commentary and promote the social welfare, it would be the playwright who everyone considered to be the father of tragedy.

Who, then, would have a similar social location in today’s society? To what do we ascribe equivalent significance to that of tragic theatre in Athens? Who has influence comparable to the tragedian of the Ancient world?

The Nathan Lane production (adapted by Sondheim and Burt Shevelove) came up with Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, but actually I think this really doesn't work as a pairing. While Shakespeare may be even more celebrated in literature and theatre than Aeschylus, he doesn’t have a hold in the social imagination, in the way that an Aeschylus or a Euripides would have done in Ancient Athens. Similarly, Shaw’s plays don’t have the influence of Euripides’ or Sophocles’ plays. Shaw is one of many modernists, and he doesn’t necessarily stand apart from Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, O’Neill, and Samuel Beckett.  In short, the Shakespeare/Shaw pairing is altogether too high class to really work, in my opinion.

Instead, I felt I should focus on songwriter and popular music. Music has the kind of hold on large segments of society, and, in the 1960s at least, seemed to be socially transformative.  And, just as Greek society was undergoing transformation, and those who could speak to earlier generations (Sophocles and Aeschylus) no longer spoke to later ones – who looked to Euripides – the same thing is true in the modern age.  The music of the 60s was quickly superseded and even scoffed at in the 70s and 80s, and then retrieved once again in nostalgia. This is often seen in terms of genre shifts. Blues becoming rock, becoming psychedelic, then glam rock, funk, punk, New Wave, heavy metal, grunge, hip hop, gangsta rap, alternative, etc., etc., so any rendering of the competition among artists represented in this play has to take into consideration these shifts.

For me, at least, the death of Lennon was a turning point, one that provides a divide between the socially conscious music of the 60s and early 70s, and the more commercially based music that followed. The end of the Beatles and the death of John Lennon provided a divide between before and after, which made Lennon the likely person that Dionysus would want to bring back to life.

And some of this is nostalgia, of course. The point that Dionysus makes at the beginning of the play, that tragedy has lost its way and is no longer as strong as it once was, and no longer as able to be influential as in the days of Aeschylus, is a point that all music lovers instinctively make. A lot of people claim that their music is the most compelling, and those who came before and after are barely worth mentioning. And music has the same element of competition embedded in it that tragedy had in the ancient world. Competitions would occur as tragedians would put on their plays and viewers would vote on which was their favorite. Clearly the music charts and the markets perform a similar function in today’s world (not to mention X Factor and the reality talent shows), and artists view themselves as being in competition with others, wishing to secure a larger hold on the public than other artists, wishing to be seen as stronger than those who came before.

Added to this, though, there is a degree to which in the modern world no one who comes to the fore has a lasting presence. Modern music embodies Andy Warhol’s idea of everyone getting his or her fifteen minutes of fame. So the competition that Aristophanes creates between Aeschylus and Euripides, cannot be replicated in the modern world, except by taking up a somewhat arbitrary selection of a Lennon on one side, and a composite group of artists on the other. To fill this bill I selected – Jim Morrison from the Doors, Freddie Mercury from Queen, Poly Styrene, Marvin Gaye, Tupac Chakur, and Amy Winehouse.

And to make this work, I combined all of these individuals into one, self-transmogrifying character that I called Mr. Mojo Risin’ – this is an anagram based on Jim Morrison – which comes from his song LA Woman. So MMR symbolizes an alter-ego of the collective artist.  Originally, I started with 9 incarnations, but whittled it down to 6, owing to the need to shorten the play, and to make the difficulties of creating music for each character, which my brother and I were doing, less daunting.

The other device I needed to make the play work was to come up with a character as a replacement for Dionysus. It occurred to me that the person would be an artist who had concern for the social impact of music and was a political activist of some sort. This could be one of two people, I felt, either Bob Geldof or Bono, so I combined them into one character, Bonoff, son of Yeats. Once this character was in place, Xanthias, the slave, could then be represented as a common roadie, and I thought I would get considerable mileage out of that. Finally, Hercules, who provides directions to the underworld, just had to be Elvis, who has been seen several times on both sides of the Styx since 1976.

2) The Chorus

There are three types of choruses in Frogs—Reimagined.  The first I wanted to be of a rock opera format, with a back and forth between Bonoff and the Frogs as they cross the River Styx to the underworld. This I hoped would have a Tommy-like feel, or Peter Gabriel’s Genesis (i.e. from Foxtrot or Nursery Cryme).

The second chorus is witnessed as Bonoff and Xanthias are searching for Aquafrog’s (Pluto’s) palace. They come across a chorus of initiates. These I wanted to be a cross between a 19th century Utopian community and the Woodstock crowd from 1969.  The music was intended to sound like a number of different bands/people from that era from Jethro Tull, to Janis Joplin, or the band Renaissance.  Whereas the first chorus represents the performers, the second one emphasizes the worshippers.

Finally, the third type of chorus is the most untraditional. It endeavors to blend the two previous ones and break down the barriers between actors and chorus. Essentially, the character of Mr. Mojo Risin’ is comprised of the members of the Chorus, so each of the actors who plays a part in the contest between Lennon and Mr. Mojo Risin’, comes out of the chorus and returns to it. This suggests that these artists themselves are a creation of the chorus, and that if these ones weren’t chosen they might have been replaced by others (and the play itself might be reworked so that in different performances different musicians came to the fore).

Anyway, that’s the play in a nutshell. It has a Doors-like piece called “The Mend”, a funk piece called “Tongue in Groove”, a Madonna-ish piece called “Like a Nun”, a punk piece called “Cereal Killer”, a Freddy Mercury number called “Iron Chef” – and so on. It ends with “News from Nowhere” (title of a William Morris Utopian novel), which is a send up of Lennon’s Imagine. And there’s more besides.

The play will have its first airing at Stockton College in the spring of 2014. And then, who knows?

Fifty-eight: Of Epigrammatology -- Wilde Stuff

During the course of his cross-examination, Wilde was repeatedly asked to explain his various epigrams. Having to explain negates the entire epigrammatic position: the discourses are suddenly claimed unfamiliar, the intervention unrecognizable, the mastery invalid, and the epigram unrepeatable. The epigrammist is silenced. But each time we see one of Wilde’s plays, we get to see successful epigrammatology at work. Through that process, the characters achieve the new, the original, the epigrammatic. Night after night, the theatre’s Jack is claimed and becomes Wilde’s Ernest.

Francesca Coppa, in Reading Wilde, Querying Spaces  p.19